Orson Scott Card ( the author of Ender's game )

[rward]

If any fans of Enders Game don't want to be fans anymore, sci-fi writer John Kessel wrote an essay that's a thorough takedown of the book and has been known to turn hardcore fans against it.

http://www4.ncsu.edu/~tenshi/Killer_000.htm

(Not breaking link because it's a page from a university website.)

This puts into words the gross feeling I got when I read Enders Game.

I read something else by him first, something horribly misogynist, and gave up on him. A friend gave me Enders game to try. I hated it but couldn't articulate why. Thanks.

Dan Simmons, ugh. In one otherwise great book, the main character finds an abandoned Muslim submarine packed with world ending blck hole bombs. At the time, the Muslims ruled the world. Those ka-razy Muslims, ready to blow us all to Allah even when they've won!

I threw the book across the room.

[Trynn]

This puts into words the gross feeling I got when I read Enders Game.

I read something else by him first, something horribly misogynist, and gave up on him. A friend gave me Enders game to try. I hated it but couldn't articulate why. Thanks.

.

If I read this, will there be spoilers for speaker for the dead? The first few paragraphs said the essay would be examining that book too, but I haven't read it yet.

[Savoring Samsara]

If any fans of Enders Game don't want to be fans anymore, sci-fi writer John Kessel wrote an essay that's a thorough takedown of the book and has been known to turn hardcore fans against it.

http://www4.ncsu.edu/~tenshi/Killer_000.htm

(Not breaking link because it's a page from a university website.)

I had this link in another tab waiting to be shared. Thanks for beating me to it, heh. I am one of those who was finally put over the edge by reading it. Ender meant so much to me as a child but I just can't anymore.

[Savoring Samsara]

If I read this, will there be spoilers for speaker for the dead? The first few paragraphs said the essay would be examining that book too, but I haven't read it yet.

Yes, many spoilers.

[lawfulevil]

"Lovelock", Card's paean to capuchin torture-masturbation and monkey-pedophilia, serves as the ultimate warning about Card. I did eventually read everything he put out before about 1998, but always keeping in mind that he was a seriously screwed up person. (Something that evidently didn't escape co-author Kidd, since the sequels to Lovelock never got written.) Alarming sexual hangups/proclivities aren't anything new in classic sci-fi/fantasy. Heinlein and incest (and sexism and...), Piers Anthony and obvious pedophilia, McCaffrey and rape/dubcon plus misogyny. I can only really list a handful of sci-fi/fantasy authors whose work I've read extensively and didn't run into something incredibly troubling. That kind of thing eventually turned me off the genre. It got sickening and old to see stories of the fantastic future dominated by the same old shit.

[Palimpsest]

If I read this, will there be spoilers for speaker for the dead? The first few paragraphs said the essay would be examining that book too, but I haven't read it yet.

Yes, lots of spoilers, but the postscript to the essay pretty much sums up the article without spoilers. Here you go.

POSTSCRIPT 2009

A number of people have objected to this essay on the grounds that intentions do make a difference in our judgments of the degree of culpability we assign to an actor performing any action. I did not mean to give the impression that I believe that intention is irrelevant to judging whether an action is moral. We normally take intentions into account when making such judgments. I do, too. To judge only by results would be cruel and rigid.

What bothers me about OSC and Ender's Game is that he says that only intentions matter in making such judgments. This I absolutely reject. It is the classic excuse of someone who commits a heinous act to say that his intentions were good, and to justify his questionable means by referring to his good ends. We see this all too obviously, for example, in the justifications the Bush administration gave for the Iraq war. They said they thought Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, that he had links to terrorism, that we were there to promote democracy, etc. Millions of people even at the time knew that these justifications were inadequate, or in many cases outright fabrications.

Card sets up Ender to be the sincere, abused innocent, and rigs the game to make us accept that he does no wrong. I see the entire pupose of the "remote war by game" trick in the novel as a device to make this argument plausible. But in the real world genocide is not committed by accident. We see the immoral consequences of such a mode of thought in the heaps of dead bodies that history has piled up, committed always by leaders who tell us they only meant to protect us from evil. I just will not accept that. —JK

It is a very good argument. I have a quibble because when I read the book (long ago) I did see Ender Wiggins as culpable for his actions. His overkill (literally) was over the top and he justly deserved to spend the rest of his life paying restitution. The ultimately flawed anti-hero rather than the hero. So either OSC failed to convince me that Ender did no wrong or this is a bit of a straw argument.

One thing more: Ender's Game is a Young Adult novel and I read it as an adult. The capacity to see shades of grey and be comfortable with ambiguity develops in late adolescence. I suppose if a young teen read it, they would miss the flawed anti-hero bit and focus on intent as an excuse as their take home message.

I'm on the fence on this one. Anyone want to discuss?

I haven't read any of OSC's later works. I got nauseated and infuriated too many times.

[BalconySmoker]

I loved Ender's Game (which I borrowed, not bought). However, I do know that whatever money Orson makes off the movie, at least ten percent will be given to the Mormon church.

I won't be seeing Ender's Game for the same reason that I won't see any movie with a Scientologist actor in it. I have no desire to give these shady organizations one dime of my money.

[VampireProtectYou]

The book is well written but he is a really ugly close-minded person. I will not go and see the movie opening weekend in protest... maybe later.

[fakepigtails73]

Agree with JFC and terranova. It may be uncomfortable, but sometimes people whose views we find abhorrent are still excellent artists/writers/musicians. Everybody has to draw their own line, and mine is I won't see any screen adaptations. However, I do not regret reading the books for a minute, and Ender's Game is part of my permanent book collection.

Gore Vidal was a twat of a misogynist, but you would have to pry some of his novels away from me with a crowbar.

Exactly. In my case it's Louis-Ferdinand Céline, one of my fave French author of all time. Major, major asshole in real life though (a Collabo during the Occupation, among other things). I still buy his books though, he's dead a long time ago so the $$ goes to his estate. He can't buy shit with my $$ in the afterlife, if there is one... :shifty-kitty:

Tons of writers are major misogynists and general assholes, or in the case of some women authors they abused their children terribly; but since they write brilliant stuff I seperate the art from the creator...I'd never stop reading an author that I really love because he's or she's a horrible person.

I feel the same with other artists and creators; I have a problem with supporting Roman Polanski after his Swiss house arrest a couple of yrs ago. I'm a major fan of his body of work. Sexual crimes against minors is one of the things that I tend to forgive the least... So what I did with Polanski's last two films is something that I never do otherwise: I DL them. No $$ given!!

If someone doesn't want to give her $$ to an author I guess borrowing the book from the local library would be an idea if one doesn't want to do a 100% boycott? No $$ to said asshole writer either.

[GeoBQn]

Glad to see people find the essay interesting. My husband told me about it because he had Kessel as a professor for a fantasy/sci-fi literature class at NC State. (My husband still won't read the essay because he's a fan of Enders Game and doesn't want to give up those feelings.)