Homecoming

"Heaven has burst open
Now it's raining bones
The chaos will erode you
Breeding little clones

Born of a fallen rib
From the monkey's womb
Overcooked by cathode rays
Evolved to consume"

Angelspit - 100%


The author of Ender's Game wrote one of the great science fiction novels of all time. It was called "Ender's Game" and the series it spawned, while decidedly milking their increasingly threadbare subject matter after the first sequel, occasionally made for decent casual consumption in their own right.

His parvum opus Homecoming, on the other hand, stands as irrevocable proof of the ravages inflicted by the cerebral disease faithosis upon an otherwise capable mind. See, the good Orson Scott Card happens to subscribe to Mormonism, and like many who have dabbled in mythology he decided to adapt his favorite myths to a new style and setting. Nothing Fundamentally wrong with that. Demigods, fearsome supernatural beasts and morality plays about tempting fate have routinely found comfortable homes in modern media. Except most of the people who keep ripping off (for instance) the demigod Jesus' mythical journey aren't trying to get you to believe in such fairy tales. They just appreciate that the whole "prophecied savior, martyrdom and resurrection w/ awesomah powah!" schtick makes for a good popcorn flick. It's a strenuous hop and a hernia-inducing skip from cribbing from works of religious fiction -- to proselytism.

Unfortunately, in trying to adapt Mormon superstition, Card churned out a work of propaganda with an intriguing but woefully derailed SciFi plot dangling off one end to remind us of what might've been. So let's take the series book by book.

1) The Memory of Earth is mostly a valid SF novel. (Had to whet readers' appetites.) It presents an intriguing phlebotinum and motivation for medieval stasis (albeit dependent, unfortunately, upon that narrative dead end of telepathy) and it describes a memorable, heavily idealized matriarchal society based partly upon Central Asian / Middle Eastern culture and partly on willfully ignorant gynocentrism. Card was obviously painfully aware of his need to distance himself from old-school Mormonism's infamous stance on polygamy.
And, damnit, while some of his anthropological explanations are decidedly lacking, Card's understanding of interpersonal power games is impressive enough to remind us why Ender's Game captured our attention in the first place, as is his subtle use of concentric iteration in the first book's cosmology. He marks the isolation of the protagonists' planet in the universe. Upon it in the midst of a wide desert sits the city of Basilica, with all households owned by women, about which circle men like ingratiating puppies or rabid coyotes depending on the author's mood in any particular passage. The city itself is built around a hydrothermal lake which is in turn defined by a point in the center where warm and cold waters meet which spot plays a crucial role in the psychology and mythology of the city's soothsayer who serves as only the first example of characters' private relationship with their god, the computer known as The Oversoul. Lovely imagery.
Despite a few awkward moments of characters affirming and glorifying their blind faith, much of the plot is still driven by arguments for powermongering, self-preservation, intellectual/cultural preservation/advancement or other drives which can easily be defined as rational ideals or at least pragmatically from a game theory perspective.

2) The Call of Earth... was a waste of paper when it was printed, and I dare say even now it's a waste of bits. It's entirely dominated by a completely new character, an army general who serves absolutely no narrative purpose beyond a blatantly obvious grand reveal that his resistance to god's will only made him play into god's plan. Cue the motherfuckin' harps. And that's it. Hundreds of pages of finger-wagging. The only other plot point has various characters receiving a second kind of mystical prophetic dream (totally different from the OTHER mystical dreams they were already receiving from their telepathic computer-god) which they decide must be from the Keeper of Earth... which none have ever heard of before but are now absolutely certain is sending them dreams because... well, mostly just "feels".
I can't imagine what the hell possessed Card (a skilled enough writer to be aware of the dangers of derailment and the critical need to pace a narrative) to not only interject but drag out such drivel except the gratuitous tragic hero of the piece must correspond to some figure in Mormon mythology. Otherwise you can safely scrap this whole cheap morality play while detracting not at all from the rest of the series.

3) The Ships of Earth actually picks up quite a bit, reminiscent of the first installment's better parts, with more interpersonal intrigue, the plucky band of heroes adventuring across the desert, etc. Unfortunately it's also where many plot threads begin to fall apart. Start with the fact that when the group gets down to one single fragile hunting/defense weapon, neither they nor their superintelligent computer-god devote even a second to considering contingency plans until it's inevitably destroyed... all to set up a convenient moment of divine inspiration for the hero. Then there's the increasingly grating issue that even when they reach the technological heart of the computer-god, presumably littered with speakers, monitors and endless other means of communication, the Oversoul for no particular reason insists on communicating with its subjects via telepathy and bemoaning in every single chapter the fact that some unbelievers ignore its magic dreams and vague inklings. For the love of fuck, TRY THE JUMBOTRON !
While all that might insult my intelligence as a reader, as a science fiction fan I'm particularly outraged by Card wholesale lifting the book's climax (the selectively permeable force field) from the short story Arena by Fredric Brown, which (unlike the Homecoming books) has ranked as a true classic of the genre since it was published in 1944. Seriously, Card, go fuck yourself. At least Star Trek owned up to it.

4) Earthfall is mostly defined by an increasing number of characters acquiring godlike magical powers and never actually using them, to the point where their motivations become increasingly vague and nonsensical. That and a ludicrously protracted Mexican standoff. The second half, at least, gives us a real SciFi setup of returning to Earth to find it inhabited by two newly intelligent species.

5) Earthborn being the last book is where Card apparently decided that any audience he managed to retain thus far must be committed enough to trudge through whatever nonsense he spews (well played on the sunk cost fallacy, sir.) Discussing its plot would be largely meaningless. Yes, there's a whole new cast of characters with kings and saints and martyrs, blah-blah-blah but really it revolves around ramping up the morality play about blind faith in god (herein The Keeper of Earth) and good lord-I-don't-even-believe-in, does he ever hammer that point home. His characters start inserting "Keeper of Earth" into every single conversation so often as to overshoot past outrage at bad writing or proselytism into outright farce. After the midpoint it's not uncommon to see the Keeper shoehorned into unrelated paragraphs over ten times per page, chapter after chapter! And the truly comical part is that you could CTRL-x "the Keeper" out of every single reference without adverse effect. Here's just a minimal taste:
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"The Keeper doesn't work that way, thought Didul. The Keeper doesn't make people nice. The Keeper only teaches them what goodness and decency are, and then rejoices with those who believe and obey."

What's wrong with just saying "we may not be nice by nature, but cooperation is advantageous"

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"That's good, isn't it? To tame your animal impulses in the service of the Keeper?"

Why wouldn't it be good to just tame your animal impulses?

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""The Keeper and all her works, she will matter. Ten million years from now, Didul, will the Keeper be alone on Earth again, as she was for so many, many years? Or will the Keeper tend an Earth that is covered with joyful people living in peace, doing the Keeper's works?"

Why not just leave the world better than we found it?
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""Your father and mother and I talked over the terrible things you went through as a child, and tried to figure out why the experience turned everyone else toward the Keeper of Earth, and turned you away. Your father was very apologetic, of course. He kept expressing his regret that his mistakes as a father should be causing innocent people to suffer.""

Why not just apologize for negligent parenting?

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"the Keeper rejects your plan from the start. This land belongs to all three peoples equally. That is what the Keeper decrees."

Genocide isn't nice. Come on, this ain't rocket science!

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"teaching them the way of the Keeper, the doctrines of Binaro-that won our freedom."

Teaching mutual cooperation can end slavery.

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"The Keeper tells us to forgive our enemies but I won't."

Never mind that The Keeper does not speak, ever, until the very end - in fact it's one of the bigger plot points through all five books. Also, I'm pretty sure both forgiving or not-forgiving can be carried out in the absence of gods. For instance, I (an a-Keeperist) will not forgive the author for ripping off Arena.

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"She's only going to lead Edhadeya closer to the Keeper and to you."

Threesome!

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""You foolish men of power!" cried Chebeya. "You're so used to governing with laws and words, soldiers and spies. Now you rage or have your feelings hurt because all your usual tools are useless. They were always useless. Everything always depended on the relationship between each individual person in this kingdom and the Keeper of Earth. Very few of them understand anything about the Keeper's plan, but they know goodness when they see it, and they know evil-they know what builds and what tears down, what brings happiness and what brings misery. Trust them!""

The public is stupid and operates by gut feelings. These can be reliable tools of social control.

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"<Such useless yearnings weren't put into me. I have never wished to be anything other than what I am.>
Neither have I, said Shedemei silently, realizing for the first time that she truly was satisfied with her life and glad of the part that the Keeper had given her in the plan of life. With that thought she suddenly laughed out loud, earning her strange looks from a couple of children passing by. She made a face at them; they shrieked and ran away, but soon stopped running and resumed their laughter and chattering. That's the plan, thought Shedemei. The Keeper only wants us to live with the simplicity and innocence of these little ones. Why is it so hard?"

Ok, I'll admit this last one is an intrinsically religious argument. No comparable social force has ever pushed so hard to convince every individual to remain mentally stunted at the level of an ignorant, morally incapable idiot child, wholly dependent on authority, as religions have. This brings us to one last, fairly odd, plot point. Despite the fact that Mormons' conflicts have historically flared up almost exclusively against other Christians, Card chose to frame his conflict as a diatribe against free thinkers instead. Chapter after chapter in volume after volume are dedicated to setting up and knocking down atheist strawmen (to the point of devoting much of the last title to a comically overstuffed "argumentum ad Hitlerum" with predatory rat/mole-people instead of Jews/Africans depending on interpretation... because that's not going to get awkward in retrospect... at all) and to extolling the virtue of self-imposed stupidity, of belief without evidence. Here's just one example of one of the faithful railing against an unbeliever:

"All of you trying for the center stage. All of you trying to get the audience to notice you, to declare you the star, so that when you die, the curtain will come down and the show will end. But it never does. No one was ever the star after all."

Which, first off, bears not even the slightest resemblance to atheists who, if anything, are more likely to fall into nihilism and see themselves as ephemeral motes lost in the uncaring void ; second, has no bearing on a philosophical stance (skepticism) which is based not on motivated thinking but on observation ; third, coming from a religious nut is one of the most blatant cases of psychological projection a headshrinker could ever ask for. What could be more egocentric, egomaniacal even, than expecting that THE ALMIGHTY CONSCIOUSNESS AND CREATIVE FORCE OF THE COSMOS has nothing better to do than to love a degenerate filthy ape like you?

As a last note, I find the replacement of traditional divinities with The Keeper particularly interesting in how self-defeating it is to throw away the undeserved cultural fiat built up by religions for their particular nomenclature. Our cultures have all been indoctrinated, over centuries' worth of inquisitions, crusades, jihads, pogroms, torture, mass torture, witch hunts and other fun in the sun, to fear criticizing Jesus, or The Buddha, or Mohammed, or Vesta, or Quetzalcoatl, or the various popes, tsars and Billy Grahams who claim to represent them. In fact one of the most effective tools of ridicule by atheists against religion is to take religious precepts and present them in a secular context to see how they (don't) stand up on their own. If your coworker Bob told you to eat fish on Friday, would you feel obligated to do it? No, fuck you, Bob!

Weird for the faithful to pull that trick on themselves. One can't but laugh at the pathetic desperation, the literary pitfall, of monomaniacally repeating the awkward phrase "The Keeper" a dozen times per page as a complete non-sequitur every single time. It only serves to highlight the stupidity of doing the same with the nonsense word "god" in real life. Hard to say what Card hoped with these ersatz novels, but what he achieved was a brilliant illustration of how utterly retarded and batshit insane* religions sound once divested of the terminology we've all been indoctrinated to fear criticizing.
...
(All except the Flying Spaghetti Monster, naturally, may we all bask in His starchy vapors for all eternity.)




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* Made even funnier by one of his sentient species being actual bats.