Hacker News Reader

Comment by virgil_disgr4ce | Hacker News Reader

[flagged]

How is this relevant to his opinion on writing fiction ?

reading TFA gave me a complicated perspective on OSC, and reading this comment gave me a more complicated persepctive on OSC, so I'm glad I read both, and I'm glad the long battle scenes were left out of both.

> Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I don’t like when people use this without all the important context. Showing other quotes from the same person that is giving subjective advice on topics, lends to curiosity around how to filter their advice.

> It's is a complex and hard question, but the principles we apply to it have been around for a long time and are consistent with the site guidelines. If they weren't, we'd change the latter. > > I've explained all of this many times. If you, or anyone, would like to know how we approach the question, you could start here: > > https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so... [1]

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47373246

In my opinion, it's relevant to Card's credibility. If he shows poor judgement in one area, why would I want to listen to his opinion on something else, even something which is considered to be in his wheelhouse? Poor judgement is poor judgement.

Everyone shows poor judgement in one area.

It sucks that he has those ideas, but he's a good writer.

He's a popular writer, but hardly good. No one is going to be reading his books in 50 years, let alone 200.

That's an extremely high bar. But to the extent that critics and awards are the metric we have, he is an objectively good writer.

Oh course it's a high bar! Why should anyone care about this work outside of the time of their release? It's modern culture but it ain't gonna be passed down anytime soon.

If the bar is that people will continue reading their books in 200 years, than which fiction writers of the last few decades would go into your list of "good"?

I don't know because you're asking me something that is impossible for a human that only lives to ~80 years.

Try asking better questions if you want better responses.

Take your best guess, obviously. The question is fine.

You're already confidently predicting a negative future for Ender's Game, so you're clearly not adverse to predictions.

I don't know that you can establish objectively if someone is a good writer. He's an acclaimed, award-winning writer, sure.

The not-so-short story Ender's Game was great. The novel Ender's Game was awful. I hope someone told him it was too long, too repetitive, and too Gary Stu. I wish he had taken that feedback to heart.

The novella is the only version I've read. I came away both not understanding why a longer, novel-length version would exist, and with no interest in reading anything even slightly worse than that from the same author (which I'm given to understand describes most of his other work).

The novella was an alright time, though.

Everyone is very, very wrong about something. By your logic we should ignore everyone about everything.

This but unironically!

it did not make me wish to engage in political or ideological battle, i found it an interesting reflection of a complicated person's thought process. So, any battling is on you (you no doubt have a lot of company: "don't you dare feed us raw meat, we'll jump up and down in our cages and spill the poop buckets")

Does his opposition of homosexuality some how make his point about writing critiques less interesting?

I can't believe you wrote your comment on a computer with wouldn't exist without eugenicist shockley's nobel prize winning invention. Shameful!

> Does his opposition of homosexuality some how make his point about writing critiques less interesting?

i'll bite: yes. it belies a lack of compassion, imagination, openness and curiosity required to create compelling fiction or writing advice that resonates with people who aren't bigots.

Orson Scott Card is one of the best selling sci Fi authors of all time, and has won the hugo and nebula award multiple times, and has been translated into 35+ languages. I think you would be pretty hard pressed to show that his writing isn't compelling to many people.

a lot of that happened before his views were more widely known. much like jk rowling. a lot of people have written both best-selling authors off as bigots; this is just a matter of fact. they may be financially comfortable but their standings have been irreparably harmed by their own statements.

Yes, and that's a completely different point from the one you were making.

Your claim that they became massively popular before they revealed themselves to be bigots, contradicts your claim about their

> lack of compassion, imagination, openness and curiosity required to create compelling fiction or writing advice that resonates with people who aren't bigots.

You are doing the cause a disservice. Think better.

we can learn new things about people that change the way we feel about them and the work they produce. nothing is truly static.

[flagged]

Reply on news.ycombinator.com