Navyhacker006 on 10/11/2006 at 17:04

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I know. And it's not as serious as my post comes off as. A lot of the way I talk relies heavily on my tone, my face and my body language - all of which are incredibly hard for me to express over the internet. I can throw all the emoticons in there that I want, and bold/italicize the stress points, but whenever I read something written like that, it comes off as attention-whoring or something.



I don't feel that way.

I didn't say I wouldn't participate, just that I wasn't planning on voting again. Most of what I've read falls squarely under 'Genre fiction' - your Foundations, Merlin Trilogies, etc.

I will participate in the debate, assuming I have the time. I will also read up on Genre Fiction and try to understand how it's different than Fiction. Wiki to the rescue!

BEAR on 12/11/2006 at 22:37

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I enjoyed Enders Game fairly well, but its also the kind of immature shit that I generally go for anyways.

To those who didn't like the book, just out of curiosity, did the books you read have an introduction in them, and if so did you read it? I read Speaker For the Dead first, and its introduction and then Enders game and its introduction, and it makes you see the books alot differently I suspect than if you had read them both without that. It made me take notice while reading about certain parts knowing more of what he wanted to do with the books. As I understand it, Enders Game started out as a short story revolving basically around the battle room concept that he thought up while in high school or something. Speaker for the Dead apparently is the story he actually wanted to tell, yet couldn't without fleshing out the Ender character better (for himself more-so than for the reader). That just seemed interesting to me. After a while its kind of hard to empathize with Ender, it just starts getting stupid. I mean, its like the worst childhood memories of 10 diffrent people rolled together, almost everyone he met was horribly cruel and out to get him. It was supposed to establish his isolation but it ended up just being tiresome.

As far as the book goes: it felt more like a means to an end than a real story. I guess thats somewhat supported by my understanding of how the book and its sequels came to be. He tried writing Speaker for the dead before actually doing a novel version of Enders Game, so he had already come up with the story and the eventual person that Ender needed to be, so the whole book just seemed like "What would you have to subject some poor fuck to and come out with the character I need in the end?". Having read both Enders Game and Speaker for the Dead, I'll say Sftd was a way better book. It was less sci-fi cliché, better written and basically a better story, and I think Card knows it.

Considering when the book was written, his ideas of the Internets were pretty funny. People having meaningful political discussions? Hahaha. His ideas of the battle simulators and games did seem to be ahead of their times, for someone who is admittedly not a scientist and from what I understand not in the technology business. One thing that seemed neat to me: Card described in the introduction where his very first idea for the book came from. He I guess was on his way to school during high school, thinking about war in space and how you would train people to fight in space, which lead to the short story. The kind of interesting thought was that in space, directions really wouldn't matter at all, even with computer games based in space and the fact that its many years since he came up with the idea, its still hard to think of space as having any orientations you want. Various space Sim type games dont seem to really do that good of a job of it, they tend to orient things horizontally instead of completely relative, probably because its disorienting.

The book felt pretty manipulative as well, using the basic insecurities and adolescent feelings that basically everyone has had at some point to make you feel one thing or another about the story, which kind of substituted for motivation or plot.

All in all, I still enjoyed reading it, it sucked you in and was fairly short and therefore easy reading, but I dont think it was a good choice for the book club. Probably a good example of why not to have sci-fi here to begin with.

ercles on 14/11/2006 at 07:22

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Well I apologise Stitch, but when I voted I didn't take account for the fact that this discussion would be taking place during my University finals, and thus I haven't visited the forum in the last two weeks or so.

I agree with BEAR, in as much as I felt that Xenocide and Speaker for the Dead were both much better books. Whereas Ender's game is a real boy's own story, the other two were far more mature as far as the emotions dealt with, and the philosophy. It was rather dissapointing to have a look at (didn't have a time to go cover to cover due to aforementioned reasons) when you have read other books by Card.