"House of Card"
-speculative fiction can be a means of expressing "conservative religio-political values." (179) Meredith Ross frames the Ender series as a vehicle for Card's conservative Mormon critique of the world. Card sets up a "Christian or secular" dichotomy where a secular government is responsible for creating child soldiers.(180) Ross contextualized Card's lack of insistence on the LDS faith being the only true church with the way the conservative movement built itself around "family" issues in the 1980s (181). In Shadow of the Hegemon Ender's mother explains how the state and public school indoctrinated her children with secular ideas. Religious characters seem to be the ones who are most capable of "moral discernment". (182) In Ender's Shadow, the way that Sister Carlotta tries to prevent Achilles from attending battle school (and his subsequent rise to dictatorship) shows Card's mental model that says that religious conservatives should follow their instincts in order to preserve governmental stability. The setting of the future of our own world gives Card a method to "critique contemporary society" with his dystopian speculation. (184)[1]
^Ross, Meredith (Fall 2016). "House of Card: Ender's Game and Speculative Fiction as a Vehicle for Religio-Political Values". The Journal of Religion and Popular Culture. 28. doi:10.3138/jrpc.28.2-3.3464.
^Decker, Kevin S., ed. (2013). Ender's Game and Philosophy: The Logic Gate is Down. Wiley Blackwell. ISBN9781118386576.
Monsieur Violet (1843) by Frederick Marryat, and adventure story about an eponymous hero in the American frontier drew heavily on Mormonism Unvailed (1834) and History of the Saints (1842). Robert Louis Stevenson wrote a story about Mormons in the collection The Dynamiter (1885). Arthur Conan Doyle's first work to feature Sherlock Holmes, A Study in Scarlet (1887), included unflattering depictions of Mormons, probably inspired by Stevenson. Western novels often were set in Mormon communities, as was Zane Grey's Riders of the Purple Sage (1912).[1]: 61
