Coincidentally, I finally read Ender's Game for the first time last month. I won't ruin the plot, but by the first few chapters you must have noticed his writing style. Personally, it drove me crazy. I can normally get a very good picture of what I'm reading, with very few details, but Ender's Game was just a collection of text to me. The characters don't look or sound like anything. He always chooses the least descriptive word available, and the least distinctive line of dialogue. The Game itself is completely uninvolving -- it's worse than Quidditch. I can visualize accounts of complicated naval battles involving multiple ships and shifting winds, and I've actually played video games somewhat like the Game, but I get barely anything from Card's descriptions. He can't write in one dimension, let alone three.

In the introduction, he mentions that critics prefer "difficult" novels but he would rather get the story across as clearly as possible. I think he shoots himself in the foot there. A month later, I don't remember a story at all. I just remember what happened, if you follow. It's like someone told me the plot of a movie starring unfamiliar actors.

Ironically, Card refuses to take advantage of one of the coolest ways the brain works. We remember things better if they connect to a structure that's already there. So if you take advantage of the four or five layers of meaning that come pre-attached to each word, you create a richer structure with more hooks to catch on something in the reader's mind. And if you're really clever, the structure is cohesive, so remembering one part pulls up everything else, years later. Those are the books that actually become part of you.

I think people rave about Ender's Game, because they read it when they're young, overly bright, persecuted adolescents. That's the bit that snags in their brains, and it gets stuck in there next to Catcher in the Rye and such. But it's only stuck there with one dinky hook, and it's in the lame part of your brain, listening to Bel Biv Devoe.

I'm really like to hear what you think immediately after reading it, and then about a month later. I don't know anyone else who has read it outside of adolescence. Also, what did the Game look like to you?

Jeremy! Didn't expect to hear from you. Glad you stopped by!

I can't say I agree with you at all about Card's writing. Not everyone has to be Stephenson -- and I'm pretty thrilled they're not, because the purple slang prose of the first few pages of The Diamond Age just about turned me off to the novel. For that matter, William Gibson. Talk about adolescent! OOoooooOOoooh... skull guns and raping people casually! >:P

You're not alone in feeling this way about the book, however-- check the first negative review of it listed on Amazon. I guess the secondary characters could have been fleshed out a little more. Like I said, Ender is a Mary Sue, and Mary Sues are there to get all the attention.

But if anything I thought the odorlessness of Card's prose was effective, getting out of the way of the world he was building. It reminded me of Bradbury, I think -- I recall being struck by his simple prose the last time I reread Fahrenheit 451... then again what I may be remembering is how he used really awkward metaphors. But I do recall a certain plainness, too.

I don't think rich prose necessarily works the way you think it does cognitively... other research on cognition demonstrates that if a person is asked to generate models for a given problem, they will remember it better. So by leaving the imagining up to the reader, he may actually be making the book more memorable for many. The other thing about the semantic "hooks" you mention is that different people supposedly have different ones due to their prior experience; thus, it's likely that different people like and remember the book for different reasons. (And Jeremy, with all due respect, I am much less inclined to listen to any of your claims about science after that time you tried to convince me that twins sometimes eat each other in the womb because "you'd read scientific evidence somewhere"... evidence which later turned out to be a Stephen King novel.)

As for the game, which game? The book was full of many of them -- the video games, the battles, the simulations, the politics... let me know which one you meant.

You might enjoy reading Vernor Vinge's "Rainbow's End". It's about what being a middle school student might be like in 20 years; but not the geniuses, the normal kids. Different types of intelligence are relevant to the plot... as is computer literacy and the future of fanfic and also did I mention it's a spy thriller?

Actually, also Vinge's "True Names", if you haven't read it yet. It is kinda like "Shockware Rider" in that it's a proto-cyberpunk novel (it's from 1981) that isn't as well known as "Neuromancer". The premise: hackers are good at what they do because they've figured out better metaphors for dealing with the net. The net isn't high-res 3D, it's lo-res information transformed by the user's imagination. The metaphor of choice is, of course, magic.

You've also identified my principal complaint with The Stars My Destination. Gully Foyle is a much more interesting character at the start of the novel than he is at the end of it. The opening sets off a kind of A Hero of Our Time vibe; here is this forceful, verging on psychotic character, set up in opposition to a flat and conventional society long on the artifice. I starting thinking, oh boy, he's going to cut through them like a hot knife through butter. But he doesn't. Instead he wusses out and becomes good, and as though that weren't obvious enough, Bester then emphasizes that once he's good, he can start controlling his talents, and now he's Superman. Yawn. I liked the angry antisocial Gully better. The educational narrative Bester wants to tell is boring.

Hey Gus, good to hear from you, too.

First of all, I think you were right about evil cars and hotels full of ghosts. They don't exist. As for vanishing twin syndrome, why not? One of a pair of twins miscarries and the tissue is absorbed by either the mother, the placenta, or the other twin. It gets detected more nowadays thanks to early term sonograms. And it gets detected a lot in sleepy lumber towns in Maine.

I think you slightly misunderstand my claim about good prose. I don't want it to be flowery, or dense with detail. I just want it to be apt. You don't have to mix in a ton of sensory details, that's excessive. You don't need to put an adjective before every noun. But if you're describing a world no one has ever seen before, and if you don't steer the reader a tiny bit toward your vision of it, then you don't have a vision.

All I'm saying is that this:

"The gangster in the fedora fired a rifle at the bunny." (yes, I know this is overdone)

works better for me than:

"A man in a hat shot a rabbit."

Granted, the second sentence lets me imagine a lot more freely. I can come up with all sorts of crazy looking hats and guns and rabbits. Whee. But I'm lazy. I am going to come up with the most generic stuff imaginable. And I won't remember those details a month later. No hooks.

"Ender was losing the game, but he saw an opening that the other kid didn't. The opening was over by the west corner. Ender took a chance and won. It was a brilliant move." Well, thanks for allowing me to model a game in which the west corner is the key to winning, but how can I tell how brilliant he really was? Ender out-geniused the other geniuses again, that's all I remember.

The Game I meant was the 3-D, antigrav game, the one they play for most of the book. What did it look like in your head? I pictured a mix between American Gladiators and the Holodeck when there's no simulation running. They wore grayish suits, like fencing uniforms. The guns looked like any raygun, with a couple of buttons. I remember a couple of the winning strategies that Ender deployed, but mostly I just remember that he won, because he's the hero. I don't remember anyone else's name, or anything they did. I have no mental picture of Ender, the bugs, and I only just now remembered he had a sister.

Maybe my expectations were too high. Many people consider Ender's Game a life-changing experience. I've played text adventures which affected me more, had better puzzle design, and much better graphics. I expected a book about games to have some interesting games, or failing that, be an interesting book. Anyway, give it a month or two, see how it plays with the other stuff in your head.

Of course, your memory/imagination might be better than mine. You remembered the vanishing twin syndrome thing, and it's coming up on a decade since I said that. All I know is that Ender's Game floated past all the junk in my head and disappeared faster than anything I've ever read.

Jeremy, you specifically said eaten. Not absorbed. Like with the mouth, eaten. I remember this clearly. ;)

But you know, Jeremy, you're right. I have no mental image of Ender either. Something about him being short and having tousled hair, but I know Card didn't give me the slightest hint at the latter -- I came up with it myself. In fact, he didn't describe any of the characters, aside from the racial epithets in the dialogue. No, wait -- one of them had a wiggly butt. And one of the grown-ups was fat.

It's kind of an interesting way to approach a novel, really. Although it kind of enhances the Mary Sue hypothesis -- makes it seem like the author has no conception of anyone's take on things but his own, no reason to communicate anything to anyone but the super-compelling motion of the plot.

Anyway. James, I agree about Gully. He was deeply interesting at the beginning and seemed like someone else entirely by the end, not so much by dint of growth as by author fiat.

Wait, one of the characters had a wiggly butt? I take back what I said. That's a very concise way to describe someone. I think we've all met wiggly-butted genius children who like to kill.

Anyway, come on, what did the Game look like to you? My version was cheesy Trek stuff, but maybe yours had much better costume and set design. That may be why you're more tolerant of Card's style, because you did the work he was supposed to do for you. I think he owes you a check.

Actually, to me it looked less hi-fi than the Trek I know and love (Next Generation, mofackeys!), and yet also less covered with buttons and lights than the old generation. I think it looked a little like 2001, lots of clean grey and white surfaces. With maybe a little Tron thrown in, suit-wise.

Yeah, that makes sense. I wonder if anyone saw it in olive drab and other military colors, since it's essentially a military story. It's like Full Metal Jacket with all that homoerotic/phobic hurt you for your own good stuff. Another weird thing is that although world-changing events occur on Earth, Card never describes a house, or city, or outfit, any of that stuff. If someone told me ten years ago that in 2006 everyone would walk around talking into little Borg-looking headsets, that would really intrigue me, even though it actually hasn't changed society any more than cell phones.

I agree that when we're talking about the average sentence in the middle of a book, bland prose can be annoyingly forgettable. Still, I think that "A man in a hat shot a rabbit." would make a damn fine opening line.

I'm so happy you wrote about this! Did you know I wrote a lot about the DIamond Age as Bildungsroman for my senior seminar Lit class at UCSC? I never got very far, but let me say this:

I HATE Ender's Game.

I hate it because of all the praise heaped upon it by (you nailed it) people who were very smart, pimply-faced ostracized adolescents who identified with Ender and who can't look at it critically.

But more than that, I hate the book because of two things:
One, the way it vastly simplifies human intelligence, and, as you say, takes Ender's brilliance as a given, without illustrating its use, describing its manifestation, or exploring its development to any realistic degree. He's just off the charts, amazing, unrivaled, and was born that way. We are supposed to accept that he's smart in every field, as well, when really the only way his intelligence is ever demonstrated is in military strategy and in the BORING political debate he and his sister orchestrate in online forums. I worry that so many sci-fi authors and fans mistake smarts in (or obsession with) those areas for human brilliance.

Two, I dislike the book for its complete mishandling of emotion and human relationships between the characters. Ender is supposed to be dearly attached to his sister Valentine, but Card practically describes that bond in so many words, and then leaves it. It's been a while since I read the book, but the lingering impression I have is one of not being able to identify emotionally with any of the characters, in any way. That lack of empathy is particularly telling when otherwise so much type in the book is given to political maneuverings and military strategy.

Anyway, more later. I have a lot to say about this, and the general theme of "one unique super-child, born to save the universe" in sci-fi (Star Wars, Neon Genesis Evangelion, In Fury Born, anyone???)

Dang, I had no idea Ender would come in for such abuse! It's funny, two of my good friends out here were pushing the book heavily; I would never have expected this response in light of their love for the book. I'm acutely aware that the importance of this book in the lives of those two friends is a big part of the reason it resonated so much with me -- I was reading through going "ok, so they make sense here and here and here." Perhaps unsurprisingly, both of these friends went to Harvard. (cue rimshot.) And their sense of self-worth pretty much hangs on whether they're brilliant or not. (I love you both, guys, but I'm sorry, it's true.)

Sylvie, by the way: As far as you know, did you eat anyone in the womb? Maybe you guys were triplets.

I have never read Ender's Game and have absolutely nothing to say about it -- I'm not conscious of having read anything by Card, but I have a vague impression that he's a misogynist and a godawful hack writer, derived from I know not where. But that's not what I dropped in to say -- what I wanted to say was that the drift of this discussion makes me think that Hermann Hesse's Glass Bead Game would be a really interesting counterpoint. The book tells the story of the rise to power of the smartest man of his generation in an unspecified future when much of the intellectual energy of the smartest people is devoted to a new meta-pursuit encompassing all the arts and sciences, which is the titular "game." And Joseph Knecht, the aforementioned smartest man, is similarly a kind of blank as a character for a lot of the novel, though there is some subtlety to the way he's filled out in detail.

Hesse is hugely out of fashion right now, for all kinds of reasons including his almost complete lack of depth and psychology -- all the interesting things in this novel happen right on the surface, are announced as such by the narrator, and are discussed explicitly by the characters. But the book is a true "novel of ideas" in the old-fashioned sense, in that the plot and all the characters are primarily concerned with exploring deeply a key set of ideas.

(This reminds me that a crank at the MLA convention a few years ago, at the session on science and literary theory, tried to browbeat the panel into admitting the preeminence of sci-fi among contemporary literature, and they tried to buy her off by saying something about "literature of ideas." I think this claim may be doing ideas a huge disservice.)

Ah -- look who else is talking about Card's take on genius, and calling it "balderdash:"

http://www.raphkoster.com/2006/08/16/a-literacy-of-appropriation/

I highly encourage all of you who've been participating in this discussion to dip in to the discussion of the Harper's Grand Theft Education article going on here, at Ulises's site, and on Raph's blog -- it's been so good to have you all back after such a long discussion-hiatus!

So I'm obviously jumping into this late, but to be fair, it was by invitation...

I haven't read Ender's Game in nearly ten years, so yes, maybe I was the adolescent maligned by Jeremy. But I loved it (and unlike almost anyone I know, I also loved the sequels).

Yes, there's a great galactic drama going on, and that's fun. But it's really about the abuse of a child, the exploitation of a kid with a big brain, and the making of not a child soldier, but a child general.

The irony is that emotional nurturing and development are critical for the development of other aspects of intelligence. The big hook of the book is that, rather than becoming a near-autistic strategy computer, Ender manages to remain sensitive and empathetic throughout the abuse.

(Speaking of text adventures, Jeremy, you should know that eye candy does not good sci-fi make. I liked the fact that EG spoke to the universal story of lost childhood and the question of alien intelligences, rather than giving us a 90's version of the Jetsons.)

But I agree that Ender's Game was simplistic. Much like the first Matrix movie, that was its strength - using a well-structured plot with a simple hook, it drew you into a world with great potential, one that you'd love to explore. (Ironically, The One was explicitly Not That Smart, despite being a skilled hacker.) And that left room for many sequels. Most of those sequels were more sci-fi, particularly in their exploration of alien intelligences and the possibility or impossibility of communication and understanding. Intellectually, I liked those better, even if they were less emotionally gripping. And I liked how Valentine wound up marrying a (Scandinavian?) fisherman - such a human move, unlike the Big Destined Hero stuff of Ender.

As for creativity and intelligence, I fully agree with Koster. It's interesting to see how the Romantic idea of the lone genius / artist plays into this, not to mention copyright and patent law. But even Ender wasn't left in a room to develop tactical and strategic brilliance in a vacuum; he was placed in a hypercompetitive environment to copy and surpass those around him.

In the modern era, we've largely moved from prophecied saviors who emerge victorious because of their kingly virtues (martial strength and divine favor) to a model of intelligence as the prime virtue, at least at the conscious level of our culture. (Neo and Odysseus are exceptions to the rule.) Thus we see the competing memes of innate intelligence (akin to destined, prophecied, divinely favored champions of a regal bloodline) and intelligence gained by training and the sweat of the brow (folk heroes and bourgeois democracy). This is a vast simplification, but the point is that the emotional appeal of cultural templates and archetypes will always color our reasoning and choices about what research we pursue or believe, what educational system we prescribe to our children and others, and the roles of class and race.