posted
Am I allowed to rip on OSC here on his own website?
I just read "Hidden Empire" and thought it was really weak.
He's written some books that I truly loved, so I'm not saying he's not a great writer. I know he can write, and I know he can tell a story that touches people and is important to people. He's written some books that were really important to me, and a bunch that were really entertaining to me. This one, though, just felt to me like he was phoning it in.
I liked "Empire." I thought it was interesting on an ideas level. Didn't see any interesting ideas in this one, though, just a run of the mill adventure novel that wasn't even particularly well written or engaging. A lot of the book felt like I was glossing over summaries of scenes rather than the scenes themselves, and the characters kept making ridiculous decisions just to move the plot along a predetermined path, or so it seemed to me. It was just not the level of quality I expect from OSC.
Anybody else read it? Have any opinions or thoughts about it?
Posts: 1528 | Registered: Dec 2003
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posted
Haven't...but I've always assumed it's okay to not like something Card has written and still hang 'round here. I enjoyed a lot of Card's short fiction, and the Alvin Maker series when I got around to reading it...but I didn't much like the very first "Ender's Game" story when it was published in Analog all those years ago, and have avoided the series since. Later Card works, well...my reading habits have shifted some, mostly to non-fiction, and what SF and fantasy I do read these days are usually older works, something I've read before, with the occasional something-that-catches-my-eye thrown in.
Posts: 8809 | Registered: Aug 2005
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