The legendary Orson Scott Card has been more active on X in recent months, mostly imparting his wisdom on storytelling advice for the younger generations. He’s given his opinion as to why Dune: Messiah failed in comparison to the original science fiction epic in a recent post.
One account on X posted his thoughts as he started to read Dune: Messiah, as there’s been talk of filming a movie sequel to the popular Dune movies out recently. He posted about problems with the omniscient viewpoint perspectives wrecking the surprise of a lot of the plotting:
While most of the comments agreed it was underwhelming, some posit that people don’t generally like it because of the cautiounary tale element of the storytelling of how power corrupts, rather than continuing with a hero’s journey as the audience might expect.
This is where Card quoted and gave his opinion on the topic:
Many Dune readers feel this way about treating Dune itself as a standalone novel and ignoring the rest of the book.
Ironically, many also feel the same way about Card’s work with the follow-up, Speaker For The Dead, and its sequels. While Ender’s Game was certainly a work of military science fiction in an academy setting that redefined the genre, Card intentionally went away from doing a sequel in the same vein, taking the character of Ender and having him have remorse over his actions in different science fiction environments.
While Speaker For The Dead is in many ways superior to Ender’s Game as a sci-fi novel, the drastic tone change turned off a lot of readers who prefer to just stay within Ender’s Game.
Card eventually saw the commercial issues with his sequels to Ender’s Game, and developed the Ender’s Shadow series that more closely followed Battle School and its fallout from the perspective of Bean, which gave readers more of what they may have been looking for on that level.
However, Speaker For The Dead, as mentioned, explores incredibly interesting science fiction concepts in one of the most well-crafted ways imaginable. It’s not a good comparison to Dune: Messiah, which falls flat in many craft levels as Card and others illustrated.
Seeing Card’s perspective on sequels is certainly interesting, however. What do you think of Dune: Messiah and Speaker For The Dead?
Humanity chose to suffer. The alternative was extinction. The Space Fleet Academy trains officers to make impossible decisions that, while brutal, may be the only hope of the human race. Read the book today:
He's not wrong. I appreciate DUNE MESSIAH now, decades later, after several re-readings.
But it's definitely sub-optimal as sequels go.
I loved Dune and have read it multiple times.
I tried twice to read Dune Messiah. There are too many other things out there in this world for me to spend time trying it a third.