OSC-noxious Book

Standard conversation with friends (edited for simplicity). It happened twice this weekend.

SF- reading friends: "You've never read (fill in the blank author, book, series, etc)??"

Me: "That's right, I haven't read it."

SF-rf: "Oh come on! (fill in the blank author, book, series, etc) is so classic! How can you call yourself a sf fan?"

Me: (pause) "So. Think 4th Edition D&D will be worth the switch?"

Over the years, a lot of my friends have thrown books at me to read. I usually make an honest effort to read them. However, with a small number of exceptions, I've hated the book / author / series. The exceptions (Mercedes Lackey's Valdemar, Harry Potter, The Mists of Avalon, Harry Dresden) are vastly outnumbered by such as Xanth, Discworld, The Wheel of Fscking Time, Belgariad, DragonLance, the entire Forgotten Realms cycle, virtually all Vampire: The Masquerade novels, Fred Saberhagen's Berserker novels . . . .

The point is, once again I listened to a friend's recommendation about an author to try. I even selected a book set in contemporary America as opposed to one set in his peculiar worlds. And, once again, I was disappointed.

Orson Scott Card's Empire has an interesting premise: that the US is so divided between "Red" and "Blue" states, regions, etc. that there can be no compromise. It's a 21st century Second Civil War with hovercycles, 'mechs and EMP death rays . . . nice premise for a book I'd like, and at first OSC seemed to live up to all my friends' hype about what a great author he was.

He wrote about military culture and hardware as though he lived it without sounding trite. He created a wonderful protagonist, a truly sympathetic character with a lovely family right down to the nerdy loner kid who wandered off alone to read Discworkd and Xanth novels . . . Tight plotting, great dialog and some very well drawn characters . . . an enjoyable read until the very sympathetic protagonist is scragged like a dog halfway through the book, at about the point you find out it's evil libruls who are the rebels.

Part of me wanted to scream and another part of me wanted to throw the book at the nearest wolf. I stayed up till 0230, losing sleep but having fun reading this, only to be played like a violin by this asshat of an author! Yes, as Katherine Kurtz once semi-famously said, "Sometimes the hero has to die" Kurtz once killed off nearly a generation's worth of beloved characters (Camber The Heretic, anyone?) over four books, usually heroically (Kai Descantor, Elaine Thuryn) and sometimes not (Rhys Thuryn), but she did it with style.

Between watching the protagonist die from a .22 pistol round fired by his secretary through the eye at arm's reach range while his hands were both full and the extant to which liberals were being demonized for opposing the conservative policies of a president who makes Dick Cheney look like Ghandi, I'm ready to puke. I know, Empire is NOT Ender's Game. I know judging OSC's entire body of work based on this book is dangerous.

Perhaps fscking with the reader is a trademark of his. I haven't finished the book; I don't know if I ever will now. Up till the hero died, Empire rocked.



----------------
Listening to: Leslie Fish - Bring it Down
via FoxyTunes