Orson Scott Card’s Empire starts out promising and ends up…a video game. It’s supposed to be part of an upcoming video game franchise, so that might explain it.
Click here to read the reviews.
I’m surprised how many readers didn’t like it at all, especially compared to this nerd author’s other stuff. I’m not too mad or disappointed because it was only 5 bucks at Wal-Mart.
Though Card avoids mentioning Bush by name, you assume that’s whom he’s talking about as Prez. Hell, I’m surprised he mentions Democrats and Republicans and red and blue states (guess he’d have to in order to make it realistic). Card throws some implausible sci-fi in the mix (that’s his genre) which helps his story but robs the story that should’ve been written.
An Afterword where Card sermonizes about how polarized the country is does nothing but irritate, especially since he casts himself as a moderate.
I dislike the terms “moderate” and “extremist” because neither term has been defined well.
In most of America in the 1960s, it was natural and normal to be able to buy firearms through the mail, and nobody would blink twice at the sight of a youngster walking down the road with a hunting rifle. Now, anyone who favors just owning a gun can be accused of being an “extremist”. It’s a term as vague and open-ended as “hate crime” laws.
People who call themselves moderates are worse, they’re frauds (“frauderates”) standing on the sidelines of a game they’ve never bothered to play. You mean you’ve never in your life thought about whether abortion is murder or not? Or how much taxation is too much? (There’s always going to be that 3rd of the population who don’t give a damn either way. Let’s hope they die quickly if they choose the wrong side).
Empire features an Afterword where OSC complains that when political sides are chosen in a civil war, all of the other side is your enemy whether or not they were before. Well, duh. Wasn’t the first Civil War brother against brother, father against son?
A proper book still needs to be written about a Second American Civil War, one from the perspective of Joe and Jane Sixpack, for they, not armies or the media or the feds, will be the final “Deciders” of whether liberty stays or goes.