I just got back from Western New York, driving back to DC with my sister. She's a science fiction buff, and we listened to Orson Scott Card's Empire all the way down. Since I'd just read Peter Suderman's review of the book in the New Atlantis, I was interested to see what I'd think.
I'm afraid I agree with Mr Suderman: the book is dreadful. I'm an enormous fan of Card's, but there are some things no love can survive, and this book is one of those things. The book's premise of a plot to start a new American civil war is stupid. Card is phoning it in--apparently from somewhere with a very poor signal--and does nothing to make the story more believable. Characters this thin cannot be described with the traditional "paper" or "tissue"; they seem to be composed of some sort of special alloy fabricated to be exactly one molecule thick. Worse, they're not even entertaining. Stock fictional characters, well done, can provide hours of fluffy entertainment; these mostly bore one with ill-conceived sermons on politics and family life.
Card sorta went off the rails once he started releasing the "Shadow" series of books to cash in on the Ender univrse. They weren't bad per se--they were just pulpy and poorly written, like the fifty Dune prequels that have come out in the last ten years
I am not a surface chemist, but I think "monolayer" is what you're looking for.
From the Afterword for the book:
From Wikipedia:
IMO, authors who write books intended to be videogames or that are derived from videogames have problems. Tom Clancy has also written some stinkers that were intended as crossovers with videogames.
EI
Card has gone Heinlein: no longer concerned with any sort of success or the rigours of attaining it, he's dropping all the troublesome, difficult parts of writing in favour of books as pulpits. Which wouldn't necessarily be bad, except that old science fiction writers tend to be like curmudgeonly grandfathers on steroids who just can't believe the kids these days.
Card's fiction has always been hit or miss. As was pointed out up-thread, the main books of the Ender/Speaker series were great... but the later companion novels, not so much. Though I do think the first one (Ender's Shadow?) was pretty good.
And I know it's an old hat, but the contrast between his fiction and his values is pretty remarkable. I don't know if he's just gotten crotchety in his old age or what, but reading his blog, it's hard to believe he's the guy who wrote a multi-volume paean to secular humanism (to say nothing of the general sexual weirdness of books like Wyrms or Treason).
I thought the Ender series and the Memory of Earth series were quite good (although I was unaware at the time that the latter was based on the Book of Mormon). You're right about Empire, though, it was pretty lame. I think the problem is when authors get popular enough they can overrule editors. And everybody needs an editor.