Lost Gate was a new universe to me and was one of those books that you just inhale. The basic premise was genius. A beautiful idea. And then Card wove a story within it. Unfortunately it was not a story without flaws.
So what is this glorious idea that sucked me in? he tried to do something that many writers have tried to do in the past, and often succeeded. he tried to explain it all. By all I mean History, religion, where we came from. This is what Greg Bear does brilliantly in the Infinity Concerto and Serpent Mage, two of the best books ever written. Cards explanation idea is almost as good. This is it. Gods were real. All our stories of Gods getting involved, fathering children on poor innocent girls and leaving them with a little demi-god, all real. But something happened that made them less than they were, and so no longer Gods the families have spent the last 1400 years spinning their wheels and dreaming of lost power.
What made them gods in the past was moving through something Card called a great gate from their home world to Earth, basically the Bifrost Bridge. But no-one has travelled a great gate since Loki, the last gate wizard and member of the North family of Gods closed them all. This story is the story of Daniel, the latest gate wizard to be born and his fight to survive, and to open a great gate.
Where does the story fall down? Over explanation. Card has done this before, he likes the quasi science of something so much he goes into too many details and really tries to explain it because maybe, it is real to him. The problem is it just doesn't work. In fantasy it is a god idea to know how stuff works in the world you envisage, but leave it mysterious and let the story hinge on the characters, and their oh so very human tales, rather than the intricacies of a magic system.
Card is still worth reading, hell I own most of his books, but in most of the stuff he does he moves from dazzling brilliance to humdrum. But the magic is still there.
