I have never read any of Orson Scott Card's novels. I've read my share of SF but never got around to Ender's Game, which is the one I am given to know is a classic, etc. As it may very well be. At any rate, I've now read the first five chapters of Empire, Card's new novel -- or, more accurately, multimedia extravaganza. There will be a video game and a movie, Web sites and whatnot, all that exciting and exhausting bullshit.
The project, or at least the book, certainly has its risible aspects, as has been most ably pointed out. And certainly it is dreck. But seeing how the snark is well in hand, I think I'll focus on what's alarming about it. Card is pretty deliberately framing out not merely a fictional but also a moral universe; the generative principle of the project is a rather bizarre notion of right vs. wrong. The problem is that Card wants to pretend that he's interested in univeral truths and cycles when what he's really working with (consciously or not, I don't give a shit) are highly politicized, reductive, and derivative stereotypes. Card is essentialy a propagandist who wants to dress himself up as an artist. As such, he has a chance to be remarkably effective, and indeed pernicious, given the stated ambitions of the Empire project and current political and cultural realities.
In what follows one may be tempted to wonder why I'm wasting my time with what could quite easily be dismissed as a piece of pop cultural crap. I'd reply that just because something obviously sucks and is obviously stupid is hardly a reason to dismiss it as not worth serious analysis: stupid sucky things have tremendous power in contemporary American culture.
Card is proposing a new, and I think awesomely seductive, if stupid and sucky, narrative for 21st century America. It needs to be challenged. We need to offer a better one to compete with it.
This post is going to turn out rather long and so I'll be breaking it up into several sections. Consider this the introduction.