The Government: we need children to run the military
Bonzo: welcome to battle school
the only thing you need to know about life up here is that we only have two kinds of swearing
“fart face” and vicious racial slurs
Ender: oh
Bonzo: we’ll kill you as soon as look at you
but we’ll never say “shit”
Peter: now that Ender has gone to space to become a general, we must do our part to change humanity
Valentine: absolutely
what should we do
Peter: let’s leave comments about political theory on the internet until the government offers us jobs
Alai: Ender
let’s kiss
Ender: yes
unrelatedly, gays and Jews?
Alai: monstrous, both of them
also, unrelatedly
we call our greatest enemies the “buggers”
but don’t read too much into it
it’s just a longer, more difficult way of saying bugs that has nothing to do with the more common definition of the term
The President: look at this
Secretary of State: Sir?
The President: someone is talking about John Locke online
give them my job at once
Secretary of State: Yes, sir
Bug Ghost: Ender we knew you would come
and we knew you didn’t mean to genocide us
please don’t feel bad about it
the genociding
see
when we were murdering you
we thought we were actually just disfiguring you
we were just trying to cripple your society, not murder it
so it was all just a big misunderstanding
Ender: oh
Bug Ghost: just please don’t worry about it, genocide-wise
Tags: books, i’m into hard sci-fi, literature probably, probably
Sometimes I think about the whole scenario of “Speaker for the Dead” and it’s so big and weird and challenging and why did it have to land in the brain of Orson Scott Card?
You are so right!
I think it’s because Card is a twisted, creepy person, and not in a good way. I reached this conclusion after reading his novelization of “Hamlet.” It’s an ultra-creepy homage to pedophilia. Hamlet’s ghost is having his son unknowingly murder all his sexual abuse victims (who were of course turned gay by the abuse.) It ends with Hamlet’s Father spending eternity molesting Hamlet in the afterlife.
I found myself wondering not IF there was a child porn stash in Card’s basement, but how big it was and if there were any missing kids in his area. I’m not accusing him. I have no evidence, just my reaction to his story of a supernatural pedophile, but I wouldn’t be surprised if I saw a news report about boxes of homemade kiddie porn being removed from his basement with a few mummified bodies.
Orson Scott Card wrote a book about a family of Mormons who moved to a new city and their oldest son started acting weird and only playing this computer game and it eventually transpired that he could communicate with the ghosts of boys who were abused and murdered by this old handyman hanging around. He tried to confront him and he was murdered then figured out how to manifest himself to be able to let his family know what happened and where all the bodies were (under their house).
…………….
Uggghhh, yes! This book! I enjoyed it immensely, despite the fact that it seemed to have written by someone who has never interacted with another person ever. Like, have you ever met an adolescent boy? Who would put one of them in charge of anything?!
he had obviously met (“met”) more adolescent boys than girls though. I am not ashamed to have enjoyed this book in my time but I will never forget and never forgive the bit about how there weren’t many girls at Battle School because humanity had bred the bloodlust out of its womenfolk, or some shit like that, and left them too gentle to be effective at killing, except for Token, I mean Petra. you see how cleverly I pretend not to know the exact line by heart. come here, orson, let me show you the capacity for ruthless violence that dwells in a woman’s heart.
“met”
Hahahaha :))
orson scott card is so awful
YES and how she’s also the first one to have a nervous breakdown when they start running actual battles?!?! Grrrrrr….
YES. Made me so angry of course it’s the character sans penis who cracks first. And then she is permanently broken and never again as good.
But gets to have BABIES so, you know, it’s all okay
To be fair, he’s a devout member of a religion that believes that the restoration of the one true gospel of Jesus Christ was placed in the hands of a 14 year-old farmboy, so. And that 14 year-old girls could consent to be one of the plural wives of said farmboy once he’d grown up and taken his place at the helm of the church. SO. But that dating before age 16 is risky business.
I do still wish I could play space laser tag though.
YES. I’m going to go ahead and insist that a strong market exists for space laser tag fiction that’s ideologically dominated by intersectional feminism, at least until the malls get zero-g arenas…
hmmm. they have the technology, there’s no intergalactic war left, someone’s going to market the shit out of space laser tag. It could be the new yoga.
I also really like the idea the the skills you develop in floating space laser-tag just transfers right over to “gigantic fleets of spaceship battles”
Yeah cause it builds character, or something. Really they should’ve just found a bunch of Korean Starcraft Pros.
Well, Orson Scott Card was unfamiliar with most of human history at that point, how was he supposed to know that one special white kid wasn’t going to save the universe by being intrinsically better than his peers?
You’re on to something there. I’m really bad at StarCraft but I do get a kick out of yelling “Remember, the enemy’s gate is down!” when sending my fleet of Battlecruisers and Wraiths at the Zerg fortress.
I kinda feel like maybe this is the whole reason this book was so popular? Like, we all just wanted to play that game so badly that we’d put up with anything to think about it for even one second more.
let’s leave comments about political theory on the internet until the government offers us jobs
Oh, Orson Scott Card, so naive. But I suppose nobody in 1985 could have predicted the eventual hegemony of cat videos. Maru for president of Earth!
In fairness, even back then there was Usenet and BBSes, not that I know Card used either, but… I’m pretty sure people on the internet had high capacities for being frivolous and/or awful back then too.
“This is the novelization of one of the best short stories ever written.
If you loved the story, you’ll like the book. If you haven’t read the story
(shame on you), go buy this book. But if you didn’t really like the story,
go back wherever you came from without bothering with the book.
…
On my scale of -4 to +4, I’d give this book a +2. (The short story gets
a +4). Very little that was added turned out to be worth a heck of a lot.
It’s nice to know what became of Ender, and where he came from, but the
mystical ending is tripe. Either Card is losing it (which I won’t believe)
or he just slammed together a few hundred random words.”
-Usenet post from Dec 1985
I have nothing to add re: larger themes, am now thinking about Great Leader Maru
Marui’s slogan: a cat for every box and … um … can I fit in that?
Maru fits in everything, that’s why he’s earned MY vote
Really, some of those boxes, I’m like “Maru where’s the rest of yoooouuu”
Maru, with Nyan Cat as a running mate!
Well. Flying mate. Something along those lines.
And Limberbutt McCubbins for POTUS! http://www.npr.org/sections/itsallpolitics/2015/0…
Maru gets my vote. I mean, he could hardly do any worse than the current crop.
Val:Peter why did you mutilate all these squirrels in the woods
Peter:haha Val now you can go to our parents and demand an internet log in because otherwise all these squirrels will die because of my psychopathy
Val: o rly that’s why the squirrels are dead Peter?
Peter: yeah it was all part of my plan and definitely not because I just wanted to murder some squirrels
We read this in my 9th grade English class, which still boggles my mind. I mean, it’s kind of awesome because who gets to read sci-fi in high school English, but also my county banned 1776 from classrooms because TJ and John Adams were hot for their wives, but kids committing massacres is a-ok.
We read it in 9th-grade HONORS English, which god. Just what a group of kids who already basically believe they’re smarter and better than everyone else needs. (I include myself among this number, and my copy was underlined in a pretty embarrassing amount of places.)
SAME. I don’t know if the regular classes got it or not, but I’m pretty sure it was just our teacher, or my friends would have complained about having to read it.
Everyone knows kids can handle violence muuuuuuuuch better than sex.
‘Murrica! Although for some reason my seventh-grade English class was chock-full of really amazing sci-fi by the likes of Bradbury, Asimov and Vonnegut, for which I will be eternally grateful even though I spent the next year or so utterly convinced that my parents had been replaced by pod people.
so this book, basically, is “boy is precocious and ~special~ but in space” plus bigotry?
plus I mean two marginally less special kids influence the world government through long tendentious internet screeds under clever pseudonyms. that was one of my favorite parts and I assumed I would have no trouble doing the same once I hit my teenage years.
eta: I have to assume monitors from the U.N. security council or some secret masonic lodge are reading all my Toast comments and are putting together a very generous offer letter for a secret position standing behind the man who sits behind the man, who whispers in his ear, even now. that’s the dream OSC gave to me.
Just realised, this explains: why moldbug.
It gets better, he’s precocious and special because of government breeding programs!
SPOLIERS-IF –ANYONE-ACTUALLY-CARES: Sort of. It’s about a kid who does this hero’s journey thing to save all of humanity by going to battle school and being a great general and then at the end realizes he’s committed an atrocity, which is an interesting step away from it just being a Gary Stu tale about a precocious genius. The next three books are about him trying to undue that mistake/xenocide/unforgivable war crime. On the one hand if you’re a little nerdy kid who gets teased a lot it’s some decent escapism and if you’re a pre-teen it’s got a decent amount of all adults are stupid in there to cement itself in your heart. It’s also really confusing because the message of Speaker for the Dead and Xenocide and Children of the Mind is absolutely live and let live and it takes all kinds to make the world go round, anyone can find redemption blah blah blah. So to have the same guy who wrote 3 500 page books about a former war hero/villian general now working as a community activist to try and prevent another genocidal/xenocidal attack on an alien species also be a guy who spouts so much hate for people who live differently from him is confusing. You can actually see the deterioration in his thinking if you switch from the last 3 Ender books to the Bean books. His vocabulary gets smaller and the ideas and thoughts and problems his characters encounter become much more simplistic. There’s a lot more nuance and grey area in the last couple of Ender books, than there is in the first Bean book.
Also if anyone has any shred of love left for Petra DO NOT READ the Bean books.
You have hit on all the points on how OSC broke my heart post reading the Speaker of the Dead books. Yet I still own so many of his books.
…Also, I nearly threw Children of the Mind across the room and never finished it. It was terrible.
What ELSE did he do to poor Petra?
I think I only read the first Bean book, and iirc Petra is kidnapped. By bad guys who want to use the battle school kids to rule the world? Maybe? I don’t remember the details.
She basically incubates an obscene number of Bean’s babies, because Bean is a genius and the genius MUST be preserved to protect humanity. Also he writes several scenes from her perspective and it’s like being inside a cardboard box, absolutely no characterization.
Those books helped my adolescent mind form its moral compass – one based on empathy and trying to meet people where they are. One that recognized the “humanity” in all “people.” (Not that I live up to my own expectations) As an adult, I’m afraid to go back and reread them, afraid my adult mind won’t find what the child’s mind did.
That happened to me.
I can accept that it’s not just a Gary Stu tale about a precocious genius, at least on some level, but to me that still came through loud and clear. The edition of Ender’s Game that I read had a foreword by Card in which he addressed some of the criticisms of the book, although he didn’t address some of them so much as handwave them away; one of them was that he didn’t really get the voice of the children right. Thing is, I know some people who believe that, when they were kids, they were essentially adults in kids’ bodies, stuck there somehow in a unilateral Freaky Friday scenario, and that they even spoke as adults, not just with a big vocabulary (which was probably true) but in an adult manner. (One of them is a webcartoonist who did a childhood flashback scene in which his author-insert character spoke pretty much exactly the same way the character did as an adult, while the child versions of the other characters in the cartoon spoke like kids. It was deeply bizarre, but the cartoonist insisted that that was pretty much him as a kid.) I’ve noticed that these people seem to be pretty isolated as adults, as a very general rule; they can be surprisingly bitter, and in person will often give you their opinion on something at length and with overweening sarcasm, speaking as if they’re reading off of cue cards that they wrote at 3 AM in a white-hot rage.
Card has a family and is still well-regarded despite his chronic and toxic homophobia, but is remarkably bitter both in his attitudes toward LGBTs and his absolute refusal to own or take responsibility for those attitudes and how he’s expressed them publicly. This isn’t a new idea, but it’s worth restating, that more than one person has remarked on how a lot of Card’s attitude seems rooted in some very odd ideas about gay people, namely that boys are likely to become gay due to childhood experimentation unless they’re actively and vigorously discouraged from doing so, and that even though he favors recriminalization of homosexuality, he claims it’s just to keep gays in the closet. There is still something of the wounded child in his behavior, and a fair amount of evidence as to the nature of that wound.
This 1990 essay of OSC’s provides substantial evidence to support your points.
Yep, that’s the one.
I read them all in quick succession, and came away thinking the overarching moral of the series is “Everyone should have more babies! This is the dream you all have even if you don’t know that!”
Beautifully put. I imprinted on Ender’s Game and Speaker for the Dead relatively young and I really loved SftD. I have not re-read it in many years and I want to keep the memory of it.
And it is heartbreaking that he seems to have missed the point of his best work.
Don’ t even get me started. Shadow Puppets is PAINFULLY bad and pretty much EVERYTHING that goes wrong in that book is because Petra insists she must have Bean’s babies at all costs. She’s underaged and so is Bean. Bean is even YOUNGER than she is. So basically she manipulates him into having babies, but it gets worse. You get a gay guy going on about how horrible being gay is and that every person in the world just wants to go off with the opposite sex and have babies and if they don’t then they are not a part of the human race.
WTF?!?!? GRAAAAAAAAAAAH!
Bean: hey don’t forget about me
I’m a character too
with this name
Poor Bean. I used to be such a bigger Ender’s Game fan I read all of his side books and man if you think Ender’s Game can’t shut up about Orson Scott Card’s awful politics for five seconds well BUCKLE UP because Bean becomes an anti-abortion mouthpiece who’s ALSO a hyper-rational super-genius who can’t be wrong about anything ever. So when he says abortion is wrong he’s obviously used all the logic to prove those terrible women are killing babies. There’s seriously a book where the climactic confrontation with the villain is just Bean yelling at him about how every fetus is alive from the moment of conception for 30 pages.
Oh my GOD, I was a wee budding feminist when those books came out and I remember thinking, “No, actually, I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect your wife to give birth to 50 babies just because you made and froze a bunch of embryos for Science Reasons.” I do not think that was the reaction Orson Scott Card was expecting from his readers.
Yeah I was too young to understand how Ender’s Game was ALREADY super anti-abortion but I pretty much threw that book across the room and never read anything else by Card ever again. I have a friend who made it all the way to “There’s a war on Christmas at Battle School and EVEN THE MUSLIMS know it’s wrong” and I’ve been assured I missed absolutely nothing of value in that decision.
Kate Bonin wrote a super interesting essay about the way Orson Scott Card writes about sexuality and having children: https://web.archive.org/web/20130821184127/http:/…
I have seen that essay before and it is very good, but also man does it remind me how much naked wet wrestling there was in Ender’s Game.
God that was both fascinating and incredibly depressing. As a teenager I always thought it was just supposed to be something weird about Ender and then also Bean that they basically had no sexual desire whatsoever but it makes so much sense that OSC’s two types of sexual desire are “very bad and forbidden” and “nonexistent.”
I am not sure if she has read his books because he does NOT treat gay characters with dignity. Getting your genitals cut off for seducing someone who looks 12 is not dignifying at all. Or being married off to a woman. Or preaching at under-aged children about having babies with the “alien” opposite sex? nope.
Yes, I was very pro-life when I read those but even teenage pro-life Floridagal felt like there was something not right about that.
Yeah, I actually really enjoyed Ender’s Shadow when I first read it (I love an alternate look at the same storyline!) but then the sequels VERY quickly got too crazy even for my oblivious 14-year-old mind.
Yeah I haven’t read Ender’s Shadow since I graduated high-school but I remember really enjoying the way it kinda undercut Ender’s specialness by making all the other kids at Battle School actual people with their own agendas. Suddenly they were doing things for their own reasons instead of just being tools for Ender’s ascension. …Then the sequels quickly made them all caricatures again for OSC’s weird morality plays.
I read Ender’s Shadow first, before Ender’s Game, because I just found it browsing in the bookstore in middle school and didn’t realize it was a sequel. So I always had more of an attachment to Bean.
Good grief, that sounds like anti-choice John Galt.
Oh my god, do we think Courtney Love is secretly a huge Ender’s Game fan???
Wait, why?
I figure because of “Frances Bean Cobain”, though popular wisdom has it that Kurt Cobain thought she looked like a kidney bean in the ultrasound and that’s where her middle name comes from.
you pipe down, you’ll get your own book
Enders Game is exactly as plausible as Pacific Rim and yet only one is taken seriously and taught in schools. The Common Core standards should rectify this error soonest and commence teaching our impressionable youth the value of Drift compatibility.
I agree so strongly with this comment.
We also should teach children to build better robots to fight ocean aliens. Why would you build a humanesque robot to fight in the ocean? Because humans as a rule are so natural in water?
.
It’s true, our schools really need to step up and teach the important things.
A shark robot? That would be ridiculous. How would it hold a sword?
But what if its teeth were swords?
You fool! Obviously it’s fins/flippers would be swords!
Teach the controversy!
Maybe instead of a shark-robot we need a giant sword robot.
A narwhal robot with a sword horn!
but wouldn’t you then need to find some drift-compatible sharks/octopi/whatever to pilot the ocean robots??
Or just people who want to be/identify as fish. (Would they be “scalies”, since “furries” are people who dress up as furry animals? Also, forgive me for even opening up this line of inquiring, but then we’d also need a name for octopi-people, since octopi don’t have scales.)
I agree with your conclusion but resent the implicit comparison; PR doesn’t take itself nearly as seriously. As far as I can tell, the only reason that the kaiju aren’t simply nuked boils down to Where’s The Fun In That.
PacRim takes itself the correct amount of seriously. “There were aliens, therefore we did a robots. Now strap in to watch Charlie Hunnam turn into a human puppy dog in the face of Rinko Kikuchi’s sheer presence.”
For me, the apex moment of PR is when Baby Mako looks up at Idris Elba on top of his jaeger, backlit with a halo like some sort of Greek god/Jesus hybrid, while he looks down upon creation with a twinkle in his eye.
There is a decent chance that OSC actually shows up in tomorrow’s link roundup, I’m very excited!
I mean, this post is great by itself, but I’m totally reading it as comment bait. It’s gonna be glorious.
also I really hope men come here to tell us how we didn’t understand the book. Of course I didn’t! I was twelve! That’s why I LIKED it instead of throwing it across the room!
“Its not actually a bizarre Hitler apologia but even if it was you just don’t like it because women have been bred not to understand inherently masculine sci-fi that just happens to feature lots of scenes of adolescent boys showering. You have my contempt.”
BEAUTIFUL. I laughed out loud at the end. That is going to be my stand go-to quote reference forever.
I was totally, completely obsessed with OSC books as a young nerdy girl, and I will not lie, it upset me more than it should to find out he was such a shithead (though he had already starting losing me as I got older because all his books were so oddly boy-centric).
BUT. I bought Enders Game on Kindle recently to see if it would be a good read aloud book to share with my 11 year old (answer: no) and the preface OSC has written for the new versions is an A++++ solid gold neener neener. The TL;DR version: Everyone told me this idea would never work as a book, and after I wrote it THE ESTABLISHMENT scorned it and called it a “kids book” because my writing wasn’t sophisticated, but I always knew one day I would be recognized as the voice of the non-sophisticated and it would be taught in school as a classic. It’s crazy bad and mean spirited. It doesn’t even end with a generous “so if someone has scorned your writing, just keep working because dreams come true!” It’s just basically, they thought I sucked but it turned out I’m awesome and they are wrong and lame.
That guy has serious issues.
Only having read them as an adult, I thought they were some kind of parody of a dude’s nervousness about a giant fascist government making everyone get abortions and be kinda gay, then man if you keep reading those books he keeps just DOUBLING DOWN.
Yeah, I think there may be some sort of age barrier to entry? Because I read a couple when I was on a college break and I was just kind of like: these are mostly just offensive and not as clever as I’d been led to believe.
And now I side-eye dudes with online dating profiles that list Ender’s Game amongst their favorite books. Maybe that’s a win? Forewarned, forearmed, etc etc
Totally, I loved those books but I’m reading the comments here and I’m like…I don’t remember picking up on 90% of the icky politics. I’d be really curious whether those dudes last read it at 14 and consider it a favorite book the way I might write down To Kill A Mockingbird, or if they read it at 24 and STILL consider it a favorite book.
Yeah, I loved these books as a teenager and then petered out on reading them as they dropped off in quality. Totally afraid now to go back, since Card has gone full-on public bigoted jackass. The slow transformation of everything I loved as a child into something that is problematic and/or secretly garbage continues.
Yeah, if nothing else I’d be skeptical of someone calling it their favorite book now because, ok, you’re allowed to like things by raging bigots, but you might at LEAST not want to advertise it?
That is pretty much my stance on it. It’s not as if OSC has been…subtle or quiet about his views. And because dating profiles are so full of signifiers it’s just not worth the risk for me. This isn’t just an, “oh I totally loved that when I was a kid” thing; it has the unspoken, “and also I’m deliberately picking this to highlight in a ‘here’s me making a representation of what I see as my most essential self'” addendum.
yeah it’s an odd backdrop to the main story (there are these 2 narrator/observers who spout the most nonsensical “nazi socialism” political views) in Ender’s Game. A few more books in and the whole story action is overshadowed with ‘YOU MADE A BABY HAVE AN ABORTION AND BE GAY’ and you’re like ‘okay Orson I get it you *really* were worried about liberals forcing you to kiss a black guy.’
Also not mentioned I don’t *think* he ever stoops so low as “This super-boy is as smart as Hitler!” but if you know about any of the other tyrants who are idolized in the book it’s kiiiiiiiinda obvious that he has nothing but respect for bloody dictators. I recall specifically that there’s something like ‘He’ll be as great a leader as Napoleon and Alexander put together with the organizational zest of Genghis Khan!’
It was actually this and books like it that made me assume Napoleon got where he did by being wicked smart, so the first time I read basically anything about the real story I was blown away.
I also read the books around age 14, and mostly didn’t pick up on the weirdo political stuff. Whenever I did feel uncomfortable about certain things, though, I definitely wrote it off as a sort of dystopian commentary and not OSC being a legit nutjob.
Probably. Reading as a kid, these books were about empathy and acceptance. I haven’t read then as an adult because I am TERRIFIED of finding something completely different from the favorite books I remember
Oh, the biggest one for me was anything by Christopher Moore. I loved Lamb and A Dirty Job, and thought they were hilarious when I first read them in my teens, but now when I peruse them, I can’t get past all the casual racism and misogyny. Some things are just better off skipped after a certain age.
Sigh. I read Fool and Lamb last year, noted the misogyny, but admitted to myself that I still thought they were hilarious. Then I found Moore’s website, on which he states that he does not have any favorite books written by women, and how it just so happens that women just don’t seem to write the sorts of things that interest him, so of course it’s not sexist, it’s just some crazy coincidence and ugh no just stop. Haven’t been able to stand him since.
Noooooooooo. I love(d?) Lamb. 🙁
I second the nooooooo, in part because he seems sane (well, for comedy writer) on his twitter. Obviously I should just never ever read his website.
oh
oh no
It’s okay for it to be a favorite if he read it before age 13 and hasn’t looked at it since.
I thought Left Behind was a parody.
My childhood memories of that series consist of a rotting giant, some trees growing out of some dead short people? and Petra (or maybe Valentine) talking about peeing in the snow. And the idea that it was all extremely important to my life and brain at some point.
That one was terrifying! I had nightmares that I would die of tree-mold.
The rotting giant came from the psych game they played, which the bugs recreated for Ender to find.
Petra talks about needing to pee when she’s been kidnapped in Shadow of the Hegemon (I think, I’m pretty sure it’s the second Bean book). She tells the guards that she needs to pee, that she can do it there or on the run or as her name in the snow, that it’s more difficult for girls than for boys, and requires more/different muscles, but not impossible.
I think everyone who felt like a completely alone outcast who read the books as a child found some part of their experience resonating, and some appreciation that someone understood what it was like to be trapped in a child shell that everyone dismissed and failed to listen to purely because *child*. He really did a good job of writing the lonely frustration.
I never fully understood why the baby serial killer/actual sociopath brother was supposed to be considered a sympathetic character
Oh man one of my favorite awful Orson Scott Card stories is his answer to this question which is basically “I mean it’s all about your point of view. Sure he’s a sociopathic monster who’d gladly kill anybody who doesn’t give him what he wants, just like Bill Clinton, but just like Bill Clinton he’s justified those decisions to himself so he can look like he isn’t a sociopath and that makes him sympathetic.”
Wait, WHAT. PETER TORTURED SQUIRRELS
Also, why does that website look like it was designed in 1995 and has never been updated since?
Yeah I think that was the first time I actually realized that Orson Scott Card had just the worst opinions on the face of the earth.
And I think it looks like it hasn’t been updated since 1995 because it hasn’t. Sadly “absolutely terrible website design” is an affliction that effects 90% of even the good sci-fi and fantasy authors.
oh god the internet was the worst thing to happen to OSC, his Alvin Maker series careened off course after he discovered AOL and started hanging out there all day and incorporating his fan’s OCs into the books, and then the subsequent books became just AOL messageboard transcripts lightly fictionalized and the plot ground to a halt
So you’re saying that I should just… not finish that series ever.
Ugh, I really liked the folks magic stuff!
I really need to get over OSC. Maybe I’ll do one final read through of the books I own and love and that will be enough make me seethe red and finally get rid of them.
For better folk magics, try Suzette Haden Elgin. Pretty much any of her Ozark granny sci-fi fantasy will hook you up.
“Ozark granny sci-fi fantasy”
I must have it.
Also, some of their magical spells are made of Chomskyan transformational grammar.
EVEN BETTER. You hit on my folk magic love, Ozark love, and Chomsky linguistics love.
Her books are amazing.
That sounds amazing brb going to amazon now
So I looked her up and I already have her Native Tongue trilogy on my wishlist, lol.
Check out Lois McMaster Bujold’s four-part “Sharing Knife” series for great folk magic AND characters who aren’t gigantic assholes AND amazing women. In fact, you’ll find amazing women in all of her books.
Harlan Ellison still has an early 90s style BBS as well as a personality at least as bad as OSCs.
Ugh, Ellison. Hating on oldschool science fiction and fantasy authors fills me with SUCH JOY.
I fully plan to dance on his grave in a yellow dress, for many reasons but not least what he said about K. Tempest Bradford and the slurs he employed doing it (not to mention sexually assaulting Connie Willis).
maybe we can make this happen as sort of a flash-mob gathering of women in yellow dresses, dancing their rageful joy on his grave…
just like Bill Clinton
O_o
“Orson?! Hey, Orson! What are you doing in there?! For God’s sakes, man, the vat of Whitewater Kool-aid is NOT a jacuzzi!”
Oh, wow. Not only is that some serious wingnut cray-cray, but it confirms my minirant above about how Card is still seriously butthurt about his own childhood.
There’s a theory floating around somewhere, and look, I don’t want to get too much into OSC’s terrible psychology, but a theory floating around somewhere that Card himself suffered abuse as a child, and that Ender’s Game is a weird kind of “looks-like-reconciliation-but-is-really-Stockholm-Syndrome” coming to terms with that.
It seems to me to make more sense than any other moral framework in OSC’s work, so.
He is? I never got that. I thought he was Supposed to be a horrible monster, but an effective one. It’s his weird Ender-mental-clone one that gets redemption in the end, isn’t it?
The non-clone also gets redemption. He becomes rules of the world and marries Petra when Bean leaves for space, and he gets The Hegemon written about him.
Peter tortured his siblings and his parents didn’t do anything about it, but Ender killed two kids and didn’t even have to the first time. It was a fight with a child. But that gets brushed aside all through the book and Ender doesn’t seem to have much guilt over it.
I HAVE BEEN WAITING FOR THIS ORTBERG!!!!!
*cackles endlessly*
Adults: We’re going to watch this child kill multiple other children. But he cries about it, so we know he’s the chosen one.
I loved this book so so much has a middle schooler. Also Speaker for the Dead.
I think you should know that this is the post I would make sure to send to you, if I wasn’t certain you’d seen it otherwise.
between this and the Bruce Springsteen song one, it’s been a banner couple of weeks for my kind of white guy middle school pop culture.
This is brilliant.
This is hilarious! Didn’t something like this happen to?
General: Ender here is a video game with lots of rules and no end.
Ender: I break the rules and the video game ends.
General: … Your training is complete please proceed to leading the military.
I mean, did OSC just watch a lot of Star Trek? I think he wrote it just a couple of years after Wrath of Khan.
Also War Games (which came out a couple years BEFORE).
Also,
General: Beat this game now.
Ender: Ok I did.
General: JK that was all real you just committed genocide LOL.
I’ve always wondered if Dwight Schrute is, at least partially, based on Ender.
whoa. Now that you mention it, I can’t see it any other way. He’s got to be, right?
Yes! Pretty much any one of Ender’s quotes could come out of Dwight’s mouth during a team building exercise.
I think it’s a pretty common dude nerd/geek archetype. I see people like Dwight all the time, in person and online, and *ahem* may have resembled him somewhat in the past.
Alai: Ender
let’s kiss
Ender: yes
unrelatedly, gays and Jews?
Alai: monstrous, both of them
^^^^^ OSC is SO transparent about his closeted Mormon gayness. It’s so sad. It’s the saddest thing ever.
I ship Alai/Ender and I know the series would be better if that was canon.
While we’re talking about Orson Scott Card what was the deal with that Folk of the Fringe short story collection where there was some sort of minor apocalypse and the only people who survived were Mormons? I did not have discerning taste at used book sales as a kid.
Yes! I’m so glad I’m not the only one who did that!
My only recollection of that collection is Mormons and vague confusion (which is weird, because I’m usually pretty good at remembering books I’ve read). I was really happy to have found another Orson Scott Card book after having read 3 or 4 of the Ender’s Game (and Shadow) books, but then I was rather bewildered reading it. It did successfully introduce me to the problems with OSC’s work, though, which was worth the used book price in the end.
ok if we’re going to talk about problematic OSC works I am going to have to bring up WYRMS because holy fuck was that fucked up
OSC: Wrote a decent horror short story once, otherwise consistently the worst.
Was the decent horror short story “Eumenides in a Fourth Floor Lavatory?”
Because I accidentally read that as a kid (middle school, I think) and it may have traumatized me . . . not for the weird toxic-sucker mermaid baby monster situation, but for the fact that the dude’s wife takes him back in at the end after what he did.
I think so?
He also wrote a subtle child murder horror that I was super into for a while. No idea what the title is, but I think it’s still buried somewhere in my boxes of books at my parents’ house.
It’s called Lost Boys. And wow I wish I had not read it at home by myself as a latchkey kid.
YES.
I was in high school when I read it, but it was so perfectly creepy.
Yes, Lost Boys was the one I was thinking of!
I read this in fifth grade immediately after reading Ender’s Game and I think it’s where my fear of crawl spaces comes from.
Also, it’s where I learned what Mormons were!
I’m going to be surprised I retained all this for all these years, but “Eumenides in a Fourth Floor Lavatory” had this basic plotline:
Dude (I’ll call him Albert, I don’t remember his name) is living in a cheap apartment with a shared communal hall bathroom. He gets home late one night and finds what looks like a baby in the toilet.
Albert thinks, “What monster tried to drown a baby?” So he pulls it out and–surprise–not a normal baby, but the aforementioned merbaby monster with toxic octopus suckers on its tail. (I remember OSC specifically saying that it also had malformed genitals that looked like they had been mashed to one side. So. You know. There’s that image.)
Somehow that segues into talking about how his whole life, he was charming and manipulative and got everyone to like him and give him whatever he wanted. Turns out Albert is married but had been kicked out by his wife because . . . Oh, god. I’m gonna spare the details and just say he was caught by his wife with his thirteen-year-old daughter.
Which is why Albert is living alone in a terrible apartment now. (It specifies that he could have afforded a better one, but chose the worst one he could find to make his wife feel guilty for kicking him out. At this point, I’d thought it wasn’t possible to hate Albert more, but I realized I was wrong.)
Something or other happens, he goes home to his wife and puts on a display of being super-sorry and his wife’s like, “We checked and she’s not pregnant.” (I just. What.) And then they’re asleep in bed, but he wakes up and realizes the bedroom is now full of creepy merbabies. He worries what will happen if his wife wakes up and sees them . . . or if she can’t see them.
She opens her eyes. THE END.
So. Yeah. That short story was my sole introduction to Orson Scott Card. It really colored my feelings about starting to read “Ender’s Game” for English class the next year, believe me you.
what
My face just tried to pull itself into itself.
I think it might try to do that for a while actually.
oh my god oh my god oh my god.
(don’t mind me, I’ll just be over here, curled up in the fetal position chanting this for some time.)
Ok you think that is bad but in WYRMS a pubescent girl who has been trained as an assassin is drawn by an inexorable genetic instinct to mate with a giant evil caterpillar (“He rooted one of his appendages in her groin”) which impregnates her and she INSTANTLY gives birth to a fully formed baby that looks at her and says “help me” and then dies
did I mention this is all an allegory where the girl is Mary and the evil caterpillar thing is God and the baby is jesus
oh god why
Aaaaugh,YES I read that one as a teen and no no no no. No. No.
Why on earth did I just retell that story.
I would be the worst dinner party guest.
On Thu, Aug 13, 2015 at 2:14 PM, Theo Winterwood <[email protected]> wrote:
I’m going to be surprised I retained all this for all these years, but “Eumenides in a Fourth Floor Lavatory” had this basic plotline:
Dude (I’ll call him Albert, I don’t remember his name) is living in a cheap apartment with a shared communal hall bathroom. He gets home late one night and finds what looks like a baby in the toilet.
Albert thinks, “What monster tried to drown a baby?” So he pulls it out and–surprise–not a normal baby, but the aforementioned merbaby monster with toxic octopus suckers on its tail. (I remember OSC specifically saying that it also had malformed genitals that looked like they had been mashed to one side. So. You know. There’s that image.)
Somehow that segues into talking about how his whole life, he was charming and manipulative and got everyone to like him and give him whatever he wanted. Turns out Albert is married but had been kicked out by his wife because . . . Oh, god. I’m gonna spare the details and just say he was caught by his wife with his thirteen-year-old daughter.
Which is why Albert is living alone in a terrible apartment now. (It specifies that he could have afforded a better one, but chose the worst one he could find to make his wife feel guilty for kicking him out. At this point, I’d thought it wasn’t possible to hate Albert more, but I realized I was wrong.)
Something or other happens, he goes home to his wife and puts on a display of being super-sorry and his wife’s like, “We checked and she’s not pregnant.” (I just. What.) And then they’re asleep in bed, but he wakes up and realizes the bedroom is now full of creepy merbabies. He worries what will happen if his wife wakes up and sees them . . . or if she can’t see them.
She opens her eyes. THE END.
So. Yeah. That short story was my sole introduction to Orson Scott Card. It really colored my feelings about starting to read “Ender’s Game” for English class the next year, believe me you.
You and me both. I would totally retell that at a dinner party.
…and i forgot the incest part, blergh.
I am here to defend the OSC novella “Unaccompanied Sonata”. I have an unfulfilled dream of wanting to stage that story as a chamber opera but I never will because it would necessarily involve giving OSC money for the rights, and I can’t do that.
But music acquisition doesn’t work that way! I went through a period where I’d see “Unaccompanied Sonata”, think “Ooh, SF story about music!”, read it, refrain from bursting into tears and throwing the book across the room…then totally forget about the whole thing, only to repeat the cycle next time I saw the story. I finally grew a brain cell and stopped trying to reread it in the hope it would magically improve.
I assumed I had hallucinated that book and am moderately disconcerted to find out it’s real
How about the 5 PART SERIES that is basically retelling the Book of Mormon, in space, with hyper-evolved bat people?
Whaaaat. I somehow missed that one, please tell us more!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homecoming_Saga
As it turns out, the bat people were only in the last one, but on the other hand, there is plenty of raging homophobia throughout the whole series, so you’ve got that to look forward to.
Guh, this was the first sign I had that OSC was going into major decline. Starts pretty interesting, by book five it’s all “Everyone in this book is horrible and I wish they’d go extinct” and “Space Mormons cure Gayness!” Ugh.
FUCKING ZDORAB
THAT IS NOT HOW WE QUEERS FUNCTION
THAT IS NOT HOW ANYTHING FUNCTIONS
Oh yeah, I remember that series. I think I got through the first two books and then they got too weird for me, the child/teenager who would read just about anything (seriously, I am both happy and a little horrified at some of the things my mom let me read. Mostly happy though).
I READ THIS SERIES. (and kind of enjoyed it as a teenager..) However, I didn’t realize it was supposed to be the Book of Mormon and to this day I still don’t understand the parallels. When was there ever an awesome matriarchal society when women could have one year marriage contracts with men at will? I don’t even think “Israel” remotely had that.
I read the first one and spent a lot of time looking for the rest!
…you would think that for me, growing up in a non-Mormon LDS church would also help me see the parallels, but it didn’t. Also, I never actually READ the BOM, just saw the pageant in Palmyra when I was 12.
That said, could the matriarchal societies be referencing the native american cultures the christ was supposed to have visited after his resurrection in the BOM? I mean, that’s how my grandma and aunt explained it to me…?
I found all of these at my local public library in MD! I grew up in a completely secular household, so all of the biblical or BOM references it might have had went over my head. I mean, I guess the Oversoul was God, but then God is kind of like a deteriorating satellite? I know I could probably look up the parallels online (I’m sure there’s a page that breaks it down) but I’m too lazy too.
Also I really enjoyed how in the last book, the one surviving member of the original set of characters is pretty much an all-powerful scientist woman with technology (???), even if she was in a marriage of convenience through most of the series for no reason whatsoever.
Still can’t quite figure out the mole people/bat people situation.
Oh man, what if it turns out that that’s exactly what Mormonism is, and I’ve been lied to all this time by the liberal media??
…shhhhh don’t let the cat out of the bag
That was how things were working in the world that was falling apart because the God Satellite was malfunctioning, so doesn’t that imply that… that is how OSC wanted things to be? IDK. I’m heavily speculating from memories of a series I read 15 years ago.
Oh godddddd, they were so so so bad but teenage me loved it.
Remember the part where, if I remember correctly, they’re wandering through the desert and this gay dude is sucessfully turned straight by boobs and the necessity of reproduction and is just like, ok well, heterosexual procreative sex is my duty, thank god I’m normal now? Like wtf?
Thank god I started reading Elizabeth Bear right after and got introduced to Mallory the Genderqueer Shapeshifting Librarian in Spaaaaaace!
Yes, I remember that! And how he’s so proud because he’s overcome his “wrong feelings” to impregnate his wife after she basically begged him to because she felt bad that she didn’t have kids yet. So much wft.
Nope, OSC was definitely not projecting, not even a little.
I still think the second book is brilliant. It’s the one book where OSC’s natural compassion manages to briefly overwhelm his tortured religious self-loathing.
Agreed!
CAN YOU GUYS IMAGINE the deleted comments? I want an entire POST of them.
They’ll rival the comments for Books Literally All White Men Own!
yuuuuuup
I read the mob scene in Xenocide in my high school hallway, and was late to class because I HAD TO KNOW if the mother tree survived. (Spoiler alert, nope.)
please do dune next
Also, remember when Orson Scott Card rewrote Hamlet as a novel so that people of the Modren Dayes could understand it, and in his version of the story Hamlet’s dad was a pedophile that went around turning people gay by molesting them?
Sadly, the original RainTaxi review of it is gone, but this remains at least.
http://io9.com/5838157/orson-scott-cards-hamlet-not-as-good-as-shakespeares-version
Follow up question: why?
what did I say about “painfully transparent”
Hahah, oh yes. My favorite response to that madness was Scott Lynch’s parody of it: http://scott-lynch.livejournal.com/265746.html
OMG. That sounds horrible. (I have got to stop reading this comment thread but it’s like I can’t look away.)
I’m pretty sure people only read Ender’s Game because they don’t realize it’s possible to read non-ultrafamous books
that aren’t terrible
as a thought exercise, try to imagine just how persuasive a blog would have to be to turn someone into Earthprez
It is 100% Erick Erickson’s endgame, I’ll tell you that much.
I refer you to the previously suggested Maru for president thread upstream. Seriously, he’s like the hypnotoad we deserve.
Also, too, his book on the left and right wings of the US getting into a civil war is amusingly absurd, as he clearly has zero understanding of why the left believes what it believes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empire_(Card_novel)
Please never leave us again, “i’m into hard sci-fi” tag.
it’s my favorite tag.
I didn’t realize the Ender’s Game I read as a child was a somewhat toned-down 2nd edition: http://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/6493/how…
holy hell that’s awful
Whoa. I did not realize how bad the original was.
This explains how baby me didn’t notice the vicious racial slurs right off the bat. That’s unbelievable.
Holyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy shit!!! Well, that explains why I didn’t know what racial slurs this post was talking about.
OH!
A whole pile of comments about Orson Scott Card’s self-hating homoeroticism and no one has yet mentioned Songmaster! Spoilers follow. Note that I have not even begun to describe all of the ridiculousness of this book.
Songmaster is the book where Ansset, an uncannily beautiful boy with a godlike singing voice, trained in a monastery to absolute emotional repression, is taken to be the personal musician to the (male) Emperor of the Universe, and they do not have sex. Repeat: Orson Scott Card specifically tells us that they do not have sex.
And then there is some convoluted plot that I don’t remember and the Emperor gets assassinated, and the next Emperor (who may or may not have assassinated the first Emperor, I can’t recall) propositions Ansset for sex but Ansset refuses, and the new Emperor’s heart breaks and he does something cruel which I have now forgotten.
And then Ansset (who is still a beautiful young boy!!) ends up accepting a proposition from a Tragically Bisexual Man, except that Ansset’s conditioning from the monastery is supposed to make him celibate forever and something goes horribly wrong because of that conditioning, and the Tragic Bisexual dies. And so does the new Emperor for reasons that have something or other to do with the Emperor’s grief and thwarted desire for Ansset. Ansset ends up being one of the rulers of the universe, but he never has sex again in his life, and when he is old he goes back to his childhood monastery and self-immolates naked in a room full of snow.
I can’t imagine why people think OSC might have some painfully repressed homosexual tendencies.
…I’m gonna find a copy and read this. Yes.
Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaat.
I’ve never heard of that but it does sound like the OSCest ever OSC.
I read the Ender stuff as a kid…when I went back and read it as an adult there was a lot of “WHaaat?” and then of course I encountered OSC as a human being via some of his raging homophobic commentary online and there went another childhood delusion/illusion down the drain.
I did (and still) think Speaker & Xenocide were superior to Ender’s Game. The 4th book got really weird and I’ve forgotten it already. The 5th too if there was one. Never read the prequels because they sounded super boring.
The prequels were terrible, you didn’t miss much. Speaker and Xenocide were pretty decent, Children of the Mind was basically a screed on why sex is bad and good marriages should involve celibacy except for the express purpose of procreation. Also the awesomeness that comes from having a disembodied second wife constantly attached to you by the earlobe, with a side of “disembodied computer bitches be crazy”
I’ve occasionally wondered if Songmaster was some kind of real person fanfic about Michael Jackson.
… That is an interesting mental image. Huh.
That. That was the last book of his I read.
Oh, and then in that series that I think was a retelling of the Book of Mormon(?), there’s an openly gay male character who is forced to marry a female friend because babies or something, and because he loves her so much, they make it work.
Yes! I was waiting for someone to mention Songmaster! When I was a kid, my dad had been trying to get me to read Ender’s Game, so to get him off my case, I read Songmaster instead (I think I figured it was one book instead of a series). I was probably about 12 and was horrified by it (I vaguely remember a sex scene, I assume between Ansset and the tragic bisexual that had very fuzzy consent issues) and flatly refused to read any Orson Scott Card again. My dad was so upset that I’d gone off his very particular recommendation into uncharted Card territory.
By the way, Songmaster has interplanetary travel technology but I don’t think it ever addresses the “what about recorded music” question. Like, why are elites paying the “Songhouse” kajillions for their “Songbirds”? Why don’t Songhouse-trained singers make popular entertainment for broadcast or sell recordings instead of this weirdly decadent system of live singers on retainer?
I actually liked Songmaster enough that these questions did not occur to me for years after I read the book.
Yes! I was waiting for someone to mention this book! I checked it out of my HS library after reading (and loving) Ender’s Game, and because *solely because* I was pretty sure it would have some hot sex in it. (Who allowed me to exist as a teenager? Why did I read the things I read? Who knows.) But anyway, I was sorely disappointed.
Gee that book was squicky. It’s not even so much homosexual but… tons of people being fixated on a boy who looks 12! Being gay doesn’t even work that way! Gay people, like straight people usually go for people of age. Also, the bisexual was more gay than bisexual and ended up having his genitals cut off and killing himself with a sheet.
OSC troubles me for some reason.
Possibly the best alt-text in the history of webcomics.
https://xkcd.com/635/
He took over the world with the power of thinkpieces.
Peter “Hot Take” Wiggin, President for Life.
See I always imagined the web that Locke and Desmosthenes participating in was some kind of internet-based direct democracy thing? Like the forum they were on was some legitimate parlimetarian arm of the government that let everybody vote on laws instead of just electing MPs or whatever, but maybe that was just my baby communist brain making up an explaination that made sense. I seem to have filled in a lot of the plotholes with explainations that weren’t actually mentioned though, I loved Enders Game until I reread it as an adult. The book in my head and the actual book are super different!
I bet Ross Douthat fantasizes about this.
who dat? (who dat)
btw, if anyone’s reading on your phone, you can just stick “m.” in front of the “x” to view a version of the comic with a link you can tap to display the alt-text. like so:
https://m.xkcd.com/635/
Now that I’ve spent way more time thinking about this book than I have in years it occurs to me that there’s nothing that happens in this book that The Kestrel doesn’t do a million times better and with more compassion and nuance (except space laser tag I suppose). The hero character from the first book becomes a violent outlaw and there are psychological consequences. A princess runs her government in exile! “In the end, good triumphs not by force, but by compromise.”
The Westmark Trilogy is Lloyd Alexander’s best work I think.
The Westmark Trilogy is Lloyd Alexander’s best work I think.
COSIGNED.
If there’s no space laser tag then WHAT IS EVEN THE POINT.
I can not support this statement because I hate Lloyd Alexander for killing off important people in the last book. UNACCEPTABLE, I liked them!
(That said, the rest of it is awesome overall. And we could probably pride-and-prejudice-and-zombies in a space laser tag subplot without harming anything.)
I’ve only seen the movie of this and I think I understood more about the actual plot from Mallory’s summary than the movie?
What about the General at the end of the Shadow series who basically says “Welp, I’m done being gay now, as all old gay men do, so I can settle down and have a family, as all old gay men do.” BAHHHHH!!!!!
I almost threw my Nook across the room in the middle of the night, and definitely made a noise that woke my husband up.
exactly – as I said somewhere above, I came away from the series with the idea that OSC’s overriding moral for the books is that everyone wants to have babies and should.
Notice old OSC is awfully quiet about his plan to declare war on the government if gay marriage becomes legal since the SCOTUS ruling.
Maybe he’s busy training his space army of adolescent boys who are really good at video games.
Let’s also not forget how all these elementary schoolers have the vocabulary and conversational capacity of full-grown adults. MR. CARD, HAVE YOU EVER EVEN MET A CHILD?
General 1: humanity is doomed unless we can create The Perfect Warrior
General 2: based on the computer’s analysis, this one child is our only hope
General 1: then have the computer guide his training. let the computer monitor his internal psychological state and influence him subconsciously using symbolism that even we cannot understand
General 2: remind me again, if the computer can do all that, why we don’t just let the computer fight our space war for us
Orson Scott Card: maybe several books from now i might address this detail and how it fits into my unified and plausible worldbuilding, which was certainly not pulled out of my ass at random
Ender: everyone tries to control me, but nobody understands how i hurt inside. also i am the most important person in the world and win at everything, i play a lot of computer games but also totally kill mean kids with my bare hands
Sci-Fi Community: AWWWW YEAAAAHHH (pumps fists in air, throws Nebula and Hugo awards at Orson Scott Card)
Alai: i feel such warm brotherly affection for you since we met here at space camp
Ender: i, also. shall we get nude and engage in pubescent zero-gravity hijinks?
Alai: BY ALL MEANS
Orson Scott Card: computer, increase warm nude pubescent zero-g hijinks by 40%
Computer: i’m sorry, i can’t do that, dave
Humanity: who can possibly bring an end to this endless space war
Ender: hello, my name is Ender
Orson Scott Card: AWWW YEAHHHH (high-fives self, does victory lap around desk)
The computer doesn’t do his training, the psych game was unconnected to his skill at directing the space battles, those were real and he learned while doing (though he was told Mazer Rackham was his enemy, it was the bugs)
I’ve been secretly reading through the books because I am perversely curious about how OSC will make me roll my eyes this time and about just how much OSC can milk out this series.
But also because I am unhealthily fueled by righteous rage towards OSC as well as the Facebook pages of certain people I used to go to school with.
Ironically, Mallory Ortberg’s online takedown of Orson Scott Card resulted in her being elected Grand Matriarch of the Solar System.
Favorite Characters From Ender’s Game:
–Ender Wiggin
–Mazer Rackham
–Bonzo Madrid
–Pol Slattery
–Dink Meeker
–Stutz Overbeck
–Starter Harding
–Jamaica Balzac
–Strap Spackler
–Farquhar McPuma
–Dandler Jackwell
–Bisquick Duquesne
–Chaps Handgrip
–Rufus Numbat
–Peep Weebler
–Erwin Bugaloo
–Rox Lipschitz
–Nardo Ganglemire
–Blast Hardcheese
–Slate Fistcrunch
–Bolt Vanderhuge
–Zap Rowsdower
Big McLargeHuge
Bisquick Duquesne I mean really
Well, they call her “Duque” for short. She was the most dangerous hand-to-hand combatant at the Battle School, and was only replaced by Ender when the military determined* that the alien armada could not be punched out in single combat. However, she punched out Ender numerous times in a subplot I made up to feel better. In fact she’s continuing to punch out Ender even now. Astonishing.
Later of course she had her own spinoff novel, Duque’s A Hazard, which revealed her amazing backstory as a mercenary pugilist (“pugilercenary”), selling her ability to punch out Ender to the highest bidder, and the government’s attempt to harness her power for evil.** Also appearing are the inventor of the planet-killing “Doctor Device,” Dr. Enrico P. Device, M.D., and Professor Spacer McSpace, the scientist who discovered space.
*wrongly!
**it turns out that the ability to punch out Ender can only ever be used for good.
this is amazing, here have this internet i knitted for you
Me, to my partner: “You’ve read Ender’s Game, right? Is it as awful as this makes it sound?”
“I thought it was quite good.”
“Oh, yeah, quite a few commenters said they read it in middle school and really liked it, only to be alarmed when rereading it as adults.”
” … no, I read it last year.”
RUN. GO NOW.
MALLORY NO
Mallory’s own career path has made the career paths of the elder Wiggins 70% more plausible.
When she becomes our God-queen, it’ll jump to 110%, but my mind will have been cleansed of imperfect science fiction.
Yea, people are mocking that part but I’m here thinking “I could totally see someone getting internet-famous through clever use of twitter, then more known through their twitter persona being given a column or running a website in some popular press, then more normal-famous through getting a tv show off the ground based on the popularity of their writing, then people might actually rally behind them running for president just based on that”
I mean, if Jon Stewart or Stephen Colbert ran for president right now I’m pretty sure they would demolish everyone else at the polls. The elder Wiggins were just trying to be political Justin Bieber.
I used to teach this book and found this essay helpful about just what was so reprehensible about Ender’s Game: basically, OSC works really, super hard at creating an ‘innocent killer’ in order to excuse genocide. http://johnjosephkessel.wix.com/kessel-website#!c…
how i remember Children of the Mind
OSC: this alien bug and this sentient tree are IN LOVE
Me: that’s beautiful and i ship it.
OSC: it is a GIRL bug and a BOY tree. don’t forget. that part is important,
OSC: this human and this computer program are IN LOVE
Me: ok i don’t ship this one quite as much but ok
OSC: it is a BOY human and a GIRL computer. SO IMPORTaNt
me: why?
OSC: reasons
OSC: don’t argue.
OSC: im a liberal.
Actually, the book is about Hitler.
Enjoy!
http://peachfront.diaryland.com/enderhitlte.html
You’re a bit late, that’s been discussed upthread.
<img src="http://38.media.tumblr.com/e79f1b29e7a227f698ca7452efa3f5b3/tumblr_inline_msjltms9Fz1qz4rgp.png">
(I'm sorry!)
btw, if anyone's reading on your phone, you can just stick "m." in front of the "x" to view a version of the comic with a link you can tap to display the alt-text. like so:
https://m.xkcd.com/635/
What an enjoyable discussion after an enjoyable post! Thank you for once again making me laugh out loud:
The President: someone is talking about John Locke online
give them my job at once
Funnily enough, I liked Children of the Mind best out of the original Ender series. Even with some of the maddening plot twists along the way, I had this fascination with new!Peter and new!Val, and how that worked with Jane and her eventual corporeality. It was very interesting.
But I wanted to throw the last of the Bean books against the wall. (I couldn’t. It was a library copy.)
Actually, that’s not all I wanted to say. Part of my love for Xenocide, Speaker for the, and Children of the Mind comes from how many women do absolutely vital things. And they were so diverse – Novinha’s family was pretty clearly meant to be of black Brazilian heritage, for example. All of her children had pretty big things to do, from science to preaching to, well, rioting. So yes, Card had some pretty clear agenda items, but he also wrote women and characters of color in the original Ender books, and they were important.
*sigh* I still love the original four books, I do. And a couple of his stand-alones as well.
I am sorry, but Octavia Butler did that better. She included all kinds of diverse characters without blowing her horn about using them or using boring stereotypes. She had books with women of colour as the lead characters, not just the support ones. Like, Novinha’s kids don’t develop in terms of personality in 30 years! Novinha spends most of those books being extremely unpleasant, Petra obsesses over having babies illogically and Valentine spends most of her time as a pseudo wife to Ender! At least in the Gaea series John Varley had a strong woman of colour getting lesbionic with another character without bragging and strutting around about how progressive he is for doing that. He just had strong, interesting varied characters. Characters that were not just there as mouth pieces or sock puppets.
Worse of all, it took Mighty Whitey from the sky to solve all the problems in Speaker for the Dead! These people studying these aliens for years could not ask basic questions like how do you reproduce or state that they can’t turn into trees because humans don’t do that. It’s contrived so Ender fixes everything. And in Xenocide, would tons of Chinese people REALLY want to be Stereotypes in Space, living like ancient China only without the footbinding or is it easier to just use stereotypes rather than create complex societies?
Grrr. I hate how he gets away with this sort of thing. I’ve got to spout on about Octavia Butler more so she gets more attention than he does because she does her job BETTER than he does. I swear if I could be 1/4th as good a writer as she is, I’d be happy.
has anyone ever read this OSC short story? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eye_for_Eye
I found it after having enjoyed the Ender series. wished it was longer. although now, looking back, it seems to support the narratives people have suggested about OSC having suffered some abuse. also lots of forbidden desire, and biochemically special people who respond differently to pheromones…
Playing games with kids is something very boring for the elders but they have to give time to their child. So we can play such kind of interesting table games with our kids.