Ender's Game

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I just read this Orson Scott Card book. Was excellent. I plan on reading the rest of the series.

Yeah, I read a couple books in the series and I loved them. I can't wait for the Ender's Game movie to come out.

I loved EG and ES (Ender's Shadow) the best. I have all the books in the series..including some short stories.

When is the moving comming out? *fumes impatiently*

Indeed, one of the greatest sci-fi novels ever written. There's some list of the top 50 or so sci-fi books, and Ender's Game got #2 (Dune was #1 and the Foundation Trilogy got #3). So glad I finally read it two years ago.



Uh... Speaker for the Dead bored the life out of me, I wouldn't reccommend it. I haven't read the other two sequels (xenocide, children of the mind). You're better off reading the Bean/Shadow books (Ender's Shadow, Shadow of the Hegemon, etc.) which aren't as good as Ender's Game but still pretty cool. Its sort of weird that SftD was so bad because he supposedly wrote Ender's Game just so he'd have a prequel to Speaker for the Dead... I guess writers don't have much of an idea or much control over which of their books are gonna be the most memorable.

Speak for yourself.

I loved Speaker for the Dead ... but then again I'm heavily into the philosophical issues there. Xenocide and Children of the Mind are good as well, but a bit weird - the whole Auia business and Jane being a half human half hive queen (and later part mother tree) thing...well, it is a very thought provoking story at least.

I thought the books got better as they went on. Xenocide may be my favourite, but I haven't read them recently enough to say why, apart from the fact that the books seemed to become more philosophical into the series.

I've noticed that the people who love the Shadows series tend to dislike the Speaker series, and those who love the Speaker series tend to dislike the Shadow series. Which makes sense considering that they are for completely different audiences.

There are also those who like EG but none of the later novels, and a few who prefer the original novella to the
later novel.

I seem to be one of the rare few who likes all of them.

I really wanted to like the original novel, but i just couldnt get what was so good about it despite its reputation as being somewhat a classic.

I thought the whole book was padded out and very very boring and repetitive. Although the story was quite interesting in the way they manipulate little kids but seems kinda dated now.

I liked both, Shadow and Speaker, but then I like nearly anything that comes out of Orson Scott Card's head. The only thing I really couldn't stand was the Alvin Maker series.

***minor spoiler warning***

I'm sorry, but a thousand native Americans standing there stoic while they get shot down isn't ethical or heroic, it's just plain sick. So quit shoving the ethics down my throat.

**end***

Aside from Ender's Game, my favorite of all his stuff has got to be one most people haven't even heard of... Wyrms. Anyone who's into neuroscience ought to check it out. It's got a fascinating triad in it: creatures whose brain is all impulse/emotion/empathy, creatures whose brain is all memory (which unintentionally have some odd parallels with autistics, because of their inability to see the big picture), and a third group that I think was all rationality. I've got issues with his accuracy in the application of certain ideas, but I still love the ideas themselves.

There's another thing that bugs me about Card too, and that's that he can't or won't keep his Mormon beliefs out of the books. Time after time you get characters who have the world in their hands, and leave it all behind to raise a family. Having children, as many as possible, and sacrificing everything for them, is preached as the highest calling. And that just does not fit the personalities he builds up for some of these characters who inevitably end up "converted".

Pyraxis - I agree with your observations about asserting his Mormon beliefs. That's what made Ender's Game good - it'sdidn't do that. It stuck primarily to an univeral moral dilemmia: to defeat the enemy, one must know the enemy, yet to know the enemy is to love the enemy. But I foudnd the more he asserted his Mormonism,especially in later books, it became too hard to swallow. It's especially true when he tries to write Catholic characters who seem more Mormon than Catholic - being a Catholic, I find this irksome to the nth degree. I fe like he just uses Catholicism as a guise to make Mormon characters because it's more "mainstream."

Another thing I found irksome about his post-Ender's Game books was increasing sentimentality. I couldn't get through Ender's Shadow because I found the hard luck, nyperdramatic life of Bean just to heavy-handed and silly. I Only really liked Speaker of the Dead after Ender's Game. I think Xenocide was interesting, but a very flawed and poorly structured book. The one after that - the one that took him forever to write - I found forgettable. I can't even recall the name right now.

Side note: I admit to be hypersenstive to Mormonism - but hey if you were engaged to a Mormon guy who lied, connived and manipulated you in his attempt to convert you to Mormonism against your will, your expressed objections and your better judgement, you probably would too. And I'm not kidding. This guy even went so far as to insisting on having unprotected sex, which, he admitted later, was an attempt to get me pregnant so I'd be "forced" to marry him - apparently this is acceptable for Mormons, since his bishop nor his mother didn't have a problem with it either! But I assuredly do. This isn't something I've easily put behind me, and needless to say, my appreciation for Card has declined significantly since.

Yeh that was a good book. I think I probably wood have appreciated the subtlety of it - especially the ending - more if id red it now, rather than ages ago when i did, thogh.

Orson Scott Card is one of my favorite authors. I have most everything he's written (minus some in the Alvin Maker series, and the newer Ender series books). Wyrms is one of my favorites, too, Pyraxis. I also liked Treasure Box and Enchantment, two books a little outside his usual literary haunting ground. And Hart's Hope, and Treason, and Songmaster. Oh, I could go on and on listing books of his I llike.

I've never been put off by the "Mormon factor" in his stories. Never felt like it was too much, though I'm an agnostic. And I don't really remember any stories where main characters drop everything and go off to have a family. Can't think of any, in fact. Maybe that happens in some of the later Ender books? I've only read the first four, and then Ender's Shadow.

Another author I love is Octavia Butler - has anyone else read her work?

Although I wonder whether the last is true for everyone? Psychopaths would seem an obvious exception...

********* MAJOR SPOILER ALERT! *************

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Ender could do anything in the universe, and he decides to adopt what's-her-hame's family (Olhado and the rest of them)... yet doesn't even make that much difference in their lives.
Bean's life ambition is to marry Petra and have a kid.
Enders' parents go from hotshot rival college students to a couple determined only to break the country's 2-kid limit... and then they don't even push it after Ender.

Yeah, I'm biased.

(I wouldn't consider Ender's parents major characters, but that's a quibble point and doesn't diminish the point you're making.)

I totally missed your take on Bean's life ambition when I read Ender's Shadow (I haven't read any of the series beyond that yet--maybe that is highlighted in one of the later books). As for Ender, I didn't see what he chose to do as the end of his story, just as part of it.

But that's just my view, and possibly one that filters out relevant information while I'm reading, thus skewed and inaccurate .

With Ender's parents, I'm referring to the story about how they met, in First Meetings in the Enderverse. I can't remember which book has the thing with Bean, but it was close to the end, so it's quite possible you just haven't gotten to it yet.

Either way, it's definitely a personal beef, since I don't get the importance society insists on putting on marriage and family.