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[Capntastic]

Actually I said that a worldview that states that some people are 'good' despite intent or actions and some people are 'evil' despite intent or actions (like, say, all homosexual people being inherently evil), is one that quickly leads to fanaticism.   That puts the book in a very different light.

I never said that defending oneself is never justifiable.  I just don't think it's usually justifiable to kill a bully once you've already beaten them to the floor, even if the book tells us it is.

Crowe, above, seems to get what the issue is.  Please don't paint me as saying that I'm a pacifist or that no one should never kill anyone.  I don't want to keep restating my point over and over.

So again, I don't think I'm gonna change your mind, and this time I'll explicitly disengage from the Ender's Game chat.  I'd be more than willing to talk about, say, Foundation though.


Edit:  Hahaha I hate myself for this Derek but you realize that the humans in Ender's Game were fanatical about killing the buggers to the point of exterminating them without ever realizing what their deal was, right?  So you can't say "it's always good to kill bullies and aliens" and then also accept that what Ender did was anything less than the actual bad thing it was.   THERE I AM DONE.

[Derek]

Actually I said that a worldview that states that some people are 'good' despite intent or actions and some people are 'evil' despite intent or actions (like, say, all homosexual people being inherently evil), is one that quickly leads to fanaticism.   That puts the book in a very different light.

But neither you nor Kessel ever points to a part in the book where it even insinuates that. All of the people Ender ends up killing (Stinson, Bonzo, the buggers) were aggressors and in each situation it was more or less kill or be killed. In other words, their intentions AND actions clearly indicated that they meant Ender serious harm.

Is Orson Scott Card a scumbag for thinking homosexuality is unnatural? Yeah, totally. Is Ender's Game a bad book because of it? Not really.

Anyway, just point out the parts of the book where these ideas come up, and I'll happily agree with you. I'm not that stubborn.

Crowe, above, seems to get what the issue is.  Please don't paint me as saying that I'm a pacifist or that no one should never kill anyone.  I don't want to keep restating my point over and over.

Dude, you pointed me to that Kessel article and said "just read it"! What am I supposed to think?!

[Franklins Ghost]

I liked Ender's Game 

[Capntastic]

You took two points I was making in two different paragraphs (Ender defending himself bullies by killing them being over the top & Orson Scott Card's black/white worldview leading to fanaticism) and mistook them to mean I meant that defending oneself at all = fanaticism.  That sort of thing is pretty frustrating, and I can't help but feel the need to point that out.

[PaleFox]

I hate that you can't indent on these forums; it throws all my paragraphs off. In any case, I'll try to elucidate on what I wrote before, so it's not misunderstood:

      The issue's not that Ender defends himself, or even that he kills people. It's that the author is lazy so he just makes every situation absolutely require that choice -- I assume he does this because it takes the question of morality out of it, so he can still make Ender a sympathetic character even though he kills everyone, but who knows? A better author would allow some shades of grey but that might introduce doubts into whether Ender does the right thing, so the reader is told by author fiat that Ender chose correctly and that's the end of it.

      Indeed, Ender himself seems to know this because he never doubts he did the right thing even when he feels remorse. Interestingly, this kind of absolute moral certainty is present in several other OSC protagonists, so it appears to be a common thing. Now, obviously some people do believe this and so it's not wrong to make a character act this way, but making it an actual part of your book and portraying it as absolutely a good thing (Ender saves the world and redeems himself every step of the way) is not good writing. CAS is reading this as fanaticism, which is understandable (moral absolutism is one mark of that) if you assume that this worldview is one that OSC shares and promotes. If you don't believe that, then it's still, sad to say, truly poor characterization in what is ostensibly a classic children's novel -- this is understandable, as I've said, as a way of justifying the plot he had thought out without having to really work very hard... but that's not a very good excuse, surely,
 
      Either way, though, I think the result is not a very good book. Yeah, it's got the trappings of a morality tale and teen angst by the bucket, but basically underneath everything it's just a sub-par teen book and that's all that it'll ever be. Teenagers, tired of bullies or authority figures, can live vicariously through Ender knowing that they are perfectly justified; I'm not sure what anyone else gets out of it, though considering how successful the series has been I guess it's something.


If you enjoy it, though, go right ahead; who the hell am I to tell you otherwise?

[Derek]

I'm not sure how allowing "shades of gray" would improve the story or be any less lazy. You're kind of assuming that ambiguity makes stories more "adult" or requires more work. That's not always true (in fact, it's usually not). In this case, I think it requires more work to tie the three killings together than to make it ambiguous whether anything bad happened at all.

And I think Kessel is more of a moral absolutist than Ender, considering the comparisons Kessel draws between him, George Bush, and Hitler. It's obvious that Kessel considers killing to be wrong no matter what the circumstances are.

Either way, though, I think the result is not a very good book. Yeah, it's got the trappings of a morality tale and teen angst by the bucket, but basically underneath everything it's just a sub-par teen book and that's all that it'll ever be. Teenagers, tired of bullies or authority figures, can live vicariously through Ender knowing that they are perfectly justified; I'm not sure what anyone else gets out of it, though considering how successful the series has been I guess it's something.

Honestly, I never considered the morality aspect to be a big draw for Ender's Game. If I had to guess, I'd say it was the premise, war games, and plot twist at the end that made the book so popular.

You took two points I was making in two different paragraphs (Ender defending himself bullies by killing them being over the top & Orson Scott Card's black/white worldview leading to fanaticism) and mistook them to mean I meant that defending oneself at all = fanaticism.  That sort of thing is pretty frustrating, and I can't help but feel the need to point that out.

Sorry, I misunderstood what you meant here:

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.

[eyeliner]

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

Present your friend with some novels by Dick, Phillip K.
Do Androids Dream of electric Sheep?
A Scanner Darkly

Very cool sexy books. You just might get laid out of it.

[forwardresent]

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

I'd totally recommend it. I'd recommend reading all 3 of the 'vurtual' books. He also wrote a book called Automated Alice, which is a sort of Steampunk trequel to Alice's Adventures In Wonderland, it's even written like Carroll.

[PaleFox]

I've been on a Neal Stephenson binge lately. I just finished Cryptonomicon, and now I'm starting on his latest book, which I hear is quite good; hopefully it's enjoyable!

[Inanimate]

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

Present your friend with some novels by Dick, Phillip K.
Do Androids Dream of electric Sheep?
A Scanner Darkly

Very cool sexy books. You just might get laid out of it.

I love Dick. He's just a mad genius. I've been intending to read "Do Androids Dream of electric Sheep?", but hadn't actually heard much about "A Scanner Darkly".

Thanks for the suggestions, everyone!

[Gabriel Verdon]

But pushing all that aside, he's not really that great of a writer.  I used to play a game with my writing friends by rolling dice and getting random page/paragraphs to read and skewering the incoherent tense-shifts, pov-shifts, and similar.  There's one paragraph in particular that was just nonsense, but since I can't recall I've selected a line at random that lacks any subtlety at all.  

Bernard went red with anger.  "Who did this!" he shouted.

He might as well have written

Bernard was getting mad.  "I am mad!" he shouted, angrily.

That's really an editor's job. I haven't read the book, but editing skills aren't very relevant to being a good storyteller. So yeah, maybe he has a bad editor.

I also don't understand what's so terrible about that passage. It's pretty straightforward, but nowhere near as redundant as you seem to think it is.

[brettchalupa]

I bought all of the Harry Potter novels since they were just released as eBooks. I've never read them before, and I just started the first one. I am enjoying it so far.

[TheNineRings]

The Harry Potter books are entertaining but... They aren't really my thing. I suppose that the best thing I have to say about them is that Rowling's writing style is entertaining.

I just finished reading the Bachman books by Stephen King, Watchers by Dean Koontz, Deep Fathom and Excavation by James Rollins, Adam and BoneMan's Daughters by Ted Dekker, and the Earthsea Cycle by Ursula K. Leguin.

Honestly, I found the Bachman books rather depressing, Watchers likewise. I thought the James Rollins books were both entertaining, but dishearteningly similar. The Ted Dekker books I enjoyed vastly. He's one of my current favorite authors,

The crown jewel, though, was the Earthsea Cycle. If you haven't read them, do so. They're rather old, but classic. I consider them to be greater than the Lord of the Rings.

[Erinock]

Lord o the rigns atm 

[Inanimate]

Just finished.

SO. GOOD.