Ender's Game is an Understated Story of Uncertainty

http://sam-koblenski.blogspot.com/2013/10/enders-game-is-understated-story-of.html

by koblenski • 13 years ago

40 54 13 years ago

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tel4• 13 years 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.

koblenski2• 13 years 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• 13 years ago

This is the 'Programmed Learning' style (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). 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.

tel4• 13 years 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• 13 years 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.

tel4• 13 years 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.

minikites2• 13 years 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

ender and hitler: sympathy for the superman (20 years later) (2007): 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

saturdaysaint• 13 years 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• 13 years 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.

humanrebar9• 13 years 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.

phaemon• 13 years ago

I don't find any of those convincing. Looks like they went looking for connections and ignored all the differences. Including a genocide in a book doesn't make it about Hitler. You might just as well say it's about the Armenian genocide, or the Native American one.

generj4• 13 years ago

Heck, the Armenian genocide even has more textual support - Petra is Armenian.

slm_HN• 13 years ago

This is why Hacker News should stick to Hacker News.

It's ridiculous to think Ender's Game has anything to do with "Nazi superiority", whatever that is.

I read the book as a kid and liked it immensely. As an adult I discovered that Orson Scott Card is a Mormon and that a lot of people just have blind ignorant hatred of Mormons. This was a sad discovery, but it did have the benefit of allowing me to dismiss their diatribes.

eropple• 13 years ago

You would be hard-pressed to find a serious contingent of people who dislike Card because he's a Mormon and not because he's a homophobic authoritarian and more than a little bit of a jerk.

epi8• 13 years ago

I dislike him because of his stated, explicit bias against LGBT folk, and his frequent rants about the "gay agenda". True, I think his Mormonism motivates these things, but many if not most Mormons feel differently (I have no idea the exact statistics), and were he still Mormon and not a homophobic bigot, then I wouldn't have a problem with him.

I also liked Ender's Game as a kid. I like it now. I just think the author is a jackass.

jdbernard2• 13 years ago

I'm sorry. It is very difficult for me to take you seriously when you immediately compare someone to Hitler. The discussion has barely started and Godwin's Law has already been proved true.

Still, I figured I would at least read through the articles you listed, but they lost me pretty quick too. From the article by Kessel:

    The novel repeatedly tells us that Ender is morally spotless; though he ultimately takes on guilt for the extermination of the alien buggers, his assuming this guilt is a gratuitous act. [...] In this Card argues that the morality of an act is based solely on the intentions of the person acting.

Already it seems the author of the article has read a different book than the Ender's Game I read. Ender is not "excused" from the guilt of his actions because his intentions were good, he is excused because he did not know that the war he was fighting was real-life. He was told, and had every reason to believe that they were exercises, a game. His teachers spent a lot of effort to maintain this deception because they understood that if Ender knew it was real he would not kill like they wanted him to. By the author's logic we are all guilty of murder when we play violent video games.

The very next reference to an actual scene from the book is wrong again:

    On the very first page of the novel an adult lies to Ender about something that is going to hurt him:  the doctor removing the surgically implanted monitor that Ender has worn while being evaluated by the IE training agency swears that the removal “won’t hurt a bit.”4  But in the event it is excruciating.

The author implies that the adult purposefully lies to Ender and knowingly inflict pain beyond what is normal for a doctor's visit. First: children learn quickly that when adults say "This isn't going to hurt a bit" they are usually lying, as it will hurt a bit. So this white lie is a very relate-able experience for children, not "relentless, undeserved torment" as the author states one sentence before. The doctor certainly did not expect it to be severe pain:

    "It's designed to be removed. Without infection, without damage. But there'll be some tickling, and some people say they have a feeling of something missing. You'll keep looking around for something. Something you were looking for, but you can't find it, and you can't remember what it was. So I'll tell you. It's the monitor you're looking for, and it isn't there. In a few days that feeling will pass."

When Ender experience severe pain as a result, the doctor is almost as surprised as Ender. He is unprepared for the violence of Ender's pain, is obviously upset at how much pain Ender has endured, and is upset with himself about it:

    The doctor was trembling; his voice shook as he spoke. "They leave these things in the kids for three years, what do they expect? We could have switched him off, do you realize that? We could have unplugged his brain for all time. [...] Could have unplugged him forever. I don't have the brains of a bugger."

But notice that he does not express any misgivings about it until after Ender has his violent reaction. Surely he has never seen this reaction before or he would have been more prepared to deal with it.

Already the author's arguments are resting on very shaky readings of the source text, but I'll keep going a little further.

His next several paragraphs focus on further examples of how Card subjects Ender to "relentless, undeserved torment" with the implication that this is done simply to make the reader sympathetic to Ender. Here are some excerpts of his examples:

    When Ender is not being lied to by authorities, he is being bullied. [...]

From where I sit, this is is very common in schools. Kids are lied to by authority figures and bullies in schools act with impunity regularly. Sure, this is making Ender out to be a sympathetic character for many kids, but not because he is being subjected to extreme, unusual torture, but because he is facing things they face everyday in real life.

    The family offers no haven from assault. [...]

Again, this form of "relentless, undeserved torment" is sadly not atypical.

    Yet, for reasons that are never made clear, Ender never tells his parents; he learns early to hide his fear and hurt. [...]

Again not atypical.

    One might ask where Ender’s parents or teachers are when Ender is physically assaulted.  This question reveals a second mechanism Card uses to generate sympathy:  in Ender’s Game, adults or authority are never there to protect.

Again, not atypical. In fact, this is a key point in the book. Ender is being manipulated to believe he will always have to solve his own problems. I find it hard to believe Card is sneakily trying to manipulate the reader into feeling sympathetic for Ender when he tells the reader about this directly in the book.

The author of the article seems to be trying to make the point that Ender was morally culpable for his actions regardless of his intention of the circumstances. At this point I think he is trying to set the groundwork for the argument that Card is purposefully manipulating the reader into being so sympathetic to Ender as a character that we are willing to forgive him for his crimes. So far the author's biased treatment of the source has biased me against his article to such a degree that I do not know if I can continue reading with an open mind. His argument as I understand it so far seems to have trivial flaws. Are we always responsible for the results of our actions, even when we are purposefully manipulated into circumstances where we have been deceived about what the outcome will be?

minikites2• 13 years ago

I appreciate your detailed and good faith reply, which is more than most of the replies to my comment have been.

I think you may have stopped reading right before the main point of the Kessel article:

---------

Over and against these examples of “good” people whose cruelty is justified, even an act of friendship toward its objects, we have the “bad” people whose mistreatment of others, unlike that of Graff and Ender, springs from bad motives: Peter, Stilson, Bernard, Bonzo. We are never invited to wonder whether (and it is hard to imagine that) they might have a good motive for any of their actions. Bernard is a sadist from word one. Stilson is a bully. Peter is a psychopath. Bonzo is consumed by jealousy and hatred.

Card thus labors long and hard in Ender’s Game to create a situation where we are not allowed to judge any of his defined-as-good characters’ morality by their actions. The same destructive act that would condemn a bad person, when performed by a good person, does not implicate the actor, and in fact may be read as a sign of that person’s virtue.

The doctrine that the morality of an action is solely determined by the actor’s motive rests on a significant assumption: that the good always know what their motives are, and are never moved to do things for selfish reasons while yet thinking themselves moved by virtue. Ender has perfect knowledge of his own motives and the motives of others. Ender never suspects himself of doing other than what he thinks himself to be doing, and indeed, in Speaker for the Dead he makes a career of delivering faultless moral judgments of other people.

---------

As I understand the argument, Ender gets a pass and the "evil" characters don't.

Re: the Hitler comparison, I don't know enough about Hitler or Ender's Game to make a detailed response, but why would that many parallels exist, to the detail and degree that they do if it was unintentional? I would copy and paste the examples, but it would pretty much be the entire Radford article.

mcguire3• 13 years ago

Thanks for posting those links!

While I do think the Hitler-Ender link is a bit too far to stretch, the Kessel essay does articulate some of the discomfort I had about Ender's Game. When I read Card's quote,

“The humans in Ender’s Game never imagined that they were obliterating another species; rather they thought they were destroying an invading species’ ability to make war. Genocide was the result of not understanding the effect on the buggers of the death of the hive queen.”

all I could think of was the careful set-up of how Ender didn't know he'd killed Stilson and Bonzo.

falcolas• 13 years 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• 13 years 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.

koblenski2• 13 years 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.

mcguire3• 13 years 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.

generj4• 13 years 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.

humanrebar9• 13 years ago

When I was a kid, I enjoyed the fact that the kids in the book were not infantalized and patronized. I remember being frustrated that people in real life confused youth and inexperience with stupidity and weakness.

To some degree, I'm sure my love for Ender's Game is a result of the nostalgia of finding a story that didn't talk down to me.

mcguire3• 13 years ago

"accidentally"?

avalaunch2• 13 years ago

I think it's important to note that Ender's Game was only written to provide the necessary backstory to Speaker for the Dead. With that in mind, when you take both books as one, it becomes more a story about dealing with abuse than the abuse itself.

StavrosK• 13 years ago

Would you suggest reading SftD right after Ender's Game? The order is very confusing.

humanrebar9• 13 years ago

I remember Orson Scott Card saying Ender's Game was originally written to provide structure around the idea of the battle room.

Though Ender's Game was later revised. I'm not an expert on those revisions, so it's possible there were some retcons to support Speaker for the Dead.

fennecfoxen2• 13 years 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

anatoly4• 13 years 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."

tel4• 13 years ago

That's a pretty great synopsis of what I remember about Ender's Game.

humanrebar9• 13 years 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?

fennecfoxen2• 13 years ago

I can't read him anymore because it's too obvious what the plot is going to be: a misunderstood but fundamentally holy Hero Dude goes off into the wilderness or something to found a new city where his disciples can live in peace the way God intended <tm>.

So: the Ender's Game series, the Alvin Maker series, the Homecoming series, Lovelock, Wyrms, Pastwatch, Treason, and on some level, most of the biblio-historical-fiction series.

Any major Card works I'm missing? I'll give partial credit to _Songmaster_, and maybe even _Enchanted_.

djscram• 13 years 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• 13 years ago

Rather than just saying it's overrated, why don't you give some examples of the same kind of thing done better?

Sujan2• 13 years ago

There are some very good, very innovative novels out there

Source? (Links please?)

groovy2shoes2• 13 years ago

I'd put Dune on that list.

anatoly4• 13 years 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.

humanrebar9• 13 years ago

As I've said in another comment, I think Ender's Game is unique in the way that it is about kids without being patronizing to young readers.

Other books may be better science fiction, but how many of them are as accessible to kids?

anatoly4• 13 years ago

Can you explain what do you mean about other books being patronizing to young readers? In what way are they patronizing?

Sure, there're many SF books that may be too complex for many young readers, but there's also lots of classic SF that people loved as kids. Take, I dunno, Azimov's I,Robot stories or his Foundation novels. Are those patronizing to young readers?

anatoly4• 13 years ago

I agree with you that Ender's Game is really overrated. But you know what? I still think it works great to introduce someone to SF as a field, especially young people. Is there really a contradiction here?

Ender's Game is an Understated Story of Uncertainty

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