His name is Aaron Johnston. A month ago I was blissfully ignorant of his existence. Then I decided to read the Ender’s Game prequels. These were cowritten by Orson Scott Card and this guy. I was curious because I’d read all the Ender’s Game books up to Children of the Mind and Ender’s Shadow, and because I was curious how much of a collaboration it was or if it was mostly Johnston with Card adding his towering name to it for marketing purposes.
I read the first book Earth Unaware. It was laborious to get through. There were parts that were interesting, but mostly a lot of tedious things happened that were more filler than story. I had to practically force myself to drudge through it.
I went on to Earth Afire, the second book. I made it through one chapter, at which point I tossed it aside in disgust. I could already tell it would be even more tedious than the first. I decided, instead of wasting my time and suffering through hours of reading hell, I’d go to Wikipedia and read the plot synopsis of each prequel.
Sure enough, when I read them, it became clear to me just how much drudgery would have been involved if I’d continued on through to the fourth and of this moment the most recently released volume of the double trilogy prequels, one for the First Formic War and one for the Second. The synopsis for each book was surprisingly short, and the reason for that is there wasn’t much story in any of the novels.
It became clear to me that the coauthored prequels were little story and lots of fluff. Each trilogy could have been told in a single novel in the hands of an expert writer with all the fluff taken out.
Which makes me think this was more Johnston’s work than Card’s, because Card is a master storyteller. That became readily apparent all over again when I gave up on the prequels and went straight to the immediate sequel to Ender’s Game that precedes Speaker for the Dead, called Ender in Exile and written solely by Card. With the very first chapter, I found myself back in the hands of a competent storyteller who engaged me from the beginning.
This made me wonder, who is this Aaron guy and why is he writing these books? It didn’t take much to find out he was an associate producer on the film version of Ender’s Game and had worked with Card to produce graphic novels of Ender stories. Add to that the fact that both Card and Johnston are Mormon, and basically I get the impression they’re friends, so that explains the connection between the two.
But it still doesn’t explain why he’s writing the books. Why did Card select him? What kind of writing credentials does he have?
In the back of the paperback editions of the Ender prequels is an extremely short “about the authors” section. For Johnston, all it says is: “AARON JOHNSTON is a successful Hollywood screenwriter, and coauthor with Card on Invasive Procedures.”
My reaction to this was “Oh yeah?” immediately followed by a visit to IMDB to see what his screenwriting successes were. The astonishing answer was:
None! Not a single screenwriting credit.
Now he did write episodes for the television show Extinct produced for BYUtv, which he and Card were executive producers on, but that’s not screenwriting. Teleplays are not screenplays. Furthermore, I watched the first couple of episodes of that show to see how it was, and it was plodding, slowpaced. I wondered when the damn story was going to start.
I see a pattern developing here.
In fact, Johnston has done virtually nothing that Card didn’t get him involved with. Even his graphic novels were exclusively Ender stories.
I think I smell the friendzone version of nepotism here. I certainly can’t account for Card’s choice to include him in his projects because of Johnston’s great storytelling skills. They are invisible to me. I saw no sign of them in anything of his that I’ve experienced.
And I’m certainly not going to attempt to experience any more. Card’s welcome to collaborate with anyone he likes, but I’m not playing along, and it particularly irritates me when a less than competent writer gets billed as a “successful Hollywood screenwriter” when he hasn’t written screenplay one.