On HU
Featured Archive Post: Caroline Small on how SPX blows her mind.
Me on why Harry Potter isn’t very good (it’s all about quidditch.)
Isaac Butler on perceiving race.
Alex Buchet continues his series on the prehistory of the superhero, this time focusing on Holmes and Wells.
RM Rhodes argues that SPX has something for everyone, unlike the mainstream.
Osvaldo Oyola on queer silence and a radical ending for the Killing Joke.
Me on the Joker’s wife, and also no how the Killing Joke is sanctimonious pulp crap.
Chris Gavaler on the superheroine dress code and how the mainstream is (slowly) becoming less sexist.
Utilitarians Everywhere
For my first ever piece at Salon, I talk about Ender’s Game and making genocide a sacrament.
At the Atlantic I argue that the NYT Book Review should just embrace its identity as a lit fic fanzine.
At the Atlantic I talk about the documentary the Revolutionaries and why right-wing ideologues in Texas are only part of a broader problem with education.
At Splice Today I talk about how racists who think Indians are Arabs aren’t actually confused (just racist.
Other Links
David Brothers on how racists-react-to-things posts are themselves racist.
Feminists pretend Playboy cares about consent.
on why focusing on confessions of white privilege are counter-productive.
I quite enjoyed the Card piece. I disliked Ender’s Game long before his politics came out (at the time I read it, OSC was still doing his secular humanist revival shtick). I think you may have run into what I think of as the Protestant/Catholic divide in the comments. It’s a ‘which is more important’ divide, ime, that depends on faith vs works. Ender is sad about genocide, therefore the book says genocide is bad (faith matters more). But Ender (the good guy) killed a whole race, and his killing is more important than how he feels about it. (Which is more the Catholic/deeds view.)
Personally, I hated the book in large part because of Peter, Ender killing other people, and because of the truly gross and whack depiction of domestic violence in the next book.
Peter and Valentine are I think the weakest part of the book; externalizing Ender’s good angel and bad angel as his siblings just seems gross and stupidly schematic.
It’s the killing and the fact that his morality/awesomeness is both never questioned and linked to his violence that’s the problem for me. It’s exactly because he feels bad about it and that is supposed to make it all right that seems like the problem.
Kind of interesting in comments too that Card’s homophobia effectively becomes a defense from other charges. If I have problems with Ender’s Game, it has to be about the homophobia, not the book.
I don’t even dislike the book. I think it’s interesting and thoughtful, albeit evil (and not especially well written.)
Found your piece on Splice very good, however in the last paragraph you wrote: “Dixon thinks back people are…” shouldn`t that be “black people”
Sigh; yes. Thanks; I’ll ask them to correct it.
Interesting that hardly anyone there seems to agree with Noah on Enders Game even if they all seem to also dislike OSC, heh.
Your only defender I could see compared Ender’s Game to The Cold Equations which seems accurate. Both books present a very contrived scenario for justifying something terrible as the only possible solution seeking to absolve any of the characters of moral culpability.
There were a few folks who agreed with me. It’s a somewhat counter-intuitive argument, and most folks who are going to read an article about Ender’s Game are going to be fans, so you sort of expect resistance.
Also, I think people tend to judge characters by their reaction to the situation; the move to questioning the situation itself, and what that says, isn’t the way people usually approach these things. Ender’s upset about the genocide, so the reading is that the book doesn’t support genocide, even if the whole plot is this engine for creating a situation in which genocide is the only option and the person who commits the genocide is a moral paragon.
I thought the commenters had a point when the brought up the other books in the series. Maybe OSC was thinking about the complete series arc when he wrote Enders Game, maybe not; but you can read the series as setting up a situation where a (the story tells us) moral person is tricked into committing an atrocity, and the audience is tricked into cheering him on… but even though it was a trick, and the audience rooted for the atrocity to happen and do not wish to denounce the hero for carrying it out, the action itself was still evil and Ender still feels, again as (the author tells) as a moral person, that he must atone for it. And then he spends the rest of his life/the rest of the series trying to make up for the unforgivable thing he did as a child, sort of like the plot of Atonement.
So ultimately, in the Ender series Ender is a moral person not because the author says so (though the author does say so), but because most people, when confronted with evidence that they have done an evil thing, will try to shift the blame to someone else or downplay what they did rather than accept responsibility for their actions. Ender’s suffering is of the self-important type – he doesn’t have to shoulder all the responsibility for something an entire space school was set up to do, there’s plenty of systematic blame to go around, and by taking personal responsibility, he’s absolving all the adults who were involved in this system – but it does point toward a morality of personal responsibility in which participating in genocide is, like, pretty bad even if it seems necessary at the time.
I also agree with the commenters that the set-up isn’t all that far-fetched: we’re prolonging a destructive civil war in Syria at this moment, after all.
He had the second book in mind, not the others (he’s pretty clear about this in the introduction.)
I think it’s pretty reasonable to read the first book as the first book. It’s quite self-contained.
The status of Ender being tricked is a little complicated. He’s tricked in the sense that he didn’t know he was killing them at the time, but he knew that he was preparing for a genocide. Also, the book never actually says that anyone was wrong for committing that genocide. It’s consistently presented as a tragedy, but an unavoidable one. Ender’s guilty for having to have done what he did, but there’s never a suggestion that he didn’t have to do it. Even the buggers say that he had to do it. Ender’s personal guilt then seems not only self-important, but actually intended to argue that there was *not* systemic blame. Which, as I said, seems to me to justify genocide.
I’m not exactly sure how Syria is comparable? Syria is no threat to us at all; the entire point in Ender’s Game is that the threat is absolute and overwhelming. It’s the classic paranoid excuse for genocide (i.e., the Jews/Communists/whoever are going to destroy us) literalized.
I actually just finished a piece about the second book for Salon, so you’ll get to see what I think about that sometime in the not-too-distant future hopefully.