I’m a fan of Ender’s Game, so I assumed I was a fan of Orson Scott Card. This may have been a false assumption. I picked up Enchantment because it looked interesting, a retelling of Sleeping Beauty, and it looked different from my last Orson Scott Card disappointment. No awkward religious stuff here, I thought. I thought wrong. Enchantment is billed as a fantasy, as a retelling of Sleeping Beauty. But we open on a Russian boy in 1975 converting to Judaism to escape Russia. […]
The start of a very weird series
So I was going along, listening to the book, and it was all fine, and then all of a sudden, I came to a realization. “Wait a minute, this is JESUS!” Yes, this all seems to boil down to a second coming of Christ (or Christ-like character.) (Or something to do with Mormons. I’m not sure.) This is an alternate history of Frontier era of America. From what I quickly read of the introduction before I started, I knew there would be some differences, […]
“Humanity does not ask us to be happy. It merely asks us to be brilliant on its behalf.”
I was always a voracious reader but in reality I recycled the same 10 or 15 books a year with a few new ones sprinkled in for good measure. This isn’t a bad system but it would have made for a very repetitive Cannonball profile and one thing my CBR journey has pushed me to do in the past three and a half years is to read new books: different genres and entire author oeuvres etc. So now that I’m on my fourth year I figure […]
At least Graff gets a happy ending
Orson Scott Card wrote Ender in Exile eleventh out of the twelve books in the Enderverse (so far), but it actually falls between Ender’s Game and Speaker for the Dead, and runs alongside the events of most of the Shadow Series. Card says he wrote it to fill in the gaps between the war ending on Eros, and Ender becoming the Speaker that we see in Speaker for the Dead, Xenocide and Children of the Mind. However, it seemed more to me like Card had a list of all the endings he needed […]