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CARD, Orson Scott (b. 1951)
 What I don't like about Orson Scott Card:
• He's very religious—a devoted Mormon whose
works have sometimes been based on his religious views and the history
of the Church of the Latter Days Saints.
• He's very conservative, judging by the underlying themes in his
works and by his political commentaries on the Internet (right wing by
non-American standards anyway—I'm not sure how he's perceived in the
U.S.).
What I do like
about Orson Scott Card:
• His treatment
of religion in his mainstream science fiction is intelligent and
interesting.
• He's a prolific, versatile writer who has handled a wide-range of
styles and topics. In some ways a writer's writer, though also
definitely a reader's writer—writing to communicate with a reader, not
to impress or intimidate.
• His books have plots!
• He has a lot of practical knowledge about writing and is willing to
share it widely—for free—on the Internet. Would-be writers, take
notes.
• He wrote Speaker for
the Dead, one of the best science fiction novels I've read.
Facts about
Orson Scott Card:
• Born in
Richland, Washington, raised in California, Arizona and Utah where he
got degrees from Brigham Young University and the University of Utah.
Spent two years as a Mormon missionary in Brazil.
• Wrote religious plays and fiction for awhile but won his first major
acclaim in 1977 for a short story "Ender's Game" which was
nominated for a Hugo award.
• After this, wrote many more sci-fi stories and novels, among them The
Worthing Chronicle (1979) and Hart's Hope (1983), to lukewarm
response, though his extensive revision of The Worthing Chronicle
in 1983 is highly regarded.
• Expanded the Ender story into two novels, Ender's Game and Speaker
for the Dead (1985 and 1986), both of which won both the Hugo
and the Nebula awards, science fiction's two highest honours—the first
time an author won both in successive years. Novels look at human
confrontations with two alien species three thousand years apart, the
first novel being mainly an action-oriented war story and the latter a
psychological, character-driven story.
• Demand for more instalments, in what came to known as the Ender
saga, led to the novels Xenocide (1991), Children of the Mind
(1996), Ender's Shadow (1999), Shadow of the Hegemon
(2000) and Shadow Puppets (2002), as well as the story collection
First Meetings: In the Enderverse (2002).
• Another novel sequence, starting with Seventh Son in 1987,
depicts an alternative history of the United States with the life of
Alvin Maker being a parallel to that of Joseph Smith, the real-life
founder of the Mormon Church. Every couple of years a new volume in the
Alvin Maker series seems to be published.
• Other notable works: Wyrms (1987) about a woman on an alien
world she is meant to save, The Abyss (1989) novelization of the
James Cameron movie about aliens discovered in the deep sea, the
five-part Homecoming novel series starting with The Memory of Earth
(1992), and Lost Boys (1992), a popular ghost story not to be
confused with a similarly named vampire flick.
And that's only
only about half of what he's written. So far. Told you he's prolific.
— Eric |
