15 ms·

Ender's Game is an Understated Story of Uncertainty

40 points by koblenski 13y ago

tel 13y ago
But boy, is it refreshing to get away from all of that telling, telling, telling for a while. I often find telling comes about when there is no ground truth or confidence in a field. The author must advise because there's no certainty that if they just showed you what they knew you would arrive in the same place as they. Mathematics does a lot of telling too, but the best books don't need to as much. They just present things and let you fill in the missing details. It's almost-but-not-quite the confidence of fiction, where a good author shows and doesn't tell because the things they're trying to share are just too large to be simply explained. I've also found the best CS books don't have to tell. I was recently reading the Reasoned Schemer and I immediately came to love the style they wrote it in. The author and the "reader" are just exploring something together at whatever rate makes sense. It's one of the few CS books I'd want to read over again.
- koblenski 13y ago
  Thanks for the tip on the Reasoned Schemer. It was on my book list, so I'll have to bump it up to the top. Sounds like I'll enjoy it.
- fractallyte 13y ago
  This is the 'Programmed Learning' style (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programmed_learning http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programmed_learning). (It's what led me to 'The Little Lisper', in the same series as 'The Reasoned Schemer'). Another excellent example is Engineering Mathematics, by Ken Stroud (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_Stroud http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_Stroud). I used this at college, and have always loved the style: short 'frames' of explanation and examples, with questions leading onto the next frame, building confidence and skill with each bite-sized step.
  - tel 13y ago
    Ooh, thanks for the link! I'm interested in trying to write a bit in that style so it'll be nice to see a few more sources.
- lnanek2 13y ago
  Orson Scott Card could do a lot of telling if he wanted. He's actually pretty fiercely conservative and anti-gay, for example. That said, I've read the books, really enjoyed them, and wouldn't have realized if I didn't know. It's pretty amazing how he keeps it out of the books and doesn't just write tea party rantings constantly or something. Telling people isn't a good way to convince them anyway, I suppose.
  - tel 13y ago
    Yeah. I focused on a quote that seemed to be more about reading than Ender's Game in particular. I remember reading it when I was young and being so influenced by it... and then slowly rejecting all of the things I thought I had learned from it as I grew up. I'm afraid to read it again because I feel like it's likely to be a young kid's Ayn Rand—powerfully compelling in a selfish way that speaks so much to a young kid having trouble fitting in and seeking acceptance through competency. And then I'm afraid that the nastier side that may seep through will echo a lot of the things I've learned about OSC as a person in the intervening years. He doesn't sound much like someone I respect, and while I don't believe that I must respect an author to get something from their work... I don't think it's an easy process.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
- ctdonath 13y ago
  A D, only because there was in fact effort put into placing coherent verbiage on the page. Replace "Ender" with "protagonist", and "Ender's Game" with "Title", and a raving fan of the book wouldn't have the slightest notion of the subject of the review. The author revels in not being told what to think, and unnecessary details being left out; he says nothing about the development of young siblings thrust into positions of leadership regarding an interstellar war, the juxtaposition of petty childhood rivalries pressed against planetary survival, society-bending consequences of relativistic travel (yay hard sci-fi!), the emergence of brilliant military thinking in immense scale & dimension, and the achievement & suffering of a boy far beyond what childhood should endure ... and how all this prepares him for an even greater purpose detailed in the massive tomes which follow.
minikites 13y ago
An understated story of Nazi superiority maybe: Orson Scott Card Has Always Been an Asshat (2005): http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2005/5/28/22428/7034 http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2005/5/28/22428/7034 ender and hitler: sympathy for the superman (20 years later) (2007): http://peachfront.diaryland.com/enderhitlte.html http://peachfront.diaryland.com/enderhitlte.html Creating the Innocent Killer: Ender's Game, Intention, and Morality (2004): http://www4.ncsu.edu/~tenshi/Killer_000.htm http://www4.ncsu.edu/~tenshi/Killer_000.htm
- saturdaysaint 13y ago
  Granted, I read it at an older age than its intended audience, but I found EG to be tedious Objectivism-lite. There's little of what I look for in literature or life - humor, surprise, adventure, character evolution. The chosen one (a tedious sci-fi trope without a bit of invention) mostly has it all figured out from page 1, and the book turns into a painful slog as he nears the finish line laden with the all consuming importance of his task. If only all of us had outside authorities telling us what's important and we just had to focus with laserlike intensity on those preordained goals. As it turns out, determining our own values and participating with other people with their own independent values and agendas is a pretty significant part of the journey for most of the interesting and/or great people I've read about. I mean, it's funny that liking Ender's Game is such a nerd cliche when the paths of actual tech luminaries (Jobs and Gates) are so much more winding and free-spirited (and therefore interesting to me at least).
  - EliRivers 13y ago
    Everyone reads something different from it. When I read it, it seemed to me that Ender spent a lot of time hating the path laid out for him, often able to see what was coming but unable to do anything to stop it, and his issues with it come close to rendering him a catatonic mess.
  - humanrebar 13y ago
    I think you underestimate how much kids really are set on tracks with preordained goals. Things don't really open up unless you are born into a very well off family (like Gates, by the way) or until you finish school.
falcolas 13y ago
I have never quite understood the mythos surrounding Ender's Game. I read it as an adult, and the overarching theme that stood out to me was abuse. Abusing children in general and exposing one child in particular to more abuse because they might be a solution to an otherwise "unsolvable" problem? It just struck me as ridiculous.
- amishforkfight 13y ago
  I thought the abuse was part of the story. The lengths we will go to preserve ourselves, even to destroying the weakest of us in the effort. The subsequent Ender novels delve into Ender coming to grips with how he was used and what he did. Granted it's been forever since I read them.
- koblenski 13y ago
  Yes, there was plenty of abuse going on, and the I.F. thought that abuse was necessary for survival. They never stopped to think if there was possibly another explanation for the first two wars with the buggers and the following calm. They relentlessly pursued extermination of another intelligent life-form at the hands of an innocent minor. In the end it was far from clear whether any of that was necessary, and that is where the biggest uncertainty lies. It sucks that that was the path they chose, but I can't say that it's something humanity isn't or wouldn't be capable of.
  - mcguire 13y ago
    "I can't say that it's something humanity isn't or wouldn't be capable of." You can't say? It's certainly something that humanity is, and will remain, capable of. I just can't say that it's something humanity wouldn't choose over some other option.
- generj 13y ago
  I think the book makes the case that none of them are really children, but really adults in children's bodies (with the exception of the first boy Ender accidentally killed). The book grapples with these issues, and Graff is brought to trial for this.
fennecfoxen 13y ago
Right, so, Orson Scott Card once gave a piece of writing advice: as soon as you notice that your story is trying to give someone a moral, try to undermine it or thwart it in some way. I think that's what you're seeing here (notwithstanding the series' overarching allegory on the book of Mormon and whatever attendant lessons exist there). Postscript: Hey, guys, some of you need to crank up the ostentatious "I hate ender's game!" knob a little louder. Some of us still are unaware that there exist people who dislike the book! Surely your links to a blog post which polarizes the matter in the light of your favorite philosophical or political movement will change everyone's opinion and fix this. :P
- anatoly 13y ago
  It's nice of you to point out that, coincidentally, the people you disagree with are the ones behaving ostentatiously on this thread. Here, let me chime in with another piece of Card's writing advice, as convincingly retold by Jo Walton: "My C shelves begin, controversially, with Orson Scott Card, who was one of my favourite authors for a long time but whom I can no longer read. I started reading him with Hot Sleep and A Planet Called Treason in the early 80s, and I stopped in 1997, so I have read absolutely everything up to then and nothing since. I stopped reading him because he said in his book on how to write that the best way to get readers engaged was to have appealing innocent characters and torture them, and after that I kept seeing that he was doing that and it kept jerking me out of the story."
  - tel 13y ago
    That's a pretty great synopsis of what I remember about Ender's Game.
  - humanrebar 13y ago
    Another word for jerking around the audience (readers) though manipulating characters is drama. We still watch Breaking Bad, Mad Men, and Game of Thrones, right?
    - johnchristopher 13y ago
djscram 13y ago
When I first read the book, I did think it was very compelling. But, as the book seems to have become core curriculum for every course on science fiction, I've come to think of it as really overrated. There are some very good, very innovative novels out there, and yet people keep teaching this one over and over. I've also been around a lot of science fiction writers (I went to Clarion) and learned that Orson Scott Card is kind of an ass. I know that shouldn't change my judgement of the novel itself, but I still feel much less enthusiasm for it. (the sequels also soured me on the original a bit.)
- lmm 13y ago
  Rather than just saying it's overrated, why don't you give some examples of the same kind of thing done better?
- Sujan 13y ago
  > There are some very good, very innovative novels out there Source? (Links please?)
  - groovy2shoes 13y ago
    I'd put Dune on that list.
    - humanrebar 13y ago
      Dune is good, but would you cover it in a sixth grade Language Arts class?
      - groovy2shoes 13y ago
        In my experience, covering any literary work in "Language Arts" class is a good way to suffocate any interest a sixth grader might have in said work. So no, I wouldn't.
  - anatoly 13y ago
    Are you asking about good SF novels in general or those suitable to teach young kids? For the former, there's so much SF better than Card's. Perhaps Gene Wolfe's _The Book of the new Sun_ cycle, with its brilliant writing and real moral complexity. Or Iain M. Banks' Culture novels. For the latter, lots of classic SF - Azimov, Heinlein etc.

40 points by koblenski 13y ago

tel 13y ago

But boy, is it refreshing to get away from all of that telling, telling, telling for a while. I often find telling comes about when there is no ground truth or confidence in a field. The author must advise because there's no certainty that if they just showed you what they knew you would arrive in the same place as they. Mathematics does a lot of telling too, but the best books don't need to as much. They just present things and let you fill in the missing details. It's almost-but-not-quite the confidence of fiction, where a good author shows and doesn't tell because the things they're trying to share are just too large to be simply explained. I've also found the best CS books don't have to tell. I was recently reading the Reasoned Schemer and I immediately came to love the style they wrote it in. The author and the "reader" are just exploring something together at whatever rate makes sense. It's one of the few CS books I'd want to read over again.

koblenski 13y ago
Thanks for the tip on the Reasoned Schemer. It was on my book list, so I'll have to bump it up to the top. Sounds like I'll enjoy it.
fractallyte 13y ago
This is the 'Programmed Learning' style (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programmed_learning http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programmed_learning). (It's what led me to 'The Little Lisper', in the same series as 'The Reasoned Schemer'). Another excellent example is Engineering Mathematics, by Ken Stroud (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_Stroud http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_Stroud). I used this at college, and have always loved the style: short 'frames' of explanation and examples, with questions leading onto the next frame, building confidence and skill with each bite-sized step.
- tel 13y ago
  Ooh, thanks for the link! I'm interested in trying to write a bit in that style so it'll be nice to see a few more sources.
lnanek2 13y ago
Orson Scott Card could do a lot of telling if he wanted. He's actually pretty fiercely conservative and anti-gay, for example. That said, I've read the books, really enjoyed them, and wouldn't have realized if I didn't know. It's pretty amazing how he keeps it out of the books and doesn't just write tea party rantings constantly or something. Telling people isn't a good way to convince them anyway, I suppose.
- tel 13y ago
  Yeah. I focused on a quote that seemed to be more about reading than Ender's Game in particular. I remember reading it when I was young and being so influenced by it... and then slowly rejecting all of the things I thought I had learned from it as I grew up. I'm afraid to read it again because I feel like it's likely to be a young kid's Ayn Rand—powerfully compelling in a selfish way that speaks so much to a young kid having trouble fitting in and seeking acceptance through competency. And then I'm afraid that the nastier side that may seep through will echo a lot of the things I've learned about OSC as a person in the intervening years. He doesn't sound much like someone I respect, and while I don't believe that I must respect an author to get something from their work... I don't think it's an easy process.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

ctdonath 13y ago
A D, only because there was in fact effort put into placing coherent verbiage on the page. Replace "Ender" with "protagonist", and "Ender's Game" with "Title", and a raving fan of the book wouldn't have the slightest notion of the subject of the review. The author revels in not being told what to think, and unnecessary details being left out; he says nothing about the development of young siblings thrust into positions of leadership regarding an interstellar war, the juxtaposition of petty childhood rivalries pressed against planetary survival, society-bending consequences of relativistic travel (yay hard sci-fi!), the emergence of brilliant military thinking in immense scale & dimension, and the achievement & suffering of a boy far beyond what childhood should endure ... and how all this prepares him for an even greater purpose detailed in the massive tomes which follow.

minikites 13y ago

An understated story of Nazi superiority maybe: Orson Scott Card Has Always Been an Asshat (2005): http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2005/5/28/22428/7034 http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2005/5/28/22428/7034 ender and hitler: sympathy for the superman (20 years later) (2007): http://peachfront.diaryland.com/enderhitlte.html http://peachfront.diaryland.com/enderhitlte.html Creating the Innocent Killer: Ender's Game, Intention, and Morality (2004): http://www4.ncsu.edu/~tenshi/Killer_000.htm http://www4.ncsu.edu/~tenshi/Killer_000.htm

saturdaysaint 13y ago
Granted, I read it at an older age than its intended audience, but I found EG to be tedious Objectivism-lite. There's little of what I look for in literature or life - humor, surprise, adventure, character evolution. The chosen one (a tedious sci-fi trope without a bit of invention) mostly has it all figured out from page 1, and the book turns into a painful slog as he nears the finish line laden with the all consuming importance of his task. If only all of us had outside authorities telling us what's important and we just had to focus with laserlike intensity on those preordained goals. As it turns out, determining our own values and participating with other people with their own independent values and agendas is a pretty significant part of the journey for most of the interesting and/or great people I've read about. I mean, it's funny that liking Ender's Game is such a nerd cliche when the paths of actual tech luminaries (Jobs and Gates) are so much more winding and free-spirited (and therefore interesting to me at least).
- EliRivers 13y ago
  Everyone reads something different from it. When I read it, it seemed to me that Ender spent a lot of time hating the path laid out for him, often able to see what was coming but unable to do anything to stop it, and his issues with it come close to rendering him a catatonic mess.
- humanrebar 13y ago
  I think you underestimate how much kids really are set on tracks with preordained goals. Things don't really open up unless you are born into a very well off family (like Gates, by the way) or until you finish school.

falcolas 13y ago

I have never quite understood the mythos surrounding Ender's Game. I read it as an adult, and the overarching theme that stood out to me was abuse. Abusing children in general and exposing one child in particular to more abuse because they might be a solution to an otherwise "unsolvable" problem? It just struck me as ridiculous.

amishforkfight 13y ago
I thought the abuse was part of the story. The lengths we will go to preserve ourselves, even to destroying the weakest of us in the effort. The subsequent Ender novels delve into Ender coming to grips with how he was used and what he did. Granted it's been forever since I read them.
koblenski 13y ago
Yes, there was plenty of abuse going on, and the I.F. thought that abuse was necessary for survival. They never stopped to think if there was possibly another explanation for the first two wars with the buggers and the following calm. They relentlessly pursued extermination of another intelligent life-form at the hands of an innocent minor. In the end it was far from clear whether any of that was necessary, and that is where the biggest uncertainty lies. It sucks that that was the path they chose, but I can't say that it's something humanity isn't or wouldn't be capable of.
- mcguire 13y ago
  "I can't say that it's something humanity isn't or wouldn't be capable of." You can't say? It's certainly something that humanity is, and will remain, capable of. I just can't say that it's something humanity wouldn't choose over some other option.
generj 13y ago
I think the book makes the case that none of them are really children, but really adults in children's bodies (with the exception of the first boy Ender accidentally killed). The book grapples with these issues, and Graff is brought to trial for this.

fennecfoxen 13y ago

Right, so, Orson Scott Card once gave a piece of writing advice: as soon as you notice that your story is trying to give someone a moral, try to undermine it or thwart it in some way. I think that's what you're seeing here (notwithstanding the series' overarching allegory on the book of Mormon and whatever attendant lessons exist there). Postscript: Hey, guys, some of you need to crank up the ostentatious "I hate ender's game!" knob a little louder. Some of us still are unaware that there exist people who dislike the book! Surely your links to a blog post which polarizes the matter in the light of your favorite philosophical or political movement will change everyone's opinion and fix this. :P

anatoly 13y ago
It's nice of you to point out that, coincidentally, the people you disagree with are the ones behaving ostentatiously on this thread. Here, let me chime in with another piece of Card's writing advice, as convincingly retold by Jo Walton: "My C shelves begin, controversially, with Orson Scott Card, who was one of my favourite authors for a long time but whom I can no longer read. I started reading him with Hot Sleep and A Planet Called Treason in the early 80s, and I stopped in 1997, so I have read absolutely everything up to then and nothing since. I stopped reading him because he said in his book on how to write that the best way to get readers engaged was to have appealing innocent characters and torture them, and after that I kept seeing that he was doing that and it kept jerking me out of the story."
- tel 13y ago
  That's a pretty great synopsis of what I remember about Ender's Game.
- humanrebar 13y ago
  Another word for jerking around the audience (readers) though manipulating characters is drama. We still watch Breaking Bad, Mad Men, and Game of Thrones, right?
  - johnchristopher 13y ago

djscram 13y ago

When I first read the book, I did think it was very compelling. But, as the book seems to have become core curriculum for every course on science fiction, I've come to think of it as really overrated. There are some very good, very innovative novels out there, and yet people keep teaching this one over and over. I've also been around a lot of science fiction writers (I went to Clarion) and learned that Orson Scott Card is kind of an ass. I know that shouldn't change my judgement of the novel itself, but I still feel much less enthusiasm for it. (the sequels also soured me on the original a bit.)

lmm 13y ago
Rather than just saying it's overrated, why don't you give some examples of the same kind of thing done better?
Sujan 13y ago
> There are some very good, very innovative novels out there Source? (Links please?)
- groovy2shoes 13y ago
  I'd put Dune on that list.
  - humanrebar 13y ago
    Dune is good, but would you cover it in a sixth grade Language Arts class?
    - groovy2shoes 13y ago
      In my experience, covering any literary work in "Language Arts" class is a good way to suffocate any interest a sixth grader might have in said work. So no, I wouldn't.
- anatoly 13y ago
  Are you asking about good SF novels in general or those suitable to teach young kids? For the former, there's so much SF better than Card's. Perhaps Gene Wolfe's _The Book of the new Sun_ cycle, with its brilliant writing and real moral complexity. Or Iain M. Banks' Culture novels. For the latter, lots of classic SF - Azimov, Heinlein etc.