Book review: Wyrms

A book by Orson Scott Card. Wiki has a decent summary of the plot. Goodreads has... some reviews. I've just finished reading it for the second time, but I'd forgotten most of it. It's quite hard to summarise. I enjoyed reading it but... well, it's one of the many books where the setup at the start works quite well with lots of lose ends an unexplained matters; and he handles tying the threads together moderately but not very well.

Of the science: let's start with a simple one: the world's inhabitants are the descendants of some starship folk who came here ~3kyr ago; the world is poor in metals because "the starship captain used the ships weapons to destroy metal deposits". WTF? How would you even do that? Destroying iron ore deposits from space is like really tricky maaan. Perhaps OSC was bored with the usual "the planet was light on heavy metals" stuff but even so this is a poor piece of nonsense. Some of the "science" - headworms - is fun but implausible, but that's OK. The genetics on which the entire story hinges seems implausible to me; that's sort-of OK because, well, there needs to be something and it's pretty hard to expect a novellist to come up with new science.

Of the mind control: this goes totally unexplained. Not even a sketch of an explanation, let alone how it could reach out all the way into orbit.

Of the characters: most are implausibly excellent at what they do. The usurper, Oruc, is an excellent king, despite being an usurper. The usurped king, Peace, is wise, noble, an unparalleled assassin (techniques he learn from, errm...) and diplomat. and with unbreakable self control. His daughter, Patience, the central character is (like Ender) another unbelievably talented and grown up child. They happen to meet along the road a surgeon (in a mediaeval world that can be presumed to be rather short on surgeons) who can do brain surgery. A soldier-slave, Will, waits patiently for them to happen by. And so on.

Of the philosophy: the Goodreads folk seem to take this seriously; maybe OSC did; I don't think I can. The justification for slavery by the not-believably-noble characters is particularly odd: no-one can be a slave against their own will, and so on. Maybe there is something to explore there, but by delineating only perfect characters, it can't do it. How about me? I went to work today (it's a Saturday) and spent a few hours beating my head against Enhanced Logging (don't ask). I did this voluntarily. Or did I? Am I a slave of the company without knowing it. And so on. There's a alien race who have no "will", and so generally have a role in society of doing whatever people want them to. But in turns out they do have a will, just easily dominated, and when shielded from others are capable of acting for themselves. But... so what? It's more like ideas, than philosophy, which would require reasoned argument.

Of the prophecy: yes, it's yet another book that needs a prophecy, or foretelling, to keep the plot moving.