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donjohndijon OP t1_iu1jh6k wrote

Reply to comment by congradulations in If you ever loved Enders Game, or science fiction in general, check out some of Card's other series. by donjohndijon

Yeah. I looked him up... he doesn't think gay people should be equal citizens. Kinda hard to look past that.. honestly kinda wish I could have never made this post.

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congradulations t1_iu1k05h wrote

I promise, read Ender's Shadow and it's worth it. You won't view Ender the same way either, but he was always a tragic figure. The Shadow series does Ender's Game better (except he figures out the final reveal, because of the genius among geniuses does), AND it features Peter and Val doing Earth politics stuff in the following books. Best Ender book, best Ender series

Battle School-trained military genius kids go home to their countries, having defeated humanity's unifying enemy... what could go wrong?!

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donjohndijon OP t1_iu1m5ze wrote

Is it heavy on politics, are enders siblings in it?

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mundane_coconut47 t1_iu1wlzd wrote

Yes they play a sizeable role in the books I think (it's been a long time since I read the series so I could be misremembering).

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Contentiblereddit t1_iu3j8tl wrote

Ender's Shadow is also a multiple part series that lets Orson Scott Card say everything about Islam is evil and wrong.

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helava t1_iu292o6 wrote

Also if you’re not yet convinced, read anything he wrote in response to 9/11, Iraq and Afghanistan. It’s incomprehensible that that’s the same person that wrote Ender’s Game, but it is.

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donjohndijon OP t1_iu3329p wrote

Im.beyond convinced he's awful and deserves no money. But no one has begun to convince me whybi shouldn't read books I already own

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helava t1_iu4yfos wrote

I think that's wholly up to you. If it doesn't give him additional money, then the big negative is gone. I still have my copy of Ender's Game and The Worthing Saga. I'm debating whether to let my older son read Ender's Game. It'd be right up his alley. I suspect I probably will, and then we'll talk about Mr. Card's views afterwards.

I think the interesting thing about Card is that my interpretation of his books doesn't reflect his real-life worldview at all. One of the reasons I felt a sense of betrayal when I found out about his views was that they seem so contrary to what I took from his writing. Which is one of the interesting things about stories, how they can bend and change depending on who's reading them.

But let's take a different author, and someone I equally admired as a kid: Frank Miller. I love The Dark Knight Returns, and Daredevil: Born Again. Born Again might be my favorite comic arc ever. It still is.

But then look at something like 300, or Holy Terror. Whether it's blatant homophobia or blatant Islamophobia - those things are in those books in really fundamental ways. Is reading them bad? It depends.

We learn from stories. We build our ideals and our worldview through them. We find role models in characters. We alter our real-world behavior based on myths. While I can look at Miller's more recent work, and it's so far out in space that I can say, "This is grotesque" and reject it, the closer and closer you get to "normal" the harder it is to distinguish the influence those characters can have on you.

Should you stop reading Card? I don't know. I deeply love some of his books. But at the same time, what if instead, I read N.K. Jemisin? Octavia Butler? Ted Chiang? Would I be influenced by their works? Surely. How would the subtle influence their work has on my worldview change me? Their work is no less grand.

We all have a limited amount of time to spend. We should be careful who we choose to spend it with.

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