Re:The Second Coming of Ender
on
Ender's Shadow
·
· Score: 2
Of course there are commercial motivations for any professional author - it's bread and butter as well as art. But Ender's Shadow is also the latest and most ambitious expression of a motif that runs through much of Card's work - that it isn't the words that are important, but the story. OSC has written is several places about how changing the words doesn't change the story, that reshaping a story through different perspectives can add a lot. The Ender's Game novel is simply an expansion of an Ender's Game short story. The Alvin Maker books have strong parallels to certain American/Mormon historical figures. Memories of Earth is a retelling of a family's exodus from a doomed city - the first version is found in the beginning chapters of the Book of Mormon. By retelling stories with new words, Card and others engage in much the same act as oral storytellers - building a mythos, a culture that has a rich and subtle variation of common themes. Layers on layers of narrative get down to Card's three principle forces driving stories - Love, Sex, and Death. Ender's Shadow just happens to be the latest addition to the ongoing development of this narrative mosaic.
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Of course there are commercial motivations for any professional author - it's bread and butter as well as art. But Ender's Shadow is also the latest and most ambitious expression of a motif that runs through much of Card's work - that it isn't the words that are important, but the story. OSC has written is several places about how changing the words doesn't change the story, that reshaping a story through different perspectives can add a lot. The Ender's Game novel is simply an expansion of an Ender's Game short story. The Alvin Maker books have strong parallels to certain American/Mormon historical figures. Memories of Earth is a retelling of a family's exodus from a doomed city - the first version is found in the beginning chapters of the Book of Mormon. By retelling stories with new words, Card and others engage in much the same act as oral storytellers - building a mythos, a culture that has a rich and subtle variation of common themes. Layers on layers of narrative get down to Card's three principle forces driving stories - Love, Sex, and Death. Ender's Shadow just happens to be the latest addition to the ongoing development of this narrative mosaic.