Ender's Game

[mamadeb]

I just finished rereading Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game.


The plot of this novel is Harry Potter. But worse. In many ways, Harry's life is a nightmare - at the age of fifteen months he loses his loving parents and is inches from being killed himself. He spends the next ten years unwanted, neglected and abused. Hogwarts and the Wizarding world seems like a paradise at first - he's free of the Dursleys, he's rich and powerful and famous. Except that there are people out to kill him and the Wizarding world is as petty and prejudiced as the Muggle, and a lot more dangerous.

Ender's world is worse. Like Harry, he's unwanted at home, where he's tortured, and his classmates tease him. Except that Ender has to contend with his sociopathic older brother instead of a spoiled cousin, and he's teased because he's a third child in a world where families don't legally have more than two. He was born from government fiat. "Thirds" are despised and fair game.

His talents are recognized (after he kills a boy) and he's sent to a special school where they will be honed.

Harry was eleven. Ender was six. And while Harry has friends and parental figures, Ender has followers and distant teachers who push him along and isolate him. And lie to him in a way that makes Dumbledore look open and honest.

By the time Ender is eleven, he's destroyed an entire sentient race. At the time, he believes it's a game. (He's also killed another boy, unintentionally. They don't tell him that, either.)

Harry will be eighteen when the series ends. And although he will have to kill Voldemort, he will know what he is doing, and one hopes no one else will die. And he will have friends by his side. Ender was alone.

And that climactic chapter. I cried.

(And then there's all that odd eroticism, as when ten year old Ender sees the beauty in an eight year old boy's childlike body. Which was just skeevy.)

Comments

[mecurtin.livejournal.com]

I can no longer stomach OSC (you know about him and the deep end, right?), and I think it's both sad and horrible the way he turned his back on himself and his characters. As one of my friends pointed out many years ago, *all* OSC's early novels (and IMHO all his good ones) are about abused children. Adults in his world are not kind or wise, and the best thing that can happen is for the abused children to love each other, without letting the morally-crippled adults tell them how or who.

What's surprising to me is how many readers apparently think Ender was victorious at the end, not thoroughly duped and manipulated. Or am I mis-remembering? I haven't re-read the book in years, because I find OSC when good too emotionally searing.

[kadymae.livejournal.com]

Adults in his world are not kind or wise, and the best thing that can happen is for the abused children to love each other, without letting the morally-crippled adults tell them how or who.

And that's what I think I liked the most about early OSC. It really was all about "all you need is love". But believably so.

[mamadeb.livejournal.com]

Except that the love doesn't always work - Val's love only gets Ender deeper into the game, and the love he feels for his fellow students is taken away.

[ataniell93.livejournal.com]

OSC's politics are so repellent to me that I have a hard time reading him now, and after Songmaster and Hart's Hope I can hardly trust him not to screw with my head, but I remember reading this in Analog, and I have to agree, he's just too wrenching sometimes.

[mamadeb.livejournal.com]

There was a Salon article a few year where an interviewer, herself a survivor of sibling abuse, said that she believed that Card was one as well, from what I guess was radar.

It certainly is a recurrant theme in his novels - the younger son with homicidal older brothers (or younger brothers in the case of the Alvin Maker series), so it's entirely possible.

It's also possible that it comes from the Book of Mormon.

[mecurtin.livejournal.com]

Or both -- child abuse of all sorts is a major problem among Mormons, which their religion doesn't let them deal with.

[mamadeb.livejournal.com]

I'm not surprised. They're neck and neck with Protestant fundamentalism when it comes to paternalism.

[azurelunatic]

I got one paragraph in to his rant about marriage, and I stopped reading right there, because I knew that reading further would only raise my blood pressure more with no good effect.

Because I stopped reading it right there, I'm still willing to borrow his books from a library, buy them used, or read them in some other way that does not involve my money going to him.

[jdemorae.livejournal.com]

Hunh. I'd heard Ender's Game was one of OSC's better efforts. Mind, OSC is now on my permanent boycott list so I won't be reading anything of his, but reading this review... If Ender's game was one of his better books, I shudder to imagine what his less popular books might be like.

I've read a few of Card's books (pre-decision), and while I never considered the money wasted, they never stayed on my shelves long. I never re-read any of them more than once, which is pretty rare for anything on my shelves. (I have relatives who ask me why I hang on to these ratty old books, they're in such terrible shape... Never occurs to them to wonder how they got in that shape. *grin*)

[mamadeb.livejournal.com]

OSC can write. He can put words together and create a readable, and often unforgettable book (If he's not fictionalizing the Book of Mormon, I mean. Homecoming was *dire*.)

I'm a completist. This mean I'm going to finish the Alvin Maker series.

[mecurtin.livejournal.com]

I'm going to finish the Alvin Maker series.

Better you than me, babe. And I say this though I *loved* the first book or so. I dropped out when the characters started moving around in the Ohio Valley in the 1820s (or whenever it's supposed to be) and there were no Passenger Pigeons and no American Chestnut trees.

And I also realized that I disliked Alvin, the hero, and felt my heart crushed for the sake of the Evil Brother (whose name I cannot now recall). Also, the writing started to suck.

[mamadeb.livejournal.com]

Poor Calvin. Just in the wrong place in the birth order.

And, yeah. I don't read them more than once *and* I forget between books.

And the most compelling character is the "Torch", except everything's for Alvin now.

Emma Smith drew a short straw in the real world, too.

(And it's not a universe where non-Christians can really exist.)

[fernwithy.livejournal.com]

Yeah, it was the loss of Calvin as a really good character that bothered me. He'd set up an interesting dynamic between the two, but at some point after Prentice Alvin, it turned into The Tale of Always-Right-Alvin and Totally-Hopeless-Cally. And I stopped liking anyone in the books. I really should finish the series so I know how it ends, but I just can't make myself care.

[magid.livejournal.com]

Homecoming was *dire*
Don't read Saints either. Ugh.

[kadymae.livejournal.com]

I love early OSC.

Ender's Game and Speaker for the Dead are magnificent as are Wyrms and Songmaster.

I *cried* over Songmaster.

[spiderine.livejournal.com]

Don't forget Xenocide. Gloriously Bright is an incredibly complex and memorable character. All three of the original Ender Trilogy (I can't stomach the later books in the series) make fine reading, IMO, but I can't read anything else he's written.

[mamadeb.livejournal.com]

I loved Gloriously Bright. I'd read that portion as an independet novela in Asimov's and thought the concept was amazing. It even got me to do some reading on OCD. And when I spoke to Card at a Lunacon (he was very charming), he said he based that on his own daughter, who had gone through an OCD phase. Apparently, that's not uncommon for adolescent girls.

It's still my favorite part of Xenocide.

[(Anonymous)]

Hmmm... considering that Gloriously Bright is obsessed with her father, the idea that Card based her on his own daughter is kinda creepy.

[mamadeb.livejournal.com]

Nod.

Card has a lot of creepyness in his stories.

[redaxe.livejournal.com]

Shorter Xenocide: Wonderful characters. Sucky plot. Deus ex machina. I reread the first two books in the trilogy, won't ever go back to that one.

[mamadeb.livejournal.com]

I tend to just read the Gloriously Bright segments, actually.

[mamadeb.livejournal.com]

Songmaster.

Absolutely beautiful and brilliant.

And also, a rewriting of the books of Samuel. I know this because I happened to be rereading it at the time I was taking a class on Samuel. And I could point to scenes and say where they were reproduced.

And Ansset would never find adult love, either...

[taffimai.livejournal.com]

Mmm, it was a brilliant book.

[mamadeb.livejournal.com]

Still a nightmare, though.

[cellio]

It was an excellent, compelling book, as was the short story from which it was expanded. (Usually that trick doesn't work.)

[mamadeb.livejournal.com]

Nod, but as is often the case, the shorter work is better. I read the original when it was first published.

[kmelion.livejournal.com]

I loved Ender's Game. It got me hooked on 'hard science' fiction.

And you have the comparison backwards...Ender's Game was published well before HP.

[mamadeb.livejournal.com]

I knew that - I got this copy of the book in college. It's just a very similar plot.

[etrangere.livejournal.com]

the first time I read that book I cried for hours. OSC is good, haven't read a book by him in years of course, because disgust will put a damper on things you want to read, but between the Ender's Trilogy, Songmasters, Hart's Hope and Sonate without accompagnment... there's quite a wow factor.

[mamadeb.livejournal.com]

I did find Hart's Hope hard to read. It's so very, very nasty. And if you ever read his book on writing SF and Fantasy - he designed it that way.

[etrangere.livejournal.com]

It is, I guess. Very cruel fairy tale. I don't remember being outlandishly shocked when I read it, then again I was young and very little shocked me at the time.

I probably need to reread it.

I think one of Card's gift usually is making you feel sorry/sympathetic for even the most nasty characters. It's something I always admire in any writer. (Resnick does it on another level, Martin with some of his characters but not all, so does Kay, etc.)

Not like you need any more comments :-)

[osewalrus.livejournal.com]

Just a few thoughts.

1) It is important to think of Card in context. One of the reasons he was so popular was he boke a lot of new ground in the early 80s. He wrote fantasy set in the United States, an area that had lagged seriously in a field overwhelmed by Tolkien clones. His investigation of themese such as child abuse were new then, and done in a way that raised interesting questions (and hadn't been done to death yet).

Ender's Game is designed to be complex. Yes, Ender is cruelly manipulated. But the Earth believes it faces extinction from an unknown enemy that may strike again. Is genocide really a crime when the other race swept in out of the blue and tred to annhilate the entire Earth? Only we learn later that this was a mistake -- the other race hadn't even realized we were intelligent. Card avoids simple answers and also raises the tragedy stakes by having Ender realize the complexities. This is the whole idea behind the "Speaker for the Dead." Ender sees himself go from hero-prodigy who saved the Earth to genocidal villain. Yet he accepts, chronicles, and does not confuse speaking the truth with his moral judgements. He does the same thing for his abusive older brother, knowing that in so doing he damns himself in the eyes of history.

2) Personally, however, I found the cheating in Xenocide so bad that it made me retroactively hate the rest of the series.

3) Card's opinion on homosexuality, from what I have read, is more complex than most give him credit for. His position (again, last time I read his writing on this some years back) is that "Mormon Doctrine says you must listen to the Church Elders. The Church Elders say homosexuality is a sin. Therefore, you cannot be a good Mormon and a practicing homosexual."

This itsef is not bad logic. I'm not going to tell Mormons what they should or shouldn't beleive. But he ten makes a leap to the idea that Mormons should also prevent the secular state from conferring "benefits" that "legitimize" homosexuality, such as legalizing gay marraige. Here he makes a classic mistake of confusing his own religious belief (to which he is entitled) to what is appropriate in a multi-cultural secular society.

Re: Not like you need any more comments :-)

[mamadeb.livejournal.com]

Nod. It's complex enough that it *is* rereadable, even after knowing the plot twist in the end, and in the seventies/eighties, it was ground breaking.

And, yes. The moral questions are very difficult - even more so because Ender really had no idea of what he was doing. How much responsibility does he bear?

Doesn't reduce the nightmare factor, though.

And, yes. It's one thing to make a statement about one's religion. It's another to make it the law of, as you say, a multicultural secular society.