But boy, is it refreshing to get away from all of that telling, telling, telling for a while.
I often find telling comes about when there is no ground truth or confidence in a field. The author must advise because there's no certainty that if they just showed you what they knew you would arrive in the same place as they.
Mathematics does a lot of telling too, but the best books don't need to as much. They just present things and let you fill in the missing details. It's almost-but-not-quite the confidence of fiction, where a good author shows and doesn't tell because the things they're trying to share are just too large to be simply explained.
I've also found the best CS books don't have to tell. I was recently reading the Reasoned Schemer and I immediately came to love the style they wrote it in. The author and the "reader" are just exploring something together at whatever rate makes sense. It's one of the few CS books I'd want to read over again.
Another excellent example is Engineering Mathematics, by Ken Stroud (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_Stroud). I used this at college, and have always loved the style: short 'frames' of explanation and examples, with questions leading onto the next frame, building confidence and skill with each bite-sized step.
Orson Scott Card could do a lot of telling if he wanted. He's actually pretty fiercely conservative and anti-gay, for example. That said, I've read the books, really enjoyed them, and wouldn't have realized if I didn't know. It's pretty amazing how he keeps it out of the books and doesn't just write tea party rantings constantly or something. Telling people isn't a good way to convince them anyway, I suppose.
Yeah. I focused on a quote that seemed to be more about reading than Ender's Game in particular. I remember reading it when I was young and being so influenced by it... and then slowly rejecting all of the things I thought I had learned from it as I grew up.
I'm afraid to read it again because I feel like it's likely to be a young kid's Ayn Rand—powerfully compelling in a selfish way that speaks so much to a young kid having trouble fitting in and seeking acceptance through competency.
And then I'm afraid that the nastier side that may seep through will echo a lot of the things I've learned about OSC as a person in the intervening years. He doesn't sound much like someone I respect, and while I don't believe that I must respect an author to get something from their work... I don't think it's an easy process.
A D, only because there was in fact effort put into placing coherent verbiage on the page. Replace "Ender" with "protagonist", and "Ender's Game" with "Title", and a raving fan of the book wouldn't have the slightest notion of the subject of the review. The author revels in not being told what to think, and unnecessary details being left out; he says nothing about the development of young siblings thrust into positions of leadership regarding an interstellar war, the juxtaposition of petty childhood rivalries pressed against planetary survival, society-bending consequences of relativistic travel (yay hard sci-fi!), the emergence of brilliant military thinking in immense scale & dimension, and the achievement & suffering of a boy far beyond what childhood should endure ... and how all this prepares him for an even greater purpose detailed in the massive tomes which follow.
Granted, I read it at an older age than its intended audience, but I found EG to be tedious Objectivism-lite. There's little of what I look for in literature or life - humor, surprise, adventure, character evolution. The chosen one (a tedious sci-fi trope without a bit of invention) mostly has it all figured out from page 1, and the book turns into a painful slog as he nears the finish line laden with the all consuming importance of his task.
If only all of us had outside authorities telling us what's important and we just had to focus with laserlike intensity on those preordained goals. As it turns out, determining our own values and participating with other people with their own independent values and agendas is a pretty significant part of the journey for most of the interesting and/or great people I've read about.
I mean, it's funny that liking Ender's Game is such a nerd cliche when the paths of actual tech luminaries (Jobs and Gates) are so much more winding and free-spirited (and therefore interesting to me at least).
Everyone reads something different from it. When I read it, it seemed to me that Ender spent a lot of time hating the path laid out for him, often able to see what was coming but unable to do anything to stop it, and his issues with it come close to rendering him a catatonic mess.
I think you underestimate how much kids really are set on tracks with preordained goals. Things don't really open up unless you are born into a very well off family (like Gates, by the way) or until you finish school.
I don't find any of those convincing. Looks like they went looking for connections and ignored all the differences. Including a genocide in a book doesn't make it about Hitler. You might just as well say it's about the Armenian genocide, or the Native American one.
This is why Hacker News should stick to Hacker News.
It's ridiculous to think Ender's Game has anything to do with "Nazi superiority", whatever that is.
I read the book as a kid and liked it immensely. As an adult I discovered that Orson Scott Card is a Mormon and that a lot of people just have blind ignorant hatred of Mormons. This was a sad discovery, but it did have the benefit of allowing me to dismiss their diatribes.
You would be hard-pressed to find a serious contingent of people who dislike Card because he's a Mormon and not because he's a homophobic authoritarian and more than a little bit of a jerk.
I dislike him because of his stated, explicit bias against LGBT folk, and his frequent rants about the "gay agenda". True, I think his Mormonism motivates these things, but many if not most Mormons feel differently (I have no idea the exact statistics), and were he still Mormon and not a homophobic bigot, then I wouldn't have a problem with him.
I also liked Ender's Game as a kid. I like it now. I just think the author is a jackass.
I'm Mormon, and OSC isn't representative, especially of younger generations. As Christians we should be welcoming to everyone, and I have a very hard time reconciling OSC's statements to his professed beliefs.
In fact, we consistently have had guidance from Church leaders about being welcoming and kind to everyone, and even some rather pointed reminders about following that guidance in regards to LGBT. You'd be hard pressed to find statistics, especially any that had a representative poll outside of Utah.
Of course, he is crazy in lots of other ways - read any of his political articles. He seems to revel in stating things in insensitive ways, and then likes to play the martyr afterwards.
Nonetheless, his fiction is almost always excellent, so I avidly read him.
I'm sorry. It is very difficult for me to take you seriously when you immediately compare someone to Hitler. The discussion has barely started and Godwin's Law has already been proved true.
Still, I figured I would at least read through the articles you listed, but they lost me pretty quick too. From the article by Kessel:
The novel repeatedly tells us that Ender is morally spotless; though he ultimately takes on guilt for the extermination of the alien buggers, his assuming this guilt is a gratuitous act. [...] In this Card argues that the morality of an act is based solely on the intentions of the person acting.
Already it seems the author of the article has read a different book than the Ender's Game I read. Ender is not "excused" from the guilt of his actions because his intentions were good, he is excused because he did not know that the war he was fighting was real-life. He was told, and had every reason to believe that they were exercises, a game. His teachers spent a lot of effort to maintain this deception because they understood that if Ender knew it was real he would not kill like they wanted him to. By the author's logic we are all guilty of murder when we play violent video games.
The very next reference to an actual scene from the book is wrong again:
On the very first page of the novel an adult lies to Ender about something that is going to hurt him: the doctor removing the surgically implanted monitor that Ender has worn while being evaluated by the IE training agency swears that the removal “won’t hurt a bit.”4 But in the event it is excruciating.
The author implies that the adult purposefully lies to Ender and knowingly inflict pain beyond what is normal for a doctor's visit. First: children learn quickly that when adults say "This isn't going to hurt a bit" they are usually lying, as it will hurt a bit. So this white lie is a very relate-able experience for children, not "relentless, undeserved torment" as the author states one sentence before. The doctor certainly did not expect it to be severe pain:
"It's designed to be removed. Without infection, without damage. But there'll be some tickling, and some people say they have a feeling of something missing. You'll keep looking around for something. Something you were looking for, but you can't find it, and you can't remember what it was. So I'll tell you. It's the monitor you're looking for, and it isn't there. In a few days that feeling will pass."
When Ender experience severe pain as a result, the doctor is almost as surprised as Ender. He is unprepared for the violence of Ender's pain, is obviously upset at how much pain Ender has endured, and is upset with himself about it:
The doctor was trembling; his voice shook as he spoke. "They leave these things in the kids for three years, what do they expect? We could have switched him off, do you realize that? We could have unplugged his brain for all time. [...] Could have unplugged him forever. I don't have the brains of a bugger."
But notice that he does not express any misgivings about it until after Ender has his violent reaction. Surely he has never seen this reaction before or he would have been more prepared to deal with it.
Already the author's arguments are resting on very shaky readings of the source text, but I'll keep going a little further.
His next several paragraphs focus on further examples of how Card subjects Ender to "relentless, undeserved torment" with the implication that this is done simply to make the reader sympathetic to Ender. Here are some excerpts of his examples:
When Ender is not being lied to by authorities, he is being bullied. [...]
From where I sit, this is is very common in schools. Kids are lied to by authority figures and bullies in scho...
I appreciate your detailed and good faith reply, which is more than most of the replies to my comment have been.
I think you may have stopped reading right before the main point of the Kessel article:
---------
Over and against these examples of “good” people whose cruelty is justified, even an act of friendship toward its objects, we have the “bad” people whose mistreatment of others, unlike that of Graff and Ender, springs from bad motives: Peter, Stilson, Bernard, Bonzo. We are never invited to wonder whether (and it is hard to imagine that) they might have a good motive for any of their actions. Bernard is a sadist from word one. Stilson is a bully. Peter is a psychopath. Bonzo is consumed by jealousy and hatred.
Card thus labors long and hard in Ender’s Game to create a situation where we are not allowed to judge any of his defined-as-good characters’ morality by their actions. The same destructive act that would condemn a bad person, when performed by a good person, does not implicate the actor, and in fact may be read as a sign of that person’s virtue.
The doctrine that the morality of an action is solely determined by the actor’s motive rests on a significant assumption: that the good always know what their motives are, and are never moved to do things for selfish reasons while yet thinking themselves moved by virtue. Ender has perfect knowledge of his own motives and the motives of others. Ender never suspects himself of doing other than what he thinks himself to be doing, and indeed, in Speaker for the Dead he makes a career of delivering faultless moral judgments of other people.
---------
As I understand the argument, Ender gets a pass and the "evil" characters don't.
Re: the Hitler comparison, I don't know enough about Hitler or Ender's Game to make a detailed response, but why would that many parallels exist, to the detail and degree that they do if it was unintentional? I would copy and paste the examples, but it would pretty much be the entire Radford article.
For the sake of discussion I read through Kessel's article and made it through most of Radford's. Both articles really feel to me like they are not approaching the book from a neutral perspective. I get the very strong feeling that they have an agenda when the approach the material, causing them to interpret the work with a very specific bias. This then leads to distortions of the text's meaning similar to the ones I listed from the Kessel article and projections of the article authors' desired outcome onto the book, forcing conclusions I don't think the text supports.
They are trying to create a narrative about Card's morality using his books to ferret out his true colors. I'm not interested in that. Card is a jerk, fine. I get that. I agree even. I don't particularly care. I am more interested in evaluating his books and characters on their own merits. Despite being an insufferable heel in real life, I think Card has a very good grasp of humanity and he is able to write characters and situations that are true to life in many ways. In particular, I think Ender's Game illustrates many characters whose morality and motivations are complex in many of the same ways that real people are complex. Ender and company struggle with exaggerated versions of the same problems we struggle with. I am not interested in the book as primary source for moral teaching, and I do not think it was intended to be read that way. Kessel and Radford seem determined, however, to draw a host of moral conclusions about Card and his worldview from the book. I don't see the value in this.
Card is a good storyteller, and in staying true to the story I think it forces Card to distance his own morals from that of his characters. Specifically, there are things Card himself has said about Ender and other characters in the book that I do not think are true. Kessel points out some of these inconsistencies between the text of Ender's game and what Card has said about them later, but in his article Kessel is guilty of the same thing: re-imaging the text and Ender himself in such a way that is convenient to his argument, not as he was written (as I pointed out in brief with my previous comment).
These authors have put a good deal of thought into their works, and while I feel like I understand the essence of their arguments, I am not going to be able to construct a fair treatment of their arguments without a similar investment of time on my side to articulate my thoughts with the same depth and specificity as theirs. I will try to address them in brief, but my points here will not be as fleshed as theirs because I do not have that kind of time presently.
It is also hard to pull out Kessel's central point from the article, because he covers a lot of ground. A more fair treatment would be to try identify the main thoughts in the article, organize them into a cogent argument and address each in turn, but again I am not going to invest that kind of time into this. This is the kind of work that is more profitable in a discussion format.
At the beginning of the article Kessel states his goal:
----
The purpose of this paper is to examine the methods Card uses to construct this story of a guiltless genocide, to point out some contradictions inherent in this scenario, and to raise questions about the intention-based morality advocated by Ender’s Game and Speaker for the Dead.
----
You will notice he says the paper is to examine and question. From the tone of the article the author has strong conclusions he has drawn, or at least a point he is trying to make, but he never really articulates his conclusions. It is hard to find a place where Kessel states simply what he is arguing. The first section of the essay is predominantly filled with examples of how Card writes Ender in a very sympathetic light as contrasted with his adversaries. As best I can tell, Kessel is trying to establish that Card is using Ender as the poster-boy or prime example of the "intention-based morality&qu...
While I do think the Hitler-Ender link is a bit too far to stretch, the Kessel essay does articulate some of the discomfort I had about Ender's Game. When I read Card's quote,
“The humans in Ender’s Game never imagined that they were obliterating another species; rather they thought they were destroying an invading species’ ability to make war. Genocide was the result of not understanding the effect on the buggers of the death of the hive queen.”
all I could think of was the careful set-up of how Ender didn't know he'd killed Stilson and Bonzo.
I have never quite understood the mythos surrounding Ender's Game. I read it as an adult, and the overarching theme that stood out to me was abuse. Abusing children in general and exposing one child in particular to more abuse because they might be a solution to an otherwise "unsolvable" problem?
I thought the abuse was part of the story. The lengths we will go to preserve ourselves, even to destroying the weakest of us in the effort. The subsequent Ender novels delve into Ender coming to grips with how he was used and what he did.
Yes, there was plenty of abuse going on, and the I.F. thought that abuse was necessary for survival. They never stopped to think if there was possibly another explanation for the first two wars with the buggers and the following calm. They relentlessly pursued extermination of another intelligent life-form at the hands of an innocent minor. In the end it was far from clear whether any of that was necessary, and that is where the biggest uncertainty lies.
It sucks that that was the path they chose, but I can't say that it's something humanity isn't or wouldn't be capable of.
I think the book makes the case that none of them are really children, but really adults in children's bodies (with the exception of the first boy Ender accidentally killed).
The book grapples with these issues, and Graff is brought to trial for this.
When I was a kid, I enjoyed the fact that the kids in the book were not infantalized and patronized. I remember being frustrated that people in real life confused youth and inexperience with stupidity and weakness.
To some degree, I'm sure my love for Ender's Game is a result of the nostalgia of finding a story that didn't talk down to me.
I think it's important to note that Ender's Game was only written to provide the necessary backstory to Speaker for the Dead. With that in mind, when you take both books as one, it becomes more a story about dealing with abuse than the abuse itself.
The short story was written to flesh out his battle room idea. It was turned into a novel (adding the final chapter as a segue and the first couple of chapters as background) to set up Speaker.
Right, so, Orson Scott Card once gave a piece of writing advice: as soon as you notice that your story is trying to give someone a moral, try to undermine it or thwart it in some way. I think that's what you're seeing here (notwithstanding the series' overarching allegory on the book of Mormon and whatever attendant lessons exist there).
Postscript:
Hey, guys, some of you need to crank up the ostentatious "I hate ender's game!" knob a little louder. Some of us still are unaware that there exist people who dislike the book! Surely your links to a blog post which polarizes the matter in the light of your favorite philosophical or political movement will change everyone's opinion and fix this. :P
It's nice of you to point out that, coincidentally, the people you disagree with are the ones behaving ostentatiously on this thread.
Here, let me chime in with another piece of Card's writing advice, as convincingly retold by Jo Walton:
"My C shelves begin, controversially, with Orson Scott Card, who was one of my favourite authors for a long time but whom I can no longer read. I started reading him with Hot Sleep and A Planet Called Treason in the early 80s, and I stopped in 1997, so I have read absolutely everything up to then and nothing since. I stopped reading him because he said in his book on how to write that the best way to get readers engaged was to have appealing innocent characters and torture them, and after that I kept seeing that he was doing that and it kept jerking me out of the story."
Another word for jerking around the audience (readers) though manipulating characters is drama. We still watch Breaking Bad, Mad Men, and Game of Thrones, right?
After reading that slate article about how the writers brain-stormed the ending to fit their audience and get the "best" emotions out of them instead of following up on characters' development I decided not to watch any tv shows for a while.
edit: I thought that breaking bad was awesome but reading it being reduced as "drama" make me realize it was mainly drama in specific setting :(
I can't read him anymore because it's too obvious what the plot is going to be: a misunderstood but fundamentally holy Hero Dude goes off into the wilderness or something to found a new city where his disciples can live in peace the way God intended <tm>.
So: the Ender's Game series, the Alvin Maker series, the Homecoming series, Lovelock, Wyrms, Pastwatch, Treason, and on some level, most of the biblio-historical-fiction series.
Any major Card works I'm missing? I'll give partial credit to _Songmaster_, and maybe even _Enchanted_.
When I first read the book, I did think it was very compelling. But, as the book seems to have become core curriculum for every course on science fiction, I've come to think of it as really overrated. There are some very good, very innovative novels out there, and yet people keep teaching this one over and over.
I've also been around a lot of science fiction writers (I went to Clarion) and learned that Orson Scott Card is kind of an ass. I know that shouldn't change my judgement of the novel itself, but I still feel much less enthusiasm for it. (the sequels also soured me on the original a bit.)
Are you asking about good SF novels in general or those suitable to teach young kids?
For the former, there's so much SF better than Card's. Perhaps Gene Wolfe's _The Book of the new Sun_ cycle, with its brilliant writing and real moral complexity. Or Iain M. Banks' Culture novels.
For the latter, lots of classic SF - Azimov, Heinlein etc.
Sorry, I was asking for general tips (that are better than Enders'game) I can add to my reading list. I loved some of Card's novels, but always looking to expand my horizon and find new stuff.
Can you explain what do you mean about other books being patronizing to young readers? In what way are they patronizing?
Sure, there're many SF books that may be too complex for many young readers, but there's also lots of classic SF that people loved as kids. Take, I dunno, Azimov's I,Robot stories or his Foundation novels. Are those patronizing to young readers?
Outside of "kid befriends a misunderstood robot/alien/monster", there aren't many science fiction stories starring kids. Even within that genre, there is a reliance of the stereotype of kids being naive and good-hearted. In real life, kids can have their own brand of good critical thinking skills or even skepticism.
I guess what I mean is that in popular culture generally, kids are usually foils, adorably precocious, MacGuffins, or otherwise one-dimensional. They are usually defined by their relationships with adults and their problems are usually solved by an adult, a deus ex machina, or by magic.
Ender's Game does a great job of portraying a wide range of behaviors, character traits, and emotions within a cast of intelligent primary-school-aged kids.
I agree with you that Ender's Game is really overrated. But you know what? I still think it works great to introduce someone to SF as a field, especially young people. Is there really a contradiction here?
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[ 6.8 ms ] story [ 133 ms ] threadI often find telling comes about when there is no ground truth or confidence in a field. The author must advise because there's no certainty that if they just showed you what they knew you would arrive in the same place as they.
Mathematics does a lot of telling too, but the best books don't need to as much. They just present things and let you fill in the missing details. It's almost-but-not-quite the confidence of fiction, where a good author shows and doesn't tell because the things they're trying to share are just too large to be simply explained.
I've also found the best CS books don't have to tell. I was recently reading the Reasoned Schemer and I immediately came to love the style they wrote it in. The author and the "reader" are just exploring something together at whatever rate makes sense. It's one of the few CS books I'd want to read over again.
Another excellent example is Engineering Mathematics, by Ken Stroud (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_Stroud). I used this at college, and have always loved the style: short 'frames' of explanation and examples, with questions leading onto the next frame, building confidence and skill with each bite-sized step.
I'm afraid to read it again because I feel like it's likely to be a young kid's Ayn Rand—powerfully compelling in a selfish way that speaks so much to a young kid having trouble fitting in and seeking acceptance through competency.
And then I'm afraid that the nastier side that may seep through will echo a lot of the things I've learned about OSC as a person in the intervening years. He doesn't sound much like someone I respect, and while I don't believe that I must respect an author to get something from their work... I don't think it's an easy process.
Orson Scott Card Has Always Been an Asshat (2005): http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2005/5/28/22428/7034
ender and hitler: sympathy for the superman (20 years later) (2007): http://peachfront.diaryland.com/enderhitlte.html
Creating the Innocent Killer: Ender's Game, Intention, and Morality (2004): http://www4.ncsu.edu/~tenshi/Killer_000.htm
If only all of us had outside authorities telling us what's important and we just had to focus with laserlike intensity on those preordained goals. As it turns out, determining our own values and participating with other people with their own independent values and agendas is a pretty significant part of the journey for most of the interesting and/or great people I've read about.
I mean, it's funny that liking Ender's Game is such a nerd cliche when the paths of actual tech luminaries (Jobs and Gates) are so much more winding and free-spirited (and therefore interesting to me at least).
It's ridiculous to think Ender's Game has anything to do with "Nazi superiority", whatever that is.
I read the book as a kid and liked it immensely. As an adult I discovered that Orson Scott Card is a Mormon and that a lot of people just have blind ignorant hatred of Mormons. This was a sad discovery, but it did have the benefit of allowing me to dismiss their diatribes.
I also liked Ender's Game as a kid. I like it now. I just think the author is a jackass.
In fact, we consistently have had guidance from Church leaders about being welcoming and kind to everyone, and even some rather pointed reminders about following that guidance in regards to LGBT. You'd be hard pressed to find statistics, especially any that had a representative poll outside of Utah.
Of course, he is crazy in lots of other ways - read any of his political articles. He seems to revel in stating things in insensitive ways, and then likes to play the martyr afterwards.
Nonetheless, his fiction is almost always excellent, so I avidly read him.
Still, I figured I would at least read through the articles you listed, but they lost me pretty quick too. From the article by Kessel:
Already it seems the author of the article has read a different book than the Ender's Game I read. Ender is not "excused" from the guilt of his actions because his intentions were good, he is excused because he did not know that the war he was fighting was real-life. He was told, and had every reason to believe that they were exercises, a game. His teachers spent a lot of effort to maintain this deception because they understood that if Ender knew it was real he would not kill like they wanted him to. By the author's logic we are all guilty of murder when we play violent video games.The very next reference to an actual scene from the book is wrong again:
The author implies that the adult purposefully lies to Ender and knowingly inflict pain beyond what is normal for a doctor's visit. First: children learn quickly that when adults say "This isn't going to hurt a bit" they are usually lying, as it will hurt a bit. So this white lie is a very relate-able experience for children, not "relentless, undeserved torment" as the author states one sentence before. The doctor certainly did not expect it to be severe pain: When Ender experience severe pain as a result, the doctor is almost as surprised as Ender. He is unprepared for the violence of Ender's pain, is obviously upset at how much pain Ender has endured, and is upset with himself about it: But notice that he does not express any misgivings about it until after Ender has his violent reaction. Surely he has never seen this reaction before or he would have been more prepared to deal with it.Already the author's arguments are resting on very shaky readings of the source text, but I'll keep going a little further.
His next several paragraphs focus on further examples of how Card subjects Ender to "relentless, undeserved torment" with the implication that this is done simply to make the reader sympathetic to Ender. Here are some excerpts of his examples:
From where I sit, this is is very common in schools. Kids are lied to by authority figures and bullies in scho...I think you may have stopped reading right before the main point of the Kessel article:
---------
Over and against these examples of “good” people whose cruelty is justified, even an act of friendship toward its objects, we have the “bad” people whose mistreatment of others, unlike that of Graff and Ender, springs from bad motives: Peter, Stilson, Bernard, Bonzo. We are never invited to wonder whether (and it is hard to imagine that) they might have a good motive for any of their actions. Bernard is a sadist from word one. Stilson is a bully. Peter is a psychopath. Bonzo is consumed by jealousy and hatred.
Card thus labors long and hard in Ender’s Game to create a situation where we are not allowed to judge any of his defined-as-good characters’ morality by their actions. The same destructive act that would condemn a bad person, when performed by a good person, does not implicate the actor, and in fact may be read as a sign of that person’s virtue.
The doctrine that the morality of an action is solely determined by the actor’s motive rests on a significant assumption: that the good always know what their motives are, and are never moved to do things for selfish reasons while yet thinking themselves moved by virtue. Ender has perfect knowledge of his own motives and the motives of others. Ender never suspects himself of doing other than what he thinks himself to be doing, and indeed, in Speaker for the Dead he makes a career of delivering faultless moral judgments of other people.
---------
As I understand the argument, Ender gets a pass and the "evil" characters don't.
Re: the Hitler comparison, I don't know enough about Hitler or Ender's Game to make a detailed response, but why would that many parallels exist, to the detail and degree that they do if it was unintentional? I would copy and paste the examples, but it would pretty much be the entire Radford article.
They are trying to create a narrative about Card's morality using his books to ferret out his true colors. I'm not interested in that. Card is a jerk, fine. I get that. I agree even. I don't particularly care. I am more interested in evaluating his books and characters on their own merits. Despite being an insufferable heel in real life, I think Card has a very good grasp of humanity and he is able to write characters and situations that are true to life in many ways. In particular, I think Ender's Game illustrates many characters whose morality and motivations are complex in many of the same ways that real people are complex. Ender and company struggle with exaggerated versions of the same problems we struggle with. I am not interested in the book as primary source for moral teaching, and I do not think it was intended to be read that way. Kessel and Radford seem determined, however, to draw a host of moral conclusions about Card and his worldview from the book. I don't see the value in this.
Card is a good storyteller, and in staying true to the story I think it forces Card to distance his own morals from that of his characters. Specifically, there are things Card himself has said about Ender and other characters in the book that I do not think are true. Kessel points out some of these inconsistencies between the text of Ender's game and what Card has said about them later, but in his article Kessel is guilty of the same thing: re-imaging the text and Ender himself in such a way that is convenient to his argument, not as he was written (as I pointed out in brief with my previous comment).
These authors have put a good deal of thought into their works, and while I feel like I understand the essence of their arguments, I am not going to be able to construct a fair treatment of their arguments without a similar investment of time on my side to articulate my thoughts with the same depth and specificity as theirs. I will try to address them in brief, but my points here will not be as fleshed as theirs because I do not have that kind of time presently.
It is also hard to pull out Kessel's central point from the article, because he covers a lot of ground. A more fair treatment would be to try identify the main thoughts in the article, organize them into a cogent argument and address each in turn, but again I am not going to invest that kind of time into this. This is the kind of work that is more profitable in a discussion format.
At the beginning of the article Kessel states his goal:
----
The purpose of this paper is to examine the methods Card uses to construct this story of a guiltless genocide, to point out some contradictions inherent in this scenario, and to raise questions about the intention-based morality advocated by Ender’s Game and Speaker for the Dead.
----
You will notice he says the paper is to examine and question. From the tone of the article the author has strong conclusions he has drawn, or at least a point he is trying to make, but he never really articulates his conclusions. It is hard to find a place where Kessel states simply what he is arguing. The first section of the essay is predominantly filled with examples of how Card writes Ender in a very sympathetic light as contrasted with his adversaries. As best I can tell, Kessel is trying to establish that Card is using Ender as the poster-boy or prime example of the "intention-based morality&qu...
While I do think the Hitler-Ender link is a bit too far to stretch, the Kessel essay does articulate some of the discomfort I had about Ender's Game. When I read Card's quote,
“The humans in Ender’s Game never imagined that they were obliterating another species; rather they thought they were destroying an invading species’ ability to make war. Genocide was the result of not understanding the effect on the buggers of the death of the hive queen.”
all I could think of was the careful set-up of how Ender didn't know he'd killed Stilson and Bonzo.
It just struck me as ridiculous.
Granted it's been forever since I read them.
It sucks that that was the path they chose, but I can't say that it's something humanity isn't or wouldn't be capable of.
You can't say?
It's certainly something that humanity is, and will remain, capable of.
I just can't say that it's something humanity wouldn't choose over some other option.
The book grapples with these issues, and Graff is brought to trial for this.
To some degree, I'm sure my love for Ender's Game is a result of the nostalgia of finding a story that didn't talk down to me.
I think it's hard to fully appreciate Ender's Game as an first-time adult reader.
The books in the Ender's Shadow series came much later and are more in the same vein as Ender's Game.
Though Ender's Game was later revised. I'm not an expert on those revisions, so it's possible there were some retcons to support Speaker for the Dead.
Postscript:
Hey, guys, some of you need to crank up the ostentatious "I hate ender's game!" knob a little louder. Some of us still are unaware that there exist people who dislike the book! Surely your links to a blog post which polarizes the matter in the light of your favorite philosophical or political movement will change everyone's opinion and fix this. :P
Here, let me chime in with another piece of Card's writing advice, as convincingly retold by Jo Walton:
"My C shelves begin, controversially, with Orson Scott Card, who was one of my favourite authors for a long time but whom I can no longer read. I started reading him with Hot Sleep and A Planet Called Treason in the early 80s, and I stopped in 1997, so I have read absolutely everything up to then and nothing since. I stopped reading him because he said in his book on how to write that the best way to get readers engaged was to have appealing innocent characters and torture them, and after that I kept seeing that he was doing that and it kept jerking me out of the story."
edit: I thought that breaking bad was awesome but reading it being reduced as "drama" make me realize it was mainly drama in specific setting :(
So: the Ender's Game series, the Alvin Maker series, the Homecoming series, Lovelock, Wyrms, Pastwatch, Treason, and on some level, most of the biblio-historical-fiction series.
Any major Card works I'm missing? I'll give partial credit to _Songmaster_, and maybe even _Enchanted_.
I've also been around a lot of science fiction writers (I went to Clarion) and learned that Orson Scott Card is kind of an ass. I know that shouldn't change my judgement of the novel itself, but I still feel much less enthusiasm for it. (the sequels also soured me on the original a bit.)
Source? (Links please?)
So no, I wouldn't.
For the former, there's so much SF better than Card's. Perhaps Gene Wolfe's _The Book of the new Sun_ cycle, with its brilliant writing and real moral complexity. Or Iain M. Banks' Culture novels.
For the latter, lots of classic SF - Azimov, Heinlein etc.
Thanks.
Other books may be better science fiction, but how many of them are as accessible to kids?
Sure, there're many SF books that may be too complex for many young readers, but there's also lots of classic SF that people loved as kids. Take, I dunno, Azimov's I,Robot stories or his Foundation novels. Are those patronizing to young readers?
That is more rare, and I think it's one reason for Ender's Game's enduring appeal to young readers.
I guess what I mean is that in popular culture generally, kids are usually foils, adorably precocious, MacGuffins, or otherwise one-dimensional. They are usually defined by their relationships with adults and their problems are usually solved by an adult, a deus ex machina, or by magic.
Ender's Game does a great job of portraying a wide range of behaviors, character traits, and emotions within a cast of intelligent primary-school-aged kids.