RE: Ender's Game

From: Damien Broderick (damienb@unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Fri Aug 01 2003 - 21:15:37 MDT

  • Next message: Damien Broderick: "Re: Are Extropians promoters of an ascetic ideal and alienation?"

    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



    This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Fri Aug 01 2003 - 21:30:14 MDT