Book review: the Memory of Earth

By Orson Scott Card. Book one of a 5-book series but I doubt I go further; either I'm getting rather curmudgeonly in my old age or this book is a bit pale. Goodreads doesn't seem impressed either.

The world: Harmony, a distant (100 light years, it emerges) world settled 40 million years ago after the Earth suffers what sounds like a nuclear war. Immeadiately you, but not the book, will think: what, we had starships but only sent them out after a war? Why did we only settle one planet? And so on. But we must cast those aside.

The idea is that the world is stable, because a computer-in-orbit aka the Oversoul keeps people from advancing tech far enough to kill themselves too badly: so, for example, no wheels-for-transport. But 40 million years is a very very long time; unimaginably long. Compare (from Ashmolean: Egypt) the picture I've inlined below. And that's only 3,000 years ago; there's even stranger stuff from 2,000 years before that. We see nothing like that; never do the characters come across say an obelisk even 100,000 years old. Or even 10,000 years, worn unintelligible, and say to themselves: the older stuff has just worn away. Instead, we might be in say Constantinople 1,000 years ago, but with limited use of computers.

By which I mean, the 40 million years idea is cute, but he does nothing with it. As a contrast, an image I recall from another book: we're inside a generations starship, where barbarism has occurred, as the makers predicted, and civilisation is gradually re-establishing itself; scattered across the interior are vast pillars, inscribed with knowledge, simple at the bottom and more exotic higher up, and as tech advances people can read higher (ladders, telescopes, balloons). Somewhere across the plain, one of the pillars has fallen and forbidden tech can be read by anyone... That kind of image is totally absent from this book.

Since this isn't really thought out at all, it seems a shame to waste complaints on it, but the total failure to develope in 40 million years would suggest to me giving up, rather than continuing to fight. The people, as described in the book, have essentially lost all that history: they must, there is too much of it. By contrast, there's a lot of human history, but "we" (the West) haven't lost it, because it is embodied in our society. But since their society is quasi-static (like the weather: always slightly different, but the same patterns recur) they have lost most of those 40 million years.

Side note: apparently the story in some way parallels the Book of Mormon (close enough to spoil the plot, according to this review), which Book at a quick glance seems like totally wacky maaan.