Me too, though I had many of those same misgivings while reading the book. The difference between me and everybody else in my peer group—who loved Ender’s Game—is that I first read it as an adult, and they all read it first as teenagers or before.
To gather some actual data, I’m curious how many people there are here who first read it as a young teenager and didn’t love it, or first read it as an adult and did love it.
I read it as a teenager and didn’t love it. Many things annoyed me, but most of all the insanity of training Ender and company exclusively in skills other than the ones they would actually use (people floating in space with hand-held lasers) rather than the skills they needed. Also the absence of anything that looked AT ALL like a bell curve distribution of ability. The battle school kids are all supposed to be massively well selected and trained, yet only Ender, Bean, Valentine and Peter really matter. The battle school kids in general are all an absurd backdrop just to train “the one” who has been identified ahead of time. Finally, overly complex plans working annoyed me a bit and extreme military/governmental competence annoyed me more.
True Names and other Dangers is a weird case of an anarcho-libertarian writing a story showing extreme military/governmental competence.
Probably a stored rant here, but the thing that put me off most from Ender’s Game (which I’d read as an adult) was that the adults con a child into pushing the button which wipes out an alien race, and with the intent of absolving themselves from responsibility. IIRC, Ender actually does accept (partial?) responsibility in a later book.
Even though I’ve become more cynical since I read that book, I still think the adult behavior was well outside the human range. The normal thing is to blame the aliens for humans thinking it made sense to wipe them out.
I think its trickier than that—the adults are portrayed as being incapable of the “necessary” brilliance and/or ruthlessness. They put Ender in the hotseat because they hope he’ll do “something to win” without really visualizing what that something might entail. He’s simultaneously their “more powerful optimizing process” and (using LW terminology that makes me a little uncomfortable) their shabbos goy.
Its possible that the first two books were written specifically to explore the structure of moral reasoning in situations like this. How do people morally process a genocide that no specific person directly and obviously intended, especially if their theory of moral reasoning hinges primarily on intent?
I don’t mean to pull a Godwin, but there may (intentionally?) be a strong set of correspondences between Ender and Hitler, with a literary goal of getting people to “identify and forgive Hitler”—that is, the whole book may be a literary “Godwin prank”. I should note that this is not my original analysis, in part because I know almost nothing about “Hitler scholarship”. The original insight came from Elaine Radford, I heard about it via a K5 post by a friend of hers telling the story of how Orson Scott Card freaked out and tried to bully her into not publishing the analysis after book two but before book three (which was massively delayed, possibly because of the review if you buy the K5 story). The analysis was later cited in Creating the Innocent Killer: Ender’s Game, Intention, and Morality.
For reference, I read Ender’s Game and really liked it when I was about 12. After my brother and I read it we tried to get our mom to read it and she stopped like 20 pages in because the horrific child abuse turned her stomach.
I stopped reading Card in my 40s or thereabouts because, while I was fascinated by the character torture, I became uncomfortable with my fascination. I’d earlier realized that there’s something really creepy about a lot of the older male characters in Card—they do horrific things which are justified in the text.
Discovering that you can no longer stand a book you used to love is sometimes called “the book was visited by the suck fairy”.
More recently, (on the strong recommendation of a friend) I read Empire, and amazingly, it has a positive father/son relationship.
“Also the absence of anything that looked AT ALL like a bell curve distribution of ability. The battle school kids are all supposed to be massively well selected and trained, yet only Ender, Bean, Valentine and Peter really matter. ”
If you select out the right end of the bell curve from the general population, then you won’t have a bell curve anymore, but rather a fat lower end.
Also, the training was supposed to be a sort of abstract sport to select for leadership skill, coolness under pressure, etc—it wasn’t supposed to be actually training them to fight in space. They did training of the actual spaceshippy stuff later. You could certainly argue they should have started that earlier though.
You should have something that looks like the right end of a bell curve, e.g. very little variation, especially with feedback loops from ability shaping environment shaping ability cut short by the tight external control on environment.
abstract sport to select for leadership skill, coolness under pressure
“The playing fields of Eton.”
But since the final application was video games, why not train under that form of pressure? There is plausibly something to be said for physical activity and proximity to teammates and opponents for building teamwork and leadership.
I read it in middle school, and, though I know there’s a tendency to see my earlier self as having the benefit of hindsight, I swear that while I really enjoyed the cathartic nerd-violence, I also had an awareness that there was something creepy and wrong with the whole thing, even if I couldn’t put my finger on it. I was both attracted to and horrified by the book. I had a faint sense that feeling that self-righteous is a very dangerous sign.
I then largely forgot about it (it seems to have strongly influenced a lot of people who read it at that age, but not me) until I reached adulthood and stumbled on criticism from Kessel and Radford, whereupon it all fell into place and I congratulated myself on having seen that there was at least something there to criticize.
Me too, though I had many of those same misgivings while reading the book. The difference between me and everybody else in my peer group—who loved Ender’s Game—is that I first read it as an adult, and they all read it first as teenagers or before.
To gather some actual data, I’m curious how many people there are here who first read it as a young teenager and didn’t love it, or first read it as an adult and did love it.
I read it as a teenager and didn’t love it. Many things annoyed me, but most of all the insanity of training Ender and company exclusively in skills other than the ones they would actually use (people floating in space with hand-held lasers) rather than the skills they needed. Also the absence of anything that looked AT ALL like a bell curve distribution of ability. The battle school kids are all supposed to be massively well selected and trained, yet only Ender, Bean, Valentine and Peter really matter. The battle school kids in general are all an absurd backdrop just to train “the one” who has been identified ahead of time. Finally, overly complex plans working annoyed me a bit and extreme military/governmental competence annoyed me more.
True Names and other Dangers is a weird case of an anarcho-libertarian writing a story showing extreme military/governmental competence.
Probably a stored rant here, but the thing that put me off most from Ender’s Game (which I’d read as an adult) was that the adults con a child into pushing the button which wipes out an alien race, and with the intent of absolving themselves from responsibility. IIRC, Ender actually does accept (partial?) responsibility in a later book.
Even though I’ve become more cynical since I read that book, I still think the adult behavior was well outside the human range. The normal thing is to blame the aliens for humans thinking it made sense to wipe them out.
I think its trickier than that—the adults are portrayed as being incapable of the “necessary” brilliance and/or ruthlessness. They put Ender in the hotseat because they hope he’ll do “something to win” without really visualizing what that something might entail. He’s simultaneously their “more powerful optimizing process” and (using LW terminology that makes me a little uncomfortable) their shabbos goy.
Its possible that the first two books were written specifically to explore the structure of moral reasoning in situations like this. How do people morally process a genocide that no specific person directly and obviously intended, especially if their theory of moral reasoning hinges primarily on intent?
I don’t mean to pull a Godwin, but there may (intentionally?) be a strong set of correspondences between Ender and Hitler, with a literary goal of getting people to “identify and forgive Hitler”—that is, the whole book may be a literary “Godwin prank”. I should note that this is not my original analysis, in part because I know almost nothing about “Hitler scholarship”. The original insight came from Elaine Radford, I heard about it via a K5 post by a friend of hers telling the story of how Orson Scott Card freaked out and tried to bully her into not publishing the analysis after book two but before book three (which was massively delayed, possibly because of the review if you buy the K5 story). The analysis was later cited in Creating the Innocent Killer: Ender’s Game, Intention, and Morality.
For reference, I read Ender’s Game and really liked it when I was about 12. After my brother and I read it we tried to get our mom to read it and she stopped like 20 pages in because the horrific child abuse turned her stomach.
I stopped reading Card in my 40s or thereabouts because, while I was fascinated by the character torture, I became uncomfortable with my fascination. I’d earlier realized that there’s something really creepy about a lot of the older male characters in Card—they do horrific things which are justified in the text.
Discovering that you can no longer stand a book you used to love is sometimes called “the book was visited by the suck fairy”.
More recently, (on the strong recommendation of a friend) I read Empire, and amazingly, it has a positive father/son relationship.
“Also the absence of anything that looked AT ALL like a bell curve distribution of ability. The battle school kids are all supposed to be massively well selected and trained, yet only Ender, Bean, Valentine and Peter really matter. ”
If you select out the right end of the bell curve from the general population, then you won’t have a bell curve anymore, but rather a fat lower end.
Also, the training was supposed to be a sort of abstract sport to select for leadership skill, coolness under pressure, etc—it wasn’t supposed to be actually training them to fight in space. They did training of the actual spaceshippy stuff later. You could certainly argue they should have started that earlier though.
And to give them experience thinking about tactics three-dimensionally.
You should have something that looks like the right end of a bell curve, e.g. very little variation, especially with feedback loops from ability shaping environment shaping ability cut short by the tight external control on environment.
“The playing fields of Eton.”
But since the final application was video games, why not train under that form of pressure? There is plausibly something to be said for physical activity and proximity to teammates and opponents for building teamwork and leadership.
I read it in middle school, and, though I know there’s a tendency to see my earlier self as having the benefit of hindsight, I swear that while I really enjoyed the cathartic nerd-violence, I also had an awareness that there was something creepy and wrong with the whole thing, even if I couldn’t put my finger on it. I was both attracted to and horrified by the book. I had a faint sense that feeling that self-righteous is a very dangerous sign.
I then largely forgot about it (it seems to have strongly influenced a lot of people who read it at that age, but not me) until I reached adulthood and stumbled on criticism from Kessel and Radford, whereupon it all fell into place and I congratulated myself on having seen that there was at least something there to criticize.
Read it as an adult (sometime in the second half of my 20s) and loved it. (Still do.)