Alvin Maker

What Hacker News says

1. nemosaltatDec 2021
   You’ve beautifully articulated a feeling I’ve had for most of my life. In the Alvin Maker (historical fantasy) series, Orson Scott Card describes a phenomenon he calls the _greensong_. It’s a sort of pervading communion the first peoples have with nature, and white settlers not only can’t connect with it, but exist as a palpable disturbance to those who can. I’ve often felt like nearly _everything_ is signal, and my day-to-day experience is actually noise. That sense has been heightened on the occasions I’ve used hallucinogenics.
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2. fennecfoxenAug 2016
   Calling Ender's Game pro-genocide is a riot, but I guess if you didn't read the next 3 novels where Ender is trying to atone for his unwitting participation through an allegory on the book of Mormon, it works. There's Pastwatch which is so pro-genocide that it has a future civilization go back in time to inoculate the Americas against European diseases, and they successfully Westernize their technology just enough to make colonization moot. If I recall correctly in the Alvin Maker series, the main character sympathizes with the Native American population under pressure from alternate-history Colonial America. Let's see, what else...

   There's that allegory on the Book of Mormon - the pure allegory, the Homecoming one, meh, might be worth scrutinizing the last bits when they actually get to their little promised land and there's fractious conflict? Betting no one really reads that stuff outside of Utah, though - I certainly can't believe I bothered. (It was a slow summer that year and my standards may have been low.) Anyway, moving on... I skipped most of the horror except for the Sleeping Beauty novel...

   Oh! There's also the Songmaster stuff in which - in 1980! - had a homosexual main character who (while ultimately a tragic character) was treated with such human dignity and respect that Card had to fend off scathing criticism from his own church (and others') for doing so.

   Orson Scott Card is like Atticus Finch and we're all reading Go Set A Watchman. If all we can find for either of these characters today is hate and loathing and calls to pirate books, what kind of a future are we really setting ourselves up for?

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3. stephen_cagleSep 2015
   I actually think that is kind of interesting. As a 5'9'' guy, it aint a problem, but it is interesting.

   It reminds me of a character in the `Tale of Alvin Maker` series by Orson Scott Card. Forgot the characters name, but he was basically a bully and a 'sadist'. He had a sort of geasa placed on him as a baby, so that he never really got hurt. Anyway, he looses it, and suddenly is hurt badly. He suddenly understands what it was like for the people he was hurting. It wasn't really that he was a bad person, it was just that he had never experienced pain himself. It was enlightening when I read it as a teenager. Is it possible to really empathize until you experience something yourself? Don't know.

   BTW, I am not in any way implying you are a bully or sadist. :)

   Just saying it is interesting that you had a earnestly hard time understanding why other people felt threatened until... The exact same thing happened to you! Some human experiences are very hard to communicate, they seem to only be learned through direct experience.

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4. fennecfoxenOct 2013
   I can't read him anymore because it's too obvious what the plot is going to be: a misunderstood but fundamentally holy Hero Dude goes off into the wilderness or something to found a new city where his disciples can live in peace the way God intended <tm>.

   So: the Ender's Game series, the Alvin Maker series, the Homecoming series, Lovelock, Wyrms, Pastwatch, Treason, and on some level, most of the biblio-historical-fiction series.

   Any major Card works I'm missing? I'll give partial credit to _Songmaster_, and maybe even _Enchanted_.

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