Treason by orson scott card

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

April 26,2025

It's an interesting story, but Orson Scott Card's style just dosn't work for me. It feels too disconnected from reality. Nothing feels visceral or real. Nothing matters because the characters besides Lanock don't feel fleshed out. I loved the concept and world building but the pacing and character issues just ruined my enjoyment.

If you are a fan of Card's writing in Enders Game or Gate Mage, you'll love this. Otherwise, it might not be for you.

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shahzebxd

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

April 26,2025

This book is fabulous. It is tweaky in only the best kind of way that Orson Scott Card is awesome at. I got this book from the library freshman year and all my friends borrowed it and somehow it got lost and I had to pay the library $60 for a $5 book. They look down on "lost books" I guess. BUT even that could not sully my memory of this crown masterpiece of a book!

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arthuno

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

April 26,2025

I very much enjoyed the first half of this book. I felt that it set up an interesting situation and characters: Lanik is a young man from a clan which has learned to genetically regenerate themselves, making them undefeatable in battle and virtually immortal. Unfortunately, sometimes the genetic modification goes wrong, and rather than just regenerating lost or damaged limbs, etc, the body keeps growing new parts, requiring surgery, becoming monstrous. Usually, those people are harvested for extra parts - which are sold offworld. But since Lanik was the heir, he is spared that fate - and merely exiled.
So far, so good.
Lanik goes on a quest to discover the secret of why a rival clan is acquiring unprecedented amounts of metal - which their planet lacks. What are they selling offworld? He meets a powerful black woman, a leader of her tribe, who causes him to re-evaluate his racial beliefs. She's a wonderful character.
But rather than stopping here, and tying the story together, at this point the book becomes formulaic and overblown.
Lanik travels from tribe to tribe, at each one acquiring some kind of superpower. (Each tribe is descended from one genius scientist who has passed on their secrets and abilities to their descendants - which is a pretty dumb concept in and of itself.) However, Lanik pretty much remains an arrogant bastard with a sense of entitlement. When he discovers he has been deceived, and that there is some sort of plot going on, rather than investigating the motivations and reasons behind the secret plan, he commits genocide against the tribe that the deceivers came from, and without consulting anyone, makes a decision that will affect everyone on the planet.
Card obviously wishes the reader to contemplate the moral decisions that Lanik has made, but I also got the feeling that Card thinks that Lanik was right, that his actions, although unpleasant, were justified by the strength of Lanik's convictions that what he was doing was the right thing for his planet. However, I disagree quite strongly - I do not believe that because someone is stronger, or believes themselves to be more enlightened, that they have the moral right to make major decisions for others. I also do not feel that the deaths of innocents are justified merely because those innocents belong to the same race or tribe as people that you perceive have done you wrong.

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Zirotaku

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

April 26,2025

I wanted to like this more than I liked it. There's a lot of extremes to this story, and while I normally like stories with some things that really set them apart, it feels as if Card put too many in and used them as fairly reckless plot devices. Every royal in Mueller seems to be severely bipolar, and I found it hard to believe that no outsider would have stumbled into either Ku Kuai or Schwartz and abused their secret in some way that would have given their secret away in three thousand years, much less that one person would accomplish both.

Lanik was aimless to the point of obnoxious. He had only the most halfhearted desire to accomplish his main goals, forgetting about them for literally years at a time, to the point where it doesn't seem like it will ever get back to it. 300 pages isn't long enough to do this without feeling like filler.

The mutant transgender bits were overkill. It was creepy and didn't serve the plot as much as it was intended to. It would have been easy to write it out and have a much less creepy Lanik without changing the plot much. He's disturbing enough without having to go that direction with it.

I'll be fair. It was readable, and Card has definitely refined his abilities in the past 30 years. If this were my first experience with his work, I'm not sure I would have been so willing to dive into a second.

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saigonoe

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

April 26,2025

Some former earthlings who have been exiled a long time ago on another planet now have body regenerative powers which can mean that they grow extra legs or other genitalia (making them intersexual bodies) and even a chopped off part can regrow into a clone (which can cause mistaken identity problems).

Other groups have other powers such as being able to commune with rocks, time distortion, and mind manipulation.

Inventive creation of abilities and customs.

A dialogue exchange gives an idea of the tenor of the book:

"I'm accusing you of violating the laws of nature."

"Nature's virtue is intact. I just know some different laws."

Philosophical issues discussed such as what is good and when is it justifiable to kill.

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BabsZetina

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

April 26,2025

La verdad es que no me esperaba un libro así. Aquí tenemos la imaginación de Orson Scott Card en estado puro, es uno de sus primeros libros – bueno, en realidad es una suerte de reescritura de uno de sus primeros libros. La historia que nos trae ocurre en un planeta llamado ‘Traición’, donde se encuentran los descendientes de las élites intelectuales exiliadas al planeta por algún tipo de revuelta.
Traición nos invita a un viaje por el planeta, donde las distintas tribus se han ido especializando en base a las características de su fundador. Así, cada familia ha ido desarrollando habilidades sobrehumanas. El protagonista es un joven, Lanik Mueller, que es un ‘rad’, regenerador radical y, exiliado en el exilio, comienza un viaje conociendo las distintas culturas del planeta.
Más que la trama, que de por sí es intensa y llena de giros inesperados, la profundidad del relato se intensifica por las reflexiones de Lanik. El personaje madura a lo largo del viaje, sufre y se eleva hasta convertirse en una especie de mesías, “Hombre del Viento” que busca tanto la redención interior como la salvación de los habitantes de Traición.

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kiasrai

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

April 26,2025

Card has made his mark on the speculative fiction world primarily through the moral complexity of the stories he tells. His characters face difficult ethical questions, and the result tends to be an interesting exploration of the issues raised, wrapped up in excellent storytelling.

Treason is a revisitation of Card's second novel, A Planet Called Treason. By his own count, he has re-written about 10% of the novel, maintaining the plot and simply refining the storytelling. It does seem very evidently to be one of his earlier works, but I believe that works to the story's advantage. He says in his author's note at the beginning that

This revision is not an attempt to tell the story of Lanik Mueller as if I were writing it for the first time in 1988--that novel would be half again as long as this, with much more time spent on developing other characters and relationships. Instead, this edition retains the simplicity of the original, the story of one young man's discovery and transformation of his world and of himself.

It is, I think, this very simplicity which makes Treason work better than some of his more mature works. In some of his later work, I sometimes feel Card is working hard to show us how brilliant he is (and he is), how well he understands the human condition. Though I love a good deal of his work, at times it comes across as heavy-handed. Treason feels much more intuitive and far more subtle, and this is what makes it work, I think.

Written in the soft science fiction tradition that feels almost more like magic than science, Card tells the tale of Lanik Mueller, the dispossessed heir of the powerful Mueller family, whose genetic legacy is the ability to heal from almost any wound. Lanik's exile sets him on a path to learning more about the planet Treason on which he lives, a resource-poor planet which serves as prison to the descendants of a cabal that committed unspeakable, despotic treason millennia ago. The descendants of each of the original exiles have developed particular talents--such as the Muellers' regenerative abilities--that allow them to survive on this planet or even to trade something valuable to the Offworlders in exchange for the iron which is scarce on Treason but which gives a distinct advantage to the families who possess it as they struggle for power against the other families. Lanik is forced to come to a greater understanding of his world--its peoples, its powers, its history--and a greater understanding of himself.

In many ways, the story is the prototypical fantasy story of a young hero, wandering alone through the world, discovering great power within himself; it is the prototypical fantasy story of a young prince who must reclaim his birthright. It might be rather stale in other hands, yet it manages to be something more, because as Lanik grows and changes, his goals--not just his means of achieving them--grow and change as well.

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speedlemon

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

April 26,2025

Orson Scott Card has written some of my favorite books (Ender’s Game, Formic Wars, Shadow Series), and some of my least favorite books (some of the later Ender novels where things go off the rails from SciFi into pseudo-psychology). This is one of the first books OSC ever wrote (I read the updated version) and he somehow managed to engage and repel me in the same novel.

This book is mind boggling. It could have been so good… but it’s also just so weird. The author makes an unnecessary and extremely questionable choice in the first chapter which makes the first 1/3 of the book way more clunky and bizarre than it needed to be. About 1/2 way through the book he retcons this decision and things get back on track.

The majority of the second half is really cool. Card created a system of magic/science that is reminiscent of Brandon Sanderson’s works, but with way less development due to the length of the book. The planet and specialties of each people-group are really interesting, and you really get to dive into these things in the second half.

OSC has some trouble wrapping up the final act, and things start to get weird again. All in all it’s worth a read if you’re a fan of Orson Scott Card. Just be ready to say, “what in the world is going on” about 100 times in the first few chapters.

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Treason

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