#0035: Ender Series #1: Ender's Game, by Orson Scott Card

[orbitaldiamonds]

Ender Series #1
Ender's Game
by Orson Scott Card
p.xx Children are a perpetual, self-renewing underclass, helpless to escape from the decisions of adults until they become adults themselves. And Ender's Game, seen in that context, might even be a sort of revolutionary tract.
   Because the book does ring true with the children who read it. The highest praise I ever received for a book of mine was when the school librarian at Farrer Junior High in Provo, Utah, told me, "You know, Ender's Game is our most-lost book."

p.2 Ender nodded. It was a lie, of course, that it wouldn't hurt a bit. But since adults always said when it was going to hurt, he could count on that statement as an accurate prediction of the future. Sometimes lies were more dependable than the truth.

p.17 "It was all your genes that made us geniuses, Mom," said Peter. "We sure didn't get any from Dad."
   "I heard that," Father said, not looking up from the news that was being displayed on the table while he ate.
   "It would have been wasted if you hadn't."

p.35 "[...] Human beings are free except when humanity needs them. Maybe humanity needs you. To do something. Maybe humanity needs me--to find out what you're good for. We might both do despicable things, Ender, but if humankind survives, then we were good tools."
   "Is that all? Just tools?"
   "Individual human beings are all tools, that the others use to help us all survive."
   "That's a lie."
   "No. It's just a half truth. You can worry about the other half after we win this war."

p.37 "Just one more example of the stupidity of the military. If you had any brains, you'd be in a real career, like selling life insurance."
   "You, too, mastermind."

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#0036: Ender Series #2: Speaker for the Dead, by Orson Scott Card

[orbitaldiamonds]

Ender Series #2
Speaker for the Dead
By Orson Scott Card
p. xvi I had observed before that one thing wrong with science fiction as whole was that almost all the heroes seemed to spring fully-grown from the head of Zeus—no one had families. If there was a mention of parents at all, it was to tell us that they were dead, or such miserable specimens of humanity that the hero could hardly wait to get out of town.
    Not only did they have no parents, few science fiction heroes seemed to marry and have kids. In short, the heroes of most science fiction novels were perpetual adolescents; lone rangers wandered the universe avoiding commitments. This shouldn’t be surprising. The romantic hero is invariably one who is going through the adolescent phase of human life. The child phase—the one I dealt with most often in my fiction—is the time of complete dependence on others to create our identity and worldview. Little children gladly accept even the strangest stories that others tell them, because they lack either the context or the confidence to doubt. They go along because they don’t know how to be alone either physically or intellectually.

p.xviiiMost novels get by with showing the relationships between two, or, at the most, three characters. This is because if the difficulty of creating a character increases with each new major character that is added to the tale. Characters, as most writers understand, are truly developed through their relationships with others. If there are only two significant characters, then there is only one relationship to be explored. If there are three characters, however, there are four relationships: Between A and B, between B and C, between C and A, and finally the relationship when all three are together.

p.xvii-xix Yet during this whole times I lived with my parents, coming down the mountain at insane speeds late at night, only to end up in a home where certain words were simply never said. And I never said them. Not once did I slip and speak in front of my family the way I spoke constantly in front of other performers at Sundance. This was not by any herculean effort, either: I didn’t think about changing my behavior; it simply happened. When I was with my parents I wasn’t the same person
    I have seen this time and time again with my friends, with other family members. Our whole demeanor changes, our mannerisms, our figures of speech, when we move from one context to another. Listen to someone you know when they pick up the telephone. We have special voices for different people; our attitudes, our moods change depending on whom we are with.

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