This is the End

Well, it's about time. My uncle gave me Ender's Game and a couple of other Orson Scott Card books for Christmas (you mean the atheist celebrates Christmas?) at least seven years ago and I never got around to reading it. At the time, and actually until sometime in late 2006, I had never heard a thing about the book except my uncle's recommendation. I guess I should call him up and thank him again for the gift. It was a pretty good book.

Unfortunately for my appraisal of the book, I also just finished reading Contact. Also a book about contact with alien life and how humanity reacts. Vastly different circumstances, though. The full disclosure on this one is that Carl Sagan is one of my idols. I lament that science and rational skepticism have not had such an eloquent and visible champion since his death. He might be my guy - you know the one I'm talking about. "If you could have a conversation with anyone, living or dead, who would it be?" Perhaps one of two people Issac Asimov ever claimed was smarter than he himself (I think the other was a mathematician).

I had to have been 9 when I saw the movie version of Contact. This was before I knew a thing about Sagan or Arthur C. Clarke or just about anybody but Stephen Hawking and Gene Roddenberry. I sort of want to go back there and have a conversation with myself about the movie because though I remember it vividly, I can't imagine the ways in which I enjoyed it when I was 9. It's probably one of the events that defined my atheism. I've meant to read the book since before I even got Ender's Game at some Christmas. And the book's spectacular.


Next rant is that the novel is better than the movie, but that doesn't take away from the movie. The film necessarily removed certain plot elements, especially the Cold War element, because of changed times. There's a lot less to the movie. But it's an excellent movie nevertheless. That's partially because you just can't put all the crap from a book into a movie; they're different media. Even if you did, it wouldn't make a good movie. Douglas Adams was a master of this. He knew what would work on a radio show that he called The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Then, he knew what would work in a book called The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Finally, he knew what would work in a BBC TV miniseries called The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Though all three forms of my favorite "increasingly inaccurately named trilogy" are very much alike, they are also radically different. Visual humor is not audio humor is not written humor. Visual drama is not audio drama is not written drama. What works onscreen is not what works on radio is not what works on the written page. Why the rant? Of course, because V for Vendetta is a good movie. I'm not giving up on this one.


Maybe I should talk about the thing we're actually reading for this week. The point of that long digression was twofold: one, to explain my blasé attitude toward Ender's Game. I'll expand upon that. The second was just to go on a further rant about movies based on novels (I saw an excellent one over break, by the way - No Country for Old Men. I can't believe I didn't catch it in theatres, but oh well.). I was thinking of this over break. The conventional wisdom is, read the book, then see the movie. As with so much of conventional wisdom (or all of it, as John Kenneth Galbraith, the term's inventor, might suggest), I think this needs to be challenged. Relatively, no one who reads the book first is happy with the movie and the book. But see the movie first, and you've got a fighting chance. I realized while reading Contact that I probably wouldn't like the movie as much if I saw it now for the first time, but when I saw the movie first, it became one of my all-time favorites. It still is because I have this personal connection to it. And of course, I understand that a lot of you in this class saw V for Vendetta as a movie before a graphic novel, just as I did, and I know most of you decried the movie. But I think it's also because that's an incredibly fashionable thing to do, especially among geeks. If it's not "The book's better," it's "The English translation sucks. You should learn Farci to read it properly." Perhaps it will soon end up as part of Stuff White People Like, the funniest thing to hit the Internet since Ted Stevens' series of tubes. (Among the Stuff White People Like that we've discussed: Hating Corporations, Barack Obama, Gifted Children (I imagine this'll come up tomorrow), Apple Products, Irony, Knowing What's Best for Poor People, Recycling) Anyway, to me, it's running Microsoft Word and having someone tell you that you haven't really experienced Word until you've read millions of lines of zeroes and ones. I'm sure there's a beautiful elegance in the zeroes and ones, but for the moment, I'm typing a blog entry. What is immediately useful to me is that it is a word processor.


Rant over. I promise. Maybe. No, probably not. But for now.


So back to the first part of my initial rant and my first reason for mentioning Contact. I liked Ender's Game, but I loved Contact. Everything about Ender's Game, despite it being a completely different book and a completely different brand of sci-fi, just didn't match up. It's a cool book and a cool idea - perhaps Futurama was directly referencing the concept in Bender's Big Score, where the nudist aliens are essentially playing the battle for Earth as a video game.


But if I'm going to throw this really far off-track, I can throw this somewhere it shouldn't be. It's along the lines of "What if we lived in the Matrix?" - the answer doesn't matter as long as the Matrix follows its own rules 100% of the time. That would be our observable universe. Damn. Ranting agian. What if every video game we play is actually a real battle going on somewhere? What if video games are actually our interface into another universe? Wouldn't that really suck for the people of that other universe? Imagine that your entire world is comprised of Blade Runner-style backdrops or World War II and the only rule of the universe is to pwn n00bs. So the next time you pick up your Atari to play Pac-Man, remember only this:

And yes, Threadless is mentioned on Stuff White People Like.

EDIT: It just occurred to me as I was leaving a jet lag-induced sleep that I missed a prime Star Trek reference for this post. "A Taste of Armageddon," of course. It's the reverse of Ender's Game in that instead of a game representing real violence, the game is designed to prevent violence. These two warring planets, instead of solving their problems, decide to go into a stalemate where a supercomputer decides the outcome of hypothetical battles. When someone is declared dead, he goes to an execution room and is executed painlessly. They've taken the war out of war. And that's when the computer records the Enterprise as dead. When the crew inexplicably refuse to die, it throws the entire war into a state of disarray. Kirk destroys the supercomputer and the planet's leaders fear that the real war will resume. Finally, the two sides agree to mediation to actually end their war.

Brings up the same question raised at the end of the book. What's up with a war that you only play on computers? I won't go on, mostly because I want to see what happens in class.