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Orson Scott Card Reviews Everything
H_Fisher writes "Orson Scott Card, author of sci-fi classic Ender's Game and many other novels and stories, has posted his review of the much-discussed Joss Whedon film Serenity (which opened at #2 in the US box office this past weekend). Among other things, Card has this to say about Serenity: 'Those of you who know my work at all know about Ender's Game. I jealously protected the movie rights to Ender's Game so that it would not be filmed until it could be done right ... I'll tell you this right now: If Ender's Game can't be this kind of movie, and this good a movie, then I want it never to be made.'" With praise for Full House, Friends, Being John Malkovich, and Lost to boot.
I read Ender's Game about 10 years ago and thought it was brilliant and very dark. The political side of the story is the real meat and potatoes, but that's usually the first thing that gets cut when making a movie, as producers are more interested in what Ender Wiggin is doing, not why.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
But it wasn't the greatest movie ever, like some folks seem to think.
The camera work, for instance, left a lot on the table. I think Joss Whedon does a pretty good job directing TV, giving it a somewhat cinematic feel, but those same techniques applied to the big screen seem to leave it with a TV feel.
Plus, all the backstory required to cover 12 episodes of a TV show is very tough to do in a movie, and impossible if you want to leave any room at all to tell a story with the rest of the movie. The movie suffers some from this.
It's still easily the best movie I've seen this year, but if the next two happen ($10 million at the box office doesn't make that look likely...) I hope they grab a different director, and fortunately the backstory won't be an issue.
-F
Then why doesn't he just get Weaton to direct it. I'm sure among the two of them they can scrape up enough money.
I never saw Firefly, but Ender's Game is one of my all-time favorite books. The trailers for Serenity haven't done much to get me interested in seeing it, nor has the marketing blitz they've tried to shove down my Tivo. Either the marketroids who put together the trailers are totally incompetent (quite likely), or else I might just end up disagreeing with OSC on this one (also likely.)
Either way, now I'm interested enough to find out more.
What I should have said was nothing.
From the blurb/article: If Ender's Game can't be this kind of movie, and this good a movie, then I want it never to be made.
That's a fairly good outlook. As a fan of a lot of various fiction that I see get butchered in film I cringe everytime something comes around that I truely love only to find that it's either watered down or that the director/writers seem to have lost the original vision of the writing.
Take Lovecraft for example. Being very fond of the old gents work (obviously), I hate the crap that has his name associated with that is rarely more than a slasher film. I can appreciate the humor of Yanza's Re-Animator but the number of people who I encounter who think that somehow HPLs original work is anywhere on the same level of this film makes me fear for the future of Lovecraft's standing in the horror community. The Resurrected (based on the case of charles dexter ward), on the other hand, is a fine adaptation but still the original work is vastly superior. I still think (hope?) the film retains enough of Lovecraft's original vision to spur interested viewers into the works of HPL without being disappointed.
With the adaptation of American McGee's Alice I am fearful of what will happen. I love the game, I love McGee's vision but I really do not see how this is going to translate into a film.
I swear to God I will have a stroke on the day that Niven's Dream Park (or any other Niven work really) gets turned into a film. There is far too much going on there to make it a workable movie.
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
He may write sci-fi well, but he's a vocal homophobe in his non-fiction rants.
Well from how it was explained in the movie I think i cant take a shot at this.
The gas that was released into the atmosphere was supposed to surpress aggressive urges but was too effective. As a result all urges to do anything were suppressed (most likely because our urges to preform basic functions are driven by our darker reptilian/id/whatever part of the mind). Then one tenth of one percent of the population had an opposite reaction... They became hyper aggressive and thus all of those 'dark' (primitive) urges were magnified. Urge to reproduce, fight, indulge, etc. etc. I also suspect that the Reaver mothers would have primitive maternal instincts and would be fiercly protective of their young as most mammals are.
Thats how i see it! Hope it helps.
Live according to the Categorical Imperative. If the Categorical Imperative tells you not to live by it... ignore it
This was one of the things we were trying to figure out after the movie. I went with a bunch of friends and we were discussing: "How do they recognize each other? Why do they cooperate instead of attack?"
We do know they have at least some code/traditions they follow. In the first episode of the show, Serenity comes across a Reaver ship in deep space, and they take a chance: if they run, the Reavers "will have to follow. It's their way." If they they hold their course, the Reavers might choose to ignore them.
Unfortunately their "way" isn't "we'll leave you alone if you do X" so much as "we'll definitely torture and kill you if you do Y."
I'm okay with having some unanswered questions as long as they don't seem impossible. I can go with the reavers (as presented) getting along just well enough to be able to do more violence to others, but I can't imagine them raising children.
Personally I think Serenity has one fatal flaw -- the characters receive no development and there is no emotional connection to them. I haven't seen Firefly and have no background at all. I went to see it because of all the buzz, and I was disappointed. Who is River? I don't really understand. It's obvious she's psychic and she kicks ass, but why should I care for her? Should I care? Should I dislike her? I have no idea. I feel nothing whatsoever for River character. I can say the same for all the other characters. Who is the assassin? Why is he that way? Why is he going around killing things with a katana? Yes, I know all the obvious answers that are provided by the movie, but those answers were not enough to get me to feel anything whatsoever about that character.
I feel that some ideas were interesting, like the idea of "what happens if people are made ultra-docile?" and so on. However, this interesting idea took all of about 10-20 mins in the movie. The fights with the reavers (or whatever they're called) took 90% of the time, but content having to do with reaver's background took about 10% of the movie time. As a result, reavers are like stupid zombies that mindlessly attack things and I feel nothing, neither for them nor for the people they slay, simply because the situation is so absurd and nonsensical to me.
In short, Serenity may be a good movie-length feature for those who have seen Firefly, but it sucks badly as a stand-alone movie.
Never saw the show. LOVED the movie. It was character driven, had a plot, character development, a couple of great villans, tension and humor among the heroes, and a good zing at the end.
There were moments that I thought "Huh. I bet that's really a big deal if you're a fan of the series," but they didn't slow the movie down. You sympathized with characters in the movie because of their actions in the movie, not because of the series (which I haven't seen).
I will admit I walked out and put Firefly on my Netflix Queue as soon as I got home.
the major advances in civilization are processes which all but wreck the societies in which they occur - A.N. White
I think you saw a different cut than I did. I'd never seen a Firefly episode and the movie had plenty of character development.
Why should you care for River? Well, I'm not sure you really should until later in the film. That uncertainty about whether she's a sympathetic person or an impersonal weapon carries the tension for the first part of the movie. The Reivers I thought were a great "force of nature" villain - impersonal, mysterious, and scary as hell.
I think most sci-fi fans will enjoy this movie. I loved it.
the major advances in civilization are processes which all but wreck the societies in which they occur - A.N. White
For whatever reason I've had five or six personal run-ins with mid-tier science fiction and fantasy authors. They've all fit your description: okay writers with colossal egos.
One example sent in a bombastic resume for a position we were hiring for. He asked for roughly twice the going market rate on the long-term contract, and his cover letter was two-plus pages of wildly arrogant justification for that. We all sat around reading it aloud and laughing, which was kind of low-class, but it was that unintentionally funny. Perhaps as a consequence of the unvarnished ego represented, he had also failed to edit it with any especial care.
That same guy shows up around the city I work in giving flambuoyant courses on the handling of concealed weapons.
Maybe the trials of getting published just select for people with more-than-healthy egos... But you know, I worked in book stores for a while, and then in a small publishing house, and other genres of book did not seem to be exclusively written by maladjusted ego cases. (Other genres didn't seem to be written almost exclusively by far-right-wing types, either.)
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
Ender's Game is not an Apologia for Hitler.
There are two major differences:
1. Ender is the "deceived" and Hitler is the "deceiver"
Unless you can make a substainal case that Hitler (or any other commiter of "genocide") was fundamentally used, manipulated, etc. I think I can ignore that both Hitler and Ender were supposedly virgins until age 37 and third children as a significant similarity.
2. Ender's actions where all logical given known information.
a. Buggers Better than Humans b. Human space unable to be defended c. destroy buggers completely
Unfortunately, the tradegy is that this logic is at no point tempered by other factors such as
morality. This can not be said of the majority of Hitler's actions. These actions where often both immoral and alogical.
Fox wanted not to just broadcast Firefly, they wanted to manipulate it to pander to their low perception of their audiences' values. Fox failed to appreciate what they really had and they canned it. So if something this good is unavailable on television, especially if it is not available on Fox; well, they have no one to blame but themselves.
Fans of the show assembled an absolutely unprecedented response, one greater than all of their predecessors, to raise the funds, take the ads out in Variety and they rook it to the web. Why did they do it? It's just like OSC said; they cared about the characters.
And who was the one person in all of Hollywood who didn't snooze through it? Chalk that one up to Mary Parent.
Now failure for this kind of project is always an option, don't get me wrong, but after all, this was and is a risky business.
So what actually did happen? Well they re-assembled cast & crew and conceived a fine, hand crafted and heart felt movie.
The decision to share the movie with friends and fans was also a huge risk. But the word of mouth was good and there were no spoilers. Because the fans 'Believed.' Belief's a funny thing. Maybe Hollywood should take a lesson from that one single point, as it alone will be responsible for the success of Serenity.
"Can there be a Klein bottle that is an efficient and effective beer pitcher?"
To the extent that Firefly was a space *western*, the Reavers do play a role similar to that of the "Injuns" in a traditional western. That's to say, it has far less to do with actual Apache, Sioux and other native american peoples than it does with the role old-Hollywood put them in.
I'm not sure that has a whole lot to do with Serenity though. The film is a lot more sci-fi than western and, in it, viewers and characters learn things that fundamentally change the perceived nature of reavers. You could make the argument, if you wanted to start a fight, that the Reavers in Serenity are more like jihadists.
Read his political page here.
I think this is more of a difference in taste and what constitutes quailty.
Literary fiction (i.e. not "pulp" or "pop") attempts to tell a story by being character driven, not plot/event driven. A character has an arc, or a personality trait that drives the story. Sometimes a story is a collection of characters and their interactions. Literary fiction does not always have to be as obviously literary as Salinger or some of Vonnegut. But if you walk into a bookstore and peruse the sci-fi section, only 10% of those books could be classified as literary versus pure genre pulp. Besides not being plot driven, literary works (I know this sounds incongruent) use the standard "show don't tell". I.e. a pulpy/genre story will just say "This made me mad" or "he was a troubled soul"... because those are revelations that are not convincing (not earned) in and of themselves. But describing thoughts (first person) or scene paint a more detailed picture, and make a story a piece of art.
What makes science fiction, "science" is the attempt to ask the reader to believe something unbelievable, that may not or not yet be scientifically possible. Some argue that Slaughterhouse Five (while literary) is certainly Sci-Fi (time traveling, aliens, etc). But it is considered to be "literary fiction" as well, but often a literary author will dismiss it as "magic realism".
That is not to say that "pulp" books can't be fun to read, but they are not very stimulating and some people are bored by that style of writing. The same is true for the medium of movies. The difference is that in a movie, the visual aspect is as much as part of the art as is the story telling. But a movie that is pure visuals does not appeal to the artist or it appeals only to the visual artist. Take much of Kubrick's later works: while visually inspiring, the story behind "A Clockwork Orange" is muddled as it makes a hero out of Alex (yes I know it is from a book of the same name). But the movie is pure visual/cinematic delight.
Other movies rely heavily on action and events to move the story forward. Some (like myself) find movies like this to be largely a waste of time, while it is clear that there are those that like action and such. The Matrix, at its heart, is not a good story, from a literary perspective. Card points this out. Star Wars (especially the later movies) are horrible muddles of plot point jumping. Card argues that Kaufman is writing Sci-Fi, and in a way he is. Not every sci fi story is "spaceships" and "explosions".
Take Bradbury, for example. Farenheit 451 is not about spaceships. Even Stephenson and Gibson don't write about spaceships (not always). Yet, some of Gibson's work is literary ("Pattern Recognition"), and you will find it in the sci fi section. Heinlein is a good example as well. Reading "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" and "Stranger in a Strangeland" gives you the literary Heinlein. Reading "Starship Troopers" gives you the political Heinlein (but the opposite conclusion as the movie). But he still wrote alot of pulp, too ("Have Spacesuit Will Travel", "Glory Road", etc).
Card has his moments as a writer. Ender's Game is fairly literary, character driven. And alot of the derivative works are as well (of course as Ender changes, his character changes, i.e. "Speaker for the Dead"). Although I am tired of the whole saga.
FWIW, I liked Serenity much more than any other sci-fi movie (save Equillibrium, but for other reasons) in the last ten years. Really. I didn't even expect to. I was not a huge fan of the series, but I was suprised. And I know that a "literary" story does not sell, people like sex, drugs, and explosions. Othewise we would see Lethem's work in film (wouldn't that be nice?). So I agree with Card, for the most part, but i am not a huge Kaufman fan. Adaptation was horrible.
It's actually incredibly shallow. It's something I might recommend to kids as "my first SF novel" but that's about it.
ender's game might make an okay movie, but then modern movies - especially SF - are not particularly known for being cerebral masterpieces.
There's much better SF out there than enders game. For instance, any of the known space stuff by Niven. Greg Bear. Asimov. Herbert. Clarke. Those are great SF writers. OSC is a novice hack by comparison. He can write decently enough, but his stories are shallow, he telegraphs events light-years off, and story development is as subtle as being clubbed over the head with a baseball bat.
i'd really much rather see a larry niven or greg bear movie than an osc one.
I am too busy to look now, but I think this allegation was previously made on Slashdot, and we had a fun flame war then. Having read the allegations, and Ender's Game, I continue to remain unconvinced that Ender is Hitler, or any other way you want to put. It just didn't pass the logic test for most of it.
I have also read the article in question listed above (also on Slashdot previously, if I remember right), and I understand the point Orson Card is making, and it is not that the media should be censored. One of his points is the media have large amount of unchecked power in telling stories, and that that power is often used ways that is unhelpful to the country and in specific instances dangerous to country as we face Islamic facisim and terrorism. The country is at war, although many still refuse to believe. Unless you believe the media/press is perfect and has no agenda, his essay is strong in delivery, but not a call for censorship.
The good news is that it's not too late for you to see the complete FireFly series on DVD.
I saw the whole thing before seeing the movie, and yeah, there's much of the movie that I can't imagine had the same impact if you hadn't seen the series as if you had.
But since you liked the movie, you might enjoy going back and watching the entire series.
- Spryguy
There are three kinds of people in this world: those that can count and those that can't
It's a decent enough book, and held my attention up until the last few pages (with Ender nursing a bugger from his super-child teat). Unlike most first-time readers, I had the benefit of being older than 20 when first picking it up. Like many other things from childhood (Star Wars, anyone?), the book picks up a gilded nostalgia that prevents an objective look later on. I'm no literary critic, but it's interesting to see other people reach the same conclusion.
Either they take themselves too seriously or they take fiction too seriously. In both cases, they are annoying lot and should stuff their beliefs where sun doesn't shine.
"Creating the Innocent Killer"..riight. Card "created" a book. Not a killer.
Given OSC's political views, I think it can pretty safely be said that the guy is basically a fascist sympathesizer or something else equally distasteful.
Could you people please just fuck off already with your fascist-this and nazi-that? That subject got old and tired years ago and one might believe that Godwin's Law was sufficient hint to drop it. It's boring history and I'm starting to hate people who still whine about it as much as I hate neo-nazis.
Preserve old classics: copy your collection onto all hard drives.
What he's doing there with his paragraphs is actually standard newspaper practice. I used to write for my college's newspaper, and my editor would hack apart my lengthy paragraphs into stuttering, syncopated messes all the time. The reasoning for it was the column width used in the paper, which is typically very narrow. Paragraphs that are normal length in a paperback sized page suddenly look enormous when copied to a newspaper column. In order to keep readers from being intimidated, and thus not reading the articles printed, editors usually chop long paragraphs up.
Ender's Game may not be your favorite novel; in fact, you may not even like it.
The themes expressed, however, are important and compelling. Forget the strawman Hitler argument. How plain can the differences between Ender and Hitler be made? Ender committed atrocious acts with no knowledge of their effects. For Hitler, the same cannot be said...
Did you know that Ender's Game is on the Marine Corps' recommended reading list for Junior elisted personnel? At first glance, you might think it is because of the various strategic approaches that Ender is forced to employ, but that's just the surface.
The reality is that the underlying theme of the book, that intent makes makes all the difference in measuring good and evil, that an otherwise "good" person may be obligated to commit horrible deeds in the name of the greater good... That's the message that matters, because that's the position that our people in uniform have routinely found themselves in throughout our history.
Pacifism is the default posture for most people. There's not a person in the service that would prefer to be at war, rather than at peace. None of you would rather fight with someone rather than peacefully co-exist. Still, in the face of aggression, there comes a point where action must be taken, and that aggression must be checked.
The morality of intent is what allows people to do the terrible things that sometimes must be done in all of our names, and live with themselves afterward.
For those that would die defending it, Freedom
has a sweet taste that the protected will never know.