Orson Scott Card ( the author of Ender's game )

[DifferentGurl]

I don't know if this is the right board, but since this is his views on LGBT, I thought I'd put it in here.

I just got my new Entertainment Weekly issue and there was an article on Orson Scott Card and the controversy of Ender's Game. For those who do not know, he has said many times in the past about how he doesn't want there to be gay marriage. Not only that, he was part of a board for the National Organization for Marriage. Everyone is talking about boycotting the new Ender's Game movie that's coming out later this year. Not only that, but the studio - Lionsgate - is distancing themselves from him in order to not make people more angry. I think they just paid him and then ran the other way. I don't think they let him have veto power or anything like J.K. Rowling or Stephenie Meyer or Suzanne Collins did with the movies based on their books.

I wanted to know what everyone thought about it. I'm sorry if this is the wrong board because it has to do with an author of fictional work.

My opinion...I'm not sure what to think. It's one thing to say that you hate gays, but it's another to actively promote these anti-gay attitudes and be part of organizations that do. As for whether to go see Ender's Game or not, I'm more unsure of. Card has already be paid. The more money the movie makes does not mean he will earn more money ( at least from the ticket sales. He may earn money from merchandise and book sales that result from the movie ). They've already paid him his lump sum and that's all he'll earn from this movie. But if the movie earns a lot, it may warrant a sequel, and that will earn him more money.

So yea, I'm a bit confused. I'm not totally for him but not totally against him. He did say this cryptic thing about how he hopes the gay supporters will be tolerant towards those who were against it and that he thinks the issue is now "moot" because of the Supreme Court's ruling. Still, I just wonder what you guys think of it.

P.S. Card stepped off the board for the national Organization for Marriage, probably because of all the controversy that has been going on because of him.

[Palimpsest]

Orson Scott Card = very devout Mormon. Always totally in line with LDS theology. Vomit icon here.

Ender's Game = absolutely brilliant SF short story and later book.

ALL of his work has to be read through the lens of his religion. Once you know it, you can see LDS permeates all his writing.

Not going to see the movie. Not because of his LGBT stances, although that would give me pause, but because I have my own mental picture of the characters in Ender's Game. Don't want Hollywood to wreck them.

Typing on Kindle makes eyes bleed. Sorry for typos.

[sparkles]

I was never a big fan of Ender's Game but I did like some of his short stories. That is, until I found out about his views. Then I could no longer separate the art from the person who created it and it became forever tainted. I saw the preview fior EG the other night and my very first reaction was to tell my friends what a raging homophobe Card is, nothing about the merits of the film. Regardless of whether or not he's already gotten his payday (don't know if he negotiated points) I would still not pay to see the movie, no matter how much I wanted to (I don't so it's a win-win for me). I could never view it objectively and would not want to validate the odious views if its creator by adding to the box office grosses. Same for Cruise, Gibson and so on.

[Arete]

I won't see the movie, but I won't lie, I LOVE Ender's Game and the associated books.

[Conuly]

Disturbingly, whenever his books include a gay or bi character, that character is always the most sympathetic one there is.

I really believe he is deeply closeted and self-hating. It'd be sad, if it weren't so awful.

[sacrilicious]

What kind of LDS stuff is in the books? I read the Ender series a few years ago and loved it, however I only recently learned about his religion and views on things like gay marriage. As I recall, nothing pinged my "overtly religious" radar. Maybe it's time for a 're-read.

[darkplumaged]

Disturbingly, whenever his books include a gay or bi character, that character is always the most sympathetic one there is.

I really believe he is deeply closeted and self-hating. It'd be sad, if it weren't so awful.

I'm not into fantasy or scifi, so I don't know much about his books, but I've read a bit about him because it's fascinating in a trainwrecky way to me that a scifi writer is so virulently homophobic. Sorry, but it's not normal to be that obsessed with teh ebil gheys and what they should and should not be doing--unless you are, indeed, closeted and self-hating.

[Tesseract]

Orson Scott Card = very devout Mormon. Always totally in line with LDS theology. Vomit icon here.

Ender's Game = absolutely brilliant SF short story and later book.

ALL of his work has to be read through the lens of his religion. Once you know it, you can see LDS permeates all his writing.

Not going to see the movie. Not because of his LGBT stances, although that would give me pause, but because I have my own mental picture of the characters in Ender's Game. Don't want Hollywood to wreck them.

Typing on Kindle makes eyes bleed. Sorry for typos.

I was sitting here trying to compose a response. You've said exactly what I was trying to say including the reason for not going to see the movie. I rarely see movies of books I love.

Also, I think it is fine that he is getting backlash. If you want to make money by selling your art to the public you can't openly insult and seek to limit the rights of a large part of your audience. I don't think the backlash will change his core beliefs, though :/

[Palimpsest]

My power just came back on -- which means that I am going to be excessively wordy on Orson. (BTW, I just hate Kindle Fire HD but it is my go-to when my big computer dies. Sorry for that last telescopic post.)

I first came across Orson with the short story of Ender's Game. It was in an edition of SF and Fantasy Magazine picked up at the airport at the last minute when I was woefully short of reading material. I flew that sucker over the Atlantic and back again because I wanted Mr P to see it. Early '80s?

We both thought it was brilliant. Then the Ender's Game book came out. Mr P actually used that book as recommended reading in teaching undergraduate courses -- way back when and he sort of regrets it now. Differentiating between strategy and tactics (in a non-violent action course). Orson nailed the concepts in a very readable fashion.

Then Speaker for the Dead was published. I love that book! Want to think about cross-cultural miscommunication? Orson nailed it again. I still fucking love that book.

So we started collecting and reading Orson's work. Neither of us can remember when we first saw the sado-masochism. We picked up quite quickly on the sexism and homophobia. Somewhere in there we started picking up on the conservative LDS stuff. Then we realized that Orson was pretty up-front about the LDS connection. It is blatant in the Alvin series. Orson is honest about the LDS stuff.

Bottom-line on Orson: He is a brilliant and intelligent writer. He researches well. His characterization is great. He is a conservative toe-the-line Mormon. Read him at your own risk -- knowing that he is a dyed in the wool conservative Mormon. Insert expletives of your choice.

And, yes, I'm not going to see the movie. I don't want to risk giving this asshole cash. I also love the characters of Ender, Bean and so on. I want to keep my own images of them in my mind.

[PennySycamore]

I saw a list of Sci-Fi authors once on adherents.org and there were a whole slew of Mormon writers of Sci-Fi.

[JesusFightClub]

What Palimpsest said (except I'm not very fond of the Ender stuff, however I have enjoyed some of his other work).

Sometimes an author is a total cunt. It's really irritating because you want to say "Look. You, writing twat. How can it be that you do this brilliant stuff and you're so totally dislikeable?"

Separating the writer from the work is tricky but sometimes has to be done. In this case it's a bit clearer. Card is alive and putting forward some very distasteful views. He's not at the level, as a writer, where you have to set aside his views. If you do not like his work outside the field of literature, you're better off not giving him money. I don't, any more.

ETA: clarity

[terranova]

If I boycotted the books of every author I didn't agree with 100%, I'd have nothing to read.

Ender's Game is very dear to me. It's one of my top 5 all time books, I read it often. I won't see the movie because I don't want to picture Harrison Ford and Ben Kingsley every time I read it, not because OSC is a bigotted arse.

[Arete]

Agree with JFC and terranova. It may be uncomfortable, but sometimes people whose views we find abhorrent are still excellent artists/writers/musicians. Everybody has to draw their own line, and mine is I won't see any screen adaptations. However, I do not regret reading the books for a minute, and Ender's Game is part of my permanent book collection.

Gore Vidal was a twat of a misogynist, but you would have to pry some of his novels away from me with a crowbar.

[JesusFightClub]

Agree with JFC and terranova. It may be uncomfortable, but sometimes people whose views we find abhorrent are still excellent artists/writers/musicians. Everybody has to draw their own line, and mine is I won't see any screen adaptations. However, I do not regret reading the books for a minute, and Ender's Game is part of my permanent book collection.

Gore Vidal was a twat of a misogynist, but you would have to pry some of his novels away from me with a crowbar.

Exactly. I've loved some books by people I would strongly dislike if I met them.

My biggest example of this is Yukio Mishima. I love Mishima's work. He was, however, extremely dodgy politically (and is admired by fash I've known who were a bit more intellectual than your average casual).

[FaustianSlip]

There are a couple of things going on here, I think. First, I doubt that the studio has just paid Card and run off, because Orson Scott Card is one of the producers of the film. That almost guarantees that his contract gets him a percentage of the profits of the film. Given his very active work in trying to not only ban gay marriage, but make sodomy illegal (again), I think it's reasonable to assume that at least some of that ticket money will wind up in the pockets of groups like NOM.

Second, I agree that Card is probably deeply closeted and self-loathing, which is sad, but that doesn't excuse his behavior. If you really want great entertainment, check out his rewriting of Hamlet, in which Hamlet, the king and half of the other male leads in the play are gay, turned that way because the evil king molested them all as children. The king comes back as an evil ghost that dooms Hamlet to hell, and Hamlet falls for it because he's got a super (unrequited) crush on Horatio. I am not making any of this up. It's a really vile piece of homophobic writing that conflates homosexuality with pedophelia and plays on every anti-gay trope out there. Also, it's a terrible interpretation of Shakespeare.

I feel about this the way I felt when Mel Gibson finally went completely off the deep end. Not every single artist is going to have views that agree with mine on every single issue in the world. I can deal with that- Kelsey Grammer is a well-known conservative, but I don't not watch Frasier because of that (or because his life is a complete trainwreck lately). Ditto Gary Sinese- I suspect I disagree with him on virtually every political issue out there, but I wouldn't refuse to watch Forrest Gump based on that. But when someone goes from having a different opinion to espousing outright hatred and advocating for oppression of people, I can't separate that from their work, and I'm not going to keep giving them my money. I wouldn't be able to watch this film, I don't think, without sitting there thinking of what a douchebag Card is. I adore Gallipoli and Year of Living Dangerously, and I still find it tough to watch them without thinking, "Wow, Mel Gibson was a talented guy- shame about the crazy and the anti-Semitism!" The same applies to Tom Cruise- he could make the best movie ever, and I would still be sitting there thinking about how fucking crazy he and Scientology are. People's thresholds for this kind of stuff vary obviously, but for me, if I have a reasonable expectation that my going to see a movie or my buying a book will give someone money to donate to stuff like anti-gay legislation or Scientology, I'm probably taking my dollars elsewhere.

I haven't actually read Ender's Game, which I really want to do, so I'm going to get it out of the local library, which will keep any money from crossing Card's greasy little palm, and that should be sufficient. I may watch the movie when it gets to Netflix, since everyone's fees pay for all of the movies there, and it's not like I'm specifically giving cash to Card. Don't think I'm going to see it in the theater, though, and I'm clearly not alone- the reaction from Lionsgate (and even from Card himself, who wrote a shitty, sorry-not-sorry nonpology in, I think, an attempt to clear things up) indicates to me that there are enough people pissed about this that they really think it's going to cut into box office sales. My only surprise is that they didn't seem to anticipate this reaction ahead of time- Card's views on the LGBT community are pretty well known.

[GeoBQn]

If any fans of Enders Game don't want to be fans anymore, sci-fi writer John Kessel wrote an essay that's a thorough takedown of the book and has been known to turn hardcore fans against it.

http://www4.ncsu.edu/~tenshi/Killer_000.htm

(Not breaking link because it's a page from a university website.)

[Talitha Cumi]

Disturbingly, whenever his books include a gay or bi character, that character is always the most sympathetic one there is.

I really believe he is deeply closeted and self-hating. It'd be sad, if it weren't so awful.

I agree. The way he's talked about same-sex attraction, it's clear that it's a huge "temptation" for him.

In his Memory of Earth series, there's a gay man who nonetheless must father children with a woman to populate the earth. He respects and admires the woman, even loves her, but isn't attracted to her. He does it anyway, and ends up leading a heterosexual life he's fine with. It's such clear wishful thinking, it's almost painful to read. If only he kept his hate to himself and didn't broadcast it out to where it hurts others.

We probably will go see the movie. It's one of the only fiction books my headship has ever read, and he thought it was fantastic. (I didn't give him any of the sequels. They just get into that whole weird area.) He'll want to go, and honestly, he doesn't ask for much, so if there's something he really wants to do we usually do it.

[Talitha Cumi]

Then Speaker for the Dead was published. I love that book! Want to think about cross-cultural miscommunication? Orson nailed it again. I still fucking love that book.

That's one of the things that kills me. He's so anti-Muslim it's scary. 9/11 basically made him do a 180 on cultural understanding, I guess.

So we started collecting and reading Orson's work. Neither of us can remember when we first saw the sado-masochism. We picked up quite quickly on the sexism and homophobia. Somewhere in there we started picking up on the conservative LDS stuff. Then we realized that Orson was pretty up-front about the LDS connection. It is blatant in the Alvin series. Orson is honest about the LDS stuff.

The Memory of Earth series is a full-on retelling of the Book of Mormon. Which went completely over my head when I read it, much as Narnia goes over the heads of many kids who aren't Christians.

[Talitha Cumi]

There are a couple of things going on here, I think. First, I doubt that the studio has just paid Card and run off, because Orson Scott Card is one of the producers of the film. That almost guarantees that his contract gets him a percentage of the profits of the film. Given his very active work in trying to not only ban gay marriage, but make sodomy illegal (again), I think it's reasonable to assume that at least some of that ticket money will wind up in the pockets of groups like NOM.

Second, I agree that Card is probably deeply closeted and self-loathing, which is sad, but that doesn't excuse his behavior. If you really want great entertainment, check out his rewriting of Hamlet, in which Hamlet, the king and half of the other male leads in the play are gay, turned that way because the evil king molested them all as children. The king comes back as an evil ghost that dooms Hamlet to hell, and Hamlet falls for it because he's got a super (unrequited) crush on Horatio. I am not making any of this up. It's a really vile piece of homophobic writing that conflates homosexuality with pedophelia and plays on every anti-gay trope out there. Also, it's a terrible interpretation of Shakespeare.

Ugh. I didn't realize that about the producing. Uuuuugh. :ew: :oops:

I haven't read that Hamlet (is it recent? I don't read Card anymore) but that's basically what he does in Lost Boys as well. There's a guy who molests little girls, but he's not a killer like the guy who molests little boys. That book was horrifying, and not in an "I like horror fiction" way.

[MajorMajor]

If any fans of Enders Game don't want to be fans anymore, sci-fi writer John Kessel wrote an essay that's a thorough takedown of the book and has been known to turn hardcore fans against it.

http://www4.ncsu.edu/~tenshi/Killer_000.htm

(Not breaking link because it's a page from a university website.)

That was a really interesting read. I read Ender's Game and Ender's Shadow when I was 12, I really enjoyed books. I can't say I thought too deeply about the moral implications then.

And apparently I live under a rock because I hadn't heard about all the controversy surrounding Card. I'm not sure how I feel about paying to see the movie now.

[Conuly]

I haven't actually read Ender's Game, which I really want to do, so I'm going to get it out of the local library, which will keep any money from crossing Card's greasy little palm, and that should be sufficient.

My copy was bought used for pretty much the same reason.

[Conuly]

I just read an article on Comic Con, and while it pretty much wasn't about this there was one section that made me laugh a little:

“I am never coming back here again,†muttered Harrison Ford, an “Ender’s Game†headliner, from his seat onstage. He looked only half joking as he became increasingly impatient with inane, prepackaged questions from the crowd — the Hall H studio presentations operate under rules that bar impolite queries — and the banter of an all-about-me moderator, the comedian Chris Hardwick.

(There was one meaningful question: A fan asked whether the author of the “Ender’s Game†novel, Orson Scott Card, had much involvement with the film, referring to a controversy over Mr. Card’s much-discussed opposition to same-sex marriage; Roberto Orci, one of the film’s producers, said the filmmakers had chosen to use the debate as “an opportunity†to show their own support for gay causes.)

[FaustianSlip]

Good for them (and I'm sure it's giving old Orson a twitch just thinking about that). Meanwhile, I ran across this gem of a quote from Orson Scott Card himself, written in an editorial he did for the Deseret News following the legalization of gay marriage in Massachusetts (original editorial here:

"Regardless of law, marriage has only one definition, and any government that attempts to change it is my mortal enemy. I will act to destroy that government and bring it down...."

Um, excuse me? I guess it's just fortunate for Mr. Card that he's neither Muslim nor a person of color, or he probably would have been too busy being force-fed in Gitmo to have time to produce his newest movie. I don't go to see films produced by people who make terroristic threats about bringing down the government (and certainly not over gay marriage, of all things). As a sci-fi fan, I'm sorry to say this, because it's important for movies like Ender's Game to do well if we want to see more sci-fi films, but I hope it freaking tanks. I don't think it will, of course, but I hope Card gets next to nothing to put in the coffers of NOM and tithe to the Mormon Church. Seriously, fuck that guy.

[DifferentGurl]

That's one of the things that kills me. He's so anti-Muslim it's scary. 9/11 basically made him do a 180 on cultural understanding, I guess.

The Memory of Earth series is a full-on retelling of the Book of Mormon. Which went completely over my head when I read it, much as Narnia goes over the heads of many kids who aren't Christians.

Wait, he's anti-Muslim? What did he do that showed that he's anti-Muslim?

[Talitha Cumi]

Wait, he's anti-Muslim? What did he do that showed that he's anti-Muslim?

Well, there's [link=http://notthisguyagain.blogspot.com/2007/08/orson-scott-card-and-islam.html]this[/link], but I actually think I was conflating Card with [link=http://www.dansimmons.com/news/message/2006_04.htm]Dan Simmons[/link], who has gone[link=http://bnreview.barnesandnoble.com/t5/A-Reading-Life/Flashback/ba-p/5207]absolutely bugfuck[/link]since 9/11.