Mormons are not buggers

Orson Scott Card, science fiction writer and practicing Mormon, has a sensible article in the National Review on how Mormons should react to the reaction to the Mormon reaction to Proposition 8. He also makes a few wise remarks about how a confident, successful minority group in the United States should view prejudice (note: applicable not only to Mormons).

But, to be honest, I don’t care overmuch about that, because the whole time I was reading it, I kept thinking to myself: “this is the best thing he’s written since Ender’s Game.” That novel, in fact, remains one my favorites — all the more strange, because I’ve never been able to finish another one of his.

This is may be a minority view (see above) but as far as I can tell, Ender’s Game was an anomaly: a near-perfect book that transcended the limitations of genre in a career mostly spent writing workmanlike genre fiction. More surprising still, it was conceived as a prequel, a setup to the later books that would provide the meat of the story, much like Tolkien’s epic Lord of the Rings was intended to prepare the ground for the even-more-epic Silmarillion.

Interesting how artists can get their own work so wrong. But then again I always knew Pet Sounds would be better than Smile.