I need a place to dump my thoughts on this slow-moving tragedy, sorry.

Still a stone-cold classic. I don't know how many times I've read this one, or when the last time was that I read it, but holy shit is it everything I ever want gripping prose to be. Does any book manage to be this slickly-paced and this emotionally hard-hitting? Jeez.

I was joking to friends that I was looking forward to the slow decline of Orson Scott Card, and needed to savor these early moments, when... well, there's no easy way of putting it. Somehow I wound up with a much older copy of Ender's Game than I've ever had before, and that's how I learned that the original Ender's Game somehow found a way to use the N word.

"What's the context for it, though?" you ask. Dear friend, the context makes it so, so, so much worse.

Apart from that incredibly unpleasant jolt, though, it's a classic for a reason. Apparently Card wasn't even that much of a dick when people started clamoring for him to take it out. Good for him. (This is the last time I will be using those words in this sum-up.)

Goddamn. Talk about a book that's just casually, effortlessly worth its weight in gold. Leaving aside the fascinating "science" part of this science fiction, or the intricate way it weaves its mystery—easy to appreciate even when you know the full picture going in—this is an intricate story about an unhappy family that manages a staggering lot of warmth. And that's not touching the whole idea of Speaking, or anything/everything Jane, or any of that.

Every Orson Scott Card book has a quote from a critic on its front page claiming that he might just be the best science fiction has to offer. While it's pathetic that he's still hawking that quote forty years on—and doesn't really have another quote to show for it—this is the book that earned him that quote, and boy is it earned.

Both these books are controversial, partly because they continue Card's aggressive policy of mostly having middle-aged people carry out conversations, and I will say that they're both... how to put it. Delicious meals, but a little gamey. There's a lot of chewing. And way more repetitive monologuing about a few abstract sci-fi-ish concepts than was strictly warranted.

But I think they're both delightful anyway. Each one is just indelible moment after indelible moment, the metaphysics are all kinds of fascinating, and the wham moments really do wham. Are the religious overtones a bit heavier? Certainly. But these books make a case for Orson Scott Card as a religious thinker who's worth a damn, and, while his tragic, fatal flaw begins to reveal itself, it's in such a whisper early on that you can almost forget it's there.

And what's the fatal flaw? In short, it's Orson's desperate need to justify religious dogmas with scientific—meaning biological—justification. He's smart enough (and cynical enough) not to just tout religious word like it's the end-all be-all, but his philosophy of evolution is essentially that people only exist to breed, communities fall apart unless everyone remains heterosexual and monogamous, and the only meaning in life can be found in reproduction. Also God is great.

This is only mentioned out loud once or twice in these last two books, and by characters whose beliefs seem peculiar to them. So far. So I savored these two books, and breathed a sigh of relief when I was finished with their somewhat-draggy pace, and braced myself for what I knew would come.

But first! One last rollicking good time.

This is by far Orson Scott Card's most fun book, even during the opening bits where he asks whether Charles Dickens novels would've been cooler if they'd starred Baby Sherlock Holmes and Baby Moriarty. It's a parallel novel to Ender's Game, but starring such a superhuman Smart Kid that he mainly spends his time breaking all the systems that defined Ender's own journey.

But it also sets up its own quartet in an incredibly heavy-handed manner, by which I mean it introduces a psychopathic mass murderer named Achilles. Remember when I called an Orson Scott Card book intricate? Yeah. We're well past "subtlety" now.

I'm making a special note of this book, not because it's remotely distinguishable from the two books that come after it, but because it's the last book Orson wrote before his contract demanded that every book feature multiple monologues about the evolutionary need for heterosexuality.

I'm not qualified to touch the fact that a major subplot here involves Card arguing that Muslim countries shouldn't be allowed to have governments, or that his ideas about China and India come directly out of a racist 1940s cartoon.

Instead, what really matters is that a book quartet that started out about international intrigue instead becomes a series about Our Hero getting monologues from scientists about how, even if you're a man who's attracted to men, it's imperative that you find a way to have biological children of your own. Adopted children don't count, and if you adopt kids then you probably don't have a soul. Also, surrogate mothers are possibly demonic. Also also, even if you're attracted to your own gender, it's not actually homosexuality, because homosexuality doesn't exist.

Orson Scott Card was always, from the beginning, a fan of people convinced that they were smart going on about all their thoughts. But for approximately six books, he managed to find things for those Smart People to think about amongst themselves. Here, he completely runs out, and has them repeat the same canned bits about evolutionary imperatives, monogamous social stability, and how important it is not to fuck until you're married, over and over and over and over again. It's seriously wild to go from Speaker for the Dead to this stuff, which feels more like one of those shitty assemblies they make you sit through in high school. And we're not even at rock bottom yet.

An absolutely odd book that largely just fills in a couple of boring and uninteresting blanks. Ender Wiggin gets on a spaceship, teaches a teenage girl not to be horny, teaches himself that horniness is a sin, outmaneuvers an admiral in a pretty cool scene, re-lives a bunch of shit from Ender's Game, and then confronts the one remaining loose thread from the last series, a confrontation which ends almost before it even begins.

In his afterward, Card admits that he thought the whole book was going to be about that final confrontation, then wrote all the other scenes and realized he didn't have room to tell a real story. In other words, this book is nothing more than deleted scenes from a better novel that never got written. The second book quartet isn't great literature, but it's at least compelling storytelling rooted in interesting ideas. This one, though... man. It's just tripe.

But that's okay, because the real reason Orson wrote this is because he'd never given Ender a chance to tell us all about how important it is that we remain monogamous! At least, that's my hunch, because Ender launches into that monologue literally the moment we meet him. Remember this 13-year-old boy from my bestselling novel? Here he is, 23 years later, to tell you that it's imperative that you fill up a bunch of wombs with semen. Heterosexuality: It's God's Law.™

(Here is also where Orson just can't be bothered to rise above a general Sunday School-ness in his own writing. Ender Wiggin, a man whose life we follow till his death, a man who mostly only quotes religious scripture for cynical purposes, now mostly wants to discuss Bible passages with every single person in his life. Truly, we are dealing with the stuff of greatness.)

This is a very tiny novel involving some very unlikable kids in space. It is written as if the author was actively trying to make a young child feel condescended to. At the very end of it, the tiny children abruptly discover something that fills in a plot hole—though "discover" makes it sound like they do anything more than say, in text, "Guess what? We figured out that thing. Neat!" Orson doesn't even bother to make them monologue about it.

I'm not sure why this book exists.

Though technically published before Ender in Exile, I read this one as my final pre-last-book-in-the-Ender-series-ever-seriously-you-guys-I-promise palette cleanser. And man is it bad.

First Meetings consists of three short stories about Ender's early life, and the original novella of Ender's Game, for some reason. By far, the highlight involves Ender's father first meeting Ender's mother, in the middle of a college course where she tells everyone that science can prove that civilizations who allow abortion are doomed to die out, then self-righteously kicks out a student who asks her whether her Mormonism is getting in the way of her science. Leaving aside that this is literally a Republican chain email with the names mixed up, it's incredibly on-the-nose that Orson—a man whose reputation for writing good science fiction took a plunge when it became clear that he was using half-baked "science" expertise to "prove" Mormonism—decides his savior character's origin story involves Orson Scott Card But A Lady owning an 18-year-old, and Orson Scott Card But A Polish Man deciding to fall in love with her on the spot.

The best part, though, is that he seduces her by ordering her an excessive glut of takeout—literally sends a new restaurant's worth of food to her doorstep every half hour—and tells her about each and every substitution he demanded each restaurant make, because his palette is further proof of his genius.

"Gosh, Man Orson! What did you tip the restaurant for living up to your incredibly sexy standards?"

"What did I tip, Orson With A Womb? Only my fedora."

He does not say this last bit, but he does finish his I-just-met-you-today seduction by reminding her that, biologically speaking, there is no chance that she doesn't want to fuck him after this.

Anyway, the original novella is fascinating, because it's the first fiction Card ever sold, and it has the emotional depth of a thimble. All the nerdy sci-fi details? Already in place. But the characters essentially don't exist.

What's amazing to me about that is that Ender's Game is, again, one of the all-time greats when it comes to casually slicing you to emotional ribbons. Ender Wiggin's journey in that book is so powerful that it justified an entire twelve-book series, almost half of which is tolerable. And it's incredible to think that Orson Scott Card didn't even want to write Ender's Game, he just couldn't think of a way to make Speaker for the Dead work without reviving a kid from his first-ever short story and making him the main character, somehow, only three thousand years in the future. So he picked up this novella, and, over the course of about a month, went: "What does this need to work as a book? Oh, right. Crushing pathos." And then he just put it there, and became an internationally renowned writer overnight.

This book ends on a simultaneous high/low note, though, as Ender figures out a way to pay $70,000 in taxes instead of the $1,500,000 he owes for being a billionaire. And the IRS guy who tries to get him to pay more ends up imprisoned, where Orson makes sure to let us know he somehow simultaneously gets drowned in a toilet and someone slits his throat.

In 1985 and 1986, this man won science fiction's two greatest awards. Not one and then the other: he won both awards twice for two books in the same series.Nine books later, a dude gets toilet-shanked.

Anyway, I'm looking forward to liveblogging my reactions to The Last Shadow, which promises to finally unite Card's two quartets, resolve any outstanding ambiguities, and provides us with "a capstone truly deserving of the series to date." Let's just open to the first sentence and see what Orson means by that, shall w—

Ultima Thule.

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Heterosexual Lord have mercy on my soul. I'm going in.