A small comment about writing style. (I wrote this a long time ago. Found it in a drafty place.)

I read the original Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card years ago, and at the time it seemed “simplistic”. The hero (Ender) and the path he took were just too perfect. He faced his challenges almost robotically and we never had to struggle; we were never really in any doubt as to his ultimate success. The story was direct and told without flair, almost as if it itself were written by a child. What set the book apart, though, was the depth of analysis of the characters’ absolutely every action and thought and intention; the lack of subtlety and, truth be told, the refreshing departure from “show, don’t tell”, that old writers’ maxim which was drilled into me in elementary and high school English classes. Okay, I confess at this point that I don’t remember the prose of Ender’s Game all that well, but with respect to Ender’s Shadow, this commentary seems very applicable.

The boy ate the banana and was no longer hungry.

That would be “tell”.

The banana peel lay on the table, and the boy’s stomach stopped rumbling.

That would be “show”.

The second seems far more literary. Want to get even more literary? In the “show” version, I still “told” you some facts (about the banana peel and the boy’s stomach) which implied the idea I really wanted to convey. But why not show the above facts, themselves, instead? This’ll sound a bit absurd, but that’s the nature of the beast, as we go one level of abstraction further up the ladder:

If someone had walked on the table, he would likely have slipped in a classically comical way, while meanwhile in the boy’s stomach elephants were no longer on parade.

That’s a pretty absurd way of describing lack of hunger due to having consumed a banana, yet we see prose which aspires to that level of obliqueness all the time, and it’s often venerated for that. What does it add, really?

My point is that Card’s novels work because he just flat out “tells” and doesn’t pretend to be doing anything more than that. Although the reader isn’t left anything to figure out, I maintain that for the most part, making readers figure things out is mostly tiring, as is the telling of irrelevant facts (e.g., the fact that the banana peel is on the table; the fact that the boy’s stomach was rumbling) in order to be “showing” the important facts which are illuminated only by implication. In truth: take the flowery language and non-linear narrative blocks out of many books, and the story itself would compress quite a bit. Perhaps the same mood wouldn’t be conveyed, true, but sometimes “he felt sad” is just as good as “he hung his head in despair”, unless he really did hang his head in despair, but that’s just a literary cliche at this point and we don’t even know what he really did with his head when you say that, if anything (other than feel sad with it) unless more specific non-cliche actions are described.

Card just says “he felt sad” and uses the extra space to explain exactly why he feels sad, what his sadness means, what he is doing differently now because of his sadness, what he feels about the fact that he feels sad, how other characters react to his analysis of his own sadness and, in turn, their analyses of their reactions to his analysis of his sadness and their reactions to their analyses of such, and so on. And all of this is somehow relevant to the story.

That makes it atypical and fun.