I just finished reading Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card and LOVED it. To me, the important questions are so easily transposed onto the film that is SF. Maria Doria Russell addresses it all in her Children of God books. Card has been around forever and I just never picked him up and he is another example of a fabulous SF writer asking the hard questions. I just adore these writers for their courage and ability to tackle the big issues like: what does it mean to be human? What are my responsibilities to myself? To my species? To other species? How does our sentience change our rights/responsibilities to the world?
Anyway, Card does a brilliant treatment of these and other conflicts in Ender’s Game. I was all set to pick up the next book in the series when I did the thing I shouldn’t have : I googled Orson Scott Card.
Let me be clear – in literary theory classes I spent an inordinate amount of time considering the dangers of injecting the author into his/her work. Taking a biography and overlaying onto the body of work is both dangerous and stupid. You can reach all kinds of erroneous conclusions. More importantly, a work of art stands alone. It is, at some point, an individual separate from the creator.
So imagine how pissed off I was when I found this article and started to change my mind about how clever/enlightened/brave Mr. Card is. Can I undo the change its wrought in my thinking about his writing? Probably not.
What do you think about digging into the author’s history and beliefs? Relevant to the work are needless speculation on the motives beneath the text?
