Opinion: Dead-Enders Game
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Delaware Dave Weigel has the literary find of the day: a heapin’ helpin’ of Red State rage from Orson Scott Card’s new liberals-vs-conservatives civil war novel Empire. Card’s celebrated science fiction novel Ender’s Game attracted legions of fans and enough sequels that it really should be retitled Neverender’s Game. But like Al Capp, Johnny Hart, Mel Gibson, and other great world-creating cranks before him, Card has been around long enough to make you realize that his occasional socio-politico-cultural fixations—the ease with which one can catch the gay and the apocalyptic dangers of ‘homosexual ‘marriage,’’ among others—are not just minor vestiges of his talent: All along, the fixations have been the dog and the talent has been the tail.
Ordinarily, it’s fascinating to watch popular figure reveal their inner obsessions, but in Card’s case the result is just too dire for words. Or rather, as an excerpt from the book shows, it’s unfortunately not too dire for words. In Empire, the assassination of a U.S. president ‘will make a whole bunch of European intellectuals very happy’ and cause ‘dancing in the streets in Paris and Berlin, not to mention Moscow and Beijing,’ while the liberal media establishment (which Card, in an afterword to the book, chastises for its conspiracy of silence against one Orson Scott Card) is just ‘dying’ to pin the murder of a Republican president on ‘a vast right-wing conspiracy.’ After a bit of this you start to suspect the author’s concerns go beyond the merely literary. And he can never do enough instructing: When one character makes an allusion to Jack Ruby, the limited-omniscient third-person narrator pipes up with a helpful gloss: ‘The guy who assassinated Lee Harvey Oswald before he could be tried.’
[Lee Harvey Oswald, by the way, is the guy who shot John F. Kennedy, the president between Dwight Eisenhower and Lyndon Johnson.]
All this is in service of a plot where a bizarro gang of libertine leftists take over Manhattan with robots (of course!) and declare themselves the new Grand Duchy of Fenwick and America; the decadent blue states, in league with their abortion- and gay-marriage-loving Islamic allies, immediately recognize the new government, and it’s up to a ragtag band of Special Ops patriots to bring back the real U.S.A. The book features plenty more writing like what’s above, prompting one sharp reader to comment: ‘There’s less stilted dialog in four-hour North Korean state operas about the Five Year Plan to increase tractor production.’
Card was a legitimately important figure in idea-driven science fiction, and there’s probably a lesson in all this about the fleeting nature of literary inspiration and the eventual temptation to stop entertaining people and just mount your once-a-week soapbox. But I think there’s an even simpler lesson here: Never trust a man who hates Star Trek.