I haven’t read it in quite a while but that’s a plot point in Xenocide and Children of the Mind IIRC. Speaker for the Dead is quite good, but I would advise you not to waste your time on Xenocide or Children of the Mind. They don’t really make any sense, and it’s hard to slog through a novel with that much wasted potential. The Shadow series was passable, but nothing special.
And as for religion, it’s present in all his books, but it’s presented well enough that I don’t really care much. Actually, before I new that he was Mormon, and read some of his more extreme opinions, I would have called SftD a humanist book. It bleeds over more and more though, and by Xenocide it and a lot of other things have tainted the characters.
As for the thing about taking over the world through the Net, it does sound kind of ridiculous now, but the Net seemed to me to be more exclusive than our Internet. And it wasn’t to big a stretch of the imagination, before the internet was invented, that people could rise through the Net like some today do through television.
The point was to make Ender self-sufficient enough to never ask for or need help from the adults, who couldn’t provide it if they wanted to because the simulation was real, and to make him creative, so the system wouldn’t ruin him. He was supposed to be reliant on his toon leaders, though; that’s why Graff talks about balance throughout the novel. As for Graff, he did come off like a sadistic dick, but he pushed Ender to make him the best he could be as quickly as possible, and his justification was simple: It worked.
-One of the main themes in the book (IMO) is to ask the question: “What atrocities are justified in order to win a total war?” So if making the characters older makes the behaviour seem less atrocious, that somewhat defeats the point.
-From an in-world point of view, if you thought that humanity’s only chance for survival revolved around training the perfect strategist, would you start at age 5 or age 10?
With regards to the nudity:
-It didn’t bother me. I think it’s an accepted idea (at least among sci-fi authors in the 70s) that the taboo against nudity is mostly a cultural thing. And it does a good job of showing the dehumanising treatment (at least by our standards) that these kids are going through.
-At any rate, even if bad stuff results from nudity, it can’t be much worse than the “regular” torture and murder that seems to be expected at Battle School!
Almost every one of his books has religion in it. Ender’s Shadow and Speaker for the Dead are no exception. But I think you’ll still enjoy it regardless. Card’s downfall, in my opinion, is when Card’s religion so overwhelms the text that the characters start doing things that are completely out of character for how they were established. If you go beyond either of those books to Xenocide and Shadow Puppets (the third book in the Shadow series) you’ll absolutely notice it and be annoyed by it.
I still liked Xenocide but was extremely frustrated by the choices Ender made. No spoilers but by the end of Shadow Puppets I could not believe that Bean and Petra were the same people I knew from the Ender series. They simply would not have been that stupid in the choices they made and it was done because of religion.
Card’s religious background is ever-present in his books, but I think there’s a marked difference between how it’s used in Ender’s Game and Speaker For the Dead vs more recent works like the Shadow series. Card’s earlier books, as others have mentioned, take a more (for lack of a better word) liberal view of religion as a whole - he uses his Mormon background to inform his writing of his numerous religious characters, but there’s an underlying humanism to the whole thing, and he’s quite adept at portraying characters of non-Mormon religions. Most of the main characters in Speaker, for example, are Catholic, and although I’m not Catholic myself, I’ve never gotten the impression that Catholic readers feel like Card did a poor job capturing what it means to be Catholic.
That changed dramatically over the decades between Speaker and the Shadow series. Card becomes far more dogmatic in his thinking, to the point where his recent novels are little more than thinly-veiled political screeds. Enderw24 touched on how Card’s children undoubtedly affected his perspective, but I think another equally important event was 9/11. Prior to 9/11, Card’s writing emphasized cooperation and understanding between cultures, openness to alien ideas, and the dangers of assuming you know everything. After 9/11, Card almost immediately turned into an American exceptionalist and military hawk (something especially noticeable in his political essays), and his books quickly began to reflect that as well. Where Speaker For the Dead and its sequels portrayed humans of various cultures and aliens of various species as all having an underlying capacity for empathy and mutualism, so long as they made sufficient effort to understand each other, the Shadow books portray the nations on Earth as being defined purely by their histories and cultural differences, with “peace” something bought by marriage between heads of state. As a long-time reader of Card’s, it was all rather shocking. He literally turns a philosophical 180 over the course of about ten years.
And that’s completely leaving out Card’s virulent homophobia, which is a whooole 'nother controversy in and of itself.
The characters had to be young for it all to work.
Ender knows that the results of using Dr. Device are unconscionable, even within a simulator. He’s counting on adults to say that he’s too violent. It’s like arguing that we should solve conflict in the Middle East by nuking the whole area. Horrifying as it is, it’s an efficient solution to eliminate both sides of the conflict.
You wouldn’t even consider nuking the Middle East if you were training to become a diplomat/general/something, it would be an immature waste of time at best, a sign of madness at worst. Ender uses Dr. Device in an effort to wash out of training but an adult probably wouldn’t have even considered that course of action.
I think one of the adults in the book explicitly states that they want to give Ender minimal training so they don’t mess up his nimble, free-thinking child brain. Ender comes up with innovative solutions throughout the book because he either doesn’t know or doesn’t care about established rules - he’s just trying to get through school.
I’d agree with this. There are only two religious things in Speaker that raised my hackles: a “hedonist” atheist who tries to get a religious woman to buck an absurd societal restriction on marriage and is rebuffed by her religious adherence to purity, and the trope that atheists are really people who are mad at god. Both are fairly minor as it goes.
In contrast, the Speaker ethos celebrates humanity and ignores the concept of a deity.
I read the first 5 of the series this summer and after Speaker for the Dead it got uncomfortably religious for me. The religious overtones of the fifth book (the first of the Shadow series) read like a religious fanfiction version of Ender’s Game.
My understanding was that Card’s first proposal to his editor was more like Speaker, but his editor told Card his take on the material wasn’t mature enough yet. Card wrote Ender’s Game to set the stage for the novel he wanted to write (Speaker) and set up the tragedy that is Ender’s childhood. So while the original main character of Speaker wasn’t Ender, it was an Ender-like character and Ender was created to be the main character of Speaker.
I can’t find a cite, so that may be apocryphal.
Some of the OP’s questions or areas where more information is wanted (i.e. the fantasy game). The sequels are really two series. One (Speaker, Xenocide, Children) follows Ender far in the future. The Shadow series follows Bean from Battle School through the aftermath of the defeat of the Buggers.
IMO, Ender’s Shadow is well worth the read. It covers many of the same events, but from Bean’s perspective, which is very different. After that, the Shadow series starts to go downhill. By the end, Petra is unrecognizable and I found her repulsive. This is the series you’re probably expecting after Ender’s Game, with lots of battle planning, politics, and power struggles.
IMO, Speaker is well worth a read. It’s a very different book. Don’t expect wargames and political machinations; Speaker and its sequels are about a man who committed a horrible act as a child trying to make amends. After that, the series starts to go downhill, though not as precipitously as the Shadow series.
I was never a big fan. I always thought it captured exceptionally well the emotional response of a bullied kid, which was pretty impressive considering giving a crap about builling was unusual at the time. I don’t thnk I’ve seen it done better.
I never really bought Ender (or Peter, for that matter) were brilliant though. NO ONE ever thought to point the nuke at the planet? Not the scientists who invented it? Not the miltary who deployed it, and who MIGHT have read about familiar with the whole kamekaze concept? Are there no gamers in the entire military power structure?
Only a CHILD who DIDN’T KNOW what he was doing would be willing to use it to blow up the planet? Back when I was running a c-store, I was regularly confronted by people demanding someone nuke the middle east in order to save them $5 a week on gas. No one in the whole military power structure was willing to even consider taking out the evil insect hive mind to save the human race?
Note, I didn’t think it was bad, just somewhat overrated. I think people were hooked by the emotional power of the early part, and that made them less critical of the rest than they might otherwise have been. Overall, I thought Xenocidel was better, and the one after that was wierd.
As for the ‘predicting blogs’ thing, wasn’t Usenet up and going by that point? At the very least, some of the big BBSs were. Not a bad leap, but not the blind critical hit it might look like at first.
I liked the book of Mormon series better. Though the last one of that was pretty wierd too.
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Like a lot of people, I was . . . disappointed by his recent swing to hateful. The mormon series even had a sympathetic and fairly realistic gay character.
Of course they thought of using the doctor on the planet. But if you’ll recall, there were millions of bugger ships around it, and the doctor had a limited range. Ender was the only one tactically good enough to pilot the ships through that, and the fact that he could connect with his toon leaders in such a close way helped as well. That’s why they needed him to be so empathetic: so he could work with his toon leaders. However, since he was so empathetic, they couldn’t be sure he would be willing to kill all the buggers, so they went with the safe bet and kept him in the dark.
I remember it differently. I remember pretty clearly during his ‘congratulations’ conversation afterwords that they stressed how his uncluttered childs mind was the only one who could have come up with the ‘nuke the planet’ idea, which mirrored his first victory stratagem in the lasertag games. (Don’t worry about being hit, it’s HITTING THE GOAL that wins)
I could be misremembering, though. I read it quite a while ago.
I think you’re right. I just read it so the memory’s fresh in my mind, I distinctly recall something like that. Tomorrow when I have my book in front of me, I’ll read that part again
Yeah, you’re right, Ender’s not really coming up with any astounding ideas, he’s just ruthless since he thinks it’s simulation. I guess I’m just inclined fan-wank/rationalize the shit out of it because I enjoyed the book so much.
Here’s the relevant portion of the conversation, before and after Ender beat the Buggers.
Before:
After:
Its still kind of a retcon, I feel, but I can forgive it I guess. Mazer’s basically inferring in the aftermath that while he may have decided to use the device, he would have been unable to get close enough to do it. However, that still doesn’t really jive with what he said before, because his line about the buggers not deliberately attacking civilians seems to run contrary to his joy after it was done. I felt that part was confusing. Maybe he was trying to simply not plant ideas into Ender’s head, but if so, why did he choose those exact words that makes it seem like Ender shouldn’t attack the planet?
You are indeed misremembering. “Nuke the planet” was not “the idea”. The final idea was to take a huge chance and sacrificing a ship, going in an unusual way straight for the homeplanet. And that in turn only worked because the buggers had learned that the humans (eg Wiggin) didn’t sacrifice ships such as they did, and when they realised this wasn’t always true, it was too late. Very few others would have even thought this attempt worth it, and maybe only one other person could get to the position where this was possible in the first place.
Really? Some day I’ll introduce you to President Carlos Menem, from Argentina, he was elected on a leftist and nationalist platform and run the country with a neo liberal agenda that would have made Milton Friedman blush.
No, nuke the planet was definitely the idea. When Rackham congratulates Ender after the battle he says “All or nothing. End them or end us. But heaven knows there was no other way you could have done it.”
When he gets on the mike for the final battle, Bean says “Remember: the enemy’s gate is down.” Both Bean and Ender realize that that’s the only way to win as well.
In battle school, when Ender gets matched up against multiple armies at the same time, he realizes that the solution isn’t to win by defeating the soldiers, it’s to exploit the rules of the game and meet the goal without bothering to shoot the other team.
Given the shrewdness displayed by the adults in charge, it’s hard to believe that the battle school game wasn’t designed with this exploit in mind. They have a weapon that plays holy hell with large quantities of mass and a planet to attack, so they make a game where the goal isn’t killing the other side, it’s reaching the goal line. It is a little hard to believe that no one would ever have thought of it before Ender. For a school full of brilliant little kids taught that winning at all costs is what matters, the rest of the battle school displays a real lack of initiative and ingenuity when it comes to developing tactics for an open game.
It’s not just a question of getting the idea of nuking the home planet. Anybody could get that idea, as you say. Wiggin’s final move was something that would seem like it was impossible for it to work for anybody else, but he could see there was a chance, because he understood the mind of his opponent. None of your quotes invalidate anything I said.
