Xenocide

There are the fans, and there are the ones who haven't got around to reading his work. I have yet to meet anyone who doesn't like Orson Scott Card's books. Well, the Ender books, anyway. I guess there are some weird, less famous ones that I've heard might be lame.

A while back, it's probably been almost ten years now, I read Ender's Game. It was an experience never to be forgotten. No other book I've ever come across has taken an idea and explored it in such a way, while at the same time creating a character I actually cared about, pretty much like I care about real people. Disturbing at multiple levels—most of which can't even surface until you've finished the book, put it aside, and utterly failed at forgetting it and moving on with your life—it stretched the boundaries of what I thought fiction books could really do and how much they actually can change you.

I've been changed by other books before, but not in such a self-aware way. The Little House on the Prairie books partially defined my childhood, L.M. Montgomery's books defined my adolescence, and Harry Potter helped pull me and keep me out of a very dark period of transition. Countless other books altered my perception of the world around me and the relationships I had formed and should form—most of them good, some of them bad. But I didn't think about it that way.

When I think about books that truly changed me, Ender's Game is always at the very top of the list. I should probably go more into why, but I don't want to, because it's a little too personal, and because I'd rather discuss Xenocide right now. For a long time, I had to recognize that I could only read a book by Card every few years or so, because when an intense personality reads an intense book, long periods of recovery time are required. So I read Ender's Game, then a few years later I read it again. A few years after that, I read Ender's Shadow, and a few years after that I read Speaker for the Dead. I got my copy of Xenocide on purpose to go to an author signing, but that, also, was a few years ago. I had to wait to start reading it when I was ready. And, contrary to my expectations, waiting a few years was not a bad thing; I could remember every character and every pertinent detail.

I just finished reading it this morning, only because last night I had a hundred pages left and was holding my eyes open with stinging tears just to get that far.

I'm sure most of my reaction to this book has to do with the fact that the author and I are members of the same faith, so I understand where his ideas are both coming from and traveling towards. But I haven't read any other books that attempt to explore and explain faith and religion with science—all at the same time throwing in dilemmas of ethics that span across planets, across villages, across religious orders, across different species, across members of the same family, and even within individuals.

What is the nature of life? Why do people care about each other? Why do people exist? How do people exist? What is free will? What is bondage? What is power? What is right? What is wrong? How much of reality is limited to our power of imagination?

He's asking the questions, and he's presenting evidence for the questions to be relevant along with evidence to provide answers. But he doesn't try to answer them.

Some authors are so open-ended you almost wish they had never brought up the questions in the first place. Others are a little too eager to wrap up their own conclusions in a box and present it to readers as if it were a great gift. A really great author leaves just enough alone. Like asking which came first, the chicken or the egg, and giving multiple arguments for either one—and at the same time wondering how vital it really is whether we know or not.

What I'm saying, then, is that Card is a great author, aside from all the stylistic fumbles he has said are relatively unimportant. He believes in substance over style, and I do agree with the overall philosophy, though I'm not convinced he's entirely correct in his approach. The book would have been much stronger if he had tighter editing (I feel patronized as a reader when the author feels the need to tell me things more than once, especially how certain people are related to others; and I was informed at least six times that Ender was Miro's step-father), and even possibly if he could employ a little more verbal subtlety in characterization.

But what's the job of a critic? In the words of Anton Ego, "the average piece of junk is worth far more than our criticism designating it so." There's plenty of junk out there in the world of books, but Xenocide isn't part of that pile.