Interestingly enough, the novel is an expansion of a short story, which omits a lot of the backstory for Ender and his family and focuses on the training at the space station and the actual campaign against the aliens. It is likely the reason so many people consider "Ender's Game" a triumph of capable and intelligent people over an imminent threat.
The novel is the one that puts the plot in a different context, and it is indeed very frightening. The realisation that high intellect doesn't save you from your inner darkness has always given me shivers. However, the most terrifying part of all is that what Ender does is actually rational. He applies extreme violence against his bullies not because he enjoys it, but because he doesn't want it to happen again, as he realises nothing will shield him from more bullying if he lets go.
I have always considered this a reflection of actual global politics. Essentially, it is the idea that you don't strike first, but when attacked, you respond in massive force so it doesn't happen again. This is probably the most brilliant part of the novel, as it brings that concept from global politics, where many would support it, to children, where it is terrifying. What the novel taught me is that actions have consequences, especially violent actions.
To wrap up, you don't have to look hard to find countries that apply a doctrine of extreme response when attacked. There is a conflict going on right now that has been ignited by that doctrine, as a matter of fact - and yes, I am referring to Israel and Gaza. So the novel provides plenty of food for thought. It is also yet another example of how fiction becomes reality, like manipulation of public opinion through social networks could lead to massive policy changes (this is about the novel's subplot featuring Ender's siblings).
This is an excellent analysis of the book. It very much fits within the Cold War-era zeitgeist of making political themes more engaging and disturbing by reinterpreting them as childhood games, like Lord of the Flies, or the Peter Gabriel song "Games without Frontiers".
Ender’s game is as you say an excellent SF but also so much more. With the following several books in what became a series it is both cautionary and visionary. The horror of genocide, the Intelligent agent of later books, the demagogic power of social media. The exploitation of the planet of autistic people. Important and powerful. The movie sucked
I re-read Ender's Game about a year ago along with Speaker for the Dead, Xenocide, and Children of the Mind. Things definitely fall off after Speaker, but the tetralogy is worth going through once at least.
First off, Ender's Game felt incomplete without also reading Speaker for the Dead, especially on a re-read. I think the emphasis Speaker places on communication, empathy, and prejudice provides the context necessary to fully grasp the tragedy of what Ender did to the Buggers as well as the monstrosity of the adults who placed Ender in a position to commit Xenocide.
And I think your take on Ender is interesting - I think it's true that Ender is capable of extreme, horrifying violence, but it's also true that that's EXACTLY WHAT he was selected for. His foils are explicitly Peter and Valentine - all three are highly intelligent, but Peter is a cruel sadist and Valentine is unwilling to "go all the way" the way Ender can. Ender isn't cruel. He clearly never enjoys violence. Every time he is forced into massive retaliation he is clearly traumatized. You're correct to say that his intelligence had no bearing on restraining his violent capabilities and his willingness to use them.
The monsters are the adults who cultivated the Wiggin children (remember his family was given explicit permission to have more kids for basically eugenic reasons) and then placed Ender into the situations he was placed. Even the six year old bully Ender killed was a situation engineered to determine whether Ender had the killer instinct the adults thought he needed to win the war.
So I suppose like Ender you too are being cruel to yourself for the non-sin of recognizing the potential you have to commit great evil, consciously or not. You recognize that intelligence has great utility but that something else is needed to direct that utility towards the good. It also seems you've internalized the lessons of Speaker - the key is understanding and empathy. You can't blame yourself for others wanting to use your talents for evil - but you can resist that evil by always trying first to understand and empathize.
What Noah also doesn’t go into is that the xenocide is (presented as) necessary for the survival of the human race. If not for Ender’s victory, the buggers, not understanding the nature of human consciousness, would have exterminated humankind and suffered their own regrets. Thus while the actions of the authorities with respect to Ender were monstrous, ultimately they did what they had to do in the absence of a cosmic intervening peacekeeper.
This is related to what I think is one of the book’s biggest flaws, which is that it presents the authorities as far more competent and compassionate than is realistic. Ender’s minder, Col Graff, is written as loving Ender and only reluctantly going along with his carefully-determined training plan. In reality, bureaucratic cruelty is never so calibrated and precise.
I'm not sure given how I've read Speaker that the situation was "us or them". If I recall correctly (and even in the Giant game epilogue in Ender's Game where he finds the Hive Queen) the Buggers realized pretty soon after the first war that they made a mistake in how they understood the differences in human vs Bugger communication (where killing Bugger drones is akin to shutting down comms while killing a person is killing a fully sentient being) while also realizing that the humans were about to make the same mistake but instead it probably meant their own extinction. They launched a last ditch effort to communicate via ender which works and ultimately revived the species.
Mayyyybe that's post-war Bugger apologetics from the Queen to play to Ender's sympathies, but her interaction with the Piggies suggests it's genuine.
All of which to say, the reason I consider Speaker essential is it shows how humans erred badly by not trying to understand the Buggers and immediately resorting to massive retaliation. I don't think humanity was nuts to do this, but it's clear the prejudice (even the name Bugger is derogatory) led humans to believe they understood the situation and that it required extermination of the enemy. That's the tragedy which is redeemed in Speaker.
I agree with your reading. The point I was trying to make is that while “revenge of the nerd” is a grotesque misinterpretation, Noah’s gloss as “cautionary tale about how intelligence can be used towards monstrous ends” is also an oversimplification. Part of what makes the books good is that every character can be read sympathetically (even Peter), even though the story being told is one of an enormous, tragic crime.
Incidentally, though normally I have no trouble separating art from artist, I still can’t wrap my head around how the same person who wrote a beautiful series of books about the importance of empathy towards the alien came to OSC’s later fate.
Card is Mormon and was always quite hostile to queer folks, and as queer rights have advanced, he's allowed himself to be hijacked by the right-wing / anti-woke fever swamp, e.g. appearing on Ben Shapiro's show.
It's sad that somebody who could write totally alien beings as sympathetic, could not bring himself to sympathize with fellow humans.
My interpretation of this is that there really wasn't a context for the Buggers to correct the misapprehension. Their last, best hope for survival was Jane (who enabled Ender to eventually overcome the otherwise-unwinnable Giant's challenge, although the Buggers' limited capacity for empathy meant that they kind of just chucked her and lost track of her whereabouts once her purpose was accomplished), but given the events of the end of Ender's Game and Speaker / Xenocide it seems clear that the Buggers knew they were essentially screwed as far as averting the fundamentals of the conflict.
In essence, the humans had no capacity to appreciate the PoV of the buggers, no reason to believe it wasn't a zero-sum conflict, and neither side had any real means to correct the misapprehension prior to the resolution of the conflict. Given this, there's no real fault to find with the human side at large--they didn't start the conflict and took the most rational action available to them in view of the information they had.
The PoV of the formics was invading Earth and killing all humans. Xenocide of the formics was absolutely the right response by humanity. No other response was possible after the formic invasion, no chance could be taken that the formics could be trusted to adhere to any treaty.
I only ever read Ender's Game. I had no interest in apologetics for the xenocide.
"it shows how humans erred badly by not trying to understand the Buggers and immediately resorting to massive retaliation. "
Was it "humans," or just the military dictatorship who took over the planet? The book tells us that the actual footage of the main human victory was tightly censored, and only a select few knew the truth about what the aliens were actually like. It's reasonable for the average person to be afraid when they didn't know anything, but after Ender learned the truth, he probably should have thought a little bit more about what that really meant instead of just "how can I use this to kill them?" And the adults running everything *really* should have thought about that, assuming they even cared.
Your analysis of Peter and Valentine is apt, but are the adults actually monsters in the context of Ender's game under a global analysis? IIRC The actual genocidal conflict with the Buggers wasn't a metaphor, it was a literal us-versus-them zero-sum conflict (at least as far as the information then-available to all relevant actors went).
Really enjoyed reading this, especially since Enders' Game had a big influence on me too. For me the most interesting bit of the book, and series, was how Ender himself is self-consciously the author of his own downfall, rather than having it foisted upon him by jealous or horrified "normal" people. It's quite life-affirming that, presented with the choice of turning into Peter or Valentine, he turns towards Valentine.
I guess I think of it as a reminder that even though bad systems can make us bad people, we're capable of stepping outside of them and making our own moral choices. Society is something we can remake through our own decisions, and not a straitjacket. It's a lesson that I think Orson Scott Card himself would benefit from learning in his own life, ironically enough.
“To me, it was the cautionary tale of a boy whose excessive pride in his own natural ability and resentment at his chronic mistreatment combine to make him amoral and destructive.” I definitely read it that way too, though I think I’m enough older than you that I had a different experience with the book and subsequent follow ups. I always felt Ender knew what was going on in the end, but felt he had no choice. The two species couldn’t communicate, notwithstanding the alien’s attempts with Ender. I always felt a flaw in the book was the underexplained initial attack by the aliens and that it ignored the possibility of the aliens backing off and signaling truce. But maybe Card wanted to emphasize the relentlessness of humanity once stirred to war?
yes, in fact that explicit framing was presented (by Graff? Maybe Mazer?) within the book itself. It's why Ender's parents were allowed to have a third child, after the first two showed such (imperfect) promise from the perspective of the authorities.
There's a Goldilocks joke in there somewhere, but I'm not funny enough to find it.
The sister didn't have a killer instinct, and the brother didn't have the natural empathy to understand people well enough to earn their loyalty and understand enemies well enough to defeat them.
This was fun. I appreciated your perspective but I have so many way to challenge this. Context - Not bullied as a child, experienced racism, smart with shitty grades, rebellious and told i was beautiful far too often to be terribly insecure. Now at 50 I'm married and have raised 2 incredibly bright, dare I say "gifted" kids and 2 grandkids (my sisters) showing a lot of the same traits.
Here's the thing about beauty and intellect or talent. It's mostly genetic. You didn't earn it. So that brings me a lot of humility. It's a luck of the draw. I'd thank my parents.
Violence as a child is sociopathic. The best warriors throughout time probably had traits on that spectrum.
Violence does beget violence. But the assumption always is that 'nerdy' forest gump type of kid is suppose to turn the other cheek, or triumph in some fashion through wealth. (I just vomited in my mouth) People are much more complex. That nerd can actually be 6 ft 2 250 pound sociopath who pulls double duty in the military and performs all the grunt work NO ONE is willing to do. That is true of nerds blah blah blah. Let's not stereotype ourselves. I certainly wouldn't want anyone doing it to my kids.
Dont conflate a challenge or words with violence. People don't get to publicly LIE. Particularly if you CHOOSE to be a public figure. Within the bounds of the law you are fair game. I don't give a rat fuck about FOMO, or being liked, or popularity. DO THE RIGHT THING. Celebrities leverage that same sociopathic behavior into manipulation of a narrative. How mentally unstable is that. That's what I fear. At least in Ender's game there is a darwinian narrative that serves a purpose. There is some measure of honesty to it. The thin veneer of civilization.
Being a woman is another ball of wax I wont even begin to get into. Weaponizing your sexuality is the frickin' oldest trick in the book and men still can't see through it. Imagine what a smart woman could do with that? To parallel Ender.
Would you know what actions were subterfuge, chaos, strategic? I'd have to give myself away constantly. That wouldn't be very smart.
If I occasionally insult people i think are 'insanely stupid', it might be because the future I want for my children and theirs (I just sanctified myself :-) how social media) doesn't allow for this amount of nonsense and waste. You might think it's ego. I'm certainly not alone.
The parallel series starting with “Ender’s Shadow” was more interesting to me.
(From Wikipedia)From the perspective of Bean, Ender’s second-in-command. The first three sequels, Shadow of the Hegemon, Shadow Puppets and Shadow of the Giant tell the story of the struggle for world dominance after the Bugger War. (The strategic alliance between countries may interest you)
This involves the Battle School children, as well as Ender's brother, Peter Wiggin, and Petra Arkanian going up against Achilles de Flandres.
I was one of those people who *loved* Ender's game as a kid, but also I was a psycho. My favorite author for a time was Paul Zindel, whose book Rats contained a scene that was an infinitely more gruesome version of the clawing-through-the-giant's-eye one.
I will always find it hilarious that I discovered those books in my middle school library. There is _no way_ the school realized how gory they were.
hey, it's a teen coming-of-age novel! they're all like Catcher in the Rye where nothing happens and most characters are whiny, right? What could possibly go wrong? :)
I read Enders Game around the same time that I read Lord of the Flies. And, like Lord of the Flies, I suspected that a lot of people took a much different message from Enders Game than I did. I wasn’t as deeply affected by Enders Game as you appear to have been, but it always seemed evident to me that it was in many senses a cautionary tale. Of course, much of the sci-fi canon contains messages which seem to go over most people’s heads. (This is, by the way, a pattern common most literature, not just sci-fi.) Most people see Wesley Crusher not as an instantiation of the rise of the nerd but rather as a petulant and annoying kid in an otherwise adult world.
heh, one of my kids just read Lord of the Flies in school, and I told him the message is to beware of idiots acting in groups & to understand the importance of civilization as a vehicle to keep smarter people in charge. :)
He knew I was half-kidding, don't worry. But am I wrong?
The common interpretation of Lord of the Flies seems to be that it is pessimistic commentary on human nature. (Hobbes’ “nasty, brutish, and short.”) While that’s true, it also serves as commentary on the nature of power dynamics….it can be seen not just as a Hobbesian parable of violence and death, but simply as a parable about machinations for power in, say, a corporate boardroom. In other words the violence isn’t the point, or rather, it’s not the only point.
That's how I read it too. Not that we needed society to restrain us from violence, but that violence was an inevitable part of creating the mini-society that the boys were setting up on the island.
Something that I think has been lost to history is the context behind it too. Lord of the Flies was an intentional send-up of British colonial era Robinson Crusoe-type novels where (white, European) people would get stranded on an island and set up their own little civilisation. The boys in Lord of the Flies would do that too, but the way they did it was considerably nastier.
Also, the pilot that rescues them was a military one who goes back off to war after rescuing the stranded children, suggesting that the adult world isn't any less savage than the children on the island were...
not wrong at all, from my perspective. "what happens if we smash all the institutions" is a thought experiment that is answered with terrifying precision by that book, which is why every high schooler reads it. Left to our own devices, human nature is feral, violent, excessively fearful, insufficiently empathetic, and builds nothing that can last. Our institutions, and the willingness to respect them and follow their rules and work within their system, are the essence of civilization and how we can avoid being in a constant battle against hunger and tribal violence. And who better to illustrate what "reversion to being feral" really looks like than a bunch of pre-teen boys, who aren't far from that even on their best days?
Stories like Ender’s Game, Dune, even the Hunger Games all face the same problem: They want to be a cautionary tale, but their appeal comes in large part from the reader *enjoying* reading about the protagonist killing other people. Maybe this is part of the intentionally-troubling message, but I’ve still always found it a bit odd - like the book wants to have its cake and eat it too. Still, great books.
Also, people hate on the Ender’s Game sequels, but even as a teenager I thought Speaker for the Dead was the best of the series.
How many great films involve leading the viewer to sympathize with someone awful, because you like them or understand what they're doing? Anti-hero is a trope for a reason, because when we realize that we're taking the perspective of Patrick Bateman in American Psycho or Hannibal Lecter in Silence of the Lambs, it does (or ought to) provide a jerk of realization and an opportunity for reflection. Are we happy, at the end, that Lecter escapes to freedom and promises Clarice that she'll be safe and looked-after - or terrified? We're not sure! Probably both! That's why it's a great ending!
In Ender's Game, though, I think the novel's narration makes pretty clear that the actions Ender takes, even if they're understood as pragmatic, are not to be admired. Ender isn't proud of them, so neither are we, the readers. I don't think it's posing quite the same moral dilemmas. Instead, the primary moral dilemma of the book is whether the ends justify the means.
I’m arguing that, even if we’re not proud of Ender in the abstract, on an emotional/subconscious level, we’re savoring his victories. Otherwise, the book wouldn’t be such an engrossing read.
The reader may not particularly enjoy the killing done by the protagonist but the narrative structure puts you on the side of the protagonist and vicariously enjoy his triumph
I enjoyed the logic of it - the acknowledgment that violence sufficient to create permanent deterrence is, in fact, a solution to a problem identifiable to a specific actor. (Note that I believe in the book Ender doesn't actually know or specifically intend to kill the other child -- that's information we learn later as readers but that is withheld from Ender himself -- but we know that his internal thought process is "engage in sufficient violence solve the problem so that this doesn't recur" rather than merely to get a lick in and be subject to the recurrence of the same problem the next day). Conversely, because I as a reader didn't empathize with the bully in the story, I didn't experience any vicarious horror at his death (Admittedly I'm not sure if that would be true today. Parenthood kind of totally reorients one's attitudes towards the topic or portrayal of violence to children.)
Right, and importantly, that’s one of the main reasons it’s such a good book. The animal part of your brain gets the pleasure of the triumph and your moral side is prevented from ruining the fun by the fact that it’s a cautionary tale.
I guess what I’m saying is (1) this feels a bit icky, though I’m not sure that it’s actually bad, and (2) it’s no surprise that people misinterpret these books - it’s not like those people are *incorrect* about what makes the books a good read
Speaker of the Dead clearly demonstrates that Card's intention all along was to frame Ender's Game as a cautionary tale. Over time (and as I have gotten older), I have found more meaning in the sequel than in the first book.
The other moral of Ender's Game, and one that probably resonated with a lot of smart 13 year olds in a different way, is one Orson Scott Card has explicitly pointed out in an introduction to the book: that children are *people* with inner lives that are every bit as rich and important as those that adults have, and who can be better than the adults around them and deserve to be taken seriously. Many 50 year-olds will look at a smart 14-year-old complaining about being treated like an inferior and see an uppity [racial slur] that needs to be put in their place instead of a human being that deserves to be treated like one. If you want to play Oppression Olympics, children are the grand champions.
yes, this was made pretty explicit in Card's introduction to the book - that readers were pleasantly shocked to find a book that treated children as people, and told the children who were reading it that it was understood that they had internal dilemmas and thoughts just as complex, and just as worthy of narration and explaining, as the adults do. Was a big factor in the book's popularity with teens imo, because of the agency it gives to children who are accustomed to not having much of it.
I only read Ender's Game for the first time recently at the age of 42. As you might expect, the behavior of the adults in the story was perhaps even more interesting to me. The way in which he is being manipulated the entire time, even when he thinks he's out smarting them.
I'm not sure if Noah's memory is foggy on this, but in my reading it's a crucial detail that Ender, and you the reader, do not know definitively that he killed those boys until later in the book when it's revealed by adults. Even if Ender suspected it, any consequences or even acknowledgement of the terrible things he is capable of is kept from him by the adults to further their own plans. The Game seems to be the adults making sure that there is no limit to what Ender will do so long as he thinks it's just a game.
The first time Ender is confronted with the real and horrific consequences of his abilities is when he has killed an entire species, and in that moment everyone around him is celebrating. The experience would probably have physiologically broken a real child. What disturbed me in this book most (and yes disturbing is the right take away) was not Ender, it was the depravity of "the adults in the room". Especially when you realize that at this point the Buggers were no longer the threat we thought they were. That there may have been a possibility of a different understanding being reached.
"There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs."
I read it probably around the same time you did (early teens, mid-90s) and I wasn't horrified at all by the Giant's Drink scene. To me, I was already well-inculcated in suspending disbelief when in video game worlds, so the intended subtext went right over my head; I saw it as just another "creative solution in a no-win scenario."
In general, I would be cautious at a blanket condemnation of "Ender's Game-likers"; my cultural milieu at that point in my upbringing was things like Last Starfighter/Tron (on the sci-fi side) and Top Gun/Iron Eagle (on the military side) so I didn't engage with the brutality/violence/cautionary themes at all then. If you'd asked me for my summary then, it probably would have been "Extreme situations justify extreme measures." Only now, that I have some life experience in the military under my belt, would I add "and for those involved, their reward is regret, not adulation." In short, if it's your favorite at 13, that says one thing; if at 30, that says something else.
Perhaps a more shallow reading of the book, but for me I loved how it wrestled with the problem of being able to commit fully to a solution. The first bully sets this up - pointing out the problem that merely hurting or antagonizing the adversary would just make things worse. But as you say, truly solving the problem is morally uncomfortable.
In that sense, I feel like it stimulated my brain in the same direction economics does. What will be the actual consequences of action or inaction? Based on measured outcomes, what path leads to success - even if it does not FEEL emotionally satisfying?
Note that the entire Ender's Game program reflects this moral compromise. Should you be taking young children and shaping them into killing machines? I mean "no", but on the other hand do you want to win?
Interestingly enough, the novel is an expansion of a short story, which omits a lot of the backstory for Ender and his family and focuses on the training at the space station and the actual campaign against the aliens. It is likely the reason so many people consider "Ender's Game" a triumph of capable and intelligent people over an imminent threat.
The novel is the one that puts the plot in a different context, and it is indeed very frightening. The realisation that high intellect doesn't save you from your inner darkness has always given me shivers. However, the most terrifying part of all is that what Ender does is actually rational. He applies extreme violence against his bullies not because he enjoys it, but because he doesn't want it to happen again, as he realises nothing will shield him from more bullying if he lets go.
I have always considered this a reflection of actual global politics. Essentially, it is the idea that you don't strike first, but when attacked, you respond in massive force so it doesn't happen again. This is probably the most brilliant part of the novel, as it brings that concept from global politics, where many would support it, to children, where it is terrifying. What the novel taught me is that actions have consequences, especially violent actions.
To wrap up, you don't have to look hard to find countries that apply a doctrine of extreme response when attacked. There is a conflict going on right now that has been ignited by that doctrine, as a matter of fact - and yes, I am referring to Israel and Gaza. So the novel provides plenty of food for thought. It is also yet another example of how fiction becomes reality, like manipulation of public opinion through social networks could lead to massive policy changes (this is about the novel's subplot featuring Ender's siblings).
This is an excellent analysis of the book. It very much fits within the Cold War-era zeitgeist of making political themes more engaging and disturbing by reinterpreting them as childhood games, like Lord of the Flies, or the Peter Gabriel song "Games without Frontiers".
Ender’s game is as you say an excellent SF but also so much more. With the following several books in what became a series it is both cautionary and visionary. The horror of genocide, the Intelligent agent of later books, the demagogic power of social media. The exploitation of the planet of autistic people. Important and powerful. The movie sucked
I re-read Ender's Game about a year ago along with Speaker for the Dead, Xenocide, and Children of the Mind. Things definitely fall off after Speaker, but the tetralogy is worth going through once at least.
First off, Ender's Game felt incomplete without also reading Speaker for the Dead, especially on a re-read. I think the emphasis Speaker places on communication, empathy, and prejudice provides the context necessary to fully grasp the tragedy of what Ender did to the Buggers as well as the monstrosity of the adults who placed Ender in a position to commit Xenocide.
And I think your take on Ender is interesting - I think it's true that Ender is capable of extreme, horrifying violence, but it's also true that that's EXACTLY WHAT he was selected for. His foils are explicitly Peter and Valentine - all three are highly intelligent, but Peter is a cruel sadist and Valentine is unwilling to "go all the way" the way Ender can. Ender isn't cruel. He clearly never enjoys violence. Every time he is forced into massive retaliation he is clearly traumatized. You're correct to say that his intelligence had no bearing on restraining his violent capabilities and his willingness to use them.
The monsters are the adults who cultivated the Wiggin children (remember his family was given explicit permission to have more kids for basically eugenic reasons) and then placed Ender into the situations he was placed. Even the six year old bully Ender killed was a situation engineered to determine whether Ender had the killer instinct the adults thought he needed to win the war.
So I suppose like Ender you too are being cruel to yourself for the non-sin of recognizing the potential you have to commit great evil, consciously or not. You recognize that intelligence has great utility but that something else is needed to direct that utility towards the good. It also seems you've internalized the lessons of Speaker - the key is understanding and empathy. You can't blame yourself for others wanting to use your talents for evil - but you can resist that evil by always trying first to understand and empathize.
Love Ender's Game. Thanks for the thoughts .
What Noah also doesn’t go into is that the xenocide is (presented as) necessary for the survival of the human race. If not for Ender’s victory, the buggers, not understanding the nature of human consciousness, would have exterminated humankind and suffered their own regrets. Thus while the actions of the authorities with respect to Ender were monstrous, ultimately they did what they had to do in the absence of a cosmic intervening peacekeeper.
This is related to what I think is one of the book’s biggest flaws, which is that it presents the authorities as far more competent and compassionate than is realistic. Ender’s minder, Col Graff, is written as loving Ender and only reluctantly going along with his carefully-determined training plan. In reality, bureaucratic cruelty is never so calibrated and precise.
I'm not sure given how I've read Speaker that the situation was "us or them". If I recall correctly (and even in the Giant game epilogue in Ender's Game where he finds the Hive Queen) the Buggers realized pretty soon after the first war that they made a mistake in how they understood the differences in human vs Bugger communication (where killing Bugger drones is akin to shutting down comms while killing a person is killing a fully sentient being) while also realizing that the humans were about to make the same mistake but instead it probably meant their own extinction. They launched a last ditch effort to communicate via ender which works and ultimately revived the species.
Mayyyybe that's post-war Bugger apologetics from the Queen to play to Ender's sympathies, but her interaction with the Piggies suggests it's genuine.
All of which to say, the reason I consider Speaker essential is it shows how humans erred badly by not trying to understand the Buggers and immediately resorting to massive retaliation. I don't think humanity was nuts to do this, but it's clear the prejudice (even the name Bugger is derogatory) led humans to believe they understood the situation and that it required extermination of the enemy. That's the tragedy which is redeemed in Speaker.
I agree with your reading. The point I was trying to make is that while “revenge of the nerd” is a grotesque misinterpretation, Noah’s gloss as “cautionary tale about how intelligence can be used towards monstrous ends” is also an oversimplification. Part of what makes the books good is that every character can be read sympathetically (even Peter), even though the story being told is one of an enormous, tragic crime.
Incidentally, though normally I have no trouble separating art from artist, I still can’t wrap my head around how the same person who wrote a beautiful series of books about the importance of empathy towards the alien came to OSC’s later fate.
What is "OSC’s later fate"? (I don't keep up with these things, thanks)
Card is Mormon and was always quite hostile to queer folks, and as queer rights have advanced, he's allowed himself to be hijacked by the right-wing / anti-woke fever swamp, e.g. appearing on Ben Shapiro's show.
It's sad that somebody who could write totally alien beings as sympathetic, could not bring himself to sympathize with fellow humans.
https://www.wired.com/2013/10/enders-game/
My interpretation of this is that there really wasn't a context for the Buggers to correct the misapprehension. Their last, best hope for survival was Jane (who enabled Ender to eventually overcome the otherwise-unwinnable Giant's challenge, although the Buggers' limited capacity for empathy meant that they kind of just chucked her and lost track of her whereabouts once her purpose was accomplished), but given the events of the end of Ender's Game and Speaker / Xenocide it seems clear that the Buggers knew they were essentially screwed as far as averting the fundamentals of the conflict.
In essence, the humans had no capacity to appreciate the PoV of the buggers, no reason to believe it wasn't a zero-sum conflict, and neither side had any real means to correct the misapprehension prior to the resolution of the conflict. Given this, there's no real fault to find with the human side at large--they didn't start the conflict and took the most rational action available to them in view of the information they had.
The PoV of the formics was invading Earth and killing all humans. Xenocide of the formics was absolutely the right response by humanity. No other response was possible after the formic invasion, no chance could be taken that the formics could be trusted to adhere to any treaty.
I only ever read Ender's Game. I had no interest in apologetics for the xenocide.
"it shows how humans erred badly by not trying to understand the Buggers and immediately resorting to massive retaliation. "
Was it "humans," or just the military dictatorship who took over the planet? The book tells us that the actual footage of the main human victory was tightly censored, and only a select few knew the truth about what the aliens were actually like. It's reasonable for the average person to be afraid when they didn't know anything, but after Ender learned the truth, he probably should have thought a little bit more about what that really meant instead of just "how can I use this to kill them?" And the adults running everything *really* should have thought about that, assuming they even cared.
Glad to see the love for Speaker for the Dead. I actually prefer it to Ender’s Game
Your analysis of Peter and Valentine is apt, but are the adults actually monsters in the context of Ender's game under a global analysis? IIRC The actual genocidal conflict with the Buggers wasn't a metaphor, it was a literal us-versus-them zero-sum conflict (at least as far as the information then-available to all relevant actors went).
...Whoops, wrote that then ninja'd by Phil.
Replied to Phil! Check it out. I don't think the adults are as redeemable. I think the redemption of humanity fell to Ender.
Really enjoyed reading this, especially since Enders' Game had a big influence on me too. For me the most interesting bit of the book, and series, was how Ender himself is self-consciously the author of his own downfall, rather than having it foisted upon him by jealous or horrified "normal" people. It's quite life-affirming that, presented with the choice of turning into Peter or Valentine, he turns towards Valentine.
I guess I think of it as a reminder that even though bad systems can make us bad people, we're capable of stepping outside of them and making our own moral choices. Society is something we can remake through our own decisions, and not a straitjacket. It's a lesson that I think Orson Scott Card himself would benefit from learning in his own life, ironically enough.
“To me, it was the cautionary tale of a boy whose excessive pride in his own natural ability and resentment at his chronic mistreatment combine to make him amoral and destructive.” I definitely read it that way too, though I think I’m enough older than you that I had a different experience with the book and subsequent follow ups. I always felt Ender knew what was going on in the end, but felt he had no choice. The two species couldn’t communicate, notwithstanding the alien’s attempts with Ender. I always felt a flaw in the book was the underexplained initial attack by the aliens and that it ignored the possibility of the aliens backing off and signaling truce. But maybe Card wanted to emphasize the relentlessness of humanity once stirred to war?
Also…. The sister was not ruthless enough… the older brother too ruthless… Ender was… just right?
yes, in fact that explicit framing was presented (by Graff? Maybe Mazer?) within the book itself. It's why Ender's parents were allowed to have a third child, after the first two showed such (imperfect) promise from the perspective of the authorities.
There's a Goldilocks joke in there somewhere, but I'm not funny enough to find it.
The sister didn't have a killer instinct, and the brother didn't have the natural empathy to understand people well enough to earn their loyalty and understand enemies well enough to defeat them.
This was fun. I appreciated your perspective but I have so many way to challenge this. Context - Not bullied as a child, experienced racism, smart with shitty grades, rebellious and told i was beautiful far too often to be terribly insecure. Now at 50 I'm married and have raised 2 incredibly bright, dare I say "gifted" kids and 2 grandkids (my sisters) showing a lot of the same traits.
Here's the thing about beauty and intellect or talent. It's mostly genetic. You didn't earn it. So that brings me a lot of humility. It's a luck of the draw. I'd thank my parents.
Violence as a child is sociopathic. The best warriors throughout time probably had traits on that spectrum.
Violence does beget violence. But the assumption always is that 'nerdy' forest gump type of kid is suppose to turn the other cheek, or triumph in some fashion through wealth. (I just vomited in my mouth) People are much more complex. That nerd can actually be 6 ft 2 250 pound sociopath who pulls double duty in the military and performs all the grunt work NO ONE is willing to do. That is true of nerds blah blah blah. Let's not stereotype ourselves. I certainly wouldn't want anyone doing it to my kids.
Dont conflate a challenge or words with violence. People don't get to publicly LIE. Particularly if you CHOOSE to be a public figure. Within the bounds of the law you are fair game. I don't give a rat fuck about FOMO, or being liked, or popularity. DO THE RIGHT THING. Celebrities leverage that same sociopathic behavior into manipulation of a narrative. How mentally unstable is that. That's what I fear. At least in Ender's game there is a darwinian narrative that serves a purpose. There is some measure of honesty to it. The thin veneer of civilization.
Being a woman is another ball of wax I wont even begin to get into. Weaponizing your sexuality is the frickin' oldest trick in the book and men still can't see through it. Imagine what a smart woman could do with that? To parallel Ender.
Would you know what actions were subterfuge, chaos, strategic? I'd have to give myself away constantly. That wouldn't be very smart.
If I occasionally insult people i think are 'insanely stupid', it might be because the future I want for my children and theirs (I just sanctified myself :-) how social media) doesn't allow for this amount of nonsense and waste. You might think it's ego. I'm certainly not alone.
The parallel series starting with “Ender’s Shadow” was more interesting to me.
(From Wikipedia)From the perspective of Bean, Ender’s second-in-command. The first three sequels, Shadow of the Hegemon, Shadow Puppets and Shadow of the Giant tell the story of the struggle for world dominance after the Bugger War. (The strategic alliance between countries may interest you)
This involves the Battle School children, as well as Ender's brother, Peter Wiggin, and Petra Arkanian going up against Achilles de Flandres.
I was one of those people who *loved* Ender's game as a kid, but also I was a psycho. My favorite author for a time was Paul Zindel, whose book Rats contained a scene that was an infinitely more gruesome version of the clawing-through-the-giant's-eye one.
I will always find it hilarious that I discovered those books in my middle school library. There is _no way_ the school realized how gory they were.
hey, it's a teen coming-of-age novel! they're all like Catcher in the Rye where nothing happens and most characters are whiny, right? What could possibly go wrong? :)
I read Enders Game around the same time that I read Lord of the Flies. And, like Lord of the Flies, I suspected that a lot of people took a much different message from Enders Game than I did. I wasn’t as deeply affected by Enders Game as you appear to have been, but it always seemed evident to me that it was in many senses a cautionary tale. Of course, much of the sci-fi canon contains messages which seem to go over most people’s heads. (This is, by the way, a pattern common most literature, not just sci-fi.) Most people see Wesley Crusher not as an instantiation of the rise of the nerd but rather as a petulant and annoying kid in an otherwise adult world.
heh, one of my kids just read Lord of the Flies in school, and I told him the message is to beware of idiots acting in groups & to understand the importance of civilization as a vehicle to keep smarter people in charge. :)
He knew I was half-kidding, don't worry. But am I wrong?
The common interpretation of Lord of the Flies seems to be that it is pessimistic commentary on human nature. (Hobbes’ “nasty, brutish, and short.”) While that’s true, it also serves as commentary on the nature of power dynamics….it can be seen not just as a Hobbesian parable of violence and death, but simply as a parable about machinations for power in, say, a corporate boardroom. In other words the violence isn’t the point, or rather, it’s not the only point.
That's how I read it too. Not that we needed society to restrain us from violence, but that violence was an inevitable part of creating the mini-society that the boys were setting up on the island.
Something that I think has been lost to history is the context behind it too. Lord of the Flies was an intentional send-up of British colonial era Robinson Crusoe-type novels where (white, European) people would get stranded on an island and set up their own little civilisation. The boys in Lord of the Flies would do that too, but the way they did it was considerably nastier.
Also, the pilot that rescues them was a military one who goes back off to war after rescuing the stranded children, suggesting that the adult world isn't any less savage than the children on the island were...
not wrong at all, from my perspective. "what happens if we smash all the institutions" is a thought experiment that is answered with terrifying precision by that book, which is why every high schooler reads it. Left to our own devices, human nature is feral, violent, excessively fearful, insufficiently empathetic, and builds nothing that can last. Our institutions, and the willingness to respect them and follow their rules and work within their system, are the essence of civilization and how we can avoid being in a constant battle against hunger and tribal violence. And who better to illustrate what "reversion to being feral" really looks like than a bunch of pre-teen boys, who aren't far from that even on their best days?
"...and builds nothing that can last."
Ruthless military conquest is the bedrock principle of every successful, world-shaping empire. Including our own Pax Americana.
Stories like Ender’s Game, Dune, even the Hunger Games all face the same problem: They want to be a cautionary tale, but their appeal comes in large part from the reader *enjoying* reading about the protagonist killing other people. Maybe this is part of the intentionally-troubling message, but I’ve still always found it a bit odd - like the book wants to have its cake and eat it too. Still, great books.
Also, people hate on the Ender’s Game sequels, but even as a teenager I thought Speaker for the Dead was the best of the series.
How many great films involve leading the viewer to sympathize with someone awful, because you like them or understand what they're doing? Anti-hero is a trope for a reason, because when we realize that we're taking the perspective of Patrick Bateman in American Psycho or Hannibal Lecter in Silence of the Lambs, it does (or ought to) provide a jerk of realization and an opportunity for reflection. Are we happy, at the end, that Lecter escapes to freedom and promises Clarice that she'll be safe and looked-after - or terrified? We're not sure! Probably both! That's why it's a great ending!
In Ender's Game, though, I think the novel's narration makes pretty clear that the actions Ender takes, even if they're understood as pragmatic, are not to be admired. Ender isn't proud of them, so neither are we, the readers. I don't think it's posing quite the same moral dilemmas. Instead, the primary moral dilemma of the book is whether the ends justify the means.
I’m arguing that, even if we’re not proud of Ender in the abstract, on an emotional/subconscious level, we’re savoring his victories. Otherwise, the book wouldn’t be such an engrossing read.
The reader may not particularly enjoy the killing done by the protagonist but the narrative structure puts you on the side of the protagonist and vicariously enjoy his triumph
I enjoyed the logic of it - the acknowledgment that violence sufficient to create permanent deterrence is, in fact, a solution to a problem identifiable to a specific actor. (Note that I believe in the book Ender doesn't actually know or specifically intend to kill the other child -- that's information we learn later as readers but that is withheld from Ender himself -- but we know that his internal thought process is "engage in sufficient violence solve the problem so that this doesn't recur" rather than merely to get a lick in and be subject to the recurrence of the same problem the next day). Conversely, because I as a reader didn't empathize with the bully in the story, I didn't experience any vicarious horror at his death (Admittedly I'm not sure if that would be true today. Parenthood kind of totally reorients one's attitudes towards the topic or portrayal of violence to children.)
Right, and importantly, that’s one of the main reasons it’s such a good book. The animal part of your brain gets the pleasure of the triumph and your moral side is prevented from ruining the fun by the fact that it’s a cautionary tale.
I guess what I’m saying is (1) this feels a bit icky, though I’m not sure that it’s actually bad, and (2) it’s no surprise that people misinterpret these books - it’s not like those people are *incorrect* about what makes the books a good read
Speaker of the Dead clearly demonstrates that Card's intention all along was to frame Ender's Game as a cautionary tale. Over time (and as I have gotten older), I have found more meaning in the sequel than in the first book.
The other moral of Ender's Game, and one that probably resonated with a lot of smart 13 year olds in a different way, is one Orson Scott Card has explicitly pointed out in an introduction to the book: that children are *people* with inner lives that are every bit as rich and important as those that adults have, and who can be better than the adults around them and deserve to be taken seriously. Many 50 year-olds will look at a smart 14-year-old complaining about being treated like an inferior and see an uppity [racial slur] that needs to be put in their place instead of a human being that deserves to be treated like one. If you want to play Oppression Olympics, children are the grand champions.
yes, this was made pretty explicit in Card's introduction to the book - that readers were pleasantly shocked to find a book that treated children as people, and told the children who were reading it that it was understood that they had internal dilemmas and thoughts just as complex, and just as worthy of narration and explaining, as the adults do. Was a big factor in the book's popularity with teens imo, because of the agency it gives to children who are accustomed to not having much of it.
I only read Ender's Game for the first time recently at the age of 42. As you might expect, the behavior of the adults in the story was perhaps even more interesting to me. The way in which he is being manipulated the entire time, even when he thinks he's out smarting them.
I'm not sure if Noah's memory is foggy on this, but in my reading it's a crucial detail that Ender, and you the reader, do not know definitively that he killed those boys until later in the book when it's revealed by adults. Even if Ender suspected it, any consequences or even acknowledgement of the terrible things he is capable of is kept from him by the adults to further their own plans. The Game seems to be the adults making sure that there is no limit to what Ender will do so long as he thinks it's just a game.
The first time Ender is confronted with the real and horrific consequences of his abilities is when he has killed an entire species, and in that moment everyone around him is celebrating. The experience would probably have physiologically broken a real child. What disturbed me in this book most (and yes disturbing is the right take away) was not Ender, it was the depravity of "the adults in the room". Especially when you realize that at this point the Buggers were no longer the threat we thought they were. That there may have been a possibility of a different understanding being reached.
Anyhow, thanks for this.
Noah, it sounds like you got smart person complex all on your own.
A lot of people were reinforced in that by Atlas Shrugged. But that was before your time . . . Or am I wrong? Did that book impact you?
"There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs."
-- John Rogers
I read it probably around the same time you did (early teens, mid-90s) and I wasn't horrified at all by the Giant's Drink scene. To me, I was already well-inculcated in suspending disbelief when in video game worlds, so the intended subtext went right over my head; I saw it as just another "creative solution in a no-win scenario."
In general, I would be cautious at a blanket condemnation of "Ender's Game-likers"; my cultural milieu at that point in my upbringing was things like Last Starfighter/Tron (on the sci-fi side) and Top Gun/Iron Eagle (on the military side) so I didn't engage with the brutality/violence/cautionary themes at all then. If you'd asked me for my summary then, it probably would have been "Extreme situations justify extreme measures." Only now, that I have some life experience in the military under my belt, would I add "and for those involved, their reward is regret, not adulation." In short, if it's your favorite at 13, that says one thing; if at 30, that says something else.
Perhaps a more shallow reading of the book, but for me I loved how it wrestled with the problem of being able to commit fully to a solution. The first bully sets this up - pointing out the problem that merely hurting or antagonizing the adversary would just make things worse. But as you say, truly solving the problem is morally uncomfortable.
In that sense, I feel like it stimulated my brain in the same direction economics does. What will be the actual consequences of action or inaction? Based on measured outcomes, what path leads to success - even if it does not FEEL emotionally satisfying?
Note that the entire Ender's Game program reflects this moral compromise. Should you be taking young children and shaping them into killing machines? I mean "no", but on the other hand do you want to win?