His opinions on other subjects range from misguided to outright offensive.
Orson Scott Card has devolved into a frothing at the mouth lunatic in recent years. His opinions are borderline worthless. His more recent novels make Twilight look like fine literature.
You value this comment and want to see more of this kind of comment on HN?
He gets away with it because 1) most sci-fi (especially in the past, it's actually made a lot of strides) is pretty bad in terms of writing....it's more about the strength of it's ideas and fantasy.
2) Ender's Game is "Twilight" for nerds. Ender (and to an extent, Val/Peter) is this empty vessel for Teens to pour themselves into. (come on..it starts with Ender bemoaning about how the big bad grownups are always lying to him)
I'd say read Ender's Game because it's an interesting enough book. You can safely skip just about everything else he's written though.
The only reason Ender's Game gets so much praise is because most people read it as a teenager and didn't notice how awful it is. It's basically porn for mal-adjusted nerds (it's the ultimate revenge fantasy) so a lot of it's young readers (hey, myself included) completely miss the high amount of WTF.
I mean come on, the book starts out with the premise that eugenics works. The twist at the end is predictable.
Theres a bunch of plot holes....and the characters are ridiculous. Ender is this absurd Jesus figure and everyone else in the book is a cardboard cutout that exists solely for the purpose of either getting knocked over or propped up by Ender.
The thing is Ender's Game does not provide any insight into children per se, it does provide a perfect example of how many teenagers like to view themselves though (misunderstood mesiah figures persecuted by a universally evil populace) hence it's popularity.
The whole Val/Peter thing is just embarrassing and sad...and you can imagine a lot of Card's young readers placing themselves in that role and imagining themselves as great orators who take over the world with their brilliant (though never really articulated ideas).
Only teenagers and someone like Card could be so naive/insane/ignorant of how politics work to find such an idea remotely plausible.
It has at it's heart the premise that everyone in politics is just dicking around doing nothing.... just waiting for someone who actually knows whats REALLY going on to shine the light on them...(despite my disdain of current politics, I have slightly more respect for both sides than that).
Understanding that and reading Card's blog you can see maybe his politics and writing aren't so divorced
The books only redeeming quality, like I said before, is the interesting ideas....
The battle school for example is interesting...the game is interesting (until Card ruins it...the game is actually a really good example of where, instead of making Ender brilliant he just made everyone around him really dumb.) The buggers etc are moderately interesting.
I've read a fair amount of his other work, and really he hasn't done much worth reading....stick with any of the thousands of SciFi authors who are much much better.
What do you mean "we can't"? You can say whatever you want here (subject to YCombinator's terms of services and any applicable laws), but the voting system is supposed to encourage "content that contributes to the site" to make the site higher quality and I don't think astrodust's comment "he's a frothing lunatic" is a high quality contribution, it's just an unsupported personal insult and I'm annoyed that it's being upvoted by agreement.
id say i will be avoiding his books like the plague.
Ender's Game makes number 1 in a top 100 SciFi books list ( http://home.austarnet.com.au/petersykes/topscifi/lists_books... ), don't avoid it because you don't like the author personally, only avoid it if it looks like a rubbish book.
For the record: I didn't upvote.
Either way, he's done some of my favorite science fiction titles but I mostly have to pretend he doesn't exist in real life. His politics, with regard to social issues, are just vulgar.
If you feel bad about supporting him financially, remember that he only gets about a dollar for each book you buy. If you borrow it from the library, your contribution is even smaller.
On the subject of his political views, I looked at the referenced Wikipedia site and don't see anything "vulgar" listed there. Perhaps I use a different definition of "vulgar" than others... [http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/vulgar]
While part of me is still hoping he's talking about Snopes, I know this is a reference to the University of East Anglia emails, which were about as much a blow to climate science as the Arsenic bacteria were a boon to astrobiology. I may have to adopt your "pretend he doesn't exist in real life" approach.
I refuse to read any of his new stuff, but that's probably 50% politics and 50% taste.
I think OSC's political positions are nigh idiotic, and frankly confusing given the very reasonable positions he presents in some of his books. E.G. Homosexual characters in his books are not society destroying monsters. Yet even given that you're still overstepping sane literary analysis when you start the Hitler biography bullshit. Attack the man on his politics all you want, his positions are easy to verify and highly public, just leave the stupid smears to die.
Yes, that has always puzzled me - going from portraying gay characters as alright people suffering from straight society's marginalization to ranting about the Gay Agenda. I suspect it has something to do with a remark he made in the late 80s or early 90s about local church (CoLDS) officials encouraging him to spend more of his pro writing time on religious propaganda or other pro-church material. It was in a non-fiction piece or an afterword in a book of his, and I wish I could remember which one.
What I thought was more interesting than the Hitler comparisons were the allegations of ghostwriting. I thought THAT was the real point of the article, that it was clear he didn't even know what was in his books, and when presented with something he definitely wrote, it was incoherent and poorly written.
I was willing to give him a chance since it's the WSJ, but he just had to throw something like that in there.