Pastwatch by Orson Scott Card

I think that I first read about the existence of this book when I was in high school I was intrigued by the premise and really wanted to check it out, but the library didn't have it available at the time and I moved on to something else. It wasn't until earlier this year that I saw it at Fred Meyer, bought it, and eventually read it. Conclusion: I really liked it and found it to be my favorite work by the author. Recommended and such. Blah blah blah. It's good. A bit silly in parts, but that adds to the fun.

One of the most striking things I've noticed about this novel is that much of the reception, at least these days, fails to separate the work from the author. Some readers seem desperate to find a way to read between the lines and find something terrible about this book. And I think I know why. A huge portion of Card's audience read some of his earlier books, especially the "Ender" saga starting with the 1985 Ender's Game. They were introduced to Card through those books at a young age, fell in love with them, usually turned away at some point due to the diminishing returns in quality of the sequels, and branched out to read other authors as they got older. They may or may not have known that Orson Scott Card was Mormon (it has nothing to do with most of his books). The years went by, the world wide web swelled in importance, and through it, Card's former fans discovered that he was actively campaigning against gay marriage and writing some intense vitriol on the subject of homosexuality (this was a major movement by Mormons at the time, with every Mormon I knew of doing at least a bit of rallying to stop gay marriage, and I'm convinced that there was some sort of church-impelled mandate going on, not that this would absolve the individuals involved). For this beloved author of their youth to write something they found so vile, Card's former fans felt betrayed. And that is what I'm seeing reaction to in recent reader reviews of Pastwatch. Commonly, there's an insistence that the book is Mormon propaganda or at least some sort of culturally conservative propaganda. Many facts in the book fly in the face of this interpretation, but the people imputing hidden propaganda messages on the book, published in 1995, are more interested in how scandalized they were by what Card was saying in 2009 than by the actual contents of the book.

Orson Scott Card has a talent for using language and selection of detail to make fictional technology seem like gritty realism. He skillfully gets into the heads of characters, exploring their emotional motivations, even while not fully fleshing them out. Beyond that, he's a competent writer, not one of the greatest of all time, but certainly not bad. And this is his best work I've read so far. It's full of plot holes and splits too little time between too many major characters, but it's a fun read with some compelling philosophy.