Me gustaría darle un 2,5
La historia es interesante pero creo que no está bien ejecutada.
Hay mucho material para este libro, y fácilmente se podría haber convertido en una trilogía y habría sacado mas partido.
No el mejor libro de Orson Scott pero se nota qué tipo de ficción le gusta y encaja con sus otros libros.

Treason is a weird book with a weird premise. It starts off with the main character having a sort of super cancer, and getting weirder from there. Though the occasional real world name comes into the story just long enough to make you think, "wait what?", it's not hard to follow the story. The whole book is Lanik going from once place to another, learning about the world as he goes and trying to make things better.

It reminds me a lot of "Tales of Alvin Maker," another series by Card that I regard at about the same level of quality. In fact, if you were to cross Dune with Tales of Alvin maker, you'd have this book. It has similar themes, though in a wildly different setting, and about the same tone. It's not one of his best works, but considering it was his first novel, it's pretty good. If you like Orson Scott Card, you'll like this book.

Odd book. I give it points for creativity and general readability. The characters are not terribly strong. It meanders a fair bit. The love story is half baked. Couple of plot holes. And this book literally begins with the major conflict being a young man growing breasts. I'm not sure whether that is a positive or a negative, but it's certainly original. Dan hypothesized that Orson Scott Card just wanted an excuse to talk about breasts. I don't know, but were I a man, I don't think I'd find the whole thing titillating. In fairness, the breasts are only a symptom of much more, but still. . . Moving on, another complaint I have is that the main character simply becomes too powerful. I think his story would have been more human if he hadn't become Superman. Overall though, a fun enough read.

This book was originally published in 1978. This edition came out much later and has a new forward by the author where he explains how the book came to be and how he wished he had been given time to fix its problems. It is a crazy ride and far more fantasy than fiction. Reality has no role here.

This is a book about the coming of age of Lanik Mueller. We meet Lanik as his father tells him that he cannot secede him to the throne because of Lanik's condition. And what condition would that be, you might ask. Well, Lanik is a radical regenerator of body parts. Almost everyone who lives in Muellerland can regenerate lost parts and they make great soldiers because when injured they can usually heal themselves before dying. But the "rads" are out of control. Body parts grow even when not needed. Lanik, thought to be mail, has grown breasts and other female organs, in addition to his male parts. Rads are used by the Mueller government to obtain body parts to sell to the Ambassador in exchange for iron.

So what makes iron worthwhile? Well, the people on Treason were sent there (somewhere in space) because they were considered traitors on their prior planet. Iron is needed to make space ships so they can leave Treason. There were many individuals banished to Treason. Each had a specialty and on Treason, each established a colony and tried to develop something to trade for iron.

While disinheriting Lanik, his father still wants him to undertake a mission for him before going to the rad pen. But, Lanik's brother doesn't want him around, rad or not, and tries to kill him during the night. Lanik escapes and has some very cool, and uncool, adventures in the different colonies. He eventually returns and then escapes again with his father only to return again and then .... You'll have to read it to learn the totally unexpected ending. This was an engaging read - 3.5 stars rounded down.

Excellent read.

I'll begin by saying that I like Orson Scott Card. His books normally engage me, and I love Ender's Game and Ender's Shadow, not to mention some of sequels. And this is going to sound ironic after that last statement, but Treason is simply NOT believable. I'll admit that I have not finished it yet, but have gotten far enough in to develop a deep dislike of the presumptions that Card takes. (I will revise this after finishing the novel, if I do and if it needs changes.) He obviously has no idea of the issues that face trans- and intersexed people. Sure, the protagonist has secondary sexual characteristics and genitalia of both the male and the female sex. But here's a slice of reality: breasts do not make a woman. It is simply not that easy for a boy in his adolescence to pass for a woman, even if he possesses breasts and can raise the pitch of his voice. Mannerisms down to the way a person walks and talks affect people's perceptions of an individual's gender. Drag queens and transsexual women have to learn this. They have to undo the training boys have in youth about how to behave, how to sit, how to cross their legs and the length of their strides. Transsexual women in particular know how much work goes into having the world perceive them as female.

The way the protagonist manages to make his way through the novel as a "woman" with almost no effort just makes me disappointed in Card.

It was a weak mix of Dune and Foundation. Not Card's best.

Yikes! I'm a fan of Orson Scott Card. He's easily my favorite author. He's often talked about as an egotistical jerk who you just shouldn't bother with. That, or he's just dismissed as crazy. (Thanks Hank Green. You really know how to make an argument on a hot-button issue.) I've had the pleasure of meeting him and he was just the sweetest guy imaginable. I've also read The Worthing Saga and The Folk of the Fringe and I thought they were absolutely phenomenal. He's made it very clear that he doesn't write "Mormon fiction". And in the cases when the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is brought up in his fiction, he's often quite satirical. This can be seen in the cases of Ender's mother, or Deaver Teague, and many others.
I only bring this up because I've been able to discover why he writes the way he does. His fiction is very different from mine because he's not afraid to tackle bizarre situations. Well... with Treason, that couldn't be any truer. In fact, as I was writing this review, I had to take a star off because it felt too bizarre in my memory. And I read Magic Street! That should get me some credit, right?

Let's talk about the story for a second. Very fascinating concept. Radical Regeneratives are treated as monsters among society, but they can grow extra body parts that can be sold in exchange for metal to build a spaceship so that they can eventually leave the prison planet Treason. That's a pretty sweet concept! I dig that!
But as I've noticed with Orson Scott Card, he takes this as an opportunity to prove that he's edgy. I can't stand this with ANY author, and that counts with Brandon Sanderson too. Please remember, I love OSC's work. I just can't deny that he seems to jump at the chance to talk about excretion, sex, et cetera. And it's just really uncomfortable most of the time.
In the beginning, they talk about how Lanik Mueller, the protagonist (I think), is a Rad and how Rads work, they bring up another fascinating point: hormones would likely change how Rads grow and mature. What better way to explain that than puberty?
Well, I make this sound like an interesting point, but the way the book does it is describing how Lanik has grown breasts and how there was another girl who grew a penis and used it to pee on people in protest to... something. It's just bizarre.
I was reading this part while on a bus and a guy looked over my shoulder and got quite weirded out. Don't blame him.
Okay, fine, I can live with that (though I will say I nearly dropped the book there). But then his dad basically sexually assaults it. I think I still remember the quote... "You're soft and womanly. No man would follow you." "Except into bed," said his mother. I'll come back to why this is important later, but I just want to make sure this is clear: I still think the concept is genius. It's the execution that turns me off.

Before I talk any more about the story, I should also bring up that this is technically not written in the OSC voice you're familiar with. It's in first-person... This is a totally personal preference, but I don't like his first-person voice, especially because I have basically no idea if I'm supposed to like Lanik Mueller. He's smarmy, whiny, and can't seem to figure out if he likes his breasts or not.
Figure out, okay!? Want to rub your breasts because it feels good? Cool. Just say it and move on. It gets really awkward when you tell me that you think you're supposed to feel motherly or that you're apparently irresistible to men. It's just weird and annoying.

Back to the story...
I'm not going to go through the entire story. Now I'm just going to go through a few parts of the book that I thought were really odd.

The scene when Mwaba-Mawa (I think that's how you spell it (I really hate stupid names. Looking at you Brandon Sanderson.)) shows Lanik how to "drop" was just weird...
If you're on a spaceship and pooping is a legitimate concern, then, by all means, show me how you do it. That sounds really interesting! But when you're living at the top of a tree, I could figure out well enough on my own that your crap had to go somewhere. Naturally, it had to be down. I don't need some tall, black lady illustrating how to poop and when to do it.

The scene where Mwaba-Mawa basically rapes Lanik was weird. In fact, all of the parts where Lanik was basically raped were weird.
This is going to come across really strangely, but I can't stand bad rape scenes. I hate rape in general, but it can be an effective form of storytelling. Cut and dry, that's just a fact. Most authors use rape as a tool to either A) Describe how sexy their character actually is and then slap the reader on the wrist for thinking so because, "LOOK, THEY'RE BEING RAPED, YOU SICKO!" Or B) to get unneeded sympathy for a character. We all should know by now that rape is bad. Stop trying to use it as a tool to make someone look cool.
I'm going to bring up two rape scenes written by Orson Scott Card. One is from The Folk of the Fringe and one is from this book.

In The Folk of the Fringe, two girls are orally raped by two bushwhackers. This was a very effective scene because it actually had many characters involved. Not all as victims or as attackers, but as scared onlookers. And it was able to show the character of Teague as not only an anti-hero, Han Solo type, but because we also got to see how the two girls recovered from the attack. It was uncomfortable to read, as it should have been, and it didn't try to justify any horrible action.

Now with this book, there are just a bunch of different cases of rape or sexual assault, and they all seem to end in ways that I didn't think they should. Lanik's dad gropes him and it was just weird to think about because later, it just turns out that he's a good guy sweetheart the whole time.
WHAT? He freakin' groped the guy! HIS SON. And humiliates him in front of his jerk family. And to make matters stranger, Lanik wonders if because his dad did that because Lanik's attractive.
So he uses this advantage of boobs to get where he wants. But there's a bit in here that I think should be noted: the most womanly parts about him are his breasts and the fact that he has long blonde hair. THAT'S IT. Nowhere does it say his eyes are motherly or that he's got real nice girly skin. It's seriously just his breasts.
Anyway... Mwaba-Mawa later tries to have sex with him. There's a bit where she gropes him and the texture of her skin changes to be rougher and manlier on cue, but that never went anywhere so WHY DID THAT HAPPEN? Oh, and what is one of the considered solutions to this problem? TO CUT OFF - wait, I need you to understand the logic here - to TAKE HIS DAGGER AND CHOP OFF HIS - wait... do you not get it? HE WAS GONNA CHOP OFF HIS JUNK.
ACTUALLY WHY?
Now, he doesn't end up doing this, and he explains why in the narrative, but... WHY? Why was that even considered? "Oh, it'll just grow back cuz Imma Rad." Uh, no? Like, it will, but how would you do that without Mwaba knowing and also chopping off your penis won't suddenly give you ovaries or a vagina. (Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that he has ovaries. Dunno if he can get pregnant and I don't care to.) Lanik is portrayed as this super smart, athletic, sex magnet in both his manly man form and as the womanly Rad form, and THIS was something he considered??
One MORE case of stupid rape was the two guys somewhere. The rape happened so suddenly that I forgot where Lanik even was. May have been a beach? Desert maybe? Lanik just smiles at these two guys and in a blink they're groping him and crap and it's all just really weird. But I don't feel any sympathy for him this time because first, he expected it to happen, and second, the scene happened so that he can show how manly he actually is. Yeah, he just kills the two guys. Cool I guess?
Last one. There's a bit where he is in a cabin somewhere and he meets this girl who says that she's waiting for the right one. I honestly thought we were going to get something meaningful in this sexual travesty, but nope! Turns out, the girl is an old guy using some illusory science/magic and he makes his girl image naked, starts straddling Lanik so that she can get close enough to stab him. Through some science/magic that Lanik learned halfway through, he's able to freeze time and that allows him to see that the hot naked girl is an old guy...? And then I think he kills the guy - I really don't remember.

Enough rape... let's talk about something good.

...

It was well-written, I guess. I normally hate first-person books, but he does a good job. I know earlier I said I don't like his first-person voice, but that's just because I'm so much more comfortable with third-person omniscient. It was weird specifically to me.
But... well, I'm not sure if this book would have been better in his traditional voice.
To be clear, this was his next book after Ender's Game. So... "traditionally" isn't really fair because he was still discovering who he was as an author, and that's fine. I can appreciate this for the story it tells about the author.
But that's about all I can say. I would have enjoyed the science/magic more if it just went for it. Lanik pretty much becomes a god on Treason. I'm not sure if there's anything he CAN'T do.

This book was also written before his Worthing stuff, so back then, he didn't understand that Metal rivet covers are for sci-fi, trees are for fantasy. This is a tree story no matter how you try to slice it. The cover looks amazing, but much like the Ender books, absolutely nothing on the cover happens in the book. (One exception to that is Shadows in Flight which I think is cheating because the whole book takes place on a spaceship and/or on an asteroid, but I digress.) You SHOULD judge a book by it's cover. That's why it's there. For you to think, "Huh, that's cool. I would like to read that please!"

Okay, now I'm going to tackle the ending. I just want to make it clear that I finished what is often said to be his most bizarre book and liked it. So for me not to like this ending and story must have been a realy doozy. It ends with this girl, Saranna, who was frozen in time and then being let out of slowtime. She asks Lanik (who now is a real man instead of a dude with breasts) to return while he's still young enough to want her. Okay, fair enough. So he comes back after four years in his time and he wins the war or something and now he has Saranna all to himself. The last two pages just couldn't resist saying that they make love to each other a lot. Cliché and stupid.

You know what, I skimmed over Saranna a lot. Let me just say this: I have NO IDEA what is so appealing about her other than she's pretty and supposedly loyal. But I think there's like three different cases where they're in Ku Kuei and he sees her having sex with people.
Loyal? Not in your wildest dreams.

I left so much out. I don't even think I mentioned the Schwartzes or the fact that Lanik can pretty much clone himself at all, so I'll just say this: this book is bizarre and easily my least favorite Orson Scott Card book right now. I have a lot of his books to go, so you might see me again later. My rating of two stars stands.

I got this book because it was on sale through Audible, assuming that it would be quite good—everybody is always going on about what a fantastic author Orson Scott Card is.

If I could sum Treason up in one word, I would say that it's lackluster. This is one of his early books, so we can't expect the same kind of polish that he would be writing with nowadays, but this book wandered around (literally) so much that sometimes I couldn't tell what the story would end up being about. Now that I've finished it, I can see that everything was leading up to a certain point, but not a whole lot about this book was satisfying during the actual read. Or even now.

The story is set on a planet called Treason (which was the original publication title), and follows Lanik Mueller from his point of view. In the Audible version, Card offers us a 15-minute background/advice session in which he tells us where he got this story and the mechanics of writing it, and I found that it was as entertaining as the book itself. One of the main complaints that I have about Treason is the fact that we don't get any serious movement out of Lanik until about 2/3 through the book. Until that time, he just seems like a confused guy in his early 20s that happens to be on a different planet.

All that being said, the ideas in the book are really interesting. With each family/nation having excelled in something adds a lot to the science fiction-ness of the book. However, I feel that since the world is so rich and interesting, the story could have been so much more. I'm not disappointed—I'm glad I read it. I think I was expecting steak, but what I got was McDonald's. Still good, just not what I was hoping for.

I loved this book. Expanded into a full novel years after its appearance as the short story “A Planet Called Treason” (1979), Card revisited one of his very earliest forays into Science Fiction. He claims to have written it with the original spirit and storyline intact, only modifying the pacing and presentation in ways to reflect what he had learned in the interim. The result is a beautiful read that captures the feel of an ambitious young writer with a huge and complex setting but is also tame and succinct. Indeed, there is hardly a wasted word in this novel, as the story progresses relentlessly from beginning to ending, never becoming distracted by any of the numerous potential sidetracks.

TREASON tells of an arrogant and talented young man, Lanik Mueller, and his journey to learn about himself and his world. The reader discovers the prison-world of Treason as Lanik does, learning new secrets and amazing abilities from each of the various peoples he visits. Eventually Lanik becomes something more than human and finds himself in a position to save his world from tyranny (in his eyes). This is a book for which the journey and the constant discovery are the big draws, rather than the climax or conclusion. There are plenty of surprises in this tale but there are also plenty of occasions where the readers’ hopes are met in the most satisfying way. Like most of Card’s protagonists, Lanik is comfortable company, imperfect, but likeable and deeply sympathetic.

As usual for Card, this book is chock full of ethical questions and scientific musings. In what ways might humans be improved? How would these changes affect society and people’s behavior? One of my favorite things about Card’s novels, in addition to his easy-to-read writing, is that they do such a good job of striking a balance between challenging a reader with philosophical questions while telling an exciting and fun story. This one is no exception.

I think this is my favorite Orson Scott Card book! As a philosophy student, I really appreciated his exploration of what it means to be human, how time & perceptions of time can be different, our relationship to life & death and finally what if the elements of earth are actually also alive & able to communicate if we had the right mind space.
I also enjoyed the exploration of how hard metals (iron) changes the balance of power between different communities, contributes to greed, makes war more devastating and leads to destruction (death) of earth elements when/if hard metals could be mined and smelted.
Plus it’s a good story, especially if you listen to the audiobook as the author encourages in the intro.

Card's second published book, the one I read redone slightly in later years. I kept puzzling over the fact that it seemed familiar, then I realized, yes, I'd read it before. One scene had really stuck in my head, but the rest had dissolved away. Even so, it is a good fast read with some interesting 'families.' Glad I read it again.