next »

[Chris Pavia]

I liked Ender's Game overall, but one thing that seemed odd to me was the subplot of Ender's brother and sister taking on these Internet personas to try and affect political change in the world. I may be forgetting something because it's been quite a while, but it seemed like a non-sequitur that didn't really go anywhere.

[Inanimate]

Ender's Game had some very intriguing concepts in it, but yeah.

I've heard very good things about Foundation, so I'll definitely check that out; and I forgot about 2001 (which I have read, and enjoyed).

My friend has read very very light cyberpunk, barely touching upon its themes; a more accurate term could be just "stuff involving virtual reality". She did seem intrigued by the concepts, though, so I'm sure cyberpunk would be a good route to explore.

[Capntastic]

P.S. MASSIVE SPOILERSz
Either way, the intention or morality of the author is not really what makes a book good or bad. It's whether the story is good or bad, and in this case, I think the story is good.

You (and the paper) seem to be arguing that Ender is an evil person because he committed xenocide, and that his intentions don't matter in the context of his actions... but then you're using Scott Card's intentions to strengthen that argument. I think that's a bit unfair.

As for that paragraph, it's definitely supposed to be Ender's internal monologue.

a:  The story is alright, but when you deconstruct it there's some seriously messed up stuff contributing to how the story plays out as it does.  You can see it as "kid genius goes to space war school and kicks butt" or look deeper and see "kid raised to be ultimate weapon murders children his own age constantly, is still, in the context of the story, innocent and perfect".  It's like how the Sword of Truth series is supposedly about this morally perfect Libertarian ubermensch, but he still straight up murders innocent people and children because they don't agree with his worldview.  In that deeper manner, the story is arguably bad.

b:  The paper's short enough to read on your own in like 15 minutes, and it makes a lot of points that aren't easily summed up.  It's not even that Ender is 'evil', it's just that even in the context of the story, he is by no means the ultimate pure martyr/savior the story literally says he is.

c:  If it is his internal monologue, the prose makes no indication of this.  The paragraph starts with him smiling.  It also jumps tenses around: Present, past, present, past, present, past, past, past.  That it does stuff like that, the way the narrative prose and his own internal monologue sort of blurs together, is just bad writing.

In fairness, I'll transcribe a random paragraph from Foundation.   From page 105:

He visited it as a private citizen.  He saw no official and he did nothing of important.  He merely watched the obscure corners of the busy planet and poked his stubby nose into dusty crannies.

Here was have an actual string of coherent events.  Asimov has a very understated style, and it's not a character driven work by any means.  But it is very much telling us what happens and letting us infer the tone, rather than trying to make us feel a certain way be heaping on melodrama in a paragraph that is, ostensibly, describing Ender being proud about making the text scroll on the screen.

Edit:  Even if you are willing to completely discount the author's own stated goals and opinions with regard to the book, I feel the need to point out Card stating:

What worries me is when you have bad people trying to do good.  They’re not good at it, they don’t have any instinct for it, and they’re willing to do a lot of damage along the way.

So it's not even, to him, about intentions, or final results.  It is literally that there are people who are predestined to be good, despite intention or action, and those who are bad.

[Derek]

Okay, I'll read the paper later. I don't remember Ender killing more than one bully his own age, though... (regarding him "murdering children his own age constantly")

In any case, I did feel sympathy for Ender while reading the book and liked him (maybe pitied him?) more than anything else... but I didn't see him as this perfect being you're describing. Even if that were Card's intent, it wouldn't make the book bad for me - if anything, that added layer just makes the book more interesting.

Ender smiled.  He was the one who had figured out how to send messages and make them march--even as his secret enemy called him names, the method of delivery praised him.  It was not his fault he was a Third.  It was the government's idea, they were the ones who authorized it-- how else could a Third like Ender have got into school?  And now the monitor was gone.  The experiment entitled Andrew Wiggin hadn't worked out after all.  If they could, he was sure they would like to rescind the waivers that had allowed him to be born at all.  Didn't work, so erase the experiment.

I wish I had the book in front of me, but I don't think it's uncommon to write the way a character thinks, even in the third person. The reason you can tell it's his internal monologue is exactly because it's written in that sort of stilted, rambling style. It sounds like the inner monologue of a little kid, full of pride and resentment. "It was not his fault he was a Third." -> "It's not MY fault I'm a Third."

I don't think I'm reading too much into it - it seems to mirror Ender's thoughts quite naturally.

Edit:  Even if you are willing to completely discount the author's own stated goals and opinions with regard to the book, I feel the need to point out Card stating:

What worries me is when you have bad people trying to do good.  They’re not good at it, they don’t have any instinct for it, and they’re willing to do a lot of damage along the way.

So it's not even, to him, about intentions, or final results.  It is literally that there are people who are predestined to be good, despite intention or action, and those who are bad.

Man, you're inferring a LOT from that one, vague passage... without even knowing what he means by "good" and "bad", I honestly couldn't say one way or the other what that passage has to do with predestination (and what's wrong with believing in predestination, anyway?!).

[forwardresent]

I actually haven't gotten round to reading Ender's Game, it sounds interesting but I'm very peculiar about the science fiction I read.

My favourite science fiction book is probably Vurt, by Jeff Noon. It's set in some odd future and is sort of like if Fear and Loathing met The Matrix.

A band called Curve did a song about it.

[Inanimate]

I've heard of Vurt! I was actually going to read it sometime soon.

[Capntastic]

Just read the article I guess.  I don't really think I can do much more to explain why the idea that specific people are 'meant' to be good or evil, regardless of their intentions or the results of their actions is dumb as heck.  Either way, if the narrative's prose is made to mimic the protagonist's frame of mind, then I am even less persuaded to find Ender a reliable narrator, since it's constantly assuring the reader that, no, Ender had to kill this or that dude, and he's still a good person.

It's like the Death Wish movies, with Charles Bronson going on a straight up murder spree, baiting 'badguys' into trying to mug him or so he can blast them in the spine with a big fucking hand cannon.  Even if the tone of the movie sets him up as a hero, he is by no means a good person.

But even Death Wish was more about violent wish fulfillment rather than about how unfortunate it is to be this killer with a heart of gold.  Nor were any of the numerous Death Wish sequels made to honor how glorious it is that Charles Bronson killed for our sins.

[Derek]

I love Charles Bronson and Death Wish, so I might not be the right audience for that paper, but I'll let you know.

[peanutbuttershoes]

Either way, if the narrative's prose is made to mimic the protagonist's frame of mind, then I am even less persuaded to find Ender a reliable narrator, since it's constantly assuring the reader that, no, Ender had to kill this or that dude, and he's still a good person..

Wouldn't that make sense though? It sounds like that's him reassuring himself of his righteousness. Especially if it keeps coming up, over and over.
I know I'm probably not going to make you change your opinion on the book as a whole but that just seemed clear to me.

I haven't read it. But now I kinda want to.

[Capntastic]

The problem is that there's no differentiation in any way between Ender's internal monologue and any other narrative prose.  It comes across as sloppy writing, is all.  Show, don't tell, and all of that.

[Derek]

Okay, read it. But I wish I had only read the postscript, because, as with a lot of "papers", Kessel dances around his actual point until he's actually challenged on it.

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

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

Most of the paper is written as if the reader has already accepted that violence is never completely justifiable. Unfortunately, this is not a given by a long shot - for example, we have self-defense laws in the U.S. that basically decide whether violence (even murder) is reasonable.

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.

This is what he's really getting at - that Card is making a point through Ender's Game that intentions are all that matter. Unfortunately, not only does Kessel not provide very compelling examples of this, the way he presents his argument makes it seem like he's offering the other extreme opinion - that results are all that matter (hence the confusion he describes in the postscript).

Regarding Stilson, Bonzo, and the buggers, he's basically saying "look at how violent this is, and look at how Card makes it seem okay."

Well, dude, sometimes it IS okay. You can be a peaceful person but also defend yourself when attacked. And if you are a peaceful person, those are the only times you'll have to hurt people! It's not just something Card made up - there are plenty of kind, peaceful people out there who are nonetheless fighting to protect themselves or things that they care about. Are they all psychos? No! There's a difference between Peter and Ender as much as there's a difference between Jeffrey Dahmer and someone fighting for their own life/cause.

Despite his settling on this martial philosophy, after it is all over we are assured again that Ender is at heart a pacifist.

Kessel is using his own definition of pacifist here. I don't remember the book ever even insinuating that Ender was against violence NO MATTER WHAT, just that he didn't want to be violent. That seems perfectly reasonable to me.

And the comparison of Ender, essentially a child soldier, to Hitler and George Bush, is just nonsensical (and honestly, pretty offensive):

Ender thought he was playing a simulation whereas Hitler knew the gas chambers were real. ... But whether or not Ender’s battle simulations were practice or real, the ultimate purpose of any practice was to enact such destruction in reality.  Ender and his commanders were aiming for this battle and they all knew it; thanks to the trick played on Ender it just happened sooner than it would have otherwise.

Now suddenly intentions are important? Practicing how to harm others is as bad as harming others? WTF? So yeah, if you practice karate you're basically a psychopath. What a hypocrite.

Anyway, I didn't like the paper.

[Derek]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-aggression_principle

Aggression, for the purposes of the NAP, is defined as the initiation or threatening of violence against a person or legitimately owned property of another. ... In contrast to pacifism, the non-aggression principle does not preclude violence used in self-defense or defense of others.

This probably more accurately describes Ender.

[Capntastic]

It's not about violence being unjustifiable I would say, it's about how the book is specifically set up that any time Ender does do violence, he is 100% innocent, and yet we should feel bad for him.  Ender gets credit for killing when killing is 'required', even though he doesn't want to, and he then gets credit for 'feeling bad' about it.  

That, coupled with the aforementioned "some people are just good, some people are just bad" quote sort of combines to lead down a bad road of fanaticism.

As for the bit about how practicing to harm is a bad thing, and intentions and all of that, it sort of shows that if Ender were truly to be absolved for his peaceful intentions, he wouldn't go along with the battle program at all.

I mean, at this point I don't think I'll change your view on anything.  I just think that Orson Scott Card is a really awful dude, and that you can see a lot of it in his writing.

Edit:  The NAP is awful as heck but that's whole different heap of trash

[PaleFox]

I just found it really goddamn lazy how OSC always sets it up so that Ender "has to" kill every single obstacle in its way. Can he just beat up the dude? Well, he says he can't, and the dude is totally crazy beyond all reason so I guess it's ok that Ender kills people. Can he defeat the aliens without commiting genocide? Well, the book says he can't, so I guess it was ok there too.

It's just lazy to make everything an absolute dichotomy. That's why I don't like Ender's Game.

Irrespective of intent, it's just bad writing, something OSC is no stranger to in his other novels either.

[Derek]

Cap, I'm scared that you think defending yourself from bullies and aliens that want to kill you is akin to fanaticism.

Or that saving your own life or humanity is a "heinous act" (as Kessel put it).

EDIT: This is irrespective of whether Orson Scott Card is an awful dude. I think he is awful, but not because of Ender's Game.