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Use so much Military Tactic in his Shadow Books and even the whole EG series? Achilles...bean in the shadow....showed such high military experiences....was he in the army?
Posts: 35 | Registered: Apr 2004
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Any suggestions on how to enjoy Card's sci-fi/fantasy novels? I have read his fiction (and loved each), read some of his short stories (enjoyed),I am eagerly awaiting my copy of his poetry book, but I cannot seem to get into his sci-fi. I read other sci-fi so maybe I am expecting his books to be like Robert Jordan's and Star Wars (they are not). What am I missing in his sci-fi? Need I be politically inclined?
Posts: 58 | Registered: May 2003
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quote:I read other sci-fi so maybe I am expecting his books to be like Robert Jordan's and Star Wars
Aah, I see why you're disappointed. The quality that OSC's missing and you're looking for is something I refer to as "suck".
Posts: 5264 | Registered: Jul 2002
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Funny. I was really big on The New Jedi Order books until I read the full Ender series. After that, Star Wars never kept my intrest.
Posts: 126 | Registered: Mar 2004
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To me, EG or the Shadow books are not really sci-fi. Card appears to be focusing on the characters on a psycological or personal level in a sci-fi setting. Example: Enders game is more about Enders struggle with himself, abilities, and deeper emotions than a book about war with aliens. So being a person who loves EG and Shadow Series and dislikes most sci-fi, I would assume that a avid sci-fi reader would not enjoy such books unless they also enjoy heavy character development.
Posts: 13 | Registered: Jun 2003
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Actually, Josh makes a good point. Much of science fiction, such as Clarke, has focused on the science, and not so much on the fiction. It would be impossible to tell the story of 2001 without it being a science fiction story.
But Card's stories rarely depend on the science-y setting to work as stories. They are more like Herbert's (Dune) work in that respect.
Posts: 16551 | Registered: Feb 2003
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I think that many of the issues in Card's books (defining alien races with which you can or cannot have peaceful contact, guilt for the death of an entire sentient race, the consequences of suspended animation running rampant through the upper classes of a society, finding out you are a mutant that grows extra arms and legs, finding out God is a machine left behind by your ancestors) are completely dependent on the science fiction setting. Some can be seen as analogies to real-life situations (Lanik's struggle, for instance, paralleled Card's own struggle with weight gain), but the science fiction setting is, at the very least, used to put those situations in a centrifuge, make them more extreme, and analyze them in a way you can't in modern settings.
Card proudly admits that he writes "soft" science fiction, which deals more with the personal and sociological impacts of hypothetical futures and worlds. Fiction that examines purely scientific potentialities are called "hard" science fiction.
The two are distinct, and most writers clearly fall into one category or the other, but there are also many who blur the line, and all of them fall well within the bounds of "science fiction".
Posts: 1907 | Registered: Feb 2000
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Oh, and to answer the original question, Card has been plotting to take over the world since he was a little kid with a political map of the earth hanging over his bed He reads a lot of histories of wars, conquests, powerful individuals, and political machinations, and studies current events just as closely. Two of his most powerful influences at a young age were Foundation and The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. So you can see where he went from there.
Posts: 1907 | Registered: Feb 2000
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He reads a lot of histories of wars, conquests, powerful individuals, and political machinations, and studies current events just as closely. Two of his most powerful influences at a young age were Foundation and The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. So you can see where he went from there.
