Orson Scott Card was once one of my favorite science fiction writers.

It all started with my first Orson Scott Card book, Ender's Game. I was about 10 years old, looking through the dusty racks of my local moldy old bookstore, looking for something new. Science fiction or fantasy it had to be, because, although I was a girl, comic books had just began to grab my attention. Even though I was quiet and reserved, the superhuman feats of comic book heroes, and of certain science fiction characters, drew me. I didn't play with boys, but read what were considered "boy" subjects. The types of stories I liked best (and still do, to this day) were the ones where the hero was a normal person (a teenager, almost always a boy) who had to go on a quest or had some huge life-changing experience that revealed a secret hidden talent that saves the world (you'd be surprised at how many of those books there are). Ender's Game not only fit into that mold, it broke it.

Here I had the above paradigm, but also an exciting setting, simple yet effective prose and, most of all, painfully real characters. Orson Scott Card had written a book about the entire human experience through the eyes of one supersmart boy, and I was blown away.

I have high standards now. Orson Scott Card's work set them.

I then went on to read Songmaster, yet another story in the preferred mold, and yet completely different. Songmaster has a bit more fun with it's poetry. And the images in that book - imagine being about 11, and reading about such things as communicating only with song, and about a boy with a voice that could bring an emperor to tears. Love so strong it could only be communicated with the utmost of control, so that it seems to be it's opposite, and sound so powerful it brings a roomful of people to the height of lust. Wonderful stuff. I've reread the book recently, and it stands the test of time.

Finally, at 12, I started with a bit more age appropriate stuff. I read Seventh Son, about an alternate America where magic works. Alvin is born the seventh son of a seventh son, which makes him a "Maker", a person with a wonderful power for good. I don't want to give too much away, but lots of things try to kill him. Once again, a wonderful book from a wonderful writer.

What's great about Card, hands down, are his characters. He draws people that get under your skin, making you believe that they are fully human. His stories are wonderfully moralistic, but not in a preachy kind of way. They're about the good inherent in humanity, and the many, many ways we have of messing ourselves up. It's hard for me to pinpoint, but read his collection of short stories, Maps in a Mirror, and you'll see what I mean. Read "Kingsmeat", "Fat Farm", "Euripiedes in the Fourth Floor Lavatory", and "A Thousand Deaths". Also, read his essays about the nature of storytelling. They've been instrumental in my own writing.

I was, mostly, an Orson Scott Card completist. It was my mission to try and own all his books. I did all of the Ender series, all of the Seventh Son series, and tried to get my hands on all of the single books he did.

Now, as to the title of my review...

My first inkling that all was not right in Card land was a few years ago. Checking out his website, I saw that he was thinking of making "Ender's Game" into a movie. I was a bit wary of this, but I figured that he was the AUTHOR. It was his project. He wouldn't mess it up. So when the first 10 pages of the screenplay were released on the web, I downloaded them eagerly. Oh boy.

I had, in the intervening years, decided that writing was what I wanted to do for a living. So I enrolled (got accepted to) NYU's Dramatic Writing Program. I wrote plays and screenplays all the time, for classes. I learned what made a good screenplay and what didn't. This was not a good screenplay.

Oh, the format was fine. The writing was passable. But the story -- !

Mr. Card had decided to reveal the biggest plot secret - the thing that the entire story turns on - in the first few pages!!!!

Now, if you haven't read Ender's Game, I'm not going to tell you what this was. But if you have, you know what it is. Yes, that. The thing that you might have guessed, but didn't definetely know until the triumphant ending. That thing there. THE BIG SECRET.

The screenplay began with the secret!

And the dialogue was terrible! Wooden and canned. Worse than anything in the book.

A few days (weeks?), Mr. Card took the pages down, because of the negative feedback he was getting. He was sick of being told how to tell his own story, he said. Movies need a big bang to open with, or you can't get the studios interested.

Orson Scott Card was destroying his own work.

And the sucky writing continued. All of a sudden, his books because nearly unreadable. Lost Boys, a wonderful short horror story, because a horrible full length novel, obvious and not scary in the least. The Folk of the Fringe was pretty bad. It got a little better with Children of the Mind, the last novel in the Ender Series, but I couldn't get through Alvin Journeyman, the most recent in the Alvin Maker series. The last book of Card's I picked up, Homebody, felt like a dime store romance novel. I sold it on half.com. And Ender's Shadow, the "paralell" story of Ender's Game told from the point of view of Bean, one of Ender's companions, reads like a desperate attempt squeeze another dime out of his readers. In Ender's Game, Bean is a likeable character, being the "second" Ender, a kid as smart and fast and small as Ender was in the beginning, and whom, after some trouble, becomes one of Ender's most trusted companions. In Ender's Shadow, Bean is a little thinking machine. All of his actions are carefully calculated because he's a genetic mutant that doesn't really know how to feel. So the warm, spunky, fun boy that was in Ender's Game, becomes instead a cold, measuring machine in Ender's Shadow. He's nowhere near as likeable (not that this makes a character, but still). Not for one minute did I truly believe he was the same character, or a real person. His back story felt phony, and the number of coincidences, ridiculous coincidences, left me shaking my head. I also sold that book on Half.com.

Has success hurt his writing? Have his editors stopped doing their jobs?

Orson Scott Card was one of the best living science fiction writers. However, his recent work has made me sceptical, and where once, a new book by Mr. Card was a no-brainer, I now cringe and have to really consider whether or not to pick it up. Hopefully, he will return to his former proficency. Until then, I always have Songmaster to reread.




Recommended: Yes