A lot of his books were influenced by Mormon mythology (and I don't really see a problem with that, since many of the greatest works of speculative fiction were heavily influenced by biblical mythology -- hello there, C.S. Lewis); the Homeoming series (which despite my early-teenaged enthusiasm, I recognize now were pretty awful) were practically a straight rewrite of the Book of Mormon.
I share the mixed feelings about Card. I devoured his work as a kid, and I still feel that a few of his novels (Ender's Game, Wyrms, and a few others) and many of his short stories (if you haven't read the Maps in a Mirror anthologies, now's the time, espescially as the collected full anthology is finally back in print) are hugely important contributions to the SF output of the 20th century. But at the same time he's also written some crap, and his personal views and the statements he's made about them often disgust me.
But I listen to Wagner, and I still read Card. While context is of course important, to some extent it is necessary to consider art independent of the artist. And ignore a lot of the later work.
Gotta agree with you, it's particularly notable with The Worthing Saga...
It's been a few years since I read it, but I remember TWS as an extremely elaborate moral/religious justification as to why humans live in a world where pain exists, and why god would feel the need for giving people free will. I loved this, and found it morally fascinating, all these detailed short stories of individual living with a mixture of powers (over themselves, over their peers, and over their environment). For those of you who've read it, we go from a man who is building a colony single-handed, deciding how much to intervene in the lives of his children, to children of that colony with psychic powers far greater than the rest of the planet, and responsibility to them, to the relationship between a planet of these "gods" and the rest of the universe.
It was fascinating, on the level of individual stories, and on a whole moral landscape.
It's probably The Worthing Saga that made me hate Pastwatch so much... Because Pastwatch is a story who's abiding theme is intervening in people's lives in order to make them better, whether they want (or know) it or not. I don't know if in the intervening years Orson became less of an individualist, but this idea of a morally unimpeachable heroine, deciding to jump into history and change it in order to alter the history of slavery was so at odsd with his previous stance that my jaw dropped. When did Card decide to fuck free will, and not only attack things he didn't like, but wipe them from history? The twist in Pastwatch only hammers home how right they were to be considering reshaping history in the first place. So of course you can force people to be better people with the bludgeon of your personal morality.
I haven't read it in a few years, so I cant remember exactly why it made my skin feel quite so polluted, but I just felt that all the moral highground I had given him for The Worthing Saga's individualist morality, was demolished by this hideous book about the rights of the superior to fix the world as they see fit.
I had to take a long shower after that pile of poo.
But yes, morality makes some of the best SF, although I would say Tolkein more than Lewis (equally catholic, but so much more blatant).
