After my friend Lion handed me ENDER’S GAME, and after my Uncle Brian loaned me a copy of (I think) UNACCOMPANIED SONATAS, I was hooked. I read every Orson Scott Card book I could get my hands on, and thanks to my local public library, that meant pretty much all of them.
THE MEMORY OF EARTH has the somewhat odd distinction of being nearly the last book by Card that I read. (I succumbed to temptation when ENDER’S SHADOW came out, and, most recently, reread ENDER’S GAME for a book club.) It’s strange to have a falling out with an author, especially when it’s over their writing. (This was long before I became aware of Card’s unfortunate personal and political opinions. I marvel at how someone who writes with such sympathy and empathy for human pain and suffering could be so cold and callous toward others in his public life. I’m not going to get into it more here, and there are others who’ve written much more thoughtfully about this issue than I feel able to do.) I think it’s pretty impossible to read Card’s books without coming to the conclusion that he can’t stop writing about messianic figures. His deeply misunderstood protagonists are always saving the world in some fashion or other.
Not so much with THE MEMORY OF EARTH, though. This book is a barely veiled science fictional retelling of the beginnings of the Mormon religion. Which, I suppose I’m fine with, but I just started feeling weird when the characters start marrying multiple women… assuming I’m remembering this correctly.
Up to that point, I think I’d had basically two encounters with Mormonism, neither of them directly. The first were the vicious Mormons as described by Jefferson Hope’s tale in the Sherlock Holmes story “A Study in Scarlet.” Let’s just say it doesn’t paint 19th century Mormons in a very flattering light.
The second, also indirectly, came about from all my time in evangelical churches, which, let’s just say, are not the biggest fans of Mormonism.
So, I stopped reading Card’s books. In fact, I remember standing in the library with THE CALL OF EARTH (book 2) in my hand, and setting it down again. Maybe it had to do with the Mormon thing. Maybe it had to do with the fact that I’d read probably twenty of his books up to that point, and had just gotten tired of his writing style. Maybe I was tired of reading about misunderstood messiahs. It’s tough to say, at this point, why I stopped reading his books back then. I’ll always be grateful for the tens (hundreds?) of hours of enjoyment I got out of reading his books, but…
Now… I just can’t bring myself to open up another one.