Ender's Shadow - Orson Scott Card

After a college friend revealed Orson Scott Card's feelings towards homosexuals to me it was hard not to let his personal feelings affect my opinion of Ender's Game. This brought up the common question of 'does an artist's personal opinions affect the enjoyment of his art or ideas in such a way that it completely ruins them?' Nietzsche was a well known sexist, and there are even many passages in his books that tout these ignorant opinions, but does that mean his other, more enlightened views are thus negated? Some (okay, 99 percent) rappers have hateful or sexist lines in their songs, but does that mean we can't look past it or enjoy their other songs? Or with the case of Card, can we enjoy his books even though he actively supports the mistreatment of an entire section of people in our society?

Card's situation is a little different that the other examples above because his personal opinions are a little less obvious from his work. There is no way to tell that he is a homophobe from the text of Ender's Game. In fact all the scenes of little boys running around naked and talking about their love for each other is more than a little homoerotic. However, Ender's Game was written before Card became more outspoken about his beliefs so it's possible that he just didn't feel as strongly at the time. After talking to some friends, and reading about his other work on the internet, I decided I had no interest in reading the rest of the Ender series. However, I was interested in Ender's Shadow on the strength of a couple of recommendations, and was also interested to see if Card's homophobic beliefs would rear their ugly head in this later written piece.

On the later of these accounts, I found Ender's Shadow to be no more homophobic than Ender's Game. Frankly it was possibly even more homoerotic than his seminal work. Now I'm not the kind of person that thinks every homophobe is possibly just a closeted self-loathing gay, but the thought did cross my mind more than once when it comes to Card.

Ender's Shadow is as the subtitle says, 'a parrallel novel to Ender's Game'. It takes (mostly) the same story and tells it from the character of Bean, Ender's right hand man and another small but intelligent child. Additionally to telling Bean's point of view, Shadow is used to give us more background and explanation for the events that happened in Game either through Bean's interaction with the teachers and commanders or through blunt bits of exposition through other characters.

I found Bean's own development to be interesting, if not a little more than reminiscent of the story we are told about Ender. They are both younger than the typical members of battle school, and furthermore they are small for their age. They both are singled out for their size and intelligence by their instructor during their lunch to the school in order to ostrisize them from their fellow students. Although this makes sense later on when we learn that Bean is really the 'back up' to Ender in case he should fail, it still feels a little too repetitive. Further making Ender's Shadow repetitive is the fact that the sections with Ender are exactly like they are in the previous book, with us getting the running monologue of Bean's head instead of Enders. Also, Card still has no idea how to write children (I don't care how smart they are, children don't speak like that!).

In addition to using many of the same sections for the plat, Card also doesn't have the best of writing styles. It is often said that the best films 'show and not tell', and even though this is a book I think the same basic principle applies to all storytelling. It is best to tell a story while leaving the audience to fill in some gaps themselves. The best storytellers will leave enough gaps to keep the audience stimulated and thinking, while giving them enough information so everyone can follow along and come to (mostly) the same conclusions. There are way too many sections of unnecessary explanation in Card's books, and it makes him only a mediocre writer. There is no need ot have a character explain what happened and why in a two page monologue after the reader themselves have also read the event in question. Card is either spoon feeding the reader, or trying to make his characters seem 'analytical', but it really just comes off as both patronizing and boring.

I didn't hate Ender's Shadow, and found much of it entertaining as I did with Ender's Game. Card does reuse a lot of the same tricks, and clumsily connects events and characters while over-explaining everything, but the story is still interesting. After reading Shadow, and reading about the other books in both the Ender and Bean series, I can see why people think Card is a one trick pony. Shadow did feel a little like Card realized he had used up his one good idea, and that he missed the boat and underdeveloped many of the characters in that book. Shadow is really for Ender's Game fanatics who can't get enough of that universe, but for everyone else I'd say it's a solid skip.

So how did I come out of this feeling about Card the person? Well from Shadow and Game I gather that Card feels two things about himself, or at least about himself at a young age. 1) That he was small and unfairly picked upon as a child. And 2) that he was beyond his age in intelligence and was able to use this to trick the older and bigger kids. Furthermore, it's obvious from his online commentaries that he is just another conservative religious man who recently decided to make gay-bashing his personal quest. So can we disconnect his art from the person? In this case I think you can, even though he only has 1 great book (that is poorly written like many sci-fi greats) and I don't think he's really worth the energy getting that upset about in the first place.