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« Speaker for the Dead | Main | Children of the Mind »

August 13, 2008

Comments

Jeffrey G

A little off topic, Card also wrote a Sci-Fi story called The Worthing Chronicle*. As far as I can tell, the major theme of that book was dealing with the problem of pain. It has a pretty interesting perspective on that. I just wanted to share.

*The last time The Worthing Chronicle was published, it was as part of a collection called The Worthing Saga, but the Chronicle was the only thing worth reading, IMO.

Christina

I remember hearing a quote once that it was ok to ask a reader to accept the impossible, but when you started asking him to accept the improbably then you lost him.

I wish I could remember where I heard that quote, but it seems that it would apply well to this book.

Shane

I guess it is sounding more and more to me like this series might be intended as something like a Mormon Chronicles of Narnia, in which case it would seem to me not so much to be artistically inferior or whatnot, but to actually be immoral.

Matheus F. Ticiani

Jimmy

Talking about "Off Topic", I wonder whether Card's novelization of James Cameron's The Abyss is better or worse than the movie. While reading this post I went to Wikipedia, just out of curiosity to find out more details about Card's presence here in my country, and realized that he wrote that book, which I came across in a bookstore some years ago but really didn't have any interest in reading. I used to like the movie very much and regard it as Cameron's best (I haven't seen it again for some time, but I'm sure it's better than Titanic).

Brandon

The Path parts of the book are built up from an earlier short story, and I think this is in part why they tend to work very well -- Card has always been better at short stories than novels. But I always felt that Xenocide reads like several storylines put together in a way that's just not very well-integrated. The storylines cross, but they do it suddenly and without much development, and the rest of the time just proceed on their own. We don't really get a novel, we just get several stories put together in a half-hearted way.

Mary

I remember hearing a quote once that it was ok to ask a reader to accept the impossible, but when you started asking him to accept the improbably then you lost him.

It's from Aristotle's Poetics. I've heard it in various translations, but here's one:

"With respect to the requirements of art, a probable impossibility is to be preferred to a thing improbable and yet possible."

Sam Urfer

Actually, Card has written a series that is essentially the Mormon Narnia, but it isn't the Ender books. The Homecoming Saga is a science fiction retelling of the Book of Mormon set forty million years in the future. They are interesting books, but kooky to an extent.

labrialumn

And Stargate:SG1 deals with Mormonism from the other side. The System Lords are the false gods. :-)

brendon

Huh. All that aiua stuff is Mormon metaphysics. Something about it always felt...wrong to me, but I could never quite put my finger on it. I was neither conversant in metaphysics nor Mormonism at the time I read the book.

I have not really read Xenocide or Children of the Mind again in the years since I first read them. I've tried, but I always have to stop during Xenocide, even before the book becomes physical and metaphysical conversations about aiua. One of the characters from the world of Path--the one whose name translates into English as "Gloriously Bright," if I remember correctly--absolutely infuriates me. I can read Ender's Game over and over again. I don't hate Speaker for the Dead, but I cannot get through Xenocide again.

The Bean fork is a lot more interesting. Action packed and full of interesting moral dilemmas and geopolitical events. I am anticipating your reviews.

Anders

It's been years since I read Xenocide, but Jimmy Akin's comments hit the mark. The bizarre metaphysics are bad enough, but the characters' discovery of it was so implausible that it shook me out of the story. As I recall, the eternal, uncreated nature of the "philotes" and "aiuas" was proved as follows: if God or a god had created them, then they would be under His/his control without free will of their own; but in fact souls have free will; therefore souls are uncreated.

Now that's a logical argument of sorts, but the characters gloss over as self-evident the highly controversial major premise, that God cannot make beings who have free will--flatly contradicted not only by Christianity but by almost every religion on earth. As a reader, am I supposed to believe that *none* of these genius characters, some of whom are Catholic, stops to think, "Maybe we should justify this dubious major premise of ours?"

The art suffers so much that my suspended disbelief crashed to the ground, not at Mormon metaphysics but at the unbelievable dialogue.

Uhura

blip

Clark
All that aiua stuff is Mormon metaphysics. Something about it always felt...wrong to me, but I could never quite put my finger on it. I was neither conversant in metaphysics nor Mormonism at the time I read the book.

One should clarify this. It's an expansion of a speculative theological notion of an early LDS apostle named Orson Pratt. But it's anything but Mormon metaphysics. Pratt's ideas were very influential on Card. You can see elements of them in Treason (which was a significant rewrite of an earlier novel A Planet Called Treason) and also in The Worthing Chronicle (which I think has been rewritten as a new novel at least three times with a different name each time plus an original short story)

Clark

BTW - the metaphysics of the philotes and so forth was there in the first novel. He expands on the idea but it's definitely there. (It's also prominent in his Alvin Maker series which has two amazingly strong books and then quickly tapers off in quality) It's a constant theme in his books and I'd say that in the Ender series it's a prominent subtheme in all the books. (Not in the Bean books though)

mike

I'm coming to this discussion way late, but I am a believing Mormon and thought how curious it was that Card basically made no effort to hide LDS metaphysics going into Xenocide. So i Googled philotes and mormon and found this review. His implementing mormon philosophy is not covert at all. I realize the negative commentary on this is people being extremely bothered by Card implementing his beliefs into fiction. Maybe it is preachy, maybe he gets to the concepts too fast and too conveniently, but I still think the books far surpass almost any other contemparary work of sci fi/fantasy, and certainly blow most formula fiction right out of the water, even with the flaws.

I've noticed that a lot of series' get utterly crap as the the authors choose to add more and more volumes, and while Card may have lost it slightly, the imagination is still there and it still causes me to think a lot more than other novels I've gone through.

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