jack

( Picture of new Ender's Game front cover )

I was buying Ender's game for someone (sorry! on it's way, I wanted to check the translator for Name of the Rose and Three Musketeers, as I loved my translation, but don't know if another might be different[1].)

But I couldn't bring myself to buy this edition, though it was slightly cheaper.

The dragon is good. In fact, a dragon is a good metaphor for Ender (and the Buggers) -- beautiful in its own way, powerful, but incomprehensible, lean, intelligent, drawing people to it but somehow apart.

But the slogan! "At battle school FIGHTING IS COMPULSORY". What on earth... Who is buying this? It sounds like it's aimed at teenage boys who want Jack Ryan with ray guns. There's some appeal there, but I don't recommend Ender's Game to people who just like adventure with lots of gratuitous deaths. Any death in the novel is mourned over.

I recommend Ender's game to precocious intelligent people who may have been left out at school and with an unfulfilled predisposition to empathise with people.

OK, anyone fulfilling both camps is going to like it, the mock-battles are entertaining, and anyone who likes larger than life embittered heroes probably will like ender. But that's not who I'd aim it at.

Also, it's a little redundant, don't you think? What the hell do you THINK happens at battle school? Any sentence with "battle school" in would fulfill much the same function. All the real fighting is not really on the curriculum. Couldn't they find a more expressive slogan?

[1] Eco had a lot to say about how to translate Three Musketeers, that a lot of charm was in the wolliness of the writing, and automatically translating that away would leave a blander book.

I can't remember the last time I cried. But I *nearly* did again last night, just reading Speaker for the Dead.

For the record, Ender's Game is a complete classic, and if you've not heard of it, you have to read it. It's not like Cryptonomicon which was just my opinion, everyone says so. I think.

Speaker for the Dead is also very good in my opinion, but rather different, and generally regarded as less good. Certainly as I read it again, I sense a confusion of ideas over the plot. Something I understand more and more as I write, and want to fit my original ideas in, even thought the *reasons* for them have been modified out of existence.

But indeed, I also want to think about how different evolutions might give sapients with different feelings for what's right.

* If froglike you have hundreds of children, only a few of which grow to maturity, you'll likely extend very little if any consideration to them. It might be like pets: you love some, you care for many, but you get on with your life when one dies.

I have seen this a few times, in The Algebraist, and a Peter F. Hamilton. And sometimes even in reverse in a way, where we transcend, and then stop worrying about individual humans. It would be a reasonable way for God to think of us, too, for that matter, though not pleasent for us to think of that! But none that ring exceptionally true to me.

* Lack of friendship between beings. If we evolved from solitary carnivores, we might easily work together when necessary, but never really feeled obliged to help anyone. Or from bees, we might love our mother and her fertile daughters, but not care almost nothing for ourselves or our other siblings.

I've often seen emotionless portrayed, but it's generally mocked or overcome by a sufficiently persuasive human.

* Sex might not be a drive. Or we might find entirely different things erotic.

* Or take the frog example to an extreme, we might ascribe more importance to our eggs than each other, and by extension have affection for round inanimate objects the way we actually do for pets.