conuly

*topples off her chair* Christ, it's too early in the morning for these levels of batshit insanity.

I loved Ender's Game and Speaker for the Dead. I didn't like Xenocide very much, and the later volumes varied from boring to offensive. Oddly enough, I am neither a fascist nor a drooling Card fangirl.

I abhor the man's politics and his raging homophobia, and his increasing tendency to put large wodges of unprocessed propaganda in his books pisses me off. But there was a time when he wrote good, engaging stories that could stand on their own. He's a jerk, but a jerk with talent which he doesn't always live up to.

Also I think it's funny that he supposedly denies up and down the board, frothing at the mouth, that Ender = Hitler, but he has never made any bones about the fact that Homecoming = Book of Mormon.

From:

It's actually a very interesting article, and if I didn't think that my library records would get searched and the homeland security would start calling me up, I'd try to verify what is said by researching the life of Hitler.

From personal experience, I have spoken to Card on two occassions and been in his presence a great deal via EnderCon which I attended a few years ago, I can verify that he really doesn't have that great of a grasp on something he supposedly wrote. He has no explinations for mistakes in the books, nor any idea about the technology of the world he's created. It's itneresting to see them go from books which are really outstanding in the way they portray the world, into something that is lame, preachy, obsessed with reproduction. Hindividuals marrying for the sake of making babies? The guy is a homophobe and far more political than most of his readers give him credit for. This is the guy who has said that all homosexuals are just heterosexuals who were sexually abused by their parents.

Anyways, It wouldn't surprise me at all if someone else wrote a vast majority of Ender's Game. It just has a vastly different style than any of the later books, or those in the Shadow series for that matter. Ender's Shadow comes close to re-achieving that, but I think we're asked to swollow a lot to believe that everything that goes on is Bean's master plan and Ender really had nothing to do with it. It's possible the similarities there are solely because it follows the same plot outline.

Anyways, I'm rambling.
Mew.

From:

packbat.livejournal.com

Well, I haven't read the other books, but I remember that Ender's Shadow (1) wasn't as good as Ender's Game and (2) contradicted Ender's Game in a couple places (the one I remember is one point where Ender's Game said Bean was thinking one thing, and Ender's Shadow said he was thinking something else).

Oh well. I guess I might look up this article, but it really doesn't make a big difference to me.

From:

loved Ender's Game and Speaker for the Dead. I didn't like Xenocide very much, and the later volumes varied from boring to offensive. Oddly enough, I am neither a fascist nor a drooling Card fangirl. [...]

Seconded, with a litle addition: the latter volumes haven't been published in Hungarian and after Xenocide I didn't feel enthused enough to read'em in English in e-text.

From:

I can verify that he really doesn't have that great of a grasp on something he supposedly wrote.

Erm. Am I the only one who doesn't know everything that s/he wrote in intimate detail? I thought that was normal. When I write with a deadline looming over me, or under a lot of stress, I can be surprised at the results later on... "Did I really write that?!" And with him being a professional writer, I suspect it's all about deadlines. :O

From:

Well, that's okay then. You weren't missing much. *pets*

From:

-meow!-

From:

maladaptive.livejournal.com

I can't deny that Card is an asshat, but I didn't really see the Hitler connection in Ender's Game-- at all. It was just an enjoyable book....

From:

It depends. If you're talking about college essays or something of that nature, I agree, I don't expect anyone to remember years later, intimate details of it, or even remember they wrote it.

On the other hand, we're talking about a novel which became a series of four books, and now has a sequal/parallel series of another four or five books. I would -hope- that an author has a firm grasp on the world he's playing around in when he's been playing in it that long. I've been working with a sci-fi world of stories for nearly ten years now (shorter than OSC and his Enderverse for sure) and I know that world inside and out. I understand my characters, their motivations, and the situations they are in as well as the more global plot arch that runs through it.

What surprised me a lot at Ender-Con is how little OSC actually knew about the world he was writing about. He had absolutel zero throught to the technology behind what he was suggesting, and his books blatently contradict each other when it comes to things such as layout, development, and history.

Perhaps it can be explained as simply forgetting over time, but I would think that is a sign of an author who has bitten off more than they can chew if they can't even keep track of the world that -they- created.

Anyways, I'm rambling again.

From:

If you're talking about college essays or something of that nature, I agree, I don't expect anyone to remember years later, intimate details of it, or even remember they wrote it.

Actually, I was thinking of a recent incident, where I had to confess to the editor [of Galaktika the major Hungarian SF magazine] that I was profoundly unsure what a short story of mine contained. "Will there be any major changes or can this go into publication?" "Erm... Um... I dunno, you see... I wrote it in a hurry and haven't looked at it ever since I sent it to you..." [which was months ago] -.-;;;

(It's about an autistic woman who gets held up at the airport. As for the rest... I'm not sure I recall :O I remember that I looked up the US security clearance system for some detail. It had taken more time than writing the story and it ended up being half a line of information.)

On the other hand, we're talking about a novel which became a series of four books, and now has a sequal/parallel series of another four or five books. I would -hope- that an author has a firm grasp on the world he's playing around in when he's been playing in it that long.

Hmm, well, you sound right on that one. I've been meaning to write a novel for ages, and in the meanwhile I have worked out the background in really fine detail. But then again, I'm an absolute freak for detail *cough*Asperger*cough* and I realize other people might not be - just look at Star Wars for example, it has so many incongruencies it's... ah well. I'd better not start flaming Star Wars because I actually liked Episode 3! It was the visuals that did it for me though, not the coherence LOL. Also, there is this anime series called Saishuu-heiki Kanojo (She, the Ultimate Weapon) that manages to completely botcher up the background in 13 small episodes. It should've been heart-breaking, according to the local anime ML, but frankly it just left me annoyed.

Sorry if I sound completely incoherent, in the past 40 hours or so I've slept a grand total of two hours (plus-minus ten minutes). Finals time tra la la. I have gotten beyond the point of being able to decide over such meagrish things such as the grammaticality of a given sentence. Even if they were created by me! OK I'll shut up. ;]

Well just one more thing
He had absolutel zero throught to the technology behind what he was suggesting,
that's pretty sad. Something similar is how people put psi/magick into their stories and then proceed to disregard the effects completely. (RPing GMs know psi can be Teh Plot Killer and they're right. "How did you find out about all this?" "I'm a telepath. Work it out." - Babylon 5) But that's my pet peeve. (What is a "peeve", anyway?)

From:

Aye, I know what you mean about the detail orientedness and such. I really don't have much that I'm firmly basing my assumption on other than my own experiences, and like yourself, I'm on the autistic spectrum. I've seen some wonderful authors who when playing even in a world of science fiction, have found sources for mechanical engineering, sciences, etc. even for something as small as figuring out how a certain type of car works.

I also have a bit of a different perspective, due to actually attending EnderCon and seeing a lot of OSC's reactions to things first hand were. They had a group of engineers who had actually worked up how Battle School could possibly be done, and he just sat there without word one on if it even fit what he had in mind. Just seemed strange for him to say he hadn't thought of what battle school looked like or worked, and yet he wrote two storys that take place there. (Not to mention EG and ES disagree on a lot of issues with Battle School.)

Anyways, I'm being perseverant and obsesive, you have some points that I'll agree with. I need to find some non-spectrum friends who are writers and ask them how they work out their world concepts ;)

*chuckles*

From:

I pretty much agree with the above. I am a very big fan of Ender's Game, and it's a vital book to many children who grew up in abusive situations. It was the first book I read that showed childhood the way I was used to it being. It showed that other people have to make the same choices I did, even if they were fictional.

But calling Ender Hitler is just stupid. Yes, stupid. Because Ender did was not informed that he was killing anyone. He never made a choice to kill the Buggers. He never was given a chance to. And he only ever killed in situations of justifiable self-defense.

You cannot make the same argument about Hitler. And you cannot compare deliberately and with knowledge both torturing and killing sentients to be the same as accidentally killing sentients in situations where you believe it is kill or be killed. They are not morally equivalent, and trying to say that Ender=Hitler is both offensive to those who like the story of Ender and empathize with him and to all of humanity which is disgusted by the actions of Hitler.

From:

It certainly would explain some of the inconsistencies, and how I find that the books by OSC I've read that mention homosexuality, tend to (to me) seem pro-homosexuality. Yet, OSC's political views are abhorent to me. I have no interest in meetimg him or having anything to do with him. But I still like the book Ender's Game. And some of the writing is quite good. The Shadow series (which I may or may not have read all of) had some good bits here or there, but it did a lot of things wrong, and when it started ranting on about the purpose of life being reproduction, it became sickening.

From:

In my experience, it's a matter of how much you love your work. If it's a piece of writing you just tossed out and didn't think much of, it can be easily forgotten. But if you poured yourself into it and loved it, you don't forget it easily. I've written both sorts of things. And I think fans who love a work expect the author to also love the work. It would be very disappointing to find that the author didn't care much about his/her own writings that you took seriously. At least to me.

From:

raleighj.livejournal.com

Doh. Remind me that if I ever by some chance get published, it shall be under a wonderful pseudonym. Said pseudonym will also publish a few political articles that will assure the SF community that I am indeed a loyal liberal progressive atheist. And hopefully I'll be allowed to continue my writing career in peace, without having my motives questioned at every turn.

On the Hitler thing -- If there is a Hitler-apology idea in Ender's Game (which I enjoyed), there are ways of pointing it out and criticizing it that don't involve vicious personal attacks. (I thought one of the principles of critiquing was someting like "rip apart the work/idea, not the author.") It's actually a pretty cool moral dilemma thing to play with...if Card or someone else really was being that philosophically deliberate and adamant, more power to them for starting discussions like this.

From:

azarias.livejournal.com

*shrug* OSC's also a big giant homophobe who nonetheless somehow puts massive amounts of gay in the Orion books.

Maybe a brain-eater's got to him.

From:

lakidaa.livejournal.com

I find the theories fascin...fasic..interesting, but I don't think I want to struggle through the second onward books. x_x

From:

polydad.livejournal.com

I ended up spending an hour reading the followups on this thread, and reached the conclusion that kuro5hin is a good forum to avoid. It reads like a third-grade argument; who can shout "I'm right!" loudest and longest.

My own experience with Orson personally is that the only way to get him to shut up is to stick something fairly substantial in his mouth, but within that characteristic he's reasonably well-behaved. And his relationship to his religion seems to be fairly complex.

best,

Joel

From:

*topples off her chair* Christ, it's too early in the morning for these levels of batshit insanity.

I loved Ender's Game and Speaker for the Dead. I didn't like Xenocide very much, and the later volumes varied from boring to offensive. Oddly enough, I am neither a fascist nor a drooling Card fangirl.

I abhor the man's politics and his raging homophobia, and his increasing tendency to put large wodges of unprocessed propaganda in his books pisses me off. But there was a time when he wrote good, engaging stories that could stand on their own. He's a jerk, but a jerk with talent which he doesn't always live up to.

Also I think it's funny that he supposedly denies up and down the board, frothing at the mouth, that Ender = Hitler, but he has never made any bones about the fact that Homecoming = Book of Mormon.

From:

It's actually a very interesting article, and if I didn't think that my library records would get searched and the homeland security would start calling me up, I'd try to verify what is said by researching the life of Hitler.

From personal experience, I have spoken to Card on two occassions and been in his presence a great deal via EnderCon which I attended a few years ago, I can verify that he really doesn't have that great of a grasp on something he supposedly wrote. He has no explinations for mistakes in the books, nor any idea about the technology of the world he's created. It's itneresting to see them go from books which are really outstanding in the way they portray the world, into something that is lame, preachy, obsessed with reproduction. Hindividuals marrying for the sake of making babies? The guy is a homophobe and far more political than most of his readers give him credit for. This is the guy who has said that all homosexuals are just heterosexuals who were sexually abused by their parents.

Anyways, It wouldn't surprise me at all if someone else wrote a vast majority of Ender's Game. It just has a vastly different style than any of the later books, or those in the Shadow series for that matter. Ender's Shadow comes close to re-achieving that, but I think we're asked to swollow a lot to believe that everything that goes on is Bean's master plan and Ender really had nothing to do with it. It's possible the similarities there are solely because it follows the same plot outline.

Anyways, I'm rambling.
Mew.

From:

packbat.livejournal.com

Well, I haven't read the other books, but I remember that Ender's Shadow (1) wasn't as good as Ender's Game and (2) contradicted Ender's Game in a couple places (the one I remember is one point where Ender's Game said Bean was thinking one thing, and Ender's Shadow said he was thinking something else).

Oh well. I guess I might look up this article, but it really doesn't make a big difference to me.

From:

loved Ender's Game and Speaker for the Dead. I didn't like Xenocide very much, and the later volumes varied from boring to offensive. Oddly enough, I am neither a fascist nor a drooling Card fangirl. [...]

Seconded, with a litle addition: the latter volumes haven't been published in Hungarian and after Xenocide I didn't feel enthused enough to read'em in English in e-text.

From:

I can verify that he really doesn't have that great of a grasp on something he supposedly wrote.

Erm. Am I the only one who doesn't know everything that s/he wrote in intimate detail? I thought that was normal. When I write with a deadline looming over me, or under a lot of stress, I can be surprised at the results later on... "Did I really write that?!" And with him being a professional writer, I suspect it's all about deadlines. :O

From:

Well, that's okay then. You weren't missing much. *pets*

From:

-meow!-

From:

maladaptive.livejournal.com

I can't deny that Card is an asshat, but I didn't really see the Hitler connection in Ender's Game-- at all. It was just an enjoyable book....

From:

It depends. If you're talking about college essays or something of that nature, I agree, I don't expect anyone to remember years later, intimate details of it, or even remember they wrote it.

On the other hand, we're talking about a novel which became a series of four books, and now has a sequal/parallel series of another four or five books. I would -hope- that an author has a firm grasp on the world he's playing around in when he's been playing in it that long. I've been working with a sci-fi world of stories for nearly ten years now (shorter than OSC and his Enderverse for sure) and I know that world inside and out. I understand my characters, their motivations, and the situations they are in as well as the more global plot arch that runs through it.

What surprised me a lot at Ender-Con is how little OSC actually knew about the world he was writing about. He had absolutel zero throught to the technology behind what he was suggesting, and his books blatently contradict each other when it comes to things such as layout, development, and history.

Perhaps it can be explained as simply forgetting over time, but I would think that is a sign of an author who has bitten off more than they can chew if they can't even keep track of the world that -they- created.

Anyways, I'm rambling again.

From:

If you're talking about college essays or something of that nature, I agree, I don't expect anyone to remember years later, intimate details of it, or even remember they wrote it.

Actually, I was thinking of a recent incident, where I had to confess to the editor [of Galaktika the major Hungarian SF magazine] that I was profoundly unsure what a short story of mine contained. "Will there be any major changes or can this go into publication?" "Erm... Um... I dunno, you see... I wrote it in a hurry and haven't looked at it ever since I sent it to you..." [which was months ago] -.-;;;

(It's about an autistic woman who gets held up at the airport. As for the rest... I'm not sure I recall :O I remember that I looked up the US security clearance system for some detail. It had taken more time than writing the story and it ended up being half a line of information.)

On the other hand, we're talking about a novel which became a series of four books, and now has a sequal/parallel series of another four or five books. I would -hope- that an author has a firm grasp on the world he's playing around in when he's been playing in it that long.

Hmm, well, you sound right on that one. I've been meaning to write a novel for ages, and in the meanwhile I have worked out the background in really fine detail. But then again, I'm an absolute freak for detail *cough*Asperger*cough* and I realize other people might not be - just look at Star Wars for example, it has so many incongruencies it's... ah well. I'd better not start flaming Star Wars because I actually liked Episode 3! It was the visuals that did it for me though, not the coherence LOL. Also, there is this anime series called Saishuu-heiki Kanojo (She, the Ultimate Weapon) that manages to completely botcher up the background in 13 small episodes. It should've been heart-breaking, according to the local anime ML, but frankly it just left me annoyed.

Sorry if I sound completely incoherent, in the past 40 hours or so I've slept a grand total of two hours (plus-minus ten minutes). Finals time tra la la. I have gotten beyond the point of being able to decide over such meagrish things such as the grammaticality of a given sentence. Even if they were created by me! OK I'll shut up. ;]

Well just one more thing
He had absolutel zero throught to the technology behind what he was suggesting,
that's pretty sad. Something similar is how people put psi/magick into their stories and then proceed to disregard the effects completely. (RPing GMs know psi can be Teh Plot Killer and they're right. "How did you find out about all this?" "I'm a telepath. Work it out." - Babylon 5) But that's my pet peeve. (What is a "peeve", anyway?)

From:

Aye, I know what you mean about the detail orientedness and such. I really don't have much that I'm firmly basing my assumption on other than my own experiences, and like yourself, I'm on the autistic spectrum. I've seen some wonderful authors who when playing even in a world of science fiction, have found sources for mechanical engineering, sciences, etc. even for something as small as figuring out how a certain type of car works.

I also have a bit of a different perspective, due to actually attending EnderCon and seeing a lot of OSC's reactions to things first hand were. They had a group of engineers who had actually worked up how Battle School could possibly be done, and he just sat there without word one on if it even fit what he had in mind. Just seemed strange for him to say he hadn't thought of what battle school looked like or worked, and yet he wrote two storys that take place there. (Not to mention EG and ES disagree on a lot of issues with Battle School.)

Anyways, I'm being perseverant and obsesive, you have some points that I'll agree with. I need to find some non-spectrum friends who are writers and ask them how they work out their world concepts ;)

*chuckles*

From:

I pretty much agree with the above. I am a very big fan of Ender's Game, and it's a vital book to many children who grew up in abusive situations. It was the first book I read that showed childhood the way I was used to it being. It showed that other people have to make the same choices I did, even if they were fictional.

But calling Ender Hitler is just stupid. Yes, stupid. Because Ender did was not informed that he was killing anyone. He never made a choice to kill the Buggers. He never was given a chance to. And he only ever killed in situations of justifiable self-defense.

You cannot make the same argument about Hitler. And you cannot compare deliberately and with knowledge both torturing and killing sentients to be the same as accidentally killing sentients in situations where you believe it is kill or be killed. They are not morally equivalent, and trying to say that Ender=Hitler is both offensive to those who like the story of Ender and empathize with him and to all of humanity which is disgusted by the actions of Hitler.

From:

It certainly would explain some of the inconsistencies, and how I find that the books by OSC I've read that mention homosexuality, tend to (to me) seem pro-homosexuality. Yet, OSC's political views are abhorent to me. I have no interest in meetimg him or having anything to do with him. But I still like the book Ender's Game. And some of the writing is quite good. The Shadow series (which I may or may not have read all of) had some good bits here or there, but it did a lot of things wrong, and when it started ranting on about the purpose of life being reproduction, it became sickening.

From: