Our class Tuesday bounced back and forth between culpability and rationalizing, but instead of comparing one instance of each to its counterpart, I though that we skipped from one side to another without marrying the two. Here's what I mean, because I'm not sure that made any sense.
We had two examples from the book of who could be guilty, but didn't have proper knowledge: the buggers for the first invasion and Ender. Though we briefly touched on this similarity, I thought that the issue had some legal depth. The way I see it, if the buggers were guilty, Ender was guilty. This certainly has the effect of tying their fates together for all time, which makes the whole cocoon thing work even better as the mysterious prologue-y ending. If we're going to use our own legal tradition, we would have to conclude that no, neither the buggers nor Ender are guilty because they did not have intent to commit a crime. The buggers simply didn't know that they were destroying sentient life and Ender thought he was playing a war simulation. No intent, no crime. However much we'd like retribution for our dead, punishing the buggers is like punishing an innocent man. No intent.
On the communication issue, it seems very deliberate that the "other" is in bug form. Can our bugs on earth show us some kind of intelligence? They create massive, intricate anthills and ordered honeycombs. But we don't think of those as grand works of architecture, even though they could be the Eiffel Tower of anthills, or maybe the I.M. Pei Honeycomb. In much the same way, our buildings could seem so different to an outside race that they just seem like anthills - the sign of life, but not necessarily intelligent life. So, you start clearing out and what's that? Oh, crap, they're fighting back. Well, bees fight back when you hit their honeycomb. Oh, crap, they've got some pretty sophisticated stuff. Maybe this wasn't a good idea. Maybe we should try talking to them.
So let's try! Meanwhile, from Earth's perspective, this entire thing has been an unprovoked attack. An attack, not an accident, not a misunderstanding. So you prepare to wipe the sons of bitches off the face of the... plane of the universe with all necessary speed. In that sense, as a race, humans had every right to send their fighters off into space via that other neat affirmative defense, self-defense. Your entire history with these things is that they come and attack you. Even though your best option is to collude, to put this into the classic Prisoner's Dilemma, you have no reason to believe that your enemy will collude, so you minimize your losses and wipe your enemy right out of existence. So in that sense, they're justified.
But then there's the problem of communication. Should they have tried communicating, both ways? Absolutely, but it's more complicated than just sending a Red Telephone over with a note that says "Call me!" Maybe they could have started by rattling off a bunch of prime numbers - that's generally a good sign of intelligence. Maybe rip the plaque and the record off of Voyager 1 and give that a shot. You could even send them a turntable to play it on. So yes, there were probably better ways of trying to communicate that the I.F. didn't try. Oops! You just killed off a whole race! Thanks for playing, try again.
And finally, a few words on Aliens. It's a good movie to watch, especially with a proper sound system (though until the model classroom gets a center channel, I'm not comfortable with calling it a proper system). You get all these fun little glimpses into the Company from Paul Reiser's character and you wonder how the hell government exactly works in the future. And it's a shitload better of a movie than Alien^3 or Resurrection.
But cinematically, it doesn't hold a candle to Alien. As Prof. PTJ mentioned, Alien is much more of a horror movie than Aliens, which leaves Aliens something like "Space action." Aliens is filled with the horrible dialogue between the Marines and the annoying kid with the worst scream this side of Six String Samurai. What this film loses that Alien had was a true fear of the Alien. There was only one. And he was a lurking badass that no one knew how to kill. But you can shoot the thing? And it just dies? That's it? What a ripoff. Unfortunately, few people know how to keep an infinite badass alien villian going.
Enter the Borg. They were the infinite evil badass - it was simply impossible to communicate with them. Impossible to reason with them. "Your biological and technological distinctiveness will be added to our own." That's it. That's Borg communication. You get assimilated. That's it. But then, instead of keeping them as infinite cosmic badasses, they get a queen. So it turns out, all of the drones do play second fiddle, instead of all sharing first fiddle. And I don't buy the "I, Borg" thing that individuality ended up in the collective bullshit because Picard says that the Queen was there on the cube that was sent to Earth. And also, Voyager doesn't count. There, I said it.
So back to my point. Alien had the infinite badass and Aliens removed the "infinite." Which doesn't make it a horrible movie, though the Marine dialogue brings it close. It just makes it a considerable letdown from the original. Seriously, the first time I watched it, when the Marines are about to shoot one, I thought to myself, "Oh, shit - you've got another thing coming if you think you can shoot these things." And then they did. Lame.
But again, it's not a bad movie. Alien^3 was a bad movie. Resurrection was godawful. It's just the 2010 to Kubrick's 2001. It kills the mystery, though it leaves something generally satisfying in its place. But it kills the infinite badass.
Now, I'm just imagining what would happen if James Cameron and Michael Bay worked on the same movie. Three hours of gratuitous explosions? I'd watch that.
Sunday, March 23, 2008
Friday, March 21, 2008
Genetic Instinct
Please note that this post has been updated; the third paragraph is new.
The moral component of our discussion in class was founded on intelligence. Specifically, the military intelligence to know whether the buggers had truly realized their mistake and would never attack us again, to know whether the I.F. had made any further attempts to contact the buggers once the ansible was developed (more on this later!), and whether Ender still would have been able to defeat the buggers had he known what he was doing.
Those less squeamish of us, who were willing to act in spite of our acknowledged lack of necessary facts, were not willing to take a risk where the continued existence of humanity was concerned. Although many people disagreed with this position, I don't remember hearing a cohesive argument to the contrary; instead, many people argued that more intelligence was needed, that they wouldn't be able to make a decision given only the information the I.F. claims to have had, or that wiping out another species entirely is just wrong.
Many of you argued that it would be important to know that an attempt at contact had been made; however, if you check out the Ansible entry in the Wikipedia page Concepts in the Ender's Game Series, you'll see that Card's ansible is explicitly designed like a set of two walkie talkies that are attuned to each other; the design prohibits two ansibles that are not constructed at the same time from communicating. Therefore, communication with the buggers through the ansible, based on Card's internally consistent technology, is impossible, and the I.F. would have known this, and decided accordingly.
It seemed obvious to me that, given the intelligence available, a war of extinction would be the only viable choice. That's why I was so very fascinated by all of your contrary views on the subject. We discussed it in class, but Graff's quotation deserves to be repeated:
"Ender, believe me, there's a century of discussion on this very subject. Nobody knows the answer. When it comes down to it, though, the real decision is inevitable: If one of us has to be destroyed, let's make damn sure we're the ones alive at the end. Our genes won't let us decide any other way. Nature can't evolve a species that hasn't a will to survive. Individuals might be bred to sacrifice themselves, but the race as a whole can never decide to cease to exist. So if we can we'll kill every last one of the buggers, and if they can they'll kill every last one of us."
According to Graff, individuals can sacrifice themselves, yes, but species cannot decide to stop existing, or as a group agree on a course of action that they know will lead to that outcome. Can an individual, however, decide for the rest of its species whether they can continue existing? Modern technology tells us the answer is yes -- it is (very, very remotely) possible for one person to obtain enough nuclear weaponry to eradicate humanity, if not all at once then at least by thoroughly irradiating the earth and rendering it uninhabitable. That one person can, theoretically, press a button and end our species. But we're discussing making a command decision that bears a risk of the annihilation of the species, rather than a lone madman. So here is the question that ought to be posed to those of you who could not decide to annihilate the buggers:
Do you accept responsibility for the possible death of your entire species?
I can't accept that risk, so I argued that the I.F. made the right decision. How would you argue otherwise?
The moral component of our discussion in class was founded on intelligence. Specifically, the military intelligence to know whether the buggers had truly realized their mistake and would never attack us again, to know whether the I.F. had made any further attempts to contact the buggers once the ansible was developed (more on this later!), and whether Ender still would have been able to defeat the buggers had he known what he was doing.
Those less squeamish of us, who were willing to act in spite of our acknowledged lack of necessary facts, were not willing to take a risk where the continued existence of humanity was concerned. Although many people disagreed with this position, I don't remember hearing a cohesive argument to the contrary; instead, many people argued that more intelligence was needed, that they wouldn't be able to make a decision given only the information the I.F. claims to have had, or that wiping out another species entirely is just wrong.
Many of you argued that it would be important to know that an attempt at contact had been made; however, if you check out the Ansible entry in the Wikipedia page Concepts in the Ender's Game Series, you'll see that Card's ansible is explicitly designed like a set of two walkie talkies that are attuned to each other; the design prohibits two ansibles that are not constructed at the same time from communicating. Therefore, communication with the buggers through the ansible, based on Card's internally consistent technology, is impossible, and the I.F. would have known this, and decided accordingly.
It seemed obvious to me that, given the intelligence available, a war of extinction would be the only viable choice. That's why I was so very fascinated by all of your contrary views on the subject. We discussed it in class, but Graff's quotation deserves to be repeated:
"Ender, believe me, there's a century of discussion on this very subject. Nobody knows the answer. When it comes down to it, though, the real decision is inevitable: If one of us has to be destroyed, let's make damn sure we're the ones alive at the end. Our genes won't let us decide any other way. Nature can't evolve a species that hasn't a will to survive. Individuals might be bred to sacrifice themselves, but the race as a whole can never decide to cease to exist. So if we can we'll kill every last one of the buggers, and if they can they'll kill every last one of us."
According to Graff, individuals can sacrifice themselves, yes, but species cannot decide to stop existing, or as a group agree on a course of action that they know will lead to that outcome. Can an individual, however, decide for the rest of its species whether they can continue existing? Modern technology tells us the answer is yes -- it is (very, very remotely) possible for one person to obtain enough nuclear weaponry to eradicate humanity, if not all at once then at least by thoroughly irradiating the earth and rendering it uninhabitable. That one person can, theoretically, press a button and end our species. But we're discussing making a command decision that bears a risk of the annihilation of the species, rather than a lone madman. So here is the question that ought to be posed to those of you who could not decide to annihilate the buggers:
Do you accept responsibility for the possible death of your entire species?
I can't accept that risk, so I argued that the I.F. made the right decision. How would you argue otherwise?
Thursday, March 20, 2008
Ender's Game Reflection
I agree with Tim that forcing people to address the IF’s choices regarding how to deal with the buggers as though we were the people responsible for the decision and the consequences eliminated the middle ground, but it did so because making the decision personal prevents us from being able to take the easy way out by justifying both positions. I don’t think that this exercise was a bad idea, and I don’t think that people became so entrenched that they could not see the other side. I think that we seemed to be strictly standing for our positions because we were not allowed to have a middle ground. Making the decision a more personal question caused us to have to make firm justifications for whichever side we chose instead of just sitting on the fence.
Though I disagree with much of what was said during class, I enjoyed the discussion because the different opinions were so far opposed that it allowed us to look at the same evidence and see it in completely different ways.
Tuesday, March 18, 2008
Arthur C. Clarke
Arthur C. Clarke, author and visionary, is dead at the age of 90. As a class full of science fiction geeks, I think we all owe him a great debt of gratitude.
CNN article
Another
CNN article
Another
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.
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.
Crossing Values
Pg. 269:
“And when she died, the others all died.”
“No, they just went stupid. The first ships we boarded, the buggers were still alive. Organically. But they didn’t move, didn’t respond to anything, even when our scientists vivisected some of them to see if we could learn a few more things about buggers. After a while they all died. No will. There’s nothing in those little bodies when the queen is gone.”
Pg. 270:
“Why did they kill the crew?”
“Why not? To them, losing a few crew members would be like clipping your nails. Nothing to get upset about. They probably thought they were routinely shutting down our communications by turning off the workers running the tug. Not murdering living, sentient beings with an independent genetic future. Murder’s no big deal to them. Only queen-killing, really, is murder, because only queen-killing closes off a genetic path.”
“…Think of it this way. In all the bugger wars so far, they’ve killed thousands and thousands of living, thinking beings. And in all those wars, we’ve killed only one.”
These quotes describe one of the ideas that I found most intriguing this time through Ender’s Game. Mazer justifies their actions in the war by discounting the lives of all of the buggers except for the queen because she is the only bugger who thinks. At the same time, he offers a justification for the actions of the buggers, that they did not understand that all humans are capable of independent thought. The buggers did not understand the value that humans place on each individual life, and by killing the crew of the tug, they were merely following their own standard procedures.
What I find interesting about this is that as each culture came to understand the other, it adopted the other’s values. Since the buggers actions revealed to humans that they did not value individual lives, humans began to disregard the lives of individual buggers. The third quote from above by Mazer Rackham illustrates of just how little concern the lives of the dependent buggers have become to humans. At this point Mazer only counts the single queen that died as a casualty, none of the other buggers matter at all. Buggers, on the other hand, came to respect the individual life more as they realized that each human is an independent person. As the pupa queen let Ender know, “We did not mean to murder, and when we understood, we never came again. We thought we were the only thinking beings in the universe, until we met you, but never did we dream that thought could arise from the lonely animals who cannot dream each other’s dreams.” Once they understood that each human was a thinking being, they gained a more human respect for individual life. It’s interesting that despite the interaction between the two groups having been a war, it allowed them to further understand each other, which caused each group to take on certain values of the other regarding individuality. They already placed the same value on independent thought, as each group considers murder only to have occurred when the subject is a thinking being.
A closing thought: He isn't named Ender just because it's a derivative of Andres. Card named him for what he does. He ends things. He ends the war; he ends the buggers, and I'm sure you all can come up with other things he ends. Ender is an ender.
Monday, March 17, 2008
The psychology of games
Ender's Game. On the surface, it appears to refer to the simulator "game" Ender plays towards the end of the book, in which he unknowingly defeats the Buggers. However, there is also the Battle Room, a grand game that nearly every character in the book plays. And then there's the fantasy game, the pure reflection of Ender's psyche that is the entryway for the Buggers into his mind. Other characters play their games, as well -- Graff's game is the subtle manipulation of Ender into a perfect commander, Peter and Valentine play a game of control over the world.
But the important one is Ender's Game. And which one is it? I think it's primarily meant to be the fantasy game. The fantasy is a sci-fi author's safety valve, where anything is possible without needing to be explained, internal consistency is meaningless, and symbolism is available at whim. This exploration into the inner workings of Ender's mind shows us what he is thinking far better than his internal narration; even when Ender doesn't know why he feels the way he does, we can draw clues from his fantasy world. Every great challenge in Ender's life, each significant turning point is accompanied by progress in this game. By the time he has beaten it, he himself has come to depend on the game to represent and facilitate his emotional development; even his crucial meeting with his sister only provides him with the appropriate weapon to overcome the psychological challenge that awaits him in the mirror.
"But wait," one might ask, "this isn't so cut-and-dried, is it? After all, it's specifically stated that all who enter the game face the same basic tasks; although the game is able to insert personally tailored features, the challenges are always the same. How can every child share the same basic psychological challenges?" Well! You raise an excellent point. But remember: the I.F. knew exactly what kind of child it was looking for. The game wasn't custom-tailored for Ender, but it was custom-tailored so that the child able to beat it would be the one meant to be the commander of the I.F. forces. The reason that every other child at Battle School fails the game is because he or she does not fit the same psychological profile as Ender, which is required before one can win.
The game does not reflect Ender's personality; it reflects the personality of the child who can defeat the Buggers, and that happens to be Ender.
The relative simplicity and heartfelt qualities of Card's writing make it easy to find parallels in other sci-fi works (or maybe elections). To me, the fantasy game begs the following question: do we carve our own paths in life? Or, like Ender, are we simply filling in us-sized holes?
I guess what I'm asking is, "could anyone else have written this blog post?" Could someone who grew up in similar circumstances, with a similar background and repertoire, with similarly minded friends and a similar psychological profile have come up with what I have? Since Professor Jackson can only hope that his students come up with such obviously brilliant points as mine, I'm comforted by the fact that my genius is unexpected. But Ender is explicitly filling a niche, growing into a mold because he is offered no other way to grow. I'd run away, too.
But the important one is Ender's Game. And which one is it? I think it's primarily meant to be the fantasy game. The fantasy is a sci-fi author's safety valve, where anything is possible without needing to be explained, internal consistency is meaningless, and symbolism is available at whim. This exploration into the inner workings of Ender's mind shows us what he is thinking far better than his internal narration; even when Ender doesn't know why he feels the way he does, we can draw clues from his fantasy world. Every great challenge in Ender's life, each significant turning point is accompanied by progress in this game. By the time he has beaten it, he himself has come to depend on the game to represent and facilitate his emotional development; even his crucial meeting with his sister only provides him with the appropriate weapon to overcome the psychological challenge that awaits him in the mirror.
"But wait," one might ask, "this isn't so cut-and-dried, is it? After all, it's specifically stated that all who enter the game face the same basic tasks; although the game is able to insert personally tailored features, the challenges are always the same. How can every child share the same basic psychological challenges?" Well! You raise an excellent point. But remember: the I.F. knew exactly what kind of child it was looking for. The game wasn't custom-tailored for Ender, but it was custom-tailored so that the child able to beat it would be the one meant to be the commander of the I.F. forces. The reason that every other child at Battle School fails the game is because he or she does not fit the same psychological profile as Ender, which is required before one can win.
The game does not reflect Ender's personality; it reflects the personality of the child who can defeat the Buggers, and that happens to be Ender.
The relative simplicity and heartfelt qualities of Card's writing make it easy to find parallels in other sci-fi works (or maybe elections). To me, the fantasy game begs the following question: do we carve our own paths in life? Or, like Ender, are we simply filling in us-sized holes?
I guess what I'm asking is, "could anyone else have written this blog post?" Could someone who grew up in similar circumstances, with a similar background and repertoire, with similarly minded friends and a similar psychological profile have come up with what I have? Since Professor Jackson can only hope that his students come up with such obviously brilliant points as mine, I'm comforted by the fact that my genius is unexpected. But Ender is explicitly filling a niche, growing into a mold because he is offered no other way to grow. I'd run away, too.
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