October Group Read: Ender's Game

[Jo]

This thread is for discussion of October 2014's group read Ender's game. If you have read it already or plan to read it this month feel free to discuss here. If you want to discuss the whole series please do.

[Jim]

I read this when it first came out & again later, both as a novel & a short story. Recently, I've listened to it as an audio book & really liked it. Card read one part. He said he writes his stories to be read aloud. It certainly worked well for this one.

[Jo]

I've read this and enjoyed it too. I must admit that I was disappointed with Speaker for the Dead,I quite enjoyed Xenocide but that was the last one I have read. I will finish the series at some point.

[Buck]

I read all of the series. I think Ender's Game is the best of the lot. Card wrote the novel from the short story published a decade earlier as the back story to Speaker for the Dead, which he published the following year I saw the movie when it first came out and I saw it again on TV last week. It falls far short of the novel. I don't reread books until years after I read them the first time. I'm thinking maybe I'll make an exception in this case. Dunno, we'll see.

[Rory]

There were some interesting concepts brought out in this book. Here are a couple that are always good food for thought:

We humans always struggle with the Friend or Foe question upon first contact of anything unknown. Destroy or be destroyed, are these the only black and white options?

Trick our youth into fighting our wars. Anyone have a problem with this idea?

[Jim]

People are always looking for a clear dichotomy & seem to manage to find it whether it exists or not. Look at our politics. Most hate one side, so decide the other must be right. Card points this fallacy out in a lot of his books. In this case, there was a lack of communication due to completely different mind types similar to Haldeman's The Forever War, although this war wasn't quite as stupid. At least here the bugs actually started it.

As for tricking our youth into fighting our wars... That's loaded. It takes a certain type of mindset to actually put up with combat conditions - blind obedience in the face of chaos. The blind leading the blind; old men who aren't there (& won't be, although they may have filtered memories) sending idealistic young idiots (Having been one, I get to say it.) out to do things no sane person would do. If they had any more life experience, they'd come to their senses & at least question, if not flat out refuse due to common sense. Yet some come to enjoy that sort of life.

Card's idea of taking such young minds & tricking them into war came about, in part, because he read a book on how difficult it was to train WWI fighter pilots due to the addition of the third dimension. He figured zero gee would be even worse & would take even younger minds to handle the issues. That's the entire point made in the battle school. Directions are relative.

The audio production has a long afterword by him that explains a lot of his thinking on this. Apparently it came about over a long period. I'm not sure if he wrote it down anywhere. It's not in any of my versions of the book.

[Jim]

Centipede Press has a limited edition of Ender's Game for sale right now here:
http://www.centipedepress.com/sf/ende...

Jerad's books aren't cheap, but they're very nice. I usually pick up a couple every year, generally some off-the-wall collection no one else would consider publishing, so look around at his other books. Make sure to check out the scratch & dent page, too. What he considers a damaged copy of a book has always looked perfect to me. I collect them to read, though.

[Jim]

I mentioned that Card had pointed out the fallacy of fanatical divisions in our thinking. His Empire books are a very clear example. He explains his thinking here:
http://www.hatrack.com/osc/articles/e...

I found the above & an interview with Card about the movie
http://blog.endernews.com/2012/11/ors...
while searching for the afterword I remembered from the audio book. Couldn't find that, though. Both the above are interesting.

[Buck]

I remember Card talking about the movie on an audiobook. He refused to let the filmmakers use older children. This is why it took so many years to get started on the movie. They wanted to use 16-year-olds. He insisted that they be no older than twelve. When Ender first went to battle school he was five, wasn't he? It was important to Card that young children were the only ones who could have been used to defeat the buggers. In the movie, though, the child actors were unremarkable. This, I think, contributed to the movie falling short. The kid who played Bonzo was perhaps the best, but lost a bit of credibility as a bully because Ender and all the other children were a head taller.

[Zeynep]

Interesting book re battle strategies and selecting future soldiers and war strategists as children, but ultimately rather unsatisfying.

I don't think it is shocking that 12-year-olds are waging war here. Armies have most been made up of teenagers since time immemorial - short fuses, low empathy, eager to conform and fight on demand, unquestioning obedience, drunk on their testosterone high. Unsurprisingly, people become slightly more averse to taking on mortal risk and killing others when they grow up.