I was looking at some new games today, and quite a few of them were the 4X genre. For some reason my brain reached way back to The Worthing Saga and I rememberd the wrold conquest sim game.

Does anybody know if the early 4X table top games from the 70s were influence for this particular story?

Or only the audiobook?

And if only the audiobook, which I just don't listen to audiobooks, can someone spoiler the whole plot for me? ;-)

Does anyone have the ability to contact Mr Card and convince him to do one more book for the Homecoming Saga? It’s my favorite series and I love all the books and if he were to resurrect for one more book that would be amazing!

So, I'm reading the last shadow right now and I realized that in BOTH series, Card (my second favorite author only behind Brandon Sanderson!) used a VERY similar teleportation mechanic in both series. In Enders game it's the Aiua and in Mither Mages it's the Ka/Ba, Ba right? I can't remember. I'm not complaining or anything, I just find it interesting.

This series was recommended to me by a fellow Redditor in another post of mine here.

I thoroughly enjoyed the series!!

Whenever I finish off a great series by OSC, I always feel a bit lost afterwards. Not sure what to read next as the imagery from the just finished books are still so fresh! It's almost as if I miss reading about their journey's and miss the characters!

This feeling today as especially strong after finishing the Alvin Maker series!

I have to say I really love reading OSC!

Now to try and choose the next book...

I subscribe to Uncle Orson on the Fly, and just got the first chapter of Master Alvin through that! After getting the full pre-publication versions of both Side Step novels through there, it’s good to see an Alvin Maker series conclusion happening!

Just started The Lost Gate. Like all of his novels, this too is meant to be read aloud so I'm listening on audiobook. I'm only 6 chapters in and it's already got more depth than any other fantasy novel I've read. Love this man.

I finished the main series last month and now I want to start the Shafow Series.

I didn't think it was bad, I just couldn't wait to finish. It felt like a mash up of a few of his past generas I couldn't get into it like I can with so many of osc books.

Hey all. I read a short story years and years ago that had always stuck with me. I can’t seem to remember the name of the characters but the gist was this.

Under a dome in a prison. Elderly prisoner has a small patch of hair on his face he plays with as the main character is narrating.

Drama, action, prison break

I remember having this story in a collection of science fiction short stories. I must have misplaced it over the years but kept my original John Steakly’s “Armor” and most of my Heinlein’s for my kids to read.

So, if anyone can point me in the right direction, I’d really appreciate it.

I really loved the First and Second Formic War trilogies.

Unfortunately, the third book of the Second Formic War is still not released.

Does anyone know when it will be published?

The original mod is no longer active on Reddit and this subreddit was closed for submissions some time ago. This subreddit is back online now.

Just finished Earth Unaware, Afire and Awakens.

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Should I read the second Formic war or just skip to the Ender Series?

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I see that the second Formic war series has a yet to be released third book. Is it worth reading The Swarm and The Hive before the Ender series even though they havent released the 3rd book in the second formic war series? Or should I just skip to the ender series?

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Is Viktor, Rackham, Imalla and Lem in the Ender series?

A couple of days ago I started Homebody and am burning through it. It's been awhile since I have picked up a book that I have been this eager to keep reading and reading. I had given Ender a shot and just didn't care for it. What would be an OSC book you have read that made you feel the way I do about Homebody? I'd love to read it.

library cow stupendous door point voiceless abundant subsequent languid selective this post was mass deleted with www.Redact.dev

I have noticed that several of the couples in the Enderverse (I’m in the middle of shadow puppets) seem to feature older women and younger men.

It’s a bit unusual—anyone else notice it? Petra and Bean, Ender and Novinha (by the time he gets there), Mr and Mrs Ender (according to Wikipedia Theresa was the graduate instructor of John Paul). Even the Surly/Virlomi (I don’t know what happens with that relationship yet, not done with the book).

I’m not saying it’s good or bad but it’s noticeable to me.

Ps how old is Peter supposed to be in Shadow Puppets?

I'm a big fan of OSC, I love the Enderverse, and have enjoyed a number of his other books. I had originally read the gate thief trilogy a long time ago, and I've been listening to the audiobooks over the past few months. The first two books were not bad, though the characters are pretty lame, especially Danny and his high school friends. The third book, however, just made me cringe. There was so much saccharine pseudo-philosophical yammering about goodness and Ka and Ba and giving yourself over to others and so on. When I got to the chapter where Pat started to wonder why Danny would love her, and not Hermia, who was "everything Pat ever dreamed of being", I'd finally had enough. That is so unoriginal and lame, and following on the heels of listening to an hour of the scene where the two women struggle for control of one body and then Danny comes in and shows one of them how to get the body to accept her because "she's a better person". I can't.

1/5 would not recommend.

Just wondering

I am, for those who are confused, talking about Zdorab from the Homecoming series. It’s revealed in The Ships of Earth that he is gay, and it’s referenced multiple times between then and his eventual death in Earthfall. How his character was handled wasn’t perfect, but it was better than I expected it to be, given what we know about Card and the fact that the Homecoming series is basically Mormonism…in…spaaaaace.

First of all, the word for gay man in-universe is “zhop”, which means anus. This isn’t too surprising, given the butt-related slang that has historically been used in real life. Before the events of the story, Zdorab lived in what was basically a network of zhops on the outskirts of Basilica, which mirrors the underground lives of LGBTQ+ in the 20th century.

My worst fear after that first reveal was that Zdorab was going to either turn out to be evil or get killed off immediately. That was not the case. Zdorab is portrayed as one of the least morally corrupt men of the village and gets more flak for being a librarian than for swinging the other way. He also outlives Obring, Vas, Volemak, and Rasa before dying peacefully of old age.

Where things start to get uncomfortable is the attention dedicated to Zdorab’s fatherhood. Marriage and childbirth is a main goal for all of the characters, and with Zdorab, the battle is particularly uphill for obvious reasons. This is an example of faith conflicting with orientation, and I did feel weird reading it, as if Zdorab passed some kind of test by having children with Shedemei despite not seeing her that way. Zdorab does care about Shedemei and tells her he loves her, and I chose to interpret that as platonic connection, not Shedemei turning a gay man straight.

This is my opinion, and I want to know what y’all think.

Has a release date been announced for "The Queens"? I've been anxiously wanting to read it for years now.

There was a point where there were "insects" that ate the rock of an asteroid and then produced small spheres of metals that the insects digested out of the rock. I've read all the books in the Enderverse and I wanted to go back and reread about this process. Which books described this?

My leaky memory thinks this was also in the Aaron Johnson books/comic books? I looked for anything about this in all the wikipedia articles about the books but couldn't find it.

I just now thought about if this subreddit was a thing (took long enough lol) and I just wanted to say that Scott Card is my favorite author of all time! I will admit tho, of all his novels I have currently only ready the first 2 books in The Ender Saga 😂😭 3 is coming soon the hehe. I just absolutely love the way Scott Card writes, I obsessed over Enders Game and Speaker for the Dead like no other when I read them. Its taken me a full year to get to 3, idk why but I just want to take a good long break from the series after each book but WOW it’s been so good, I can recall books pretty good but these especially. TL;DR Sorry, I’ve been rambling, I just wanted to say I appreciate Scott Card a helluva lot.

I'm listening to the audio book currently, although I did read the book years ago.
When the main characters meet up to discuss the beginning of the rebellion they are going to carry out, and Olivenko talks about how they can use their abilities to avoid the usual pitfalls of a guerilla campaign, a main strategy they discuss is having their first raid, then the second raid the week before it, the third raid the week before the second, etc. And then they spend a bit of time discussing how it will make their first raid harder because the enemy will be prepared but won't be sure why.

Its odd because this whole series, they've seemed to understand how traveling to the past can destroy and change the future that they've already experienced to be something that they didn't experience.
In fact, just before this, Noxon and Ram were discussing this fact in the context of hiding the starship in the past, Rigg and Ram were discussing it in the context of the village girl who was raped and murdered while they were visiting another wallfold, and Umbo was ruminating on it when he jumped ahead to the future and was about take Square/Biscuit to the present.

Am I misunderstanding? Did OSC and the editor(s) just miss this somehow?

what are all of peters and valentines sudoname
and was valentine the anti-russian writer and peter the *pro-russian* writer?

Greetings Fellow OSC fans!

I'm working on my first novel, unfortunately not scifi :( but need help to find the argument in Speaker For The Dead (which Chapter) where Novinha loses her temper and completely goes off on Ender (dirty fight digs). Do any of you know where that's at? I'm hoping to analyze the structure of the argument and kind of work through what makes it so good and vivid and see how I can improve my own writing. Thank you in advance!!!!!

Per Wikipedia, there's a ton of unfinished sequels that have been planned, sometimes for decades. I recognize that Wikipedia might not have follow up comments on whether he's still planning to do them, so I thought I'd ask.

There's The Queens, presumably the last Endervwrse book, outside of hopefully a collection of all the short stories. The previous book in the Second Formic Wars trilogy was The Hive in 2019. Presumably this depends in part on Aaron Johnston.

Master Alvin, the final book of The Tales of Alvin Maker. Last book was The Crystal City in 2003.

Women of Genesis has two sequels listed, The Wives of Israel and The Sons of Rachel. Last one was Rachel and Leah in 2004.

Pastwatch. Last one was Christopher Columbus, in 1996. The Flood and The Garden fo Eden are listed as planned.

Lovelock. First and only book of the planned trilogy published in 1994. It was co-written with Kathryn Kidd, who died in 2015.

It also looked like Extinct was supposed to be a trilogy, but now it doesn't seem to be listed anywhere as actually being published, so I'm pretty confused on that one.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orson_Scott_Card_bibliography

I started with the Alvin Maker series. I keep a spreadsheet of every book I've ever read and rank each book across many different axes including depth of characters, writing quality, and general reading enjoyment (among many others). Four of the Alvin books made it into my top twenty books of all time, so that got me curious about his other works. (Alvin Journeyman was my favorite and Heartfire was my second-favorite, ranking #10 and #14 on my spreadsheet respectively.)

Then I moved on to the ever-famous Ender's Game. I was surprised by how dark the story was; it was good writing and addictive, but it felt heavy. But I moved on to the rest of the original Ender series and found them highly engrossing. Orson really pushes your buttons and tests your taboos. Are insects disgusting and scary, or are we just being bigots? Is it gruesome and gory and wrong to cut someone apart, or could it be a ritual of rebirth with real meaning in an alien culture? What does it mean to be sentient? On my spreadsheet I lumped the seven main books of Ender's story into one row on my spreadsheet as I read them back-to-back and didn't want to try to analyze them individually. As a series, they landed as #40 through #46. (Followed by Arthur Golden's Memoirs of a Geisha at #47 and Brandon Sanderson's The Well of Ascension at #48.)

Personally, what impresses me most about Orson is the meaning he puts into his books. Yes the world-building is good, but Brandon Sanderson is usually better at that (although there is an exception which I'll get to in a moment). The plot lines are always filled with interesting twists, but many authors who focus on fascinating plots do that better; the Lighthouse Duet by Carol Berg (ranked #89 and #90) has fascinating interwoven plots – perhaps the best I've ever encountered. Orson Scott Card's taboo-confrontation is excellent, but Heinlein takes on taboos at least equally well in Stranger in a Strange Land (ranked #18) and The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress (ranked #81). The character building that Orson Scott Card does, however, is first-class. When I think of other authors who approach such levels of character building, I think of my all-time favorite book (rank #1), Spinning Silver by Naomi Novik, and Jo Graham's Numinous World series (#9, #28, #63, etc). But Naomi is actually new to this level of depth with her characters – her former works don't display as much depth, whereas Orson shows this level of depth in book after book. While Jo Graham has deep, nuanced characters, the different ways in which they are wise feels limited in comparison to Orson's characters. Orson understands people very deeply. I don't even think the average reader can appreciate how profound his understanding is. I work in psychology and trauma healing and I can testify that Orson is brilliant.

After reading Ender's Saga, I read the six books in The Shadow Series, beginning, of course, with Ender's Shadow. Seeing Bean's role in how the events played out in Ender's Game was exhilarating. I ended up liking Bean as a character more than Ender. In a way, I feel like Ender and Bean came together into one person in Alvin, although Orson decided to make Alvin a little less brilliant at such a young age and focus more on his innate sense of good morality. My favorites from The Shadow Series were the first and last volumes: Ender's Shadow and Shadows in Flight. I found a lot of war-focused stuff in the middle a little too focused on action, although the battle tactics and war strategies were fascinating in their own right. I learned a little about world geography which was neat. This series I also ranked as a group, coming out at #99 through #104. (It's followed by Brandon Sanderson's Mistborn: A Secret History at #105 and Naomi Novik's Uprooted at #106.)

I was less enthusiastic about The First Formic War. As you can see from the above, more emphasis on battle tactics and grand strategy isn't my cup of tea. Due to how this series opens up I expected there to be more exploration of the taboo against incest, but that was left alone after the very beginning of the story. Ultimately it became a story about how much bureaucracy sucks and ultimately hurts people. The points were valid, but less interesting and insightful (to me) than the books in Ender's Saga by a long shot. This trilogy came in at #139 through #141, followed by T.J. Klune's The House in the Cerulean Sea at #142 and Steven's Brust's Vallista at #143.

A month later I read the Pathfinder trilogy and was absolutely blown away. This series contained the lessons, moral explorations, and deep characters seen in the Enderverse and in the Alvin Maker series all rolled into one elegant story that also had world-building to rival Brandon Sanderson's Mistborn or Warbreaker (ranked #30). The Pathfinder trilogy was one of those stories I had difficulty putting down, and that's unusual for me. Often I read a single chapter of a book and put it down until tomorrow, occasionally missing a day. Yet with Pathfinder it seemed I made excuses to take entire afternoons off to just read, and read, read, read! One of the beautiful aspects of this series is how the same group of characters evolves through their interactions with one another; that was something I enjoyed in Alvin Maker that was mostly absent in Enderverse. The characters in the Enderverse were often more isolated, developing in ways that were largely due to their adversity with other characters or events. In contrast, the development in Pathfinder (and Alvin Maker) is largely about friendships and family. This is something rarely done well in any novels in any genres, making Orson's mastery all the more impressive. The Pathfinder trilogy, if you haven't guessed, ranks #6 through #8 on my spreadsheet, preceded by Catherine Wilson's When Women Were Warriors at #3 through #5, and followed by Jo Graham's The General's Mistress at #9.

Next I will be delving into Orson's Homecoming series which just arrived in the mail from thriftbooks yesterday. Somehow I'm going to have to slog my way through reading the rest of Ringworld first which will be hard when I know I have more of Orson's works sitting on my “to read” shelf.

If you haven't seen the theme in what I enjoy in books yet, I'll spell it out: it's meaningfulness. I want a good story, yes, but I want something I can ruminate on for days, months, or even years to come. I want something worth discussing with friends, and puzzling out as I fall asleep at night. Other non-Orson books worth mentioning that achieve this include Richard Bach's The Bridge Across Forever (#2), Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah (#25), and Johnathon Livingston Seagull (#24), Daniel Quinn's Ishmael (#13), Teal Swan's Hunger of the Pine (#35), and Edwin A. Abbott's Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (#51).

I'm curious to hear:

1. How you would rank Orson's works against your other favorites,
2. Which Orson book(s) were your favorite,
3. How “meaningfulness” plays into your book preferences,
4. Any other thoughts you have in response to my praise and analysis.

Looking forward to hearing back from y'all. 😁

Every now and then, I have a look at OSC's website to see if there's any news on the publishing front.

I usually also check the forum. Did so a couple minutes ago again for the first time in a good while and all threads are archived.
Has the forum been closed down?