Ender's Game: the movie

In the last post, I discussed Ender's Game, the award-winning book by Orson Scott Card. Ender, by the way, is from a rendering of the name of Andrew Wiggin by his sister, when she was small. It also can have another sort of meaning.

I have now seen the movie. Let's put it this way -- my wife liked it. It's a PG-13 film, for violence. There's no sex at all, and very little questionable language. We thought that the sound track was louder than it should have been, but have heard worse.

As would be expected, there were some deviations from the book. The most obvious one was the age of Ender, and the other battle school trainees -- they were 5 years, or more, older, than they were in the book, which actually makes more sense.

There were some other minor changes. The enemy species was called formics -- bugger was not used. The role of Petra Arkanian was magnified somewhat, which is a good thing. She was well played by Hailee Steinfeld. Asa Butterfield played Ender, the lead role, and did a good job, also, although we couldn't understand a few of his lines. Harrison Ford did a good job in an important role, and Viola Davis looked like she belonged in service in a future military.

There was even less religion in the movie than in the book. Ender's brother, Peter, was less important than in the book.

I don't wish to give away the plot, any more than in the last post, but will say that the theme, in the movie, is not so much relationships, and how they work, as it is war, and the morals of it. Is all fair in war? The book did deal with that, quite a bit. It was written before the war expense, fatalities and injuries, drone attacks, invasive data collection, and, depending on who is talking, torture, of the Bush 2 and Obama administrations, so was not a commentary on them, and the movie shouldn't be taken that way, either. There will be serious moral questions about war whenever one is fought or contemplated, and Ender's Game brings some of them to the fore.

Thanks for reading.

Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card

Ender's Game (1985, by Orson Scott Card, and based on a 1977 short story) was, and is, an important science fiction book. See here for its Wikipedia article -- the book won both the Nebula and Hugo awards. The book has been adapted for a movie, which is to come out tomorrow. I have not seen the movie, but I like the list of actors -- Harrison Ford, Ben Kingsley, Abigail Breslin, Hailee Steinfeld, Viola Davis. I don't see many movies, but I have seen all of these people in one or more, and like their work. I may see this one. Card, himself, has been deeply involved in the script of the film.

Amazon recently advertised the Kindle edition of the book. I purchased it, and I'm glad that I did. I hadn't read the book in a decade or two, and it's a good read. Also, the new edition includes a fine introduction by Card, about the book, and other things. Here's an excerpt:

Why else do we read fiction, anyway? Not to be impressed by somebody’s dazzling language—or at least I hope that’s not our reason. I think that most of us, anyway, read these stories that we know are not “true” because we’re hungry for another kind of truth: The mythic truth about human nature in general, the particular truth about those life-communities that define our own identity, and the most specific truth of all: our own self-story. Fiction, because it is not about somebody who actually lived in the real world, always has the possibility of being about ourself.

What is the book about? Before I give a brief summary, some broad themes:

Relationships. I would say that extended family relationships is the most common theme I have encountered in Card's books, almost so much that his science fiction and alternate history tales are, in large part, vehicles for portrayal of that.
War, and some of the ways it warps our morals.
Teaching children to stick up for themselves by not backing them up.
What it's like to be an exceptionally intelligent child.
Bullying.
How we might interact with aliens.

There are some interesting science fiction ideas in the book. One of them is the ansible, a device for communicating instantaneously with others, not matter how far, really far away they are. Ursula K. LeGuin seems to have invented this device, in her equally important science fiction novel The Dispossessed. Another one is the alien species that Card describes sketchily in Ender's Game.

There is no explicit religion in the book, except for some Bible quotations, and a mention of the religions of Ender's parents, one of them a Mormon, one a Catholic. (Card is a Mormon.) No one prays or goes to church. There is a high moral tone, or at least recognition that some things are right.

Now, for a summary. Don't say that I didn't warn you! Spoilers included.

Before the book starts, humans have encountered an alien race, insect-like, the buggers, a few decades earlier. They defeated them, but believe that the buggers may come back, with better weapons. Mazer Rackham was the military leader who defeated them the first time.

Ender is a six-year-old boy, highly intelligent. He, and others, all over the earth, have been monitored by the army, who is looking for children who are flexible enough in their thinking, intelligent, and physically adept, to train so that they can lead the fight against the buggers, when they return. A bully attacks him, and he believes that the only way he can stop this bully is to defeat him utterly. He does, but, although Ender doesn't realize it, he kills the bully. He is given the opportunity to go to Battle School, a satellite where such children will be trained in free fall group war games, with the understanding that he won't see his family for years.

Ender's brother, Peter, is a highly intelligent sadist. His sister, Valentine, is a highly intelligent good person. He will miss her, and hates to leave her at Peter's mercy, but accepts.

Ender becomes the best leader in Battle School. Again, a bully attacks, and Ender defends himself, so thoroughly that he kills the bully, although Ender doesn't realize this. The adult leaders of Battle School want Ender to understand that he is on his own -- if something bad happens, he has no one but himself to count on. I wonder how the movie will handle the two bullying/retaliation scenes, if at all?

Ender is so good at the games, especially at leading others to be effective, that he is sent to Eros, where he takes part in more drills to fight the buggers. Eventually, Mazer Rackham becomes his teacher. (Rackham has been traveling at near-light speed, so that he can still be helpful in the next battle with the buggers.)

As you might expect, Ender, and several colleagues from Battle School, who have joined him on Eros, eventually defeat the buggers. But there are a couple of surprises in that defeat, which I won't give away.

Ender is such a hero that he can't really go back to earth. His future, traveling with Valentine, makes up a part of four additional novels. So do the lives of some of his colleagues at Battle School.

In my opinion, the most important of the succeeding novels is Speaker for the Dead, the next novel. For more on that, and other Enderverse books, see here.

Thanks for reading

Orson Scott Card's Ender books

Orson Scott Card is one of the giants of present-day fantastic literature. The Wikipedia article on him says that he is the only author to ever win both the Nebula and the Hugo Awards in the same year, two years in a row.
I believe that I have read all but one of the books by Card that are set in the so-called Enderverse. There are, so far, four books in the Ender series, and four in the Shadow series, and, also several short stories. I wish to do four things in this post. (Ender is a nickname given to Andrew Wiggin, the central character of the Enderverse, by his sister, when both of them were young. It also can take the meaning of "one who ends something.")

First, I often post about religious aspects of fantastic literature. (See here for the most important such post, which links to several others.) Card is a Mormon. I am far from an expert on Mormonism. As I understand it, its adherents place considerable value on the family unit. That comes through in Card's books. They are as much books about family dynamics and relationships as they are about novel ideas and far planets. There are at least four families of importance in the Ender books, with Ender, his sister and his brother being one such. Both Ender and his sister also become part of another significant family.

There are religions in some of the Ender books. In Speaker for the Dead, the humans on the planet Lusitania are from Brazil, and they practice a form of Catholicism. There are hints of the practice of some oriental religions in the books.

There are ideas about the relationship between matter, or body, and spirit, which are prominent. They may come from Mormonism, or Card, like many another writer before him, may have just made them up. These ideas are part of a helpful Wikipedia article on "Concepts in the Ender's Game series." See the sections on Philote and Philotic Web. The article, and Card, present these ideas as physics -- The Way Things Are, not as religion per se, but, like real physics, they have religious implications. In this case, the implications are related to the nature of the soul, and its immortality.

Second, I wish to commend Card for what has been called the Hierarchy of Exclusion, introduced in Speaker for the Dead, and used in his later novels. What is a hierarchy of exclusion? It is a classification of intelligent beings, based on how well we understand them, or could understand them. The terms, which Card mostly took from Swedish, are useful in fantastic literature, much like Ursula Le Guin's invention of the concept of an ansible is. I don't know if anyone but Card has used them in fiction. Ansible has been used by more than Le Guin. Both Card's terms, and Le Guin's, may someday become a reality. Some stage from Card's Hierarchy should be immediately applicable if we encounter another species somewhere. One of the books, Xenocide, has a title which comes from one possible way of dealing with another species -- Ender, himself, unwittingly was almost a Xenocide -- he nearly wiped out another intelligent species.

In C. S. Lewis's Out of the Silent Planet, there are three intelligent non-human species on Malacandra -- Mars. All of them could be called ramen, in relation to humans. They, and the humans, are capable of communication and co-existence.

Third, I wish to comment briefly on Card's biology. Card creates sub-creations with bizarre means of reproduction, or, perhaps better put, means of establishing a new generation. One such is the diggers, of his Homecoming Saga. (The link does not explain this biology, and I'm not going to try, either.)

In the Ender books, there are two other important species, the buggers, or Formics and the piggies, or Pequininos. The buggers are something like intelligent wasps, bees or ants, with a queen, and sterile workers. The species is propagated from colony to colony by queen producing queen. (I don't recall a "male" bugger mentioned in the books.) The piggies are even more un-human in their propagation. When a piggie dies, or is sacrificed, and properly prepared, that creature becomes a tree. There are, actually, two kinds of trees, mother-trees and father-trees, and new piggies begin their existence in the mother-trees. As I said, Card can be bizarre.

Card also uses a so-called virus, the Descolada virus, which is of extra-terrestrial origin, quasi-intelligent, and able to make fundamental changes in the biology of the species it infects. It can infect humans. Card doesn't explain how a microscopic parasite can have enough information, or information processing ability, to be even quasi-intelligent. Another example of strange biology.

Fourth, a little about Children of the Mind, the fourth book in the Ender series.

Ender is, by now, about 3,000 years old, earth time. He is, physiologically, a mature adult. He has done so much near-light-speed travel that he finds himself millenia from the time of his origin. His sister, Valentine, has done much the same thing, much of it with Ender. Both of them have married. Valentine has children of her own, and Ender has married into an  intelligent, and deeply dysfunctional family of Lusitanians. Their brother, Peter, who was, in his time, a vicious bully, then the wise leader of the human planets, is long dead. Jane, a conscious being who lives, as it were, in the unused processing time of the computers used by humans on many planets, is a key character. She is capable of moving containers large enough to hold several humans at a time to other planets, with no time elapsed. Jane's processing power is so great that she uses Ender's mind to construct a new Valentine, with a personality like that Ender remembers from his youth, and a new Peter, again a young man. Ender finally dies, and Peter takes on his personality and memories. With various members of Ender's and Valentine's families, and with the help of piggies and their trees, and the hive queen, Lusitania foils an attempt, by all the other planets with humans, to destroy it entirely. The new Peter, and his wife, and Jane, now in a human body, are left to continue their lives.

In some ways, the Ender books resemble the Hyperion series, by Dan Simmons, also an award winner, where intelligent entities live in the unused computer processing capacity of the computers run by humans, and it is possible for computers to bring about instantaneous travel between planets.

There are moral questions in the book. How to treat other species is one. How to deal honestly with family problems, and forgive, is another. There is, I would say, much more conversation than action, although there is a lot of action, domestic, interplanetary, scientific.

Orson Scott Card has a splendid imagination. He deserved his awards. Thanks for reading.