In February, Alyssa Rosenberg wrote an excellent and nuanced examination of the paradox of Ender's Game, and the tricky negotiation of consuming valuable works by reprehensible artists. And so was Card.īut I don't want to walk away without stopping to mourn for what was worth mourning. Whoever I am, wherever I've come from, as a writer and a human being, Ender's Game was part of that. But there's that battered, beloved old paperback still sitting on my shelf, and I can't and don't want to erase what it's meant to me. I will not pay to see Ender's Game I will never buy another copy. I would never, ever suggest that a student seek out his advice. Orson Scott Card is monstrously homophobic he's racist he advocates violence and lobbies against fundamental human rights and equates criticism of those stances with his own hate speech.
Neither fiction nor its creators exist in a vacuum nor is the choice to consume art or support an artist morally neutral. Whether the rampaging extremism he's exploded into is a product of a significant change in perspective or just less tact and a larger platform, I'll never know: We fell out of touch long before, for which I'm cowardly grateful.Ĭard's hate has come to color my experience of his fiction - as, I think, it should. That at the same time we were talking about character development and the shapes of stories, he was railing against marriage rights for same-sex couples and insisting homosexuality was a byproduct of child abuse. The truth, of course, is that Card had been avidly homophobic since long before I knew him.
I may not have agreed with his personal beliefs - I knew that he was an observant Mormon and at least somewhat politically conservative - but I respected and still respect the principle of not using fiction as a soap box, even if the author who introduced it to me has since forgotten or abandoned it. The only time his beliefs came up in our conversations was a comment he made about fiction being a totally inappropriate venue for any kind of ideological proselytizing. His political reputation was much quieter back then - most of his internet presence was concentrated around a network of online writing workshop and critique groups - and his op-eds were published in circles I never stumbled into. I was also largely unaware of the extremity of Card's politics.
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