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I just read Card's recent review of, among other things, a bunch of books by K.P. Parker. The review discusses the topic of what makes a book Great™ as opposed to merely good. One of the things Card says make a book Great™ is the ability to contain an entire culture, and describe it so clearly that no matter who we are and what culture we come from we can understand it and relate to it.
The discussion reminded me of the Eisenhorn Trilogy, by Dan Abnett, set in the universe of Warhammer 40k. I'm not confident that the trilogy is Great™, but it's very good. And one of the things that makes it very good is that it describes an entire culture very well.
The world could loosely be described as what would happen if the Roman Empire never fell, or where some parallel version of it arose. The culture is loosely modeled after the medieval Catholic world. The main character is an Inquisitor who hunts down heretics. The story is about a series of choices he makes.
What I really, really like about the story is that the culture has a moral standard completely unattached to modern western morality. There's a lot of might-makes-right, xenophobia, and "Our God-Emperor said so therefore it's true." There's also a lot of perfectly good reasons for humanity to have become as self-centered and xenophobic as it has.
Eisenhorn is a product of this society. The choices that he makes result in him questioning a lot of his society's rules. I've read a lot of similar books that would have ended with the protagonist saying "You know, our society's really messed up. Let's change it." And then made some effort to fix it using some modern philosophy. And because he/she would be the protagonist we'd assume "okay, that's the moral of the story. Philosophy X is a good idea." A lot of Card's books do this. And they do it very well.
What I love about the Eisenhorn Trilogy is that the protagonist is never established as a role model for us. He's a character, in a world with its own rules, and we are free to evaluate the choices he makes by our own terms. We might learn lessons from the book, but I can see someone with a diffirent worldview than me finding a totally different moral of the story than I did.
I haven't found many people who've read the books. So here I am, hoping some of you have and have something interesting to say about them, or about other books Abnett has written. And if you haven't, that maybe you'll give them a try.
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