Cringe Side-Quest #2: Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card - Enemy gate is Down's syndrome

[White-Kettle Shufflepunk]

I've spoken to a few of you good Kiwis in DMs since I started doing these threads (sidenote, if any of you want to shoot me a rec or just say hi, my door is always open) and one thing many of you have suggested is that I cover any right-wing books. That's a very good idea. I'm still kind of a lib-cuck at heart, and I don't do these reviews just to shit on woke nonsense. I'm against shit writing regardless of ideology. The only problem is that there really isn't a right-wing presence in pop-culture anymore. Liberal and left-wing artists have dominated media for decades now. I think the last time you could say pop-culture in America (and therefore the West as a whole) skewed right-wing was probably the 1980s, with maybe a small blip right after 9/11, but even that was a very different landscape from what we have now. The 80s may have been much more friendly to conservatives and right-wingers than today, but there were still plenty of successful and influential liberals and left-wing artists and works. There's none of that pluralism today. If your book, movie, or TV show wants any kind of mainstream endorsement, it better at least nod approvingly leftward. Put it this way, one of the sci-fi and fantasy publisher Baen's most popular series is by a liberal woman, and included a book about an entire planet of gays fighting to maintain this state of affairs, and it's still known as a "right-wing company" because it sometimes publishes people right of Mao.

That's not to say right-wing art still isn't made. Evangelical Christians and Mormons still have their own little media ecosystems. Occasionally someone like Ben Shapiro will put out a thriller about, like, college kids putting everyone over fifty in internment camps, and then there's stuff like William S. Lind's Victoria, which opens with a woman being burned at the stake for heresy by a braying mob. And this is meant to be a good thing. But these are mostly extremely niche projects widely and loudly derided by the wider population. Threads about those would probably still be good for a laugh, but in the same way making fun of House of Night is. There's not much of an actual discussion to be had, you know.

So yeah, if we want to cover a book by a right-leaning author that has actual cultural relevance, we're going to have to go back a little. Thus, Ender's Game, by Orson Scott Card.

It's pretty fashionable out there in the woods beyond the Farms to hate on Orson Scott Card, mostly for his loud homophobia. And to be fair, Card's crusade against gayness is in fact, pretty silly. The dude wrote a version of Hamlet where the whole play happened because Hamlet's dad was buggering every boy in the castle. It doesn't help that Card's also pretty clear a closet-case, but we'll get to that. It eventually got to the point where the LDS Church had to decant Brandon Sanderson as the new amiable representative of Mormonism in mainstream speculative fiction. Still, even people who boycott his work to this day (because I'm sure everyone is just itching for another Gate Mage book) will still begrudgingly call Ender's Game a classic science fiction story.

Naturally, I fucking hate it. Hate, hate, hate, hate. And I did go into it with an open mind. I'd heard some critques of it over the years, but that'd mostly been weird lefty takes about how it was secretly a sympathetic biography of Hitler, or the excesses of its sequels. It's a real shame, because if Ender's Game was executed at all competently, I'd probably have enjoyed it a lot. One of my favourite kind of narrative is stories about children that are aimed at adults. Both my main fiction projects have child protagonists or mixed-age casts. I think there are a few reasons for this. One is that children are quite simply different from adults, which makes their perspective inherently novel. It's also why I quite enjoy stories about people who are middle-aged or elderly. People these days crow a lot about the importance of diversity in fiction, but they usually only skin colour or who you like to bang, not truly different life-experiences. Also, kids are just fun. They're like adults, but stupider in a way you can't hold against them, which can make for great protagonist material. There's a reason nobody actually likes Jon Kent being turned from an earnest, exciteable ten year old to a boring seventeen year old bisexual.

Another reason I probably prize child-led narratives so much is because they're so hard to do right. Often, adult attempting to write from a child's perspective wind up being cloying or unconvincing. Guess which route Card went? Spoilers, both.

Anyway, before we begin, he's a handy index of books we've already covered in our merry quest:

1. Dreadnought
2. House of Night
3. SLAY

First off, a dedication:

Portions of this book were recounted in my first published science fiction story, "Ender's Game," in the August 1977 Analog, edited by Ben Boya; his faith in me and this story are the foundation of my career.

Like a lot of older sci-fi novels, Ender's Game was originally a short story that got expanded into a full novel. I notice this has largely fallen out of fashion in modern spec-fic. If a book is proceeded by a short-story, it's usually a prequel or something written to establish the setting in advance. But then, unless you're Ted Chiang, short-stories are a lot less relevant in general these days.

Harriet McDougal of Tor is that rarest of editors--one who understands a story and can help the author make it exactly what he meant it to be. They don't pay her enough. Harriet's task was made more than a little easier, however, because of the excellent work of my resident editor, Kristine Card. I don't pay her enough, either.

I bet a few of you are suprised to find out Tor of all people published Orson Scott Card. But yes, before they dedicated themselves to astroturfing People of Identity like Gretch and hosting reread blogs of Narnia, Tor was an actual science-fiction publisher than printed books people liked. Card actually remained with Tor for many years, well into their woke period, much to the displeasure of many. Like a lot of legacy authors, I'm guessing his sales singlehandedly funded their virtue-signaling.

I usually skip author's introductions when I read, but I feel like making an exception in this case:

It makes me a little uncomfortable, writing an introduction to Ender's Game. After all, the book has been in print for six years now, and in all that time, nobody has ever written to me to say, "You know, Ender's Game was a pretty good book, but you know what it really needs? An introduction!" And yet when a novel goes back to print for a new hardcover edition, there ought to be something new in it to mark the occasion (something besides the minor changes as I fix the errors and internal contradictions and stylistic excesses that have bothered me ever since the novel first appeared).

Well, this explains why Bean is now CGI.

So be assured-the novel stands on its own, and if you skip this intro and go straight to the story, I not only won't stand in your way, I'll even agree with you!

Well, that's nice of him. I'm guessing House of Night's reissue won't include an intro like this, but if it does, at least it'll be short:

"Twilight and Harry Potter were big at at the time so my lit agent made me write a ripoff of both."

It was based on an idea--the Battle Room--that came to me when I6 was sixteen years old.

One of the reasons short-stories are so great for science fiction is that you can thoroughly explore an idea that might be too thin for a full novel. A lot of books with similar publication histories as Ender's Game were criticised as being less tight or focused than the short-fiction which spawned them, but I think Ender's Game actually has a different problem. The story is meant to be scaffholding for the concept of the Battle Room, but the Battle Room ends up feeling kind of superflous.

I had just read Isaac Asimov's Foundation trilogy, which was (more or less) an extrapolation of the ideas in Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, applied to a galaxy-wide empire in some far future time.

The novel set me, not to dreaming, but to thinking, which is Asimov's most extraordinary ability as a fiction writer. What would the future be like? How would things change? What would remain the same? The premise of Foundation seemed to be that even though you might change the props and the actors, the play of human history is always the same.

I find it kind of funny that Foundation--a story mostly told through conversations about social science and political history--inspired Card to write about a super-cool space laser-tag arena. It's like if Terminator was inspired by The Machine Stops.

And yet that fundamentally pessimistic premise (you mean we’ll never change?) was tempered by Asimov's idea of a group of human beings who, not through genetic change, but through learned skills, are able to understand and heal the minds of other people.

With psychic powers, in some cases. Funnily enough, many years after Card wrote this, Asimov concluded the Foundation series by setting humanity on the path of becoming an inhuman, galaxy-wide group-mind.

It was an idea that rang true with me, perhaps in part because of my Mormon upbringing and beliefs: Human beings may be miserable specimens, in the main, but we can learn, and, through learning, become decent people.

I clown on Card, and will continue to do so, but I do feel a lot more kinship with him as an author than any of the others we've covered so far. He at least seems to be driven by ideas, and not what might appeal to a psychopath at Manuscript Wishlist.

The essence of training is to allow error without consequence. Three-dimensional warfare would need to be practiced in an enclosed space, so mistakes wouldn't send trainees flying off to Jupiter. It would need to offer a way to practice shooting without risk of injury; and yet trainees who were "hit" would need to be disabled, at least temporarily. The environment would need to be changeable, to simulate the different conditions of warfare--near a ship, in the midst of debris, near tiny asteroids. And it would need to have some of the confusion of real battle, so that the play-combat didn't evolve into something as rigid and formal as the meaningless marching and maneuvers that still waste an astonishing amount of a trainee's precious hours in basic training in our modem military.

Have you tried plugging it back in?

It happened one spring day that a friend of mine, Tammy Mikkelson, was taking her boss's children to the circus in Salt Lake City; would I like to come along? I would. And since there was no ticket for me (and I've always detested the circus anyway--the clowns drive me up a wall), I spent the hours of the performance out on the lawn of the Salt Palace with a notebook on my lap, writing "Ender's Game" as I had written all my plays, in longhand on narrow-ruled paper. “Remember,” said Ender. “The enemy's gate is down.”

Maybe it was because of the children in the car on the way up that I decided that the trainees in the Battle Room were so young. Maybe it was because I, barely an adolescent myself, understood only childhood well enough to write about it.

Card would've been about twenty-four at the time. I'm not sure if this says something about him, Mormon culture, or the rest of us.

Or maybe it was because of something that impressed me in Catton's Army of the Potomac: that the soldiers were all so young and innocent. That they shot and bayoneted the enemy, and then slipped across the neutral ground between armies to trade tobacco, jokes, liquor, and food. Even though it was a deadly game, and the suffering and fear were terrible and real, it was still a game played by children, not all that different from the wargames my brothers and I had played, firing water-filled squirt bottles at each other.

That would explain Ender being sixteen, not six.

For one thing, the people that hated it really hated it.

Waves hello.

The attacks on the novel--and on me—were astonishing. Some of it I expected--I have a master’s degree in literature, and in writing Ender's Game I deliberately avoided all the little literary games and gimmicks that make "fine" writing so impenetrable to the general audience. All the layers of meaning are there to be decoded, if you like to play the game of literary criticism--but if you don't care to play that game, that's fine with me. I designed Ender's Game to be as clear and accessible as any story of mine could possibly be. My goal was that the reader wouldn't have to be trained in literature or even in science fiction to receive the tale in its simplest, purest form.

...That actually explains a lot about how this book is written.

And, since a great many writers and critics have based their entire careers on the premise that anything that the general public can understand without mediation is worthless drivel, it is not surprising that they found my little novel to be despicable. If everybody came to agree that stories should be told this clearly, the professors of literature would be out of a job, and the writers of obscure, encoded fiction would be, not honored, but pitied for their impenetrability.

I'm no snob, but this is starting to read like those book Twitter threads where people talk about how hard writing YA is.

For some people, however, the loathing for Ender's Game transcended mere artistic argument. I recall a letter to the editor of Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, in which a woman who worked as a guidance counselor for gifted children re ported that she had only picked up Ender's Game to read it because her son had kept telling her it was a wonderful book. She read it and loathed it. Of course, I wondered what kind of guidance counselor would hold her son's tastes up to public ridicule, but the criticism that left me most flabbergasted was her assertion that my depiction of gifted children was hopelessly unrealistic.

Man, imagine being Card when he discovered mommy-bloggers. But about that other thing...

Yet I knew--I knew--that this was one of the truest things about Ender's Game. In fact, I realized in retrospect that this may indeed be part of the reason why it was so important to me, there on the lawn in front of the Salt Palace, to write a story in which gifted children are trained to fight in adult wars. Because never in my entire childhood did I feel like a child. I felt like a person all along--the same person that I am today.

The fuck does that even mean? Aside from maybe that Orson Scott Card hasn't changed as a person since he was ten years old. Also, notice Oscar Scott Card thinks he understands gifted kids better than a woman whose job is working with them.

I never felt that I spoke childishly.

This is like an American who thinks they "don't have an accent" because they come from Illinois.

I never felt that my emotions and desires were somehow less real than adult emotions and desires.

It's weird that I'm being reminded of TRAs trying to justify transitioning children reading the foreword of an Oscar Scott Card book.

And in writing Ender's Game, I forced the audience to experience the lives of these children from that perspective--the perspective in which their feelings and decisions are just as real and important as any adult's.

I actually agree with this. Children's feelings are just as important as an adults--but they're not the same.

The nasty side of myself wanted to answer that guidance counselor by saying, The only reason you don't think gifted children talk this way is because they know better than to talk this way in front of you.

"And that's why ROGD isn't real--wait."

Yeah, Card, I'm sure all the gifted children are talking like your characters when the dumb grown-ups aren't looking. God, I'm starting to see why Eliezer Yudkowsky loves this book so much.

But the truer answer is that Ender's Game asserts the personhood of children, and those who are used to thinking of children in another way--especially those whose whole career is based on that--are going to find Ender's Game a very unpleasant place to live.

Sure, that's the only reason.

Children are a perpetual, self-renewing underclass, helpless to escape from the decisions of adults until they become adults themselves. And Ender's Game, seen in that context, might even be a sort of revolutionary tract.

I'm kind of shocked Card is such a pariah among lefty nerds, because this sounds exactly like those people who think bedtime is fascism. Card tries to back this up with some reader mail, starting with this:

Dear Mr. Card,

I am writing to you on behalf of myself and my twelve friends and fellow students who joined me at a two-week residential program for gifted and talented students at Purdue University this summer. We attended the class, "Philosophy and Science Fiction," instructed by Peter Robinson, and we range in age from thirteen through fifteen.

We are all in about the same position; we are very intellectually oriented and have found few people at home who share this trait. Hence. most of us are lonely, and have been since kindergarten. When teachers continually compliment you, your chances of "fitting in" are about nil.

All our lives we've unconsciously been living by the philosophy "The only way to gain respect is doing so well you can't be ignored." And, for me and Mike, at least. "beating the system" at school is how we've chosen to do this. Both Mike and I plan to be in calculus our second year of high school, schedules permitting. ( Both of us are interested in science/math related careers.) Not to get me wrong; we're all bright and at the top of our class. However, in choosing these paths, most of us have wound up satisfied in ourselves, but very lonely.

The lesson of course being that the best way to become a science fiction classic is to blow smoke up the arses of nerdy kids. But we also have a letter from someone with actual problems, an army aviator who wrote to Card right before the onset of the Gulf War:

We are the bastards of military aviation. Our helicopters may be the best in the world, but the equipment we wear and the systems in our helicopter, such as the navigation instruments, are at least twenty years behind the Navy and Air Force. I am very happy with the Air Force's ability to bomb with precision, but if they miss, the bombs still land on the enemy's territory. If we screw up, the guys we haul to the battle, the "grunts," die. We don't even have the armour plate for our chests--"chicken plate"--that the helicopter pilots did in Vietnam. Last year in El Salvador, army aviators flew a couple of civilian VIPs and twenty reporters over guerrilla-controlled territory and there were no flares in their launchers to counteract the heat-seeking missiles we know the rebels had. One of our pilots and a crew member were killed last year on a training flight because they flew the sling load they were carrying into the ~ at 70 miles an hour. It could have been prevented if our night vision goggles had a heads-up display like the Air Force has had for forty years. I'm sure you beard about Colonel Pickett being shot down in a Huey in El Salvador just a few months ago. That
type of aircraft is at least thirty years. old and there are no survivability measures installed. He was a good man, I knew him.
(...)
The reason I told you about these things is because I wanted to paint a picture for you. I love my job but we aren't like the "zoomies" that everyone makes movies about. We do our job with less technology, less political support, less recognition, and more risk than the rest, while the threat to us continues to modernize at an unbelievable rate. I'm not asking for sympathy but I was wondering if you and Mr. Steakley could write a novel about helicopters and the men that fly them for the Army twenty years in the future. There are many of us that read science fiction and after I read Ender's Game and Armour three times each I started letting my comrades read them. My wife cried when she read Ender's Game. There is a following here for a book like the one I requested. We have no speaker for us, the ones that will soon die, or the ones that survive...

I'm not sure what's more tragic, this guy's situation, or the fact he thinks the only person who can tell his story is Orson Scott Card. Also, why is he spelling "Armour" the British way? It was an American book.

As with those gifted young students who read this book as "their" story, this soldier--who, like most but not all of the Army aviators in the Gulf War survived--did not read Ender's Game as a "work of literature." He read it as epic, as a story that helped define his community. It was not his only epic, of course--Armour, John Steakley's fine novel, was an equal candidate to be part of his self-story. What matters most, though, was his clear sense that, no matter how much these stories spoke to him, they were still not exactly his community's epic. He still felt the need for a "speaker for the dead" and for the living. He still felt a hunger, especially at a time when death might well be near, to have his own story, his friends' stories, told.,

Why else do we read fiction, anyway? Not to be impressed by somebody's dazzling language—or at least I hope that's not our reason.

God forbid we try and jazz up our prose a bit.

Ender's Game is a story about gifted children. It is also a story about soldiers. Captain John F. Schmitt, the author of the Marine Corp's Warfighting, the most brilliant concise book of military strategy ever written by an American (and a proponent of the kind of thinking that was at the heart of the allied victory in the Gulf War), found Ender's Game to be a useful enough story about the nature of leadership to use it in courses he taught at the Marine University at Quantico. Watauga College, the interdisciplinary studies program at Appalachian State University—as unmilitary a community as you could ever hope to find!--uses Ender's Game for completely different purposes—to talk about problem-solving and the self-creation of the individual.

I'm starting to think Appalachian might not be so hot, hot, hot.

A writer and critic at Pepperdine has seen Ender's Game as, in some ways, religious fiction.

Well, you were talking about it like it was a new testament. Well, another new testament.

Next time, the actual book! Whee!

 

[David Brown]

I enjoyed Ender's Game when I read it as a middle schooler and as an adult so I'm looking forward to seeing your gripes with it. You've told us here that you do quintuple hate the book but haven't explained at all why. I anticipate you elaborating on that in the future.

This thread does remind me of how useless the "left-right" false dichotomy is. I wouldn't ever call mormons or Ben Shapiro right wing since mormons have been race cucks and slavish servants of the status quo for decades and Ben Shapiro is just doing his job as a jew to bilk gentiles for everything they are worth and keep them giving everything to Israel unquestioningly. I guess right wing for you just means a reduced enthusiasm to suck tranny dicks?

Looking forward to more!

 

[TheAmbiguousLurker]

The best way to ease me into a book is to have the author go on a tangent about how important and revolutionary their work is.

Also, for some reason I was really confident this was Maze Runners until you started talking about space wars and aliens...

I'm no snob, but this is starting to read like those book Twitter threads where people talk about how hard writing YA is.

You don't know how hard it is to extend two paragraphs of dead air into multiple pages! I can barely make it a couple of sentences into my own writing without switching to cat videos, the struggle is real.

 

[Alabama Gamer]

hands off my childhood reeeeeee

The Machine Stops

Points for esoteric tastes.

 

[Mnutu]

The only thing Enders Game accurately predicted was a bunch of underage pseuds larping as historical figures while arguing badly misunderstood politics and social issues.

 

[Jewthulhu]

Should be an interesting thread. Have to admit I'm biased against YA and the whole "kids in adult situations" trope but I'll try not to derail too much about it.

Yet I knew--I knew--that this was one of the truest things about Ender's Game. In fact, I realized in retrospect that this may indeed be part of the reason why it was so important to me, there on the lawn in front of the Salt Palace, to write a story in which gifted children are trained to fight in adult wars. Because never in my entire childhood did I feel like a child. I felt like a person all along--the same person that I am today.

I never felt that I spoke childishly.

I never felt that my emotions and desires were somehow less real than adult emotions and desires.

And in writing Ender's Game, I forced the audience to experience the lives of these children from that perspective--the perspective in which their feelings and decisions are just as real and important as any adult's.

But the truer answer is that Ender's Game asserts the personhood of children, and those who are used to thinking of children in another way--especially those whose whole career is based on that--are going to find Ender's Game a very unpleasant place to live.

Children are a perpetual, self-renewing underclass, helpless to escape from the decisions of adults until they become adults themselves. And Ender's Game, seen in that context, might even be a sort of revolutionary tract.

I don't think this guy had much self-reflection about being a child, or at least doesn't understand what being a child means. Yes, children are humans. They have free will and a sense-of-self, they have emotions and desires, and at a certain age they start to desire autonomy and equality with adults. The issue is that they're still children, gifted or not. They're still developing, they're still learning, they're still trying to form an identity.

Spoiler: Powerlevel

I was likely considered a "gifted child." I was well spoken, reading well ahead of my level (starting novels in 3rd grade, """adult books""" by middle school), thinking about politics around 7th grade, and definitely thinking of myself as an independent and "fully mature" person by highschool.

The thing is, in hindsight, I was still a child, dependent on my parents and still thinking at the level of a child, gifted or not. I still talked at the level of a child, even if I could hold a conversation with someone older. My comprehension of the books I read was still simplistic and that of a child, even if I could read more "advanced" books. My political thought was derived from my parents, and even when it evolved it was still simplistic and naïve. I was still immature and naïve and dependent on my parents, even when I thought I was a mature highschooler. Hell, even when I was 18-21, I see that I was a still-maturing person, not yet fully at the level I am now.

It's why I don't like the whole "kids as adults" trope in YA. Kids aren't adults. There's a reason why the age of consent is 18. There's a reason why the age to join military service is 18. Hell, there's a reason why the voting age is 18. Children lack the maturity, understanding, self-control, and coping skills to handle such things. Being thrust into "mature" situations early fucks them up. I'd love to see a book cover that tbh.

 

[David Brown]

Being thrust into "mature" situations early fucks them up. I'd love to see a book cover that tbh.

Ender's Game is a whole novel about child soldiers and how Ender has to cope with the responsibility of humanity's survival and the fact that he is responsible for a genocide. (the Speaker for the Dead series doesn't exist, it's fucking total whiny shitlib trash

I'd say it qualifies as a book about children being thrust into mature situations, that being difficult decision making and being forced to live with the fact that even when he does the right thing, it can still feel wrong or bad.

 

[M3xus]

I've been very interested in your take on Ender's Game since you mentioned your dislike of it, so this ought to be a nice palette-cleanser from House of Night's interminable teenage drama.

 

[pork and beans]

They do not act like gifted children at all but that didn't stop me from enjoying Ender's game as a kid. It wasn't a hard book but really engaging, I read it in one go and didn't put it down once. It was just fun. Ender's shadow was also fun (but less so) and the other sequels never catched my interest enough to start OR finish them.

 

[Kosher Dill]

All right, you know what, I'm in. I've never read Ender's Game (partly because I heard the big twist ending already) so let's see what it's all about.

I have to say, all that stuff about children being little adults really did not age well land the way it was intended given the general situation in Current Year. Anyway, this Card is starting in the hole with me, but let's see what this "realistic portrayal of gifted children" looks like.

 

[LoverofPi]

I'm curious to see your take and add my own two cents as well. I am of the opinion that Ender's game has some good bits and some stupid ass bits.

 

[White-Kettle Shufflepunk]

Right, now that we've established that this is a revolutionary book, and that if you feel its depiction of gifted children rings false, that's just because they're too afraid to show their true selves to you, let's dive into chapter one.

"I've watched through his eyes, I've listened through his ears, and tell you he's the one. Or at least as close as we're going to get.”

"Well, what about Shepherd? He grew up in the colonies."

"He knows how tough life can be out there."

Yeah, chapters in Ender's Game often open with voices in the Disembodied Plane of Dialogue talking about their big, sinister plans for Ender and his progress. An author with a lighter hand could maybe have used this to build suspense or mystery, but Card tends to use it hammer on how intense and psychological the book you're reading is.

"That's what you said about the brother.”

Ender's brother is basically a genius psychopath, the latter quality having disqualified him from serving as Military Sci-Fi chosen one. I could see the logic of that if it was a war between humans, but given that, as far as anyone knows, the enemy in this war are slathering genocidal bug monsters, I'm kind of suprised we didn't just let Peter have at them and then quietly shoot him in the head once peace was won.

"The brother tested out impossible. For other reasons. Nothing to do with his ability.”

"Same with the sister. And there are doubts about him. He's too malleable. Too willing to submerge himself in someone else's will.”

"Not if the other person is his enemy.”

"So what do we do? Surround him with enemies all the time?”

"If we have to.”

Card was definitely dedicated to making sure you didn't have to think about what he was trying to do.

"I thought you said you liked this kid.”

"If the buggers get him, they'll make me look like his favorite uncle.”

"All right. We're saving the world, after all. Take him.”

Yeah, the aliens in this are called "buggers." A lot of people think it's a homophobic dogwhistle or something, but given Card is American and the buggers are literal bugs, I kind of doubt it. Plus, Card has no fucking subtlety. If he wanted to throw shade on the gays, the buggers wouldn't be bugs, they'd be ten foot tall ogres who implant their eggs in boys' butts like if Harvey Milk was a xenomorph. You can tell he realised the name was a bit silly, because he later started calling them "Formics." Honestly, "bugger" puts me more in mind of middle-aged British men psuedo-cursing than sodomy. "The little buggers got into my cabbages again!"

The monitor lady smiled very nicely and tousled his hair and said, "Andrew, I suppose by now you're just absolutely sick of having that horrid monitor. Well, I have good news for you. That monitor is going to come out today. We're going to just take it right out, and it won't hurt a bit.”

Ender nodded. It was a lie, of course, that it wouldn't hurt a bit. But since adults always said it when it was going to hurt, he could count on that statement as an accurate prediction of the future. Sometimes lies were more dependable than the truth.

This is the kind of observation that seems really deep and world-weary when you're eight and getting a flu shot.

"So if you'll just come over here, Andrew, just sit right up here on the examining table. The doctor will be in to see you in a moment.”

The monitor gone. Ender tried to imagine the little device missing from the back of his neck. I'll roll over on my back in bed and it won't be pressing there. I won't feel it tingling and taking up the heat when I shower.

That's not the monitor, Ender just enjoys +2 to attack rolls in the shower.

And Peter won't hate me anymore. I'll come home and show him that the monitor's gone, and he'll see that I didn't make it, either. That I'll just be a normal kid now, like him. That won't be so bad then. He'll forgive me that I had my monitor a whole year longer than he had his. We'll be-- not friends, probably. No, Peter was too dangerous. Peter got so angry. Brothers, though. Not enemies, not friends, but brothers-- able to live in the same house. He won't hate me, he'll just leave me alone. And when he wants to play buggers and astronauts, maybe I won't have to play, maybe I can just go read a book.

But Ender knew, even as he thought it, that Peter wouldn't leave him alone.

I'm not sure why you thought your insane older brother would be less likely to fuck with you once you didn't have a live camera-feed to the military government of Earth in your head. Very "abolish the police" logic.

There was something in Peter's eyes, when he was in his mad mood, and whenever Ender saw that look, that glint, he knew that the one thing Peter would not do was leave him alone. I'm practicing piano, Ender. Come turn the pages for me. Oh, is the monitor boy too busy to help his brother? Is he too smart? Got to go kill some buggers, astronaut? No, no, I don't want your help. I can do it on my own, you little bastard, you little Third.

If you're wondering and have no patience, the "Third" thing refers to Ender being the third born of his family. This is usually illegal in his world. It's interesting reading a lot of older science-fiction set in the future, because often pretty heavy-handed "Two Child policy" style population measures are taken as a given, even in settings that aren't meant to be particularly dystopian, or have access to interstellar travel and entire other habitable planets. It's worth noting a lot of these stories were written before the widespread availiability (or even legality) of things like oral birth-control, as well as great advancements to agricultural efficiency. For illustration, in Issac Asimov's Robot Detective books, it has become nessecary for Earth to concentrate its entire population in various domed arcologies, with the rest of the habitable surface being given over to farming. Even then, famine is a constant concern. All this to feed a population of... eight billion. AKA, the current world population in real life. Ironically, most of the First World is now reproducing well under replacement rate, and much of the Third World is inching that way as well.

The doctor was twisting something at the back of Ender's head. Suddenly a pain stabbed through him like a needle from his neck to his groin. Ender felt his back spasm, and his body arched violently backward; hi head struck the bed. He could feel his legs thrashing, and his hands were clenching each other, wringing each other so tightly that they ached.

"Deedee!" shouted the doctor. "I need you!" The nurse ran in, gasped. "Got to relax these muscles. Get it to me, now! What are you waiting for!”

Something changed hands; Ender could not see. He lurched to one side and fell off the examining table. "Catch him!" cried the nurse.

Okay, so, the monitor is something military intelligence implants in kids at birth in order to determine if they're cadet material for Laser-Tag Hogwarts. But this isn't just a camera in their eye or the like. No, it's wired directly into their nervous system, and removing the thing carries some risk turning off their brain. Aside from being a good way of accidentally killing potential recruits, keep in mind, the Fleet has already decided they're taking Ender. So, why not just wait and have it removed in a military hospital, which I must assume would be less likely to fuck up the operation than a school nurse? The only narrative purpose removing the monitor now is so Ender can think he's out of the running for Battle-School.

"Just hold him steady.”

"You hold him, doctor, he's too strong for me.”

"Not the whole thing! You'll stop his heart.”

Ender felt a needle enter his back just above the neck of his shirt. It burned, but wherever in him the fire spread, his muscles gradually unclenched. Now he could cry for the fear and pain of it.

I find this scene interesting in the context of Card's thing about "never feeling like a child." This was of course a ridiculous, revealing statement, because no kid "feels like a child inside" for the same reason that no fish thinks they're wet. It's all they know. This whole sequence is basically a sci-fi version of a child getting innoculated, or perhaps having a broken bone reset. If you want to be as dire as possible, you could even compare it to chemotherapy. To a small child, all these things seem like arbiturary cruelty, because they don't understand why they're being done to them. In Ender's case, though, the monitor really isn't for his benefit, but rather a sinister government program who want to turn him into a killer. It reads like a grand mythologisising of what goes through a child's head at the doctor's office. It's like if the fantasy scenes from Bridge to Terabithia were meant to be real. So, like the trailer for the movie, I guess.

Actually, it occurs to me, this scene would make a great sci-fi antivax allegory. So, if any of you are so inclined, have at it, I guess.

"Are you all right, Andrew?" the nurse asked.

Andrew could not remember how to speak. They lifted him onto the table. They checked his pulse, did other things; he did not understand it all.

The doctor was trembling; his voice shook as he spoke. "They leave these things in the kids for three years, what do they expect? We could have switched him off, do you realize that? We could have unplugged his brain for all time.”

I wonder how many potential Ender Wiggins ended up with severe brain damage.

Despite that whole ordeal, Ender is back in class before the end of the school day.

In the corner of his desk a word appeared and began marching around the perimeter of the desk. It was upside down and backward at first, but Ender knew what it said long before it reached the bottom of the desk and turned right side up.

THIRD

Ender smiled. He was the one who had figured out how to send messages and make them march-- even as his secret enemy called him names, the method of delivery praised him. It was not his fault he was a Third. It was the government's idea, they were the ones who authorized it-- how else could a Third like Ender have got into school?

If you're wondering, schooldesks in Ender's time are basically giant tablets. I'm kind of curious how long the two-child rule has been a thing, if it's become such an engrained taboo that not even explicit government sanction for the good of the world can eclipse the stigma. Although, COVID did show how fast new mortal sins can be enshrined. Also, not letting third-born children attend school seems like a good way to create a permanent underclass.

"Are you all right, Andrew?”

"Yes, ma'am.”

"You'll miss the bus.”

Ender nodded and got up. The other kids were gone. They would be waiting, though, the bad ones. His monitor wasn't perched on his neck, hearing what heard and seeing what he saw. They could say what they liked. They might even hit him now-- no one could see anymore, and so no one would come to Ender's rescue. There were advantages to the monitor, and he would miss them.

Oh, another reason we got rid of the monitor today: so we could have the School Bully Scene.

It was Stilson, of course. He wasn't bigger than most other kids, but he was bigger than Ender. And he had some others with him. He always did.

"Hey, Third.”

Don't answer. Nothing to say.

"Hey, Third, we're talkin to you, Third, hey bugger-lover, we're talkin to you.”

Surely it's the bugger who loves you.

"Are you going to let me through?" Ender asked.

"Are we going to let him through? Should we let him through?" They all laughed. "Sure we'll let you through. First we'll let your arm through, then your butt through, then maybe a piece of your knee.”

The others chimed in now. "Lost your birdie, Thirdie. Lost your birdie, Thirdie.”

Children do have a talent for rhyme, don't they? That's why I'm naming my firstborn "Orange."

Stilson began pushing him with one hand, someone behind him then pushed him toward Stilson.

"See-saw, marjorie daw," somebody said.

"Tennis!”

"Ping-pong!”

This would not have a happy ending. So Ender decided that he'd rather not be the unhappiest at the end. The next time Stilson's arm came out to push him, Ender grabbed at it. He missed.

This is where Ender's inner world loses me. This doesn't read like a kid about to lash out against against bullies. It's more like a moody western protagonist realising that the idiots at the salloon aren't going to leave him alone.

Ender did not feel like laughing, but he laughed. "You mean it takes this many of you to fight one Third?”

"We're people, not Thirds, turd face. You're about as strong as a fart!”

But they let go of him. And as soon as they did, Ender kicked out high and hard, catching Stilson square in the breastbone. He dropped. It took Ender by surprise he hadn't thought to put Stilson on the ground with one kick. It didn't occur to him that Stilson didn't take a fight like this seriously, that he wasn't prepared for a truly desperate blow.

Children are well capable of calculation, as any primary school teacher should know, but when they're angry, it tends to be very all-consuming. That Peter Pan quote about Tinkerbell feels appropriate:

Fairies have to be one thing or the other, because being so small they unfortunately have room for one feeling only at a time.

For a moment, the others backed away and Stilson lay motionless. They were all wondering if he was dead. Ender, however, was trying to figure out a way to forestall vengeance. To keep them from taking him in a pack tomorrow. I have to win this now, and for all time, or I'll fight it every day and it will get worse and worse.

And here you have Ender acting like if Robocop was a weatherman.

Ender knew the unspoken rules of manly warfare, even though he was only six. It was forbidden to strike the opponent who lay helpless on the ground; only an animal would do that.

Ah yes, the well-known, inviolate laws of engagement observed by schoolyard bullies.

So Ender walked to Stilson's supine body and kicked him again, viciously, in the ribs. Stilson groaned and rolled away from him. Ender walked around him and kicked him again, in the crotch. Stilson could not make a sound; he only doubled up and tears streamed out of his eyes.

Ender's signature move, as you'll soon see.

Then Ender looked at the others coldly. "You might be having some idea of ganging up on me. You could probably beat me up pretty bad. But just remember what I do to people who try to hurt me. From then on you'd be wondering when I'd get you, and how bad it would be." He kicked Stilson in the face. Blood from his nose spattered the ground nearby. "It wouldn't be this bad," Ender said. "It would be worse.”

Ender then got the shit kicked out of him the next day, because schoolchildren are immune to logic.

He turned and walked away. Nobody followed him, He turned a corner into the corridor leading to the bus stop. He could hear the boys behind him saying, "Geez. Look at him. He's wasted." Ender leaned his head against the wall of the corridor and cried until the bus came. I am just like Peter. Take my monitor away, and I am just like Peter.

Oh, so we're doing the book 1 and book 2 Danny Tozer thing?

 

[TheAmbiguousLurker]

Yeah, the aliens in this are called "buggers." A lot of people think it's a homophobic dogwhistle or something, but given Card is American and the buggers are literal bugs, I kind of doubt it.

Bugger is considered homophoic? I've only ever heard it as polite swearing. "You cheeky little bugger..."

Ender knew the unspoken rules of manly warfare, even though he was only six. It was forbidden to strike the opponent who lay helpless on the ground; only an animal would do that.

Wait, this mother fucker is six? And he was too strong for the Doctors to hold down? How fucking jacked are toddlers in the future?

 

[Jewthulhu]

Wait, this mother fucker is six? And he was too strong for the Doctors to hold down? How fucking jacked are toddlers in the future?

Yeah him being six threw me off too. None of this reads like a six year old. The bullies didn't read like 1st graders. Not familiar with the book, does it really lose anything if he was made 12 instead? This whole chapter would make a lot more more sense if he was.

 

[LoverofPi]

Bugger is considered homophoic? I've only ever heard it as polite swearing. "You cheeky little bugger..."

The logic, spurious as it is, is that "buggerer" was british slang for gay men.

Wait, this mother fucker is six? And he was too strong for the Doctors to hold down? How fucking jacked are toddlers in the future?

A weird quirk of human biology is that we are capable of exerting an extreme amount of strength, even from a young age, much more than out bones can handle in some cases. Two doctors not able to safely hold down a six year old in the middle of the equivalent of a seizure isn't too fucked up.

The same does not hold true for...

Yeah him being six threw me off too. None of this reads like a six year old. The bullies didn't read like 1st graders. Not familiar with the book, does it really lose anything if he was made 12 instead? This whole chapter would make a lot more more sense if he was.

The movie adaptation aged him and his siblings up because yes, he does not sound like a six year old. ever.

 

[Blewberry Nausea]

Haha oh man I remember loving this book as a kid because it’s all kids get to be heroes and boy howdy that Mazer Rackham and having literal teens dictate political discourse and talk about hegemony. Yeah it’s pretty dogshit especially if you get into the sequels. Ah well try not to read Lost Boys where ghosts mess with an Atari game developer because that’s pretty silly.

 

[VeteranOfTheRetardWars]

I actually have been reading through the book series lately, and I really enjoy them. It’s an interesting case where he wanted to flesh out this little universe he made, and in Enders Shadow and Speaker For The Dead it’s obvious that he’s enjoying making all this lore he didn’t think about in Enders Game.
I’m a sci-fi nut, and intergalactic conflict and politics is right up my alley. Speaker For The Dead in particular was great for my taste because of how it handled the idea of humans finding intelligent life we just don’t understand but need to get along with.
I wouldn’t say the books themselves are super political, however, it’s a story with politics but not really pushing particular views on you. It’s more focused on how the characters interact with the politics and what that means for humanity in this space age.

 

[Kosher Dill]

For a moment, the others backed away and Stilson lay motionless. They were all wondering if he was dead. Ender, however, was trying to figure out a way to forestall vengeance. To keep them from taking him in a pack tomorrow. I have to win this now, and for all time, or I'll fight it every day and it will get worse and worse.

I could perhaps take this more seriously if if wasn't taking place between a bunch of rugrats. Really now.

So the space government picks their ultimate champions by watching their brain-cams from ages three to six??? How many hours of Space Paw Patrol do these space-glowies have to sit through?

Also: is "Ender" supposed to be a weird nickname/shortening for "Andrew" (Endrew?) or is that just his badass space-champion name because he ends you?

 

[Vecr]

Also: is "Ender" supposed to be a weird nickname/shortening for "Andrew" (Endrew?) or is that just his badass space-champion name because he ends you?

It's theoretically the nickname his sister gave him, but Orson Scott Card probably worked it backwards. "Andrew" -> "Ander" -> "Ender".

 

[Skitarii]

Also: is "Ender" supposed to be a weird nickname/shortening for "Andrew" (Endrew?) or is that just his badass space-champion name because he ends you?