From: Damien Broderick (damienb@unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Fri Aug 01 2003 - 21:15:37 MDT
At 11:03 AM 8/1/03 -0700, Lee Corbin wrote:
>I know that this was not Card's intent, but in retrospect it was
>a coolly told story to at least get Ender to save the Queen.
>(I remember that much, though maybe Card only added that in
>the insipid sequel to this great book.)
Yes, it wasn't in the short story. However...
>So frustrated at the syrupy story "Speaker for the Dead" did
>I become
Interestingly (as an afterword to the short story version in his collection
MAPS IN A MIRROR reveals), writing that novel (not story) *preceded* the
novel ENDER'S GAME. In its development, he came to understand that he
needed to extend the original tale into a novel that would provide an
appropriate backstory to SPEAKER. However, he does come close to admitting
that his moves at the end of the revision/extension were a storytelling
mistake (because for Card, as a Mormon propagandist writer, the reader is
always right):
`..few readers could understand why there were still so many pages left
when the story was clearly over. Even this flaw didn't bother me. I had a
Master's degree in English by now, so I knew how to excuse it in literary
terms. I was making the reader go through the same kind of revision of the
meaning of the story's past that Ender went through. Ah, how the tools of
criticism allow us to justify the lapses of our art!' (668).
I believe that it was *not* a lapse, but an instance of the form of sf
storytelling known as `cognitive breakthrough' (which encyclopeadist Peter
Nicholls places near the core of the mode), and I believe that Card himself
must secretly agree since his current revisionist extension of the Ender
sequence--which follows Bean and other uber-children--does just this,
repeatedly (and, alas, rather mechanically if virtuosically by now).
Damien Broderick
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