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Message: <blockquote data-quote="The Sigil" data-source="post: 647940" data-attributes="member: 2013">Personally, I found Neuromancer to be among the more vacuous, shallow, and generally worthless books in the genre.  But that's just me... obviously a lot of other people enjoyed it.  Just not quite my cup of tea, I guess.*Chuckles* I know OSC - in fact, I am the basis of the main character (Stevie?  It's been WAY too long) in his book "Lost Boys" (the rest of my family is the Cooper - rather than Cooley - family - albeit with a little poetic license since my dad's name is not Spike - and he "adopted" me into his family for the purposes of the book).  Card *is* as you suggest, hit-and-miss... though (and hopefully I don't drag this too far into religion here) for me, the Homecoming series was, well, an exceedingly dry read - because I was quite familiar with the source material he was pulling from.  As you may or may not know, Card is a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints - and the Homecoming Series is very much a Sci-Fi version of portions the Book of Mormon (though Card, as is his wont, tends to use his books to explore the psyche of his characters).  Since I happen to be intimately familiar with the Book of Mormon, I literally was reading most of the books replacing characters' names as I went with the Book of Mormon equivalents (e.g., Nafai = Nephi).  Hence, he seems "stuck" to the storyline as it unfolded in the original - which, if it is not satisfying to you there, likely will not be satisfying to you here, either! ;-)Card is an accomplished writer, and a good friend, but I will admit he tends to hammer on certain points way too often and way too repetitively for the comfort of most.  All that said, I personally enjoyed the later books in the Ender series - esp. Xenocide and Speaker for the Dead (not so much Children of the Mind) much more than Ender's Game - but that's because I enjoyed the psychological exposition (wasn't thrilled with the deux ex machina devices employed toward the end of the trilogy).  The science fiction, for me, took a back seat to the characters - always a good thing (IMO) for a book.  Ender's Game is a fun sci-fi book, but the depth of Xenocide and Speaker for the Dead intrigued me more (here's a man dealing with the fact that he personally is responsible for wiping out an entire race - even though he did so unwittingly, you can tell guilt is eating him up) - despite Card's occasional preachiness in those books.  If Card has a flaw as a writer (and it IS one he recognizes), it's that his value systems - which are way more conservative than most of his readers' - tend to crop up in his books and sometimes he bludgeons you over the head with them.  Even I, who ostensibly shares his value systems, find that annoying at times.--The Sigil</blockquote>

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