Orson Scott Card

Discussion in 'Reading & Writing' started by Ken Anderson, Feb 15, 2020.

  1. Ken Anderson

    Ken Anderson Senior Staff
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    I am currently nearly through with the last book of The Mither Mages Trilogy (The Lost Gate, The Gate Thief, Gatefather).

    It’s a fantasy that he wrote, I think, over a long period of time. Like many of his other books, the story weaves fantasy, magic, and religion together in an interesting way. It’s not his best work but I have already read his best work.

    I’ve just finished Lost Boys, by Orson Scott Card, although I had read this one several years ago, and enjoyed it the second time. It is very different from his other books in that he tells what is essentially an eerie ghost story in what is otherwise a mostly autobiographical piece about a period of his life when he was an early computer programmer, moving to North Carolina for a job with a computer software company. It's a short book, but very good, particularly if you can relate to computers in the 1980s, and the ghost story sort of sneaks up on you. This also one that almost no one mentions, but I think it’s among his better books.

    Years ago, I started a thread about a magazine article, in which Card discusses what's wrong with America today. It didn't get any responses, but there weren't a lot of people in the forum then, so I'll link to the 2015 thread.

    Ender's Game is one that you may have heard of, probably because of the movie. Needless to say, the book was far better than the movie but the movie was okay. However, he wrote so many sequels to Ender's Game that I couldn't commit myself to read all of them so I read three of them, and gave up. He has written twenty or more books based on Ender's Game. However, someone can read just Ender's Game, and it's a full story in itself so it's not like stopping in the middle of something.

    Another one that I liked was his Tales of Alvin Maker series. I read the first five of them. He has since published a sixth and is working on a seventh. This a good series too. Set in the time of early America, he tells a good story based on a premise that superstition is real.
     
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    Last edited: Feb 15, 2020
  2. Ken Anderson

    Ken Anderson Senior Staff
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    Orson Scott Card is a Mormon, by the way. His faith plays a large part in many of his stories, but very few of them deal with Mormonism itself. Lost Boys does, because he is using his own story as a backdrop for the ghost story that he tells. Otherwise, if you know anything about Mormonism, you will be able to detect aspects of it in some of his characters but I can't think of another of his fiction stories in which a character is actually identified as a Mormon.
     
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