Empire

Orson Scott Card has a new book out - Empire. I haven’t read it yet, but Amazon has informed me it’s on the way, so I’m posting about it now. I’ve a lot of time for Scott – he’s a gifted writer, capable of producing excellent books full of believable characters and compelling storylines. He’s also a very clever guy who’s generous, personable and interesting.

There are also some contradictions – he’s very right-leaning in his political views, being mostly pro-Bush and pro-war although he said to me in the past that rather than considering himself a republican, he prefers to think of himself as a 1950’s democrat – it’s just that the standards or what these labels mean in American politics have shifted over time. (For example, he’s pro-gun control.) He’s also a practicing Mormon – an interesting contradiction and something that is confounding to modern intellectuals.

There’s a particularly entertaining interview with him at Salon.com, which I can only describe as a hatchet job – the journalist who interviewed him genuinely couldn’t get her head around the idea that he was really a functioning believing Mormon. She presumed he was lapsed, or that he just gave lip service to his faith for social reasons, because he was an intellectual who wrote books about liberal characters as well as conservative characters. Clever people can't be religious, can they?

It’s a nasty read, not because of the premise of the article, but rather because of the horribly subjective way the journalist approached the subject matter. Religious views are fair game if the interview subject is willing to talk about them, but making sweeping and belittling assumptions about people’s beliefs based on your own, is not. Also, the interviewer appears not to know that writers can create characters with complex political and social views at odds with their own – if I write a paedophile character who thinks there’s nothing wrong with that condition, does that mean I actually hold that view?

Most people would say no, of course not. So why is it that if you write a character who is a humanist, atheist, liberal democrat then people automatically read their own bias into that? Perhaps that’s why - people automatically read their own bias into it. And this interview was all about the interviewer, not the interviewee.

Anyway . . . leaving aside religion and journalistic bias, why is any of these fair game for being written about online? Well, mostly because Scott has carved an interesting niche for himself as a political and lifestyle pundit, with his columns syndicated and widely read online and in US newspapers. He’s a good writer in this genre as well, but he’s taken things a step further with his new book. It's an interesting idea, based somewhat bizarrely on a video game - the rest of the world seems to think that the US sees itself as an empire, when of course, it's not. But what if it really was a modern empire, in the sense that the Roman's meant it?

The American Empire has grown too fast, and the fault lines at home are stressed to the breaking point. The war of words between Right and Left has collapsed into a shooting war, though most people just want to be left alone.

The battle rages between the high-technology weapons on one side and militia foot soldiers on the other, devastating the cities and overrunning the countryside. But the vast majority, who only want the killing to stop and the nation to return to more peaceful days, have technology, weapons, and strategic geniuses of their own.

When the American dream shatters into violence, who can hold the people and the government together? And which side will you be on?

Orson Scott Card is a master storyteller who has earned millions of fans and reams of praise for his previous science fiction and fantasy novels. Now he steps a little closer to the present day with this chilling look at a near-future scenario of a new American Civil War.

I'll post a review of it here when I've actually read it. Meanwhile, you can watch video interview with Scott here or buy the book at Amazon.com here.