Capitol

Orson Scott Card's Capitol is an early, uneven short story collection that has several interesting pieces. Many of the stories were later reprinted (some with adjustments) in The Worthing Saga.

It's a future history of a space empire whose most important feature is suspended animation. A drug called Somec allows people to be suspended agelessly for any length of time. This enables space flight, but its real function is social: important people can sleep for one year out of two, or three out of five, or nine out of ten, based on their status. This creates a society where the rich and powerful seem ageless; even though their experienced life is no longer than anyone else's, they can watch lesser people age and die while they're still young.

This illusionary immortality (and one of the nice touches is the way that its enthusiasts uncritically think of it as "immortality," when obviously it's not) becomes all-consuming: people are either on Somec, or desperate to get on it, which gives the system an unbreakable hold on society.

The stories don't necessarily fit together well. The first two are set on Earth, and feel strangely off-topic. We don't need to know how Somec was invented, and the Soviet invasion of the US seems too large a topic to just introduce and then forget.

Most of the remainder are set on the planet Crove, later renamed Capitol, and these flow better. (Well, most of them. "Burning" is interesting in terms of its later place in The Worthing Chronicle, but in this context it makes no sense. Where did these telepaths come from, what part do they play, why are they never mentioned again?)

The two best stories are "Skipping Stones," which sets up the dilemma of Somec and its effects; and "Breaking the Game," about a celebrity video game player. The latter is effective because Card, with minimal detail, succeeds at making the game interesting! You can actually believe that people would spectate, and pay to play in it.

(It also reminds me of the political message boards in Ender's Game- another detail of the internet that Card predicted, accurately if not completely.)

The Worthing Chronicle is a better, neater collection of most of this material, which I suppose is why they republished it that way. But it was interesting to see this alternative framing. And Worthing gives only a brief and unsatisfying summary of "Breaking the Game," which deserves a fuller treatment.

The Red Prophet Picture Book

Orson Scott Card is best known for his novel Ender's Game, which is fair enough. I like it a lot myself.

But my favorite Card novel is Red Prophet, the second novel in his "Alvin Maker" series about a fantasy frontier America where folk magic works.

Alvin is the seventh son of a seventh son, and this mystical conjugation makes him a Merlin-like figure of magical destiny. The first novel dealt with all this; and it was certainly interesting. But Red Prophet goes into the broader world, where ambitious White men plot among and against each other, and Red Indians are slowly dying of rampant alcohol addiction.

Two brothers seek to change this: Tenskwa-Tawa, the Red Prophet of the title, who wants to segregate Red men from White men and pursue his vision of a great Crystal City; and Ta-Kumsaw, the great military leader, who simply wants to drive the White men from North America entirely.


If Ender's Game is a story about how institutions (especially the military) use and exploit people for their own purposes, Red Prophet is about religion and social reform. That is probably part of why I like it better; it's a theme that's closer to my heart.

So I was quite taken to find that there's a graphic novel version of Red Prophet. I bought the first volume and eagerly consumed it.

In retrospect, I could have guessed that there would be problems.

Card has a very strong narrative voice in this book. It's not just happening, as many novels try to suggest, with you as an observer; someone is telling you this story. (If I remember correctly, the series actually confirms this at some point; the narrator is Taleswapper.)

This doesn't translate at all well into comics format, where the ideal is to show things visually. Visually presenting the events of the book loses almost all of the appealing style.

And so they don't. Instead, they cram as much text as they possibly can into text boxes. Virtually every panel in every page is loaded with a few sentences from the novel. The effect is to make it a sort of Red Prophet Picture Book- an unhappy compromise that loses the advantages of both novel and graphic novel formats.

Some novels don't make good comic books. That isn't a sign that anything is wrong with them; it just means that the novel format has its own specific advantages, which other media don't share. Foremost among these advantages is the ability to get inside someone's head- to share their thoughts and feelings.

Card is good at this. Comics aren't. It's a sad way to realize the fact; but at least I've learned something from the Red Prophet graphic novel, after all.

Timescales in Science Fiction

Today I finished Robert J. Sawyer's early novel Starplex. It's reminiscent of Star Trek, in that a coalition of aliens and humans has joined together on a starship to explore space, and seek out new life and new civilizations...

(Cue theme music.)

Halfway through the novel, time travel comes up; and we discover that one of the characters will apparently live to be ten billion years old.

Ten billion. Working on this kind of timescale takes a certain kind of bald-faced audacity on the author's part, both because the number itself is staggering and because you can't really do any kind of story over that length of time. All you can do is pick out episodes; or, as in this case, go to the end and see what's there.

Orson Scott Card did this, in his Homecoming series; it's generally understood that the Oversoul has been active for tens of millions of years since the founding of the planet Harmony. Card handles this by confronting it head-on: by having one of the characters talk about the impossibility of any kind of history handling that enormous duration. Even if there were some mega-library with the history all written down, who could live long enough to read it?


On the other hand, you have Isaac Asimov; his Galactic Empire was originally written to be fifty thousand years into the future, but Asimov retconned this into twenty thousand years later on. Why? A feeling that fifty thousand years is too long, somehow?