skinyourscreen.com

Space Boy

Ender’s Game Rocked: Space Boy Sucks. With a name ripped from a Smashing Pumpkins song you’d think it’d be more enjoyable! Interesting twist on wormholes with characters you wouldn’t give a smashed pumpkin for.

by Orson Scott Card

2 Stars

Not Recommended

My wife picked this one up from our local library, having attended his church classes in North Carolina. One of his much earlier works, Ender’s Game (Ender, Book 1), was a favorite of mine in elementary school, although the remainder of the series (and spin-off series) were disappointing. She picked up the book in the juvenile fiction area and I thought I’d give it a preview before reading it to the kids. It’s a smallish book, page-wise, being only 95 pages in length. Reading the summary on the inside cover I was surprised to see this was a signature edition retailing for $35. Thirty-five dollars!!! For a 95-page novella? I think I bought the whole The Spiderwick Chronicles Boxed Set for less than the price of this one book, it being an entire series of adventures geared towards the same age bracket. Already, it had set a high standard, just in terms of potential cost alone.

Unfortunately, it was just another read.

Card does does a fantastic job presenting people so unusual and disconnected from their societies that it’s hard to relate to them. Space Boy is no exception, centering around a youth reminiscent of the vacuum-cleaner boy – a savant in astronaut trivia. He discovers a hairy naked midget emerge from open air in his back-yard after his kid brother complains of an elf stealing their mother from his closet. A multi-planet adventure ensues involving worm-hole based travel, density changes, and the forcefully sudden discovery that the younger brother is a mathematical genius, with a mother and father that seem pasted in, if truly there at all. Although the character’s and their reactions were, at times, entertaining, the two brothers in particular, all the other characters, grieving father included, appeared rather stereotypical. The whole thing felt rushed.

To give Card credit, I felt the whole concept of a worm-hole actually being a living organism to be creative in scope and execution. He builds rules around this concept involving directionality as well as what can pass through and what happens to it. The speculation provided by the characters as to why is also interesting. Indeed, it could have provided the basis for a much more interesting and involving story if it had been developed more. I would love to see him elaborate on the idea, give more background, and provide more compelling characters to really make it sizzle.

Orson Scott Card is a genius – literally one of the most intelligent people I’ve ever known. Having had him as a religious instructor while living in North Carolina, I think it fair to say he’s an example of that tenuous link to sanity that genius can so often preclude. Intermixing imagination with fact, it’s hard to tell when he speaks fact or an elaborated yarn (more often the latter, I suspect). Strikingly, he strongly reminds me of another genius with a penchant for story-telling, L. Ron Hubbard, progenitor of Scientology. If Card were not grounded in something as defined as Mormon doctrines he might be the type to craft his own religion worshipping alien bugs, trees and piggies. Or not… Pardon me for elaborating on Card as he does with dead kids in the neighbor’s basement and rocket-lovin’ nerd kids crawling through wormhole anuses.

BTW: I’d not purchase this book for over $9.