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A review by royperez
Ender in Exile by Orson Scott Card
1.0
My Amazon review (yeah, I was pretty pissed):
Subj: Deeply alienated by Card's recent work.
A disappointing, socially unimaginative flattening of a character and a world I once loved very much. This novel was rife with ideologically and spiritually conservative addresses to the reader that seemed to diverge from the far ranging and broad discourses of the other books, at least the way I read them so many years ago. I felt alienated by the Wiggins of this novel, theirs and the narrator's presumptions about people's personalities and biological determinism, the absence in this world of any challenges to what seem like universally unquestioned ideas about family, gender, sexuality, social order, ethnicity and race--it's like ages of progressive thought on Earth were erased in order to create a universe where stereotypes turn out to be God's funny way of using DNA.
What the narrator of this novel would have you interpret as the human individual's inability to escape her or his own genetic make-up is truly, to my eyes, an author's inability to let his characters be anything but allegories for an outmoded, oppressive conservatism at a time when authors should be offering something much, much better than an intergalactic expansion of the middle-class Anglo-Christian exceptionalism that has done so much to hurt the world.
There's my elitist, queer-nerd, politically irked two cents. A dedicated reader of the Alvin, Homecoming and Ender series, as well as many stand-alone works, it pains me a little to say this will be my last Card novel for sure.
Subj: Deeply alienated by Card's recent work.
A disappointing, socially unimaginative flattening of a character and a world I once loved very much. This novel was rife with ideologically and spiritually conservative addresses to the reader that seemed to diverge from the far ranging and broad discourses of the other books, at least the way I read them so many years ago. I felt alienated by the Wiggins of this novel, theirs and the narrator's presumptions about people's personalities and biological determinism, the absence in this world of any challenges to what seem like universally unquestioned ideas about family, gender, sexuality, social order, ethnicity and race--it's like ages of progressive thought on Earth were erased in order to create a universe where stereotypes turn out to be God's funny way of using DNA.
What the narrator of this novel would have you interpret as the human individual's inability to escape her or his own genetic make-up is truly, to my eyes, an author's inability to let his characters be anything but allegories for an outmoded, oppressive conservatism at a time when authors should be offering something much, much better than an intergalactic expansion of the middle-class Anglo-Christian exceptionalism that has done so much to hurt the world.
There's my elitist, queer-nerd, politically irked two cents. A dedicated reader of the Alvin, Homecoming and Ender series, as well as many stand-alone works, it pains me a little to say this will be my last Card novel for sure.