Card may be the ideological opposite of Le Guin, but he was also in a sense one of her disciples. His work shows a great deal of her influence, including the bo

Card may be the ideological opposite of Le Guin, but he was also in a sense one of her disciples. His work shows a great deal of her influence, including the borrowed concept of the 'ansible'. _Speaker For The Dead_ is his big attempt at Le Guin-style anthropological SF. Of the two of them I'd rate Le Guin higher (despite having a username borrowed from Card's work), but I don't think this has much to do with Card's politics, which never really came through in the books I read. (I understand that he has later books with more explicit politics, but I had stopped reading by then.) Thiel's take on Star Wars vs. Star Trek seems like a case of someone trying to align their likes and dislikes to be mutually reinforcing, which is a typical human foible. I've never noticed any political divide in fans, and a lot of people enjoy both.