Orson Scott Card is the Nora Roberts of Sci-Fi. Books padded out to 10 times the number of pages necessary in order to cash in. He rips off classic sci-fi ideas and respins them with tortured moral relativism. Some books read like children's stories with an insidious omnipresent (and BORING) PC background music track. Not an original idea in his head.
I like Niven also, but you can't get any further apart in the Sci-fi spectrum from him than Card.
-R
Beg to differ. OSC is just an extremely uneven writer.
Some of his stuff is excellent, like the earlier Alvin Maker books, which I thought were extremely original in their use of American folk magic as a backdrop. Ender's Game was also excellent. The later sequels in each series dropped off in quality tremendously.
Some of his writing is just awful, notably the series that retells the Book of Mormon. (Boring enough in the original, but somehow he made it more so.)
Really?
I must be misremembering the one or two of his I've read...or more likely confusing him with someone else (Greg Bear maybe?)...
<listening attentively>