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Ender's Shadow
wtpooh writes "CNN has a review of Ender's Shadow, an upcoming book by Orson Scott Card which retells the events of Ender's Game from the perspective of Bean, one of the children under Ender's command. I always liked Bean, so I'm really looking forward to this. According to Amazon, it will be available on August 31. You can also read the first four chapters of the book at Card's web site". Despite all the recommendations, I've never bothered to read Ender's Game. I think that will have to change very soon.
I found the original novella to be much better, and to the point. It's not the first case where the oauthor should have left well enough alone (Though, unlike "Flowers for Algernon," he didn't utterly destroy the original work).
Mazer Rackham was my personal favorite "supporting cast." Here you have a man faced with the prospect of guiding a presumably brilliant child -- Ender -- who is also presumably mankind's last hope for survival -- to full fruition of Ender's potential.
Is that a job from hell or what? In a very real sense then, mankind's hope for survival REALLY rests with Mazer, because Mazer is the man who will make or break Ender. In other words, from a certain point of view Ender is the weapon that humanity has developed to defend themselves, but Mazer must "wield" that weapon properly.
That intense part-adversarial, part-mentor/father-figure psychological relationship between Mazer and Ender was highly intriguing and, imho, could have been more fully explored. Another book would have been a great vehicle for that . . . now Bean, it seems it's just like Ender all over again. With Mazer we get a TOTALLY different story.
After all, Mazer was certainly not in the dark about any part of the situation like Ender was. And yet he has to, in some way, subordinate his own brilliant ability to that of Ender. It would take a pretty remarkable individual to do that effectively. The whole situation is similar to the storyline in the film "Searching for Bobby Fisher."
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You're gonna be disapointed, but the rumor is that Card re-wrote the screenplay specifically for Jake Lloyd after meeting him and being impressed with his ability to express himself and his feelings - the original script had most of the emotional burden on the adult character (Mazor Rackham, etc) rather than Ender.
To give Jake Lloyd credit, I think a lot of the problems in Star Wars were caused by poor direction rather than his own failure as an actor. Most of the things that bugged me about the character were obviously deliberately there - the off-camera "Yipee!" when he finds out that he's leaving home, for example. One does need to remember that Star Wars IS a kid's movie, first and foremost.
However, not all movies about kids are really FOR kids... some examples that come to mind immediately are The Client, The Good Son, The Cure, Radio Flyer, or even Searching for Bobby Fischer and Stand By Me. If this is done well, and part of that means having a low enough budget that it doesn't have to be targeted directly at the PG crowd to make money, it could work.
I'm willing to give the movie a chance before writing it off completely.
If you think that OSC is homophobic, then you ought to read his book, Treason. Or the Homecoming series. In reality, Card's SF works are very thought provoking and liberal considering that he is also quite a religious man.
Also, both Card and C.S. Lewis are far from fundamentalist in their faith, unless you have some other definition of "fundamentalist." Lewis himself was atheist until 1929, but later became a Christian apologist. Unlike fundamentalists, Lewis completely avoided sectarian disputes in favor of core doctrines.
As for Card's religion, Fundamentalist Christians openly ridicule, and ultimately reject it. Not to say that there is no element of "fundamental" Christian beliefs in these men, but it is one thing to disagree with, say, the practice of homosexuality; and another thing to be a homophobe.
Since others have mentioned other of Card's works, here are my picks for his best:
Ender's Game of course, which is arguably his best work. The best parts, those that made me cry in rereading it this afternoon after reading the chapters of the new book, are straight from the original novella. The fleshing out into a novel to provide more motivation for Ender in the sequel doesn't make it any less powerful. It's one of the seminal works of modern science fiction.
Speaker for the Dead in many ways stands alone, despite being part of the Ender series. In addition to the very human subplot about a family torn apart in tragedy and reunited by the love of an outsider, it's fundamentally about humans trying to establish contact with an alien species. One of the key concepts from it, the Demosthenian Heirarchy of Exclusion, is a powerful tool for thinking about what separates us from aliens.
The Memory of Earth and Seventh Son are the first and best books of his Homecoming and Alvin Maker series. I like them both over the later entries because of the brilliantly realized settings (a city on another planet millions of years in the future and an alternate 18th century America where magic works, respectively).
Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus is one of the few books I've read that addresses the moral and ethical issues of time travel. It also serves as the fiction equivalent of Guns, Germs, and Steel in trying to answer the question of "Why did history turn out the way it did?"
The novella "The Originist" was written for Friends of Foundation, an anthology to celebrate Isaac Asimov's 50th anniversary of writing, and is set on Trantor during the time of Hari Seldon. It's a touching work that considers how storytelling provides a chain of continuity to history.
And, since this is a place where freely available source code is a favored topic of discussion, I should mention that I first encountered Card's writing in an old Commodore-64 magazine called Ahoy!, where he had a monthly programming column, usually with working code to type in. In particular, I fondly remember the Gypsy Starship game from the Dec. 1984 issue, which his storytelling even in making a computer game.
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Personally, I'm already queued to get Shadow. Loved the original's so much that I just had to get this. Got a local mob that flys out everything the day it is released and only cost A$1 more for the privilege. Hmmm... can't wait!
Just to add one more rambling point - I'd love to see another view of the universe that looks from Peter's and Valerie's perspectives. There's a big hole there about how Peter became Hegemon and Ender the Speaker for the Dead that I'm dying to find out what happened.
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Actually, there are four books (well, five now with Ender's Shadow), and the third book, Xenocide, takes off right where Speaker for the Dead ends , and the same goes for the 4th book, Children of the Mind, which picks up where Xenocide leaves off. Don't just get half the story! Pick up a copy today!
Yes, I feel like a cheap salesman, but cut me some slack; this is the only chance we'll ever have of plugging these books and proclaiming publically with pride that we've read them, and then finding others who feel the same way. So, put a four pronged eating utensil into my physical manifestation, I am completed.
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Somehow, I always identified with Alai more than any other character in Ender's Game. I just sat down and read the 4 new chapters, and the new book looks good (I'll probably uy it), but I wish it was about Alai instead.
The interesting thing I saw about Alai is a character that you simply don't see in fiction anywhere: a fully-functional kid who is nonetheless brilliant, yet is content to give the spotlight to someone else. If anything, I think Alai is more of the "mother" figure for Ender than even his sister.
I never really wanted to be Ender. He was too fucked up. Alai on the other hand, was brilliant, and both much more personable and functional as a human being.
While I'm sure the story about Bean is going to be good (based on the sample), I can't help wonder but if the story will end up much too similar to the original in tone and viewpoint. I think Card missed an opportunity to write about the topic from a completely different perspective, rather than one that was only incrementally different.
-Erik
PS - I find that Ender's Game and The Hobbit both suffer the same fate - the original book was so outstanding that it appealed (and was accessible) to both children and adults. The follow-on trilogies, while excellent in their own right, were much more complex pieces, and I think alot of kids got turned off to them because they weren't so accessible, and never returned to read them as an adult, much to their loss...
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I first picked up Ender's Games in the library about eight years ago. I was looking for something to read and found something written by this guy who used to write some cool articles in COMPUTE! I've since read EVERY one of his books that I could get my hands on
Personally, I really hope this is as excellent as Ender's Game (the novel, I have not yet read the original novella), but I'm not holding my breath. The problem is that Card has been wandering into a sort of "abuse the main character when plot fails" sort of mode that has made series like the Call of Earth books and *cough* the Alvin Maker books quite unreadable. Alvin Maker especially bothered me because it was such a briliantly simple idea that showed such promise. For those who haven't read the series, it's late 1800s US where many (if not everyone) have magical tallents that range from being able to make a better shoe than the technology should allow to healing the sick. Card begins the first book with a full head of steam and really brings the reader into the world. But, as the books drag on, all we get is more and more abuse of the main chraracter; this sort of "growth only comes through pain" melodrama that does not allow us to explore this facsinating world at all (in fact in one book he outright admits that he really only wants to explore one town, expounding on the contributiuons to the local citizenry that he got from the Internet).
Enough about Alvin, here's hoping that Card will return to his master-writer form, and give us a book that will wash away everything between Ender's Game and now!
I was just reading the other comments here, and I started to wonder something: Am I the only person who feels that a movie based on Ender's Game would be extremely hard to watch?
All of the main characters are younger than 14 for pretty much the whole story, and unlike all the tv shows and movies where they throw twenty-something year old in as high schoolers, they would need to use fairy young actors and (2) actresses. Let's see.. Supporting characters who can't really be dropped from the movie... Petra, Bonzo, Alai, Bean, (the older guy who was friends with Petra), a few others who have names I cannot recall. Valentine/Peter -could- be ignored in the movie.
Movies like that tend to be somewhat hard to bear. Take the more recent of the two movies based on The Lord of the Flies. This -is- my opinion, but.. it was brutal. I'm somewhat afraid that a movie on Ender's Game would be much the same. As the movie "Dune" is to the book. Watchable in its own right at best, a mockery of the book at worse.
Dozens of ~6 to ~14 year olds running around in a movie that probably can't help but turn itself into one aimed at children. And in a children's movie, can Ender kill two people and remain the hero?
To sum it up.. I liked this book enough so that I would never have wished for a movie to be based on it.
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I, like many others, didn't find children of the mind to be incredibly gripping stuff. I remember when first reading Ender's Game, I couldn't put it down, but the sequels didn't live up to it.
But on another note entirely, OSC's short story collection "The Changed Man" will absolutely rivet you if you like reading, period. It includes some -very- dark stuff, which isn't something I expected from OSC.
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I read and enjoyed Ender's Game, but didn't love it so much that I had to run out and read Speaker for the Dead.
Then the fan press erupted into a hoo-hah. Card, a Mormon, had written a very homophobic article for the Church press. Others picked up on it and villified him. I have no idea what net effect, if any, this had on his sales.
There are some authors I avoid because I find their beliefs repugnant, and these beliefs infuse their work, making it unreadable to me. A pot of message, stirred too hard, makes a work unpalatable no matter what the message is (c.f. C. S. Lewis' The Last Battle, a dismal end to an otherwise delightful series), but even a light touch of fundamentalist beliefs will ruin a book for me.
Card doesn't do this. I haven't found his work offensive in that way. However, after reading his anti-gay article, I found that I just wasn't interested in anything else the man had to say. I haven't read one of his books since and don't intend to.
What about others? Any of you out there find yourselves unwilling to read otherwise good literature because the author holds beliefs you find repugnant?
Ender's game was one of my all-time favorite stories when I was in 5th grade. Orson Scott Card is one of those people that really get it when it comes to being a gifted kid. A lot of adults hated it because they insisted it was not at all like being a gifted kid, which struck me as ironic since it most certainly is. And it definately would not make a watchable movie.
If it were made into a movie, any attempt to aim it todard an audience the age of the characters would be a Bad Thing. It would ruin the whole point of the book. The actors would have to look like little kids, but talk and act at least twice their age. There would also have to be some very effective techniques of getting the audience into the mind of Ender so they can really see where he is coming from, otherwise he would be one very unlikable character. Parents and the mass media would not know what to think. The "moralists" would fear the movie because they would say it corrupts kids' "fragile little minds".
I can't even begin to describe how awesome that book was, though. I say leave it as a book. I don't know how the idea of a movie even came up, since the discussion started about a book from bean's POV. That would be a cool book, though not a whole lot different from Ender's Game, because Bean was basically the same as Ender, but a few years younger.
Vidi, Vici, Veni
I thought Ender's Game was an incredible book, where I thought Speaker for the Dead seemed like a lame excuse to write another Ender novel.
This is actually a pretty common (and understandable) complaint about Speaker. The ironic thing is that in some ways, Speaker predates Ender (in novel form).
OSC started writing Speaker first, then decided he needed a stronger main character, so he went back to one of his short stories, and expanded it into a novel. Ender was really designed to be a prequel for the Speaker series-- OSC himself thought that Speaker was where the real story was. Ender was supposed to just be foundational.
I think they're both excellent, though they vary dramatically in tone and content. Certainly the least chaper of EG sets up the rest of the series, but apart from that, I never would have thought that the two books needed the same character.
It is really too bad about Kubrick, because Ender's Game is just the type story that would make a GREAT Kubrick film. Since that's obviously not possible, what other filmmakers would be good for a story like that? Anyone know?
Vidi, Vici, Veni