Orson Scott Card
Pop culture can be as forbidding as it is inviting, particularly in areas that invite geeky obsession: The more devotion a genre or series or subculture inspires, the easier it is for the uninitiated to feel like they’re on the outside looking in. But geeks aren’t born; they’re made. And sometimes it only takes the right starting point to bring newbies into various intimidatingly vast obsessions. Gateways To Geekery is our regular attempt to help those who want to be enthralled, but aren’t sure where to start. Want advice? Suggest future Gateways To Geekery topics by emailing [email protected].
Geek obsession: Orson Scott Card
Why it’s daunting: Orson Scott Card is the kind of author who always has several plates spinning at a time. He writes several ongoing series and currently has six forthcoming novels in progress, with a few others proposed or otherwise planned. Since he began writing in the late 1970s, Card has published more than 50 novels, and just as many short stories, from fantasy, science fiction, and speculative fiction to novels with a more religious focus, and even a considerable amount of non-fiction. Card’s work is also inconsistently aimed at different audiences, sometimes even within the same series. His two most notable series went through a progression from young-adult science fiction to more mature philosophical and morality tales, then back around to more truncated young-adult literature focused on filling in previous narrative gaps.
Card often tells stories about young people forced to take on great responsibility due to a lack of capable adults. He’s repeatedly returned to the theme, in a wide array of genres, over the course of his career. Its roots can be traced to his Mormon faith, which emphasizes missionary work for its male members at a young age, and has an average first-marriage age well below the national average. Though most of his work isn’t overtly religious in nature, elements of his personal beliefs seep into almost every one of his books, which has given him a reputation as a bigot, or at the least as preachy—elements that have kept some prospective readers at a distance.
Possible gateway: Ender’s Game
The 1985 Hugo and Nebula award-winning novel Ender’s Game is unquestionably the best place to start reading Card. The novel synthesizes the themes Card developed in numerous later novels into a fast-paced, thrilling science-fiction story of mankind’s sacrifices to ensure its own survival. The novel begins on Earth with a focus on the three monstrously gifted children of the Wiggin family: Peter, a violent psychopath who tortures small animals, Valentine, the fiercely empathic peacekeeper, and Ender, the youngest, a military genius with an almost crippling conscience. In Card’s future, humans are engaged in a war with an insectoid alien race called Formics. Each third child of Earth families belongs to the state, and Ender moves to the space station Battle School at a young age, where he joins the ranks of children bred to potentially lead the armies of Earth against the alien threat. The novel weaves together a geopolitical power struggle, the influence of political columnists, military justice, and the emotional cost of war into a science-fiction backdrop with notable action setpieces keeping the pace. Card has spent nearly the past 30 years expanding and refocusing the thematic Rubik’s cube of Ender’s Game in subsequent entries in the series, but he never distilled the dread of children presiding over a war while hanging from adults’ puppet strings in the same way he did here.