

Ender's Game is an Understated Story of Uncertainty - koblenski
http://sam-koblenski.blogspot.com/2013/10/enders-game-is-understated-story-of.html

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tel
_But boy, is it refreshing to get away from all of that telling, telling,
telling for a while._

I often find telling comes about when there is no ground truth or confidence
in a field. The author must advise because there's no certainty that if they
just showed you what they knew you would arrive in the same place as they.

Mathematics does a lot of telling too, but the best books don't need to as
much. They just present things and let you fill in the missing details. It's
almost-but-not-quite the confidence of fiction, where a good author shows and
doesn't tell because the things they're trying to share are just too large to
be simply explained.

I've also found the best CS books don't have to tell. I was recently reading
the Reasoned Schemer and I immediately came to love the style they wrote it
in. The author and the "reader" are just exploring something together at
whatever rate makes sense. It's one of the few CS books I'd want to read over
again.

~~~
fractallyte
This is the 'Programmed Learning' style
([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programmed_learning](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programmed_learning)).
(It's what led me to 'The Little Lisper', in the same series as 'The Reasoned
Schemer').

Another excellent example is Engineering Mathematics, by Ken Stroud
([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_Stroud](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_Stroud)).
I used this at college, and have always loved the style: short 'frames' of
explanation and examples, with questions leading onto the next frame, building
confidence and skill with each bite-sized step.

~~~
tel
Ooh, thanks for the link! I'm interested in trying to write a bit in that
style so it'll be nice to see a few more sources.

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fennecfoxen
Right, so, Orson Scott Card once gave a piece of writing advice: as soon as
you notice that your story is trying to give someone a moral, try to undermine
it or thwart it in some way. I think that's what you're seeing here
(notwithstanding the series' overarching allegory on the book of Mormon and
whatever attendant lessons exist there).

Postscript:

Hey, guys, some of you need to crank up the ostentatious "I hate ender's
game!" knob a little louder. Some of us still are unaware that there exist
people who dislike the book! Surely your links to a blog post which polarizes
the matter in the light of your favorite philosophical or political movement
will change everyone's opinion and fix this. :P

~~~
anatoly
It's nice of you to point out that, coincidentally, the people you disagree
with are the ones behaving ostentatiously on this thread.

Here, let me chime in with another piece of Card's writing advice, as
convincingly retold by Jo Walton:

"My C shelves begin, controversially, with Orson Scott Card, who was one of my
favourite authors for a long time but whom I can no longer read. I started
reading him with Hot Sleep and A Planet Called Treason in the early 80s, and I
stopped in 1997, so I have read absolutely everything up to then and nothing
since. I stopped reading him because he said in his book on how to write that
the best way to get readers engaged was to have appealing innocent characters
and torture them, and after that I kept seeing that he was doing that and it
kept jerking me out of the story."

~~~
humanrebar
Another word for jerking around the audience (readers) though manipulating
characters is drama. We still watch Breaking Bad, Mad Men, and Game of
Thrones, right?

~~~
johnchristopher
After reading that slate article about how the writers brain-stormed the
ending to fit their audience and get the "best" emotions out of them instead
of following up on characters' development I decided not to watch any tv shows
for a while.

edit: I thought that breaking bad was awesome but reading it being reduced as
"drama" make me realize it was mainly drama in specific setting :(

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falcolas
I have never quite understood the mythos surrounding Ender's Game. I read it
as an adult, and the overarching theme that stood out to me was abuse. Abusing
children in general and exposing one child in particular to more abuse because
they _might_ be a solution to an otherwise "unsolvable" problem?

It just struck me as ridiculous.

~~~
avalaunch
I think it's important to note that Ender's Game was only written to provide
the necessary backstory to Speaker for the Dead. With that in mind, when you
take both books as one, it becomes more a story about dealing with abuse than
the abuse itself.

~~~
StavrosK
Would you suggest reading SftD right after Ender's Game? The order is very
confusing.

~~~
humanrebar
Yes. I consider it an equally good book, though it's an entirely different
genre.

The books in the Ender's Shadow series came much later and are more in the
same vein as Ender's Game.

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djscram
When I first read the book, I did think it was very compelling. But, as the
book seems to have become core curriculum for every course on science fiction,
I've come to think of it as really overrated. There are some very good, very
innovative novels out there, and yet people keep teaching this one over and
over.

I've also been around a lot of science fiction writers (I went to Clarion) and
learned that Orson Scott Card is kind of an ass. I know that shouldn't change
my judgement of the novel itself, but I still feel much less enthusiasm for
it. (the sequels also soured me on the original a bit.)

~~~
Sujan
> There are some very good, very innovative novels out there

Source? (Links please?)

~~~
anatoly
Are you asking about good SF novels in general or those suitable to teach
young kids?

For the former, there's so much SF better than Card's. Perhaps Gene Wolfe's
_The Book of the new Sun_ cycle, with its brilliant writing and real moral
complexity. Or Iain M. Banks' Culture novels.

For the latter, lots of classic SF - Azimov, Heinlein etc.

~~~
Sujan
Sorry, I was asking for general tips (that are better than Enders'game) I can
add to my reading list. I loved some of Card's novels, but always looking to
expand my horizon and find new stuff.

Thanks.

------
minikites
An understated story of Nazi superiority maybe:

Orson Scott Card Has Always Been an Asshat (2005):
[http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2005/5/28/22428/7034](http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2005/5/28/22428/7034)

ender and hitler: sympathy for the superman (20 years later) (2007):
[http://peachfront.diaryland.com/enderhitlte.html](http://peachfront.diaryland.com/enderhitlte.html)

Creating the Innocent Killer: Ender's Game, Intention, and Morality (2004):
[http://www4.ncsu.edu/~tenshi/Killer_000.htm](http://www4.ncsu.edu/~tenshi/Killer_000.htm)

~~~
saturdaysaint
Granted, I read it at an older age than its intended audience, but I found EG
to be tedious Objectivism-lite. There's little of what I look for in
literature or life - humor, surprise, adventure, character evolution. The
chosen one (a tedious sci-fi trope without a bit of invention) mostly has it
all figured out from page 1, and the book turns into a painful slog as he
nears the finish line laden with the all consuming importance of his task.

If only all of us had outside authorities telling us what's important and we
just had to focus with laserlike intensity on those preordained goals. As it
turns out, determining our own values and participating with other people with
their own independent values and agendas is a pretty significant part of the
journey for most of the interesting and/or great people I've read about.

I mean, it's funny that liking Ender's Game is such a nerd cliche when the
paths of actual tech luminaries (Jobs and Gates) are so much more winding and
free-spirited (and therefore _interesting_ to me at least).

~~~
EliRivers
Everyone reads something different from it. When I read it, it seemed to me
that Ender spent a lot of time hating the path laid out for him, often able to
see what was coming but unable to do anything to stop it, and his issues with
it come close to rendering him a catatonic mess.

