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Thought of the Day – On the Reading of Ender’s Game

March 3rd, 2015

Here’s a question I’ve seen come up quite a few times: Is the Ender’s Game series by Orson Scott Card worth reading? And, if so, should you bother with sequels?

As a young adult, Ender’s Game was one of those books that stuck with you and transformed you and informed everything you read from that point forward in your life. Revisiting the book a few years ago as an adult, it was not quite so utterly mind-blowing, but it was still a really good piece of science fiction and I recommend it highly.

Speaker for the Dead, on the other hand, is one of the best science fiction novels ever written.

So, basically, yes. I enthusiastically recommend these books and I think your life is poorer if you haven’t read them.

With that being said, here’s my recommendation for tackling the Ender-verse:

(1) Start with Ender’s Game and read through the original sequence of novels until you don’t like them any more. Then stop. They aren’t going to get any better.

Ender’s Game
Speaker for the Dead
Xenocide
Children of the Mind

(2) Now, pop over to Ender’s Shadow. Read through this second sequence of novels until you don’t like them any more. Then stop. They are going to get a lot worse very, very quickly.

Ender’s Shadow
Shadow of the Hegemon
Shadow Puppets
First Meetings
Shadow of the Giant
Shadows in Flight

I stopped reading about midway through that sequence, so I don’t have any opinion on the Ender inter-quels:

A War of Gifts: An Ender Story
Ender in Exile

Nor do I have any opinion about the prequel trilogy:

Earth Unaware
Earth Afire
Earth Awakens

But I suspect I’m not missing anything.

Filed under: Fiction | Comments (4)

Why SF is Awesome!

January 30th, 2009

First Principle: Any story you can tell in any other genre can be told in speculative fiction.

Second Principle: … and a whole bunch more.

Let’s take Spider-Man, for example. You can probably find other ways to explore the central theme of “with great power comes great responsibility”, but it would be comparatively difficult to invest that great power into the hands of a teenage boy with whom your audience can so readily identify. (See, also, Ender’s Game.)

Similarly, love stories are ubiquitous… but it takes speculative fiction to create the specific type of dynamic that exists between a 17-year-old Vampire Slayer and a 400-year-old vampire (particularly when the vampire loses his soul as a direct result of experiencing true happiness with the Slayer). Which isn’t, of course, to say that there isn’t clear metaphoric content there that can be applied to mortal relationships.

Or take a look at the absolutely brilliant exploration of character in the new version of Battlestar Galactica. The clone-like, resurrecting cylons are a Pandora’s Box of sociological, cultural, and psychological problems that simply do not exist in the real world… and thus make possible compelling and powerful stories that you won’t find anywhere else.

Conceptually, look at a work like the original Foundation Trilogy. Or Vinge’s exploration of perverse ethical structures in A Deepness in the Sky.

None of which is to say that other forms of fiction need to pack up their bags and go home. There is clearly a power in the historical narrative of Roots, for example, that cannot be captured by any fantastical restructuring of slavery and racism. Contemporary romances can feature a closer identification between protagonist and reader than a novel starring someone from the 31st century. And so forth.

Nor is it to say that all SF is innately awesome. Sturgeon’s Law (“90% of everything is crap”) naturally still applies.

But it is to say that SF removes the walls.

Which brings us to our conclusion: SF is awesome because it has women wearing brass bras and spandex.

… wait, no. I seem to have gone astray somewhere.