More books
Feb. 10th, 2007 11:28 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
eye_of_a_catPatrick McCabe, Winterwood
It's about stories and myths and retelling myths, and identity and history, and the modern urban brushing up against the ancient rural. Sort of. Maybe.
To be honest, I gave up halfway through. I finished it, but my brain had already wandered off to the mountains. I'm sure it'll make more sense on a repeat reading. (Sort of. Maybe.)
Orson Scott Card, Ender's Game
Which has been working its way up from the lower rungs of the Should Probably Get Around To Reading One Day pile for some years now, and which leapfrogged off Middlemarch to reach the top in January. I know lots of people who love it, and it's one of those big important SF novels that everyone who likes the genre should know (see: Victorianists and Middlemarch, ahem), but measured by ingredients alone it doesn't sound like my thing: military SF, hyper-precocious children, accelerated set-up-the-rest-of-the-series conclusion, and defensive author introductions about idiot critics who think all prose should be pretentious and opaque. Plus, it's a short story turned into a novel, and I can't think of one example of those right now where that turned out to be an improvement. Case in point, Arthur C. Clarke. 2001 is lengthy and tedious; The Sentinel is a work of brilliance. (And if you haven't read it and want to, the full text is here.) Lengthy what-is-our-place-in-the-cosmos(-and-what-is-that-computer-DOING) speculations are well enough, but no moment in the novel or the film can compete with "But they must be very, very old, and the old are often insanely jealous of the young."
Anyway! Old. Young. Jealousy. Ender's Game. It seems like a cliched objection to make, given that it's already made often enough that large chunks of the introduction are devoted to a lengthy defense of how clever children do so talk and think like that, but: these children, they do not act like children. Not even clever children.
All right, extraordinary intelligent children can be more eloquent than other kids their age. And childhood as we understand it is in part a social construction that wasn't always seen the same way, and the children in the Battle School are deliberately isolated from a society that sees them as children anyway, and so on. Still, there is a fundamental level beyond at which children - all children, in all societies - are different from adults. And yes, lots of adults who were once gifted children identify with the kids in Ender's world, but I suspect this has less to do with the deeply realistic dialogue and more to do with the fact that for lots of clever children, school is both boring and full of people who hate you. The fact that the adult world fits you better doesn't mean that you were mentally there all along. I went through two months of bullying at primary school from a cabal of little girls who hated me for sneering at their Sweet Valley High books in favour of my Mary Renault, but I also believed in dragons, so, yes.
I'll forgive Ender's Game, though, because the main way children differ from adults is in the way that they understand the world, and you really can't fault this story for not making enough of an important point out of the fact that children have a blurred line between what's a game and what's real.
As for the Big Moral Questions: I want to read Speaker for the Dead before saying more about the genocide, since there's a very clear sense that the fallout of that will be dealt with in Ender's future. The question of whether you're morally responsible for something you did do but didn't do knowingly seems to be central in this one, and I liked that Ender and Valentine had the least certain views on that, with the adults being too focused on the practical results. As to whether or not you are morally responsible... well, you're definitely closer to it if the thing you thought you were doing is a diluted version of what it turned out to be, and on this Valentine/Demosthenes is closer to guilty than Ender even if her potential for harm was less (and ultimately diverted). Ender's acts of violence are presented as more horrific, but blood and death and destruction are easier to illustrate that way than words are.
This might be one of the most substantial ways that having adults in the shape of children, rather than actual children, makes a difference to the novel. What makes you responsible is your knowledge of a situation as well as what you do while in that situation, and children that understand the world already, well enough to manipulate it - Peter and Valentine - can't fall back on childhood to excuse them.
It's about stories and myths and retelling myths, and identity and history, and the modern urban brushing up against the ancient rural. Sort of. Maybe.
To be honest, I gave up halfway through. I finished it, but my brain had already wandered off to the mountains. I'm sure it'll make more sense on a repeat reading. (Sort of. Maybe.)
Orson Scott Card, Ender's Game
Which has been working its way up from the lower rungs of the Should Probably Get Around To Reading One Day pile for some years now, and which leapfrogged off Middlemarch to reach the top in January. I know lots of people who love it, and it's one of those big important SF novels that everyone who likes the genre should know (see: Victorianists and Middlemarch, ahem), but measured by ingredients alone it doesn't sound like my thing: military SF, hyper-precocious children, accelerated set-up-the-rest-of-the-series conclusion, and defensive author introductions about idiot critics who think all prose should be pretentious and opaque. Plus, it's a short story turned into a novel, and I can't think of one example of those right now where that turned out to be an improvement. Case in point, Arthur C. Clarke. 2001 is lengthy and tedious; The Sentinel is a work of brilliance. (And if you haven't read it and want to, the full text is here.) Lengthy what-is-our-place-in-the-cosmos(-and-what-is-that-computer-DOING) speculations are well enough, but no moment in the novel or the film can compete with "But they must be very, very old, and the old are often insanely jealous of the young."
Anyway! Old. Young. Jealousy. Ender's Game. It seems like a cliched objection to make, given that it's already made often enough that large chunks of the introduction are devoted to a lengthy defense of how clever children do so talk and think like that, but: these children, they do not act like children. Not even clever children.
All right, extraordinary intelligent children can be more eloquent than other kids their age. And childhood as we understand it is in part a social construction that wasn't always seen the same way, and the children in the Battle School are deliberately isolated from a society that sees them as children anyway, and so on. Still, there is a fundamental level beyond at which children - all children, in all societies - are different from adults. And yes, lots of adults who were once gifted children identify with the kids in Ender's world, but I suspect this has less to do with the deeply realistic dialogue and more to do with the fact that for lots of clever children, school is both boring and full of people who hate you. The fact that the adult world fits you better doesn't mean that you were mentally there all along. I went through two months of bullying at primary school from a cabal of little girls who hated me for sneering at their Sweet Valley High books in favour of my Mary Renault, but I also believed in dragons, so, yes.
I'll forgive Ender's Game, though, because the main way children differ from adults is in the way that they understand the world, and you really can't fault this story for not making enough of an important point out of the fact that children have a blurred line between what's a game and what's real.
As for the Big Moral Questions: I want to read Speaker for the Dead before saying more about the genocide, since there's a very clear sense that the fallout of that will be dealt with in Ender's future. The question of whether you're morally responsible for something you did do but didn't do knowingly seems to be central in this one, and I liked that Ender and Valentine had the least certain views on that, with the adults being too focused on the practical results. As to whether or not you are morally responsible... well, you're definitely closer to it if the thing you thought you were doing is a diluted version of what it turned out to be, and on this Valentine/Demosthenes is closer to guilty than Ender even if her potential for harm was less (and ultimately diverted). Ender's acts of violence are presented as more horrific, but blood and death and destruction are easier to illustrate that way than words are.
This might be one of the most substantial ways that having adults in the shape of children, rather than actual children, makes a difference to the novel. What makes you responsible is your knowledge of a situation as well as what you do while in that situation, and children that understand the world already, well enough to manipulate it - Peter and Valentine - can't fall back on childhood to excuse them.
