>*DISCLAIMER*
>I know Scott personally.

I remember you said so once.

>>Card is quite good... but after a dozen of his books, it became like reading Agatha Christie - I started guessing what's coming next. In the end you see the main (or only) reason he's having a plot is to put his characters into position where they'll have to make tough moral choices.
>
>It's difficult for any writer of any kind to maintain fresh material book after book after book.

It's not the material - it is new and amazingly rich. Specially the Shadows series, which amazingly fits another set of events into a known story. It's the way he builds the plot, which he can't change - nobody can, being born with a single set of brains. Once you learn how he thinks, you know, and there are no more surprises. Happened with Agatha Christie, as I said... you start finding clues which weren't intended as such. Pretty much like the visual clues one gets when watching a thriller - if a camera lingers just a second on some detail, you get the idea how that detail may influence the plot (or else it wouldn't be shown at all, by the Law of Screen Time Economy).

>Have you read anything in the Alvin Journeyman series? It directly parallels the Book of Mormon.

I started reading a few pages, standing in the library, and saw it's not really the SF that I like him for. AFAIK, that's fantasy, sorcery and dragons, which I try to read once in a while, but doesn't give me the pleasure. I even read the few longish ones (LOTR, Thomas Covenant) and, well, for me the only names in that genre are Ursula leGuin and Terry Pratchett, because they write fantasy as if it were SF.