Great Science-Fiction & Fantasy Works

Science-fiction & fantasy literature: a critical list with discussions.

Welcome to the Great Science-Fiction & Fantasy Works web site!

You have apparently come to this page from a link on a search engine or another site. If this is your first visit here, I much recommend that you take a few minutes to look over the introductory material accessible via the red “Introductory” navigation block just below the pictures. An understanding of the purposes and principles of organization of this site will, I hope and believe, much augment your experience here, for this page and in general. You can simply click this link to get at the site front page, which, unsurprisingly, is the best place to start. Thank you for visiting.

Search, or just roll your cursor over the colored boxes farther below.

Click the “X” above to dismiss the Search results.

You are here: Home » Authors » Individual » Orson Scott Card ( = this page)

Site navigation: place your cursor over a block below to see the pages list for that block.

Standard Disclaimer:

This is a brief discussion of Orson Scott Card and, of course, of some speculative-fiction books by Card.

This discussion and list does not necessarily include every book by Card: it includes only those books that I both know and like. Just as with the author list itself, omission of a particular item may mean I didn’t think highly enough of the omitted item, or it may simply mean that I have not yet sufficient familiarity with it. (In a very few cases, I have listed some books merely on the strength of my opinion of the author: all such books are clearly marked below, as throughout these lists, with a hash mark (#) before the title so you know what’s what.)

I don’t pretend that this discussion is a deep analysis. My intent is no more than to give you a rough idea of what kinds of tales Card tells, how those tales are usually told, and what makes them and Card worthy; in sum, to help you rank Orson Scott Card (and the works by Card listed here) on your personal literary “to do” list.

Secondary Disclaimer:
This page has not been updated in a long while; consequently, external links (if any) may lead to dead or moribund pages. I am now cleaning up these pages as fast as I can, but I am one man and it may take me a while to get to every page needing link checking (or even the “Other Resources” section added). Sorry. Please be patient.

A Few Words About Orson Scott Card

Regrettably, I have not yet had an opportunity to write an essay on this author, but the "Other Resources" section below will lead you to some information about the "Notable Books" listed farther down this page.

Other Orson Scott Card Resources

Of individual pages, there are not so many that are not focussed on Card the person rather than Card the author (see the paragraph below); one of the more useful is Orson Scott Card at Henry Jenkins's "Media and Imagination" site.

Card's personal beliefs --which include, among many controversial things, a call for literal revolution (see the last three paragraphs of the linked article) to stop the legalization of homosexuality--have drawn much attention, little or none of it less than vitriolic (the Wikipedia text is easily the most nearly neutral presentation); while some of that is outside our scope here, there remain not a few essays that examine how those beliefs affect Card's writings. Among the more notable are John Kessel's "Creating the Innocent Killer: Ender's Game, Intention, and Morality"; Elaine Radford's "ender and hitler: sympathy for the superman (20 years later)"; Roger Williams's "Orson Scott Card Has Always Been an Asshat" (with extensive back-and-forth correspondence following it); and Donna Minkowitz's Salon article "My favorite author, my worst interview". If anyone thinks that such matters don't belong here as being irrelevant, let us not forget that for many classic speculative-fiction authors a knowledge of their principles is a crucial part of any critical understanding of their work-- G. K. Chesterton or David Lindsay or E. R. Eddison, just to name a very few. And the harvest of essays here is only a sampling, and a sampling more or less related to his fiction; there's a lot more that doesn't much address him as an author.

For more--and there is a very, very great deal more--on Card, Google Is Your Friend.

Notable Science-Fiction and Fantasy Books by Orson Scott Card **

This site is one of The Owlcroft Company family of web sites. Please click on the link (or the owl) to see a menu of our other diverse user-friendly, helpful sites.

Like all our sites, this one is hosted at the highly regarded Pair Networks, whom we strongly recommend. We invite you to click on the Pair link or logo for more information on hosting by a first-class service.

(Note: All Owlcroft systems run on Ubuntu Linux and we heartily recommend it to everyone—click on the link for more information).

This web page is strictly compliant with the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) Extensible HyperText Markup Language (XHTML) Protocol v1.0 (Transitional) and the W3C Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) Protocol v3 — because we care about interoperability. Click on the logos below to test us!

This page was last modified on Tuesday, 13 October 2020, at 5:43 pm Pacific Time.