I've Seen The Future, and It's Really Hackneyed

I stopped writing in the SF genre about eight years ago. It was an easy divorce, fueled by mutual indifference. I wasn't writing material that excited most SF editors (except for Dean Wesley Smith, editor of the sadly dead Pulphouse), and they weren't publishing material that interested me. So I moved on to literary fiction, and left them to figure out new ways in which people could download themselves into computers and threaten our civil liberties. Sometimes, though, like Lot's wife, I have to look back to see what I left behind. I didn't turn into a pillar of salt upon reading Orson Scott Card's new manuscript, Emprie, but I must say that I envy Mrs. Lot her good fortune.

The blurb for Empire promises a "chilling look at a near-future scenario of a new American Civil War." What Card provides is a tale of two soldiers, Cole and Rube (as their friends, Card says, like to call them) who, in the midst of the devastating war of words between right and left and the terrorist threat of Al Qaida, know that America needs to stop listening to professors and trust good solid military men who always act for the country's best interest and never surrender to anything, not even personal bias. In an introspective moment, Rube wonders whether he's as closed minded as the representatives of the "insane Left", his fellow Ivy League graduate students:

Am I like them, just a bigot learning only what fits my worldview? That's what he kept asking himself. But finally he reached the conclusion: No, he was not. He faced every piece of information as it came. He questioned his own assumptions whenever the information seemed to violate it. Above all, he changed his mind -- and often. Sometimes only by increments; sometimes completely. Heroes he had once admired -- Douglas MacArthur, for instance -- he now regarded with something akin to horror: How could a commander be so vain, with so little justification for it? Others that he had disdained -- that great clerk, Eisenhower, or that woeful incompetent, Burnside -- he had learned to appreciate for their considerable virtues.

Yes, because as we know, the most reliable judge of whether a person is closed-minded or not is the person himself. Just ask Dick Cheney. Under other circumstances, I'd assume that this passage was meant ironically. But after reading this passage, I came to doubt that its author could claim that irony was in his bag of tricks

"I want our babies to be as smart as you and as tough as me," he [Rube] said.

"I just want them to look like me," said Cessy. "Because having daughters that look like you would be cruel."

Their daughters did look like Cessy, and their sons had Reuben's lean, lithe body, and all in all, their family life was perfect. That's what he came home to every day from school; that was the environment in which he studied. That was his root in reality that kept calling him back from the brink of getting seduced into the fantasyland of academia.

Until Averell Torrent decided he wanted Reuben's soul.

Averell Torrent, by the way, is one of those nasty academics, decked out in this passage with horns and a pointy tail (or maybe a black cape and fangs. I can't decide which). Rube's impatience with academia, his tendency to believe that anyone who enjoys the life of the mind is either a fraud or a nut, mirrors Card's expressed feelings about the professors whose love of literary fiction denies Card's books respectability. Rube imagines he's avoiding the crimes of the extremists and elitists, but he commits their worst sin. He assumes that everyone who disagrees with him, or expresses an opinion he finds beyond the pale, is either sinister or stupid. The saner of us figure that some of our opponents are sinister or stupid, whereas others oppose us for perfectly legitimate reasons, from their point of view. But acknowledging that requires us to recognize nuance, and Orson Scott Card doesn't do nuance.

When Empire isn't occupied with putting black hats on Card's--er, excuse me--Rube's enemies and white hats on his friends, it's treating its readers as if they were fools. Take this passage, where the narrator demonstrates a command of the obvious so stunning it rivals Leslie Neilsen's response to the question: "A Hospital! What is it?"*:

They made their way back through the southwest gate, past the same MPs, past the emergency vehicles and military vehicles and the cordon of soldiers that were now completely surrounding the White House. Cole finally asked, "Even if you're arrested, you know they can't convict you of anything."

"I'm not afraid of being convicted," said Malich.

"What, then?"

"I'm afraid of Jack Ruby."

The guy who assassinated Lee Harvey Oswald before he could be tried. The guy who made sure that the tough questions about the Kennedy assassination could never be answered.

Gee, uh, thanks Orson. I'd never heard of Jack Ruby before...um...duh... What's next? "Malich saw a picture of Jack Nicholson. Yes, that Jack Nicholson, star of A Few Good Men, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and Five Easy Pieces."

I guess it shouldn't surprise me that Card would stick this line in here. To him, everyone's an idiot. Without him, people wouldn't know how to vote, to read history, or to tie shoes. And failure to heed his warnings and condemn his enemies brings terrible consequences...tsk, tsk...terrible:

"You look pissed off," said Malich.

"Yeah," said Cole. "The terrorists are crazy and scary, but what really pisses me off is knowing that this will make a whole bunch of European intellectuals very happy."

"They won't be so happy when they see where it leads. They've already forgotten Sarajevo and the killing fields of Flanders."

I wasn't so happy to see where it led either. This last quote was from Chapter Five, and the way I figured it, there was a whole lot more book to go after that. And no rube or intellectual, European or American, Muslim or Christian, Freemason or Elk, Mugwump or Whig, Republican or Democrat could claim happiness upon receipt of that news.

*Neilsen's answer: "It's a big building with patients, but that's not important right now."