sun setting on Empire, and it hasn’t even been published yet.

So, I know that all you Gentle Readers have already come across this in plenty of other places, but what the hell is up with Orson Scott Card? Did he have a stroke or something? I mean, I understand that I disagree with him politically, not just on policy issues but on certain basic tenets of democracy, and I am fine with that. It doesn’t even particularly bother me. The man can write like a sonofabitch. As recently as a year ago, I enjoyed reading Magic Street.

Would Your Humble Blogger have said he was capable of bad writing? Yes, the later books in the Alvin Maker series sucked, for instance, and there have been others that I didn’t like at all. YHB would not, though, have said he was capable of writing like

"It's a trap, of course," said one of the Americans.

"Yes," said the leader, a young captain named Reuben Malich. "But will they spring it when we reach the place where his directions would send us? Or when we return?"

In other words, as they all understood: Was the village part of the conspiracy or not? If it was, then the trap would be sprung far away.

This is an excerpt from Empire, his most recent book. Now, I know that the book is supposed to annoy me with its politics, and clearly I would be annoyed, and that would be fine. In the first five chapters (excerpted on-line), there are some outrageous blue state-red state things that strike me as coming out of the Dennis Prager playbook, but fine, there it is. People are different one to another, and that includes their interpretations of our political universe, and although it does bug me, and it is a hurdle for me to enjoy a piece of fiction, it (a) isn’t all that high a hurdle, as witness my enjoyment of Dick Francis, early Tom Stoppard and half-a-dozen others, and (2) who the hell cares if I put hurdles in between my self and good fiction? The problem of this writing is not that it annoys me. The problem of this writing is that it sucks.

will they spring it when we reach the place where his directions would send us?

What was the thought process? will they spring it when we get there? No, I can’t say that, because they’re not going to go there, they’re going to double back. So, since the English Language lacks the subjunctive, I must indicate the putative direction without indicating intention. Yet, I am careful not to identify the village, so I can’t name the location—not even by saying “the cave” or “the hideout” or “the weapons cache”, because of course there is no weapons cache, as it’s a trap. I have no alternative but to describe the endpoint of the directions simply as the endpoint of the directions.

chazak, chazak, v’nitchazek,
-Vardibidian.