I’ve seen people talk about actors and artists that had a terrible time.
My own would be Anne Rice. She wrote Interview with the Vampire after her young daughter died of Leukemia. Then her husband suddenly died of a brain hemorrhage. I suspect her Christian, anti-fanfic phase was a result of mental illness and manipulation from the publishers, although I don’t think she ever apologized.
I feel bad for Orson Scott Card.
The first half of his career he wrote so much about empathy and understanding. Then flipped so hard into the opposite of that.
The internet is filled with speculation about how he’s a closeted gay man who hates himself.
Whatever the case is, there was an incredibly smart compassionate soul that used to be in there. It can’t be fun to turn into an angry bitter hate-machine.
Right? Speaker for the dead did not prepare me for some of his future works
There’s shades of the deep seated empathy in Ender’s Game itself. Iirc, there’s a line about how Ender really understands his enemy, to the point of loving them, and that is why he can destroy them.
I find it really hard to feel bad for a guy like that.
Yah I read his stuff for years as a young reader and have met him a handful of times and what we get today is very different from back in the day. That said, his book How To Write Science Fiction & Fantasy is still one of the best out there and his short stories are always very well crafted. I always liked his book Songmaster too…too bad. I wonder what happened there.
Honestly hard disagree. Ender’s Game is a book I found compelling but not enjoyable, and part of that was that I felt like if I had OSC as a roommate I’d wake up one morning with his teeth on my throat. I read only that book and if I knew he lived in my area I’d have bought a gun.
I don’t know what everyone else was reading, but I read the only scifi book ever where aliens are trying to destroy humanity and i’m thinking ‘thank christ someone is killing these fuckers. I don’t know when they arrived on earth, murdered all the inhabitants and started wearing their skin and pretending to be humans but it’s freaking me out’.
It’s not about empathy or compassion. Those are things Ender has because OSC was told once (I hope from the other side of thick glass) that those are things good humans have and so OSC’s character must have the most of that. It’s a book about how some people are just born naturally superior to other people and those others fall naturally in line to their amazingness, because normal humans are pathetic loathsome creatures that need a superior saviour to guide them out of ignorance. Which is why I was seemingly the only person not shocked at all that Ender’s brother becomes KING OF SPACE without effort.
Ugh. Just ugh. Ender’s Game creeped me the fuck out from start to finish.
I think you get more of the empathy as the series goes on, Speaker for the Dead in particular is a monument to that quality.
Reading your comment again, I think you’re getting it mixed up with some other book.
The aliens in ender’s game were insectoid, they never looked like humans.
It was a joke my friend. I’m saying that the humans in the story don’t act like humans, they act like things wearing human skins and doing a very bad job pretending they feel human emotions, and I was hoping the real aliens would kill the lot of them.
But it turns out that the aliens weren’t trying to destroy humanity. Humanity just thought that they were.
They’ve given up trying to destroy humanity after their second attempt, when they realized the humans were sentient.
The humans had no idea.
I used to read a lot of OSC, but I’ve never read a book of his that was full of hate. His opinion pieces, sure, but not his novels. What novels are you talking about?
re-read them and you’ll see the subtext.
I don’t feel bad for people who willfully choose hate. I also don’t think he was ever compassionate, he’s a person who chooses to be a part of a particular religion and his writing mirrors the public face of that religion over the decades.
My friend goes to church with him. He says if you compliment the Enders Game Book he will be happy to chat with you for a few minutes. If you compliment the movie he will just give you a cold stare and walk off.
Best expression of an overly abundant intelligent child.