Orson Scott Card

First sentence: There are many ways to lose a child, and none of them is merciful. But like all unbearable things it can be borne, and in the weeks before Christmas 1938, the Pullmans were learning how.

Premise/plot: Zanna's Gift is a LOVELY Christmas novel. Zanna, the youngest of the Pullman family, has a special way to memorialize her older brother, Ernest, after his unexpected death at fifteen.

The best way to read Zanna's Gift is without knowing a thing about it. I promise you. I'm doing show more you a favor by NOT summarizing the plot and sharing what Zanna's GIFT was and how it was a gift that kept giving and giving.

My thoughts: LOVE. I loved this one absolutely and completely from start to finish. It was one of those perfectly perfect EXPERIENCES. It feels like more than just a book, a story, a fictional work. THESE CHARACTERS ARE REAL. How it hasn't been adapted into a movie if it was truly published originally in 2004 is beyond me. It would make an excellent movie.

I would recommend this one to people who aren't necessarily readers. Of course I recommend it to readers who read anything and everything. But for those who are reluctant to pick up books, please consider reading this wonderful amazing book.

If you LOVE Christmas, this is an absolute must. I could easily see it becoming a book that you feel you HAVE to read each and every year.

ETA: I've read this one three times? four times? I love this book so much. show less

Today is the day for me rating books a 3.5.

I reread this over the weekend, in search of comfort reading. And that is basically what it was: a familiar story, nothing that made me think too hard, a plot that propelled me to the finish line in fairly short order and without a whole lot of mental effort on my part. And for doing the job of entertaining me over the weekend, it gets a 3.5.

But--despite the author's rather wordy and self-flattering forward--this is not High Art.

1. The author's very show more public homophobia influences his storylines: there are no gay characters. All the men are Manly and all the women are Feminine, unless they are damaged, and then they SHOULD be feminine and will be restored to their proper softness/motherliness by the end of the book.

2. Every single child character in his novels is some kind of prodigy. This simply is not credible. Ender himself is a prodigy, as we all learned in Ender's Game; and in this book, all of the other characters are prodigies, too, somehow able to amass enough knowledge and skill in the fields of xenobiology & xenoanthropology, respectively, to pass the admittance exams while still teenagers. I'm thinking that in 3000 years the amount of specialized knowledge in those fields would be so extensive as to make that essentially impossible, no matter how smart the kid is.

3. Ender is just not a credible character in this book. His insights are pedestrian in the extreme. In order for him to shine as a genius, Card must paint all of the other characters as exceptionally blind and stupid. Somehow no one in the entire city even thinks for a second that Novinha is unfaithful to her husband, even though ALL SIX of her children are from a man not her husband, who is actually physically sterile, and known to be so. Come on. No one guessed? No one hinted? No one gossiped? This husband of hers who was cuckolded for decades, actually adored his wife and only beat her because he loved her--oh ok. Well that makes it all right then.

No one sees that the littlest boy is grieving the man he thinks is his father--because why? It's pretty glaringly obvious. Why is Ender the only one who sees it? Why is he the only one who offers discipline or structure?

Why do all of the xeno- experts think that the aliens must reproduce the same way people do? Wouldn't that be one of the earliest and most basic things covered in the exams they all passed when they were 13? For that matter, why--except for Card's homophobia and sexism--is male/female a pattern carried through all of his alien races? In order for Ender to be a genius who solves this world's problems in 30 minutes (not an exaggeration) everyone else on the planet must be painted as an absolute idiot, even though they are simultaneously all prodigies. This makes no sense.

The way it looks to me is this:

Card needs to make Ender a genius, but one's character cannot exceed one's own intellect. Ender is limited to the insights that Card himself is capable of. Therefore, in order for Ender to be a super-genius, the entire city must be stupid.

It's dangerous for an author to make a character a genius. If the author isn't capable of the genius they need their character to display, it just won't be convincing. show less

The label on the spine says "SCIENCE FICTION", but "FANTASY" would have been more accurate. "RIGHT-WING FANTASY" would have been the most accurate of all.

Global warming is a lie, and even liberals know it in their heart of hearts. Guantanamo is relatively "nice". Progressives conspired against America, and were roundly defeated by patriotic red-state forces. Fox News is the only channel that even occasionally tells the truth. A Rush Limbaugh analog is a brave, noble, and lovable hero.

Three show more thoughts went through my head as I read this:

First, that George W. Bush could have written the whole thing. I knew that Card had been getting more and more right-wing over the years, but this surprised even me.

Second, that with each page I found myself disliking Card more and more. Your mileage may differ, but I found his opinions really offensive. He really seems quite proud of his bigoted opinions; that shouldn't be a surprise to anyone who has read any of his homophobic and religiously-biased articles.

Third, whatever storytelling talent Card had has long since been replaced with a dumbed-down writing style and an urge to grab the microphone and preach the True Faith. He's really gotten himself into a rut; he seems utterly dependent on overly-precious banter between precocious kids and their parent(s), alternating with warmed-over right-wing political philosophy and rather limp and confused action scenes.

There's a worldwide epidemic and African warfare thread which is slightly less tedious than the rest of the book, but it certainly doesn't make up for the rest of it. The whole thing rather reminded me of the Left Behind series, and that's a memory I would rather not have dredged up.

It's funny; he was able to write well, once upon a time. It's hard to believe that this book is by the same guy who wrote [b:Songmaster|31352|Songmaster|Orson Scott Card|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1168275827s/31352.jpg|2904642].

Avoid! show less

Orson Scott Card's novel The Worthing Chronicle, which I read several times as a kid, was a rewrite of his first novel, Hot Sleep. Hot Sleep had a companion book, a collection of short stories called Capitol, which gave the backstory for it. Capitol is the Trantoresque (now we would say Coruscantesque, I guess, but not in 1979) center of a galactic empire, where the elite spend much of their time in suspended animation; the richer you are, the more you can afford. This only multiplies the show more power of the elite. I had read a selection of stories from Capitol in The Worthing Saga (a collection from Tor that republished Worthing Chronicle along with some related short fiction), but I had never read the book itself. So I tracked it down to see if there were any other stories in it worth reading.

There is indeed some good stuff. "Skipping Stones" is a decent tale about two boys, one rich and one poor, who grow increasingly separate thanks to use of somec (the drug that creates the suspended animation). I also really enjoyed "Second Chance," which deals with some issues of memory manipulation as well.

There are some other solid stories here. "Lifeloop" is a trifle obvious but well written, about a person whose whole life is broadcast (we would now say "streamed") such that the self has become a performance, even more relevant now, I suspect, than it would have been in 1979. "And What Will We Do Tomorrow?" delves into the psychology of Mother, the ancient ruler of Capitol, who uses somec so much she's only awake for a day every five years.

I checked the contents of Capitol against the ISFDB's entry for Worthing Saga as I went, and I have to say, I think Card absolutely made the right call on which stories he kept in print, and which ones he did not. Many of the stories here, especially earlier in the book are bad, clumsy vehicles for exposition about Capitol and somec that don't make any sense, especially "A Sleep and a Forgetting." So Capitol is more an interesting curio than something worth tracking down on its own merits; if you want the good stuff, you can already get that from The Worthing Saga. show less