Ender's Game...so much to talk about. I liked it. The end threw me a bit but it was supposed to, so no hard feelings Mr. Card. I hope everyone had a relaxing Spring Break, I mostly did.
First off, I thought the planning and work done to ensure Ender was the person the IF wanted was very interesting. Peter was rejected for the cruel streak he displayed so well with Ender, Valentine was too gentle, but Ender somehow was in the middle. From what I know about child-raising and psychological development, that's not something you can usually plan for. Parents may correct their tactics if they see one child is doing something out of the norm the parents wanted to create, but Peter was careful to keep his work away from the adults and they couldn't have known about it by the time Ender was born. So I think it is with a bit of luck that Ender came out with the personality he did. Shaped by an aversion to the cruelty displayed by Peter and nurtured by the love of his sister, he just happened to be what the fleet needed.
Second, I found the shaping of Ender by the Battle School instructors to be interesting as well. They let him cultivate friendships and gain skills then sought to separate him and make him compete with others. Necessary, perhaps, for the commander they wanted him to be. However, Ender was what, six when he entered the school? They were trusting him to display an emotional and mental maturity that not many children his age have as he went through the school. In fact, all the children in this book are sort of 'wise beyond their years' so to speak. I suppose we really are getting older younger, in that experiences that used to happen later are happening earlier. So in the future, we'll all be geniuses, or at least those luck ones, by the age of 6 and able to strategize for major military operations by the time we're in our early teens. Excellent.
Last, as Professor Jackson said last class, this is our first book with actual aliens. Insectoid ones at that. Eww. Creepy. Or at least that's what everyone down on Earth, or above it, or near-ish it, is supposed to think. They're weird, they aren't human, they'd probably eat people if given the chance. Which of course, our brave fleet soldiers won't let happen. It's interesting what the combination propaganda and fear towards the unknown can produce. As Colbert says, there's fear out there and someone has to monger it, but the fears being played on are quite real and not exactly contrived. Not exactly contrived as in blown up from a small discomfort, but capitalized on as being a response to a perceived threat. A perceived threat as in one coming in great big ships and since we can't understand them we naturally have to be proactive and figure they're out to get us. Oh, for a Universal Translator! Or at least the Babel Fish. Or C-3PO. It's an interesting mixture of fear of something new and utterly different from what is known to you and the jumping to the wrong conclusions because of it.
Happy St. Patrick's Day!
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2 comments:
I found part of your phrasing interesting - "I found the shaping of Ender by the Battle School instructors to be interesting as well. They let him cultivate friendships and gain skills then sought to separate him and make him compete with others."
This strikes me as one fairly accurate way to look at the events, but I have a different take on the way Ender's time at the Battle School was spent. I feel that almost everything that he took from the Battle School he previously had (in terms of raw intelligence and understanding), and the things he learned there were either from his observations of the other students' tactics (done at his own initiative) or the result of him adapting to circumstances created by the kids themselves. This environment was in fact created by the teachers, but I feel as though Ender pulled himself to his successful position based mostly on his own merits, and to a lesser degree the other students.
I make this point because it reminds me of other survival situations where people have excelled and surpassed normal human characteristics in order to survive. They do so on their own merits, and it is so striking to others because people do not like to experience the pain that accompanies bringing out the best in one's self.
-Mike
That's true, Ender did cultivate his own abilities but with his friends he was able to refine them so they can't totally be discounted. But yeah, Ender was little genius guy.
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