Orson Scott Card

[sub_divided]

First general non-spoilery book discussion post of the reading period!

Orson Scott Card, author of the YA novel Ender's Game, which I recommended for this month's discussion theme, is once again in the news: he's just won the Margaret A. Edwards award for lifetime contribution to young adult literature. He was given the award for Ender's Game

Comments

[tarigwaemir]

You know, Orson Scott Card is strangely obsessed with homosexuality. In his earlier books, he has a fair number of openly gay characters (Songmaster and the Homecoming series), although admittedly the gay character in Songmaster turns out to be bisexual and has this ridiculous line where he tells a girl that he's 90% attracted to men, 10% attracted to women but 100% attracted to her (ugh, was that supposed to sound romantic?!). Still, the main character of Songmaster ends up sleeping with said gay character! (Plus, the whole Songbird relationship that Ansset, the protagonist, has with his "masters" smacks very much of pederasty.) In the Homecoming series, which is a SF spin on Genesis and Exodus, the gay character is "integrated" into the rest of society by marrying a woman with whom he shares a platonic friendship that's supposed to be fulfilling even though he remains sexually unattracted to her

[sub_divided]

I haven't read those books. Is it really an obsession if in your novels you have one prominent, gay minor character, and one prominent, bisexual character? Though sleeping with the protagonist does sound really prominent, and I guess it's a lot more common in sci fi (as in many other genres of literature) to just stay away from the whole mess and by pretending that gay people do not exist. (Or you put them in but don't call attention to their orientation.) In the Homecoming series at least, it sounds like Card included the character as a demonstration of his political beliefs -- he strongly supports platonic marriages.

[tarigwaemir]

Heh, obsession was an overstatement on my part, but I still find it baffling nonetheless. The sex scene between the two characters in Songmaster is actually a fairly pivotal moment in the plot, and it was written in 1980, when I think it was fairly unusual for a gay character to appear in an SF novel at all (as far as I know).

I was a little annoyed at the platonic marriage in the Homecoming books, because it rather seemed like he decided that everyone must be married off, including the two "outsiders", namely the gay man and the female scientist whom he described as not having any sexual interest at all. -_- I don't mind the idea of platonic marriage myself, but it's hard to prove your point when the two are basically thrown together by being the only ones left on the ship without a significant other. -_-