Familiar with Orson Scott Card novels?

Question

I have only recently become aware of some of his accomplishments, such as his novel series "The Tales of Alvin Maker".

Have yet to read.

Answer 1

I enjoyed his Alvin Maker series, but my favorite series by Orson Scott Card has to be his Ender series. It was reading Ender's Game that led me to finding the rest of his works. Here are those books in order:
Ender's Game
Speaker For The Dead
Xenocide
Children of the Mind

The Shadow series sometimes considered part of the Ender series includes
Ender's Shadow
Shadow of the Hegemon
Shadow Puppets
Shadow of the Giant

The first four books have Ender as the main hero...and the second set of four books have Bean as the main hero. Ender's Game & Ender's Shadow are parallel novels covering some of the same events but from different perspectives. The Shadow series takes place before Speaker of the Dead but was written after the Ender series concluded with Children of the Mind.

One of my favorite Orson Scott Card novels--perhaps even more of a favorite than some of the series' titles is a book called Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus. I love that book.

You should take the time to explore Card's extensive website...

http://hatrack.com/index.shtml

Answer 2

"Ender's Game" is a science-fiction classic. Personally though I prefer "7th Son" and "Red Prophet." Ender Wiggins is a brilliantly imagined character but in a certain sense he's a victim of his own success. Card does a masterful job creating a superhuman intellect, but no matter how good a job he does Ender is more intelligent than his readers (no offense meant to anyone) and therefore always at least a little remote.

Alvin Smith and the other characters of the Alvin Maker series are also superhuman, but their powers are reflections of their all too human nature. Peggy Guester (Alvin's wife) is a know-it-all and therefore it should be no surprise that she does in fact know it all. The people of Hactrack River are flawed, subject to all the strengths and limitations of the human condition. As a result they are easier to relate to and in my opinion, easier to like.

Eventually as the Alvin Maker series progresses it becomes something of a David E. Kelley show frontier style. Alvin spends way too much time in court in the later books. Not really what one expects in a fantasy tale, even if it is a tale about America, but the first two books of the series are pure gold and I highly recommend them if you haven't read them yet.

Card has also written some revisions of fairytales and is currently doing a series on the women of the Bible. I haven't read any of these but I suspect that he does a respectable job with them.

Answer 3

You should read the "Ender's game".
Very good and original book. It won the Hugo and the Nebula.