As you guys probably are aware, there hasn’t been anything new in Ender’s Game for a really long time. I’m bored along with the rest of you. This is the result of that boredom. It will probably only be funny to Game of Thrones fans, though… and SPOILERS!
I took Game of Thrones stills and put text quotes from Ender’s Game onto them. They fit oddly well! See if you can guess the context of each of them.
If you can think of more to do, let me know and I’ll make some more. 🙂
It’s Day 2 of A Battle School Christmas at EnderWiggin.net! If you haven’t yet entered the Day 1 giveaway, you can enter to win an EnderWiggin.net pin button or magnet here.
Today’s giveaway is of a hardcover Gift Edition of Ender’s Game. If your copy is getting a bit dog-eared and you want to have a nice copy for display on your bookshelf, make sure you enter.
To enter, comment on this post and tell me who your favorite character in Ender’s Game is, not counting Ender himself, and why. If you haven’t read the book yet, tell me why you think the book sounds interesting! After you comment, use the Rafflecopter widget to log in your entry. Be sure to use the same name and email address for verification. After that, you can enter with the optional entries.
This giveaway is open to the USA only and will end on Saturday, December 22.
See what else is being given away on Ender News and Ender’s Ansible.
Thanks to an EnderWiggin.net reader, we got a tip that there are a series of videos from a book signing that Orson Scott Card did earlier this month for his book ‘Ruins‘ which was released on October 30. The signing was held at a Barnes & Noble bookstore in Orem, Utah.
In this first video, Card jokes about how he was offered a part that involved cool uniforms, but insisted that he’s improving the look of the movie by only appearing by voice as a pilot on a shuttle as Ender and Graff.
He goes on to reiterate what he said in a previous interview about how few scenes are in the movie from the book but this time says there are NO scenes from the book in the movie.
There are no scenes from the book in the movie, and there are no scenes in the movie from the book, but that’s actually not a surprise. That’s pretty much the way my scripts were too because Ender’s Game is an unfilmable book. That’s something we learned 20 years ago.
I find this particularly confusing, as if there are no scenes from the book in the movie, then what exactly is going to happen in this movie called ‘Ender’s Game‘? It certainly sounds like it follows the story. Perhaps he means that there are no lines from the book in the movie?
If you filmed every scene it would be a four and a half hour movie, and I don’t care how much you love Ender’s Game, four and a half hours is a long time to sit in a theater. We also discovered very quickly that one battle in the Battle Room is one too many. You gotta see it happening, but it’s like watching Quidditch. How exciting was that? You already know how it’s gonna come out, you just wanna see them fly around a little bit, bingo it’s over. And that’s kind of how Battle Room is. It’ll look great, but we’re not going to follow these battles closely.
Looks like I’m going to have to agree to disagree with Mr. Card on this one because I really preferred watching Quidditch over reading Quidditch! I also don’t really think that one Battle Room scene is necessarily enough to appease not just fans, but newcomers. Summit will of course want non-book fans to come to see the movie and I’m not entirely convinced that one or even no battle would make the point of Battle School clear to these viewers.
In the second part, Card talks a bit about how Harrison Ford is in person, mentioning that he’s a very shy, quiet person who goes off into a corner once the cameras are off. He goes on to talk about meeting the other kids and how they suffered doing their wire work, but ended up being in the best shape of their lives.
He touched more upon the script and how they went with Gavin’s script over his.
Here’s the thing about movie. It’s going to be different from the book. It has to be. It couldn’t be filmed the way it was, the way the book is. And so what I’m hoping is, it’s brilliant. I would love it if Gavin’s script was really good. Now I did a reading of the script that I was really proud of, but you could lose your job greenlighting a film scripted by the author. That’s just the truth. And you can’t lose your job over greenlighting a film scripted by the director. So they went with the one where nobody loses their job, whether it wins or loses.
He goes on to tell his fans to go see the movie once and if they love it, bring their friends back and if they don’t, bring their friends back to show them how awful it is. Still, he sounds confident about how things will turn out. “I am very hopeful that it’s going to be terrific.”
Later, Card takes questions from fans and the first one is actually one that I’d been dying to know as well, so it was great seeing this asked.
I read Ender’s Game back when I was 17 in the 80s. The thing that really grasped me is that in it you talk about the internet, you talk about laptops, wireless internet, chatrooms, […] and identities online. What gave you the insight?
The novel by 1985, while the internet was not open for public access yet, there were services like […] and Delphi. I had been on bulletin boards, I knew about flame wars. I mean there was all kinds of stuff like that.
Despite his answer, I still found the things he described in Ender’s Game to be very prescient in that the desks he “created” in the 80s are now the tablets of today. (not laptops imo)
There are three more videos that you can watch here: Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5
Source: Donovan Heap via Roko
Warning: this editorial contains major spoilers for the book Ender’s Game.
Readers of this site may remember that about a month ago I posted about nominating Ender’s Game for NPR’s Top 100 Young Adult novels. The founder of Ender’s Ansible had asked a bunch of the fansites to help get the book nominated into their poll by spreading word of the list to the fanbase and I was more than happy to oblige, even though I don’t put much weight into lists like these since so many places love to make them.
So imagine my surprise today when I found out that Ender’s Game has been deliberately left off of their young adult fiction poll. The reason?
The judges cut Ender’s Game for the same reason — Ender himself is young, but the book’s violence isn’t appropriate for young readers.
This baffled me, to be honest, because I’ve always felt that one of the most tragic parts of the novel includes the fact that the true violent nature of Ender’s actions is deliberately kept from him. When Card chose to hide this aspect of Ender from his own protagonist, he hid this from his readers as well until the very end.
As you may or may not recall, Ender doesn’t find out about the deaths of Stilson and Bonzo Madrid until he watches Graff’s court martial years later on Eros. By then, the climax of the novel has numbed Ender and readers, and therefore effectually softened the emotional impact of their deaths through the terrifying reality of Ender’s destruction of an entire species. The scenes of the fights themselves may have been violent, but they were also quick and somewhat vague.
Which leads me to question whether the NPR judges have even read the books they included in their poll. Other books that made it onto their list include:
Apparently Ender’s violence isn’t “appropriate”, but the following passages are shining examples of acceptable violence for young readers.
It takes a few moments to find [name omitted for spoilers] in the dim light, in the blood. Then the raw hunk of meat that used to be my enemy makes a sound, and I know where his mouth is. And I think the word he’s trying to say is please. Pity, not vengeance, sends my arrow flying into his skull.
Collins, Suzanne (2009-09-01). The Hunger Games
Two more Grievers broke from the pack and swarmed over [name omitted for spoilers], piling on top of each other, snapping and cutting at the boy, as if they wanted to rub it in, show their vicious cruelty. Somehow, impossibly, [name omitted for spoilers] didn’t scream. Thomas lost sight of the body as he struggled with Newt, thankful for the distraction. Newt finally gave up, collapsing backward in defeat.
Dashner, James (2009-09-25). The Maze Runner
[name omitted for spoilers] lies on the floor next to his bed, clutching at his face. Surrounding his head is a halo of blood, and jutting between his clawing fingers is a silver knife handle. My heart thumping in my ears, I recognize it as a butter knife from the dining hall. The blade is stuck in [name omitted for spoilers]’s eye.
Roth, Veronica (2011-05-03). Divergent
I have read all three of these books and so I therefore know first hand just how completely violent they are.
That’s not to say that Ender’s Game isn’t violent. Ender does beat another child unconscious and fights naked in a shower, punching another student in the groin. But how is this any more violent than the passages above?
Sure, maybe the children in Ender’s Game are younger than “young adults”, but so are all the children in Lord of the Flies, which successfully made it onto the list. Dune features a very sadistic and violent group of characters in the Harkonens. Both of these books made the list because they’ve “become rites of passage for teen readers”. Does Ender’s Game get no credit for its themes on child bullying, population control, and the lengths humanity can be stretched to “for the greater good”? Does The Hunger Games, which kills a whopping 20+ children violently, only get on the list because it’s wildly popular right now?
I suppose I shouldn’t even let this bother me since as I mentioned earlier, lists like these don’t mean much. Despite this, I still find it rather ridiculous and insulting to presume that young adult readers, to which these books are pitched to, can’t handle the violence of Ender’s Game, but are deemed adequately equipped to emotionally handle mutilated corpses and head stabbings from books with more dramatic and graphic violence.
Something just doesn’t add up there.
Our friends over at Ender’s Ansible have re-kindled a campaign they started last year to get Ender’s Game onto NPR’s Best 100 Books, which has just recently opened up to nominations for this year’s list. Last year’s category focused on science fiction and fantasy and thanks to fans, Ender’s Game made it on the list as #3. You can check out last year’s list here.
This year NPR has chosen a Young Adult theme for their list.
To nominate Ender’s Game (the series), you’ll need to either log in or register at NPR and then comment with your nominations. They’ll let you nominate up to five books at once, so if you’re a big Harry Potter or Hunger Games fan, you won’t have to choose Ender’s Game over those, you just need to include it in your list!
Even if other people nominate the books you want to nominate, you should still comment if you can since nominations count as votes later down the line. The rules:
1. Limit yourself to five titles per post. Don’t hesitate to nominate a book that someone else has already listed; your entry will count as a vote that will help that title progress to the next round.
2. Nominate “multivolume novels” as one work. The Harry Potter series or the Hunger Games trilogy, for example, will be judged as single, collective works — so don’t bother listing the separate titles in the series.
3. That said, not all series are “multivolume novels.” To be judged as a collective work, the books in a series must be written by the same originating author or authors and must tell a more or less continuous story — usually about a consistent group of characters. So, you can’t nominate the whole Goosebumps series as such, but you can nominate The Horror at Camp Jellyjam as an individual work.
Thanks in advance for helping nominate the series!
Smart Pop Books will be publishing ‘Ender’s World: Fresh Perspectives on the SF Classic‘, a collection of essays written by almost two dozen writers and edited by Orson Scott Card himself, in February 2013, but 25 lucky fans won’t need to wait that long to get their hands on a copy.
Visit Smart Pop Books at booth #4300 at the 2012 San Diego Comic Con and you can enter to win one of 25 advance copies of the book. Head over to Smart Pop Books to see what else they have in store for SDCC.
They will also be giving out free copies of their preview volume, which will include an essay by Hilari Bell called ‘Winning and Losing in Ender’s Game‘.
Ender’s World: Fresh Perspectives on the SF Classic Ender’s Game, edited by Orson Scott Card, comes out in February 2013. But we’re giving 25 Comic-Con attendees the chance to read it first.
Come by booth #4300 and ask us to scan your badge to be entered to win an advance copy of Ender’s World. We’ll pick the winners after the end of the convention and notify you via email. Then we’ll ship you your copy, hot off the presses, as soon as they’re printed!
The preview volume will also include excerpts from their upcoming books about ‘The Hunger Games’ and ‘A Game of Thrones’.
With word of a film adaptation of Ender’s Game
I’ve had the paperback for years now, but the last time I read the novel was at least six or more years ago. In the three or four times I’ve read the book since middle school, I’ve never once read the entire introduction, taking Mr. Card’s own advice and flat out skipping it. Although it wasn’t absolutely fantastic and wondrous, I did find one bit very interesting:
The novel set me, not to dreaming, but to thinking, which is Asimov’s most extraordinary ability as a fiction writer. What would the future be like? How would things change? What would remain the same?
This book was written over 25 years ago and back then, I thought it was amazingly futuristic and sophisticated. So now that I’m reading this book 21 years after my first time through, I have to wonder what will have changed in Ender’s world for me. Surely I’ll have a better grasp of Card’s technology descriptions? I should be able to see any dated areas, right?