Mostly I'm just tired of the notes he hits repeatedly in his books -- the exploited angelic genius children get old with me fast.

This is entirely fair, and if ever I form a rock band, we shall be called the Exploited Angelic Genius Children.

Card may be personally sane, but his politics are from my point of view loony (remembering that to many here my politics are ditto).

His claiming that any criticism of "Passion of the Christ" as anti-semitic was a case of Jews telling Christians how to be Christians, his argument that homosexuality is a way god uses to mark some people as unclean and morally unworthy, strike me as two examples of fairly loony political and theological viewpoints; neither one as far as I know is inherent in being a Mormon.

The fact that Card is an ultra-conservative Mormon is not, in and of itself, a reason not to enjoy his later books.

The (just to pick the most concrete example that leaps to mind) transformation of Petra from warrior girl-child to weepy existing-only-to-make-babies teenager, on the other hand, is.

Whether the one informs the other is of no interest to me at all -- I still threw the book across the room.

Which books was Petra in?

Yak. I -- of all people -- am not going to try to support any of Card's positions. He is not insane or a pederast, just a Mormon, and thereby estranged from reality.

Sure: I think a lot of his stuff makes me cringe. And not only his latest. But I really like the first three books in the Alvin Maker series, as well as Ender;s Game, and nothing he writes since will change that for me. Also "Lost Boys" (the novella, not the novel), and a number of others.

Ender's Game, and the Shadow books. She's post-puberty in the second one, which I got about twenty pages in before throwing it across the room. It was just so sickeningly sexist. And badly written.

Ah. I never tried the Shadow books -- he lost me earlier than that. And it's been a long while since Ender's Game.

OK, but Gus I really was not calling him a pederast or a Nazi. I was bringing up those to illustrate a more general principle - judge the tale, not the teller. I've know some at least moderate Mormons who are in good standing in their church and don't take the positions OSC does - so I don't know that you can blame them entirely on being a Mormon. Hell, Harry Reid is a Mormon, and while I consider him kinda weaslly, he is by no means a right winger. So I have to assume that OSC is taking positions he wants to take and believes - not merely ones his church requires.

I was hoping they'd have more of Peter and Valentine's story, since they were my favorite parts of Ender's Game. But alas, not so much.

These days, the only one of his I reread regularly is The Worthing Saga.