Orson Scott Card posts first five chapters of new book online

[Toshiaki Koala]

Read it and howl.

 

Reuben Malich knelt over the body and cried out in the keening wail of deep grief, the anguish of a soul on fire. He tore open the shirt of his uniform and struck himself repeatedly on the chest. This was not part of his training. He had never seen anyone do such a thing, in any culture. Striking himself looked to his fellow soldiers like a kind of madness. But the surviving villagers joined him in grief, or watched him in awe.

 

Even when he was writing essays about how the Jedi were going to Hell and gay marriage was going to liquify the Earth's crust, Card was never anything less than a decent writer. Back in the Ender's Game days, I'd even say he was a great one. But this... this is at the writing level of a TNA fanfic, if not a CZW one.

 

Princeton University was just what Reuben expected it to be -- hostile to everything he valued, smug and superior and utterly closed-minded. In fact, exactly what they thought the military was.

 

He kept thinking, the first couple of semesters, that maybe his attitude toward them was just as short-sighted and bigoted and wrong as theirs was of him. But in class after class, seminar after seminar, he learned that far too many students were determined to remain ignorant of any real-world data that didn't fit their preconceived notions. And even those who tried to remain genuinely open-minded simply did not realize the magnitude of the lies they had been told about history, about values, about religion, about everything. So they took the facts of history and averaged them with the dogmas of the leftist university professors and thought that the truth lay somewhere in the middle.

 

INCISIVE!