Complicated thoughts about Ender's Game

Okay, so, I have come to terms with the fact that Orson Scott Card is a complete bag of dicks and I'm just going to let him be what he's going to be - it doesn't change the fact that Ender's Game was a massive part of my childhood. Even if I've struck the rest of the series from my own personal continuity (yes, even Ender's Shadow, because let's be honest with ourselves - it's not that good, and Bean is a Sue if you take the Shadow series to be true, and I liked him so much better when he was just the runt of the litter on Ender's team of ragged misfits and not the goddamn Messiah-slash-chessmaster, because the EG universe already has three Christ Archetypes too many without Bean adding to the clusterfuck. Also? Bean/Petra is the worst 'ship ever, it makes me barf in my mouth. Dink/Petra forever).


So, clearly, I've got a lot invested in this fandom, even if I don't actively participate in it, because honestly there's not much of a fandom to participate in. The book came out in the 80s, the author is alienating of his fanbase, the sequels all undermine the original, and the older I get the more I recognize that the universe I thought was so wonderfully diverse when I first encountered it (Alai remains the most sympathetic Arab character in all of science fiction, thank you and good night) is actually pretty sinister in ways I can't quite put my finger on. But I love the book, I've read it something like fifteen times, and that's why I get so mad at Orson Scott Card - because he's one of the people who first inspired me to write, and he's not a worthy role model. He's a misogynistic, homophobic, evangelical bag of dicks and I don't understand how a book that reads as having a really liberal worldview came from his mind. 


I'm really excited that the long-rumored film is finally in production and has what looks like a fantastic cast (Harrison Ford! Asa Butterfield!), but I do worry about what kind of reflection of this world is going to finally turn up on screen. I've been attending Battle School in my head since I was about nine years old and while I recognize that all the detail from the books isn't possibly going to make it to film, I'm more worried about the essence of the world.


What would ruin this film for me is if the author's personal politics were to be jarringly present in it. Because I don't think his worldview is overtly present in the book. I do think that the film could benefit from updating the world to match modern terminology - but even that's not a huge stretch, because OSC basically predicted the internet and iPads. But if the world of Ender's Game were to change from one where characters are presented with moralities independent of their ethnic and religious backgrounds to one where OSC's xenophobic rationale is the norm I would be sorely disappointed, because the message of Ender's Game is one of acceptance - just because you don't understand how someone thinks doesn't make them evil, which is Ender's ultimate conclusion about the Buggers/Formics (dear fandom, what are we calling them?)


I've also got some bizarre but smaller concerns that aren't really relevant to my worries about the overall tone of the world being changed / OSC being a bag of dicks. 


ie - Ben Kingsley, who is a fantastic actor, has been cast as Mazer Rackham. In the books, Mazer is described as being "half-Maori." Ben Kingsley is of Indian and English descent. Does this reflect a tendency in Hollywood casting towards considering minority ethnicities to be interchangeable? (Other complaints I could lodge under this same heading - Taylor Lautner is even less Native American than Johnny Depp; The entirety of The Last Airbender.)


Is it "whitewashing" when you're substituting one minority for another instead of substituting a white actor?

Je voudrais aller a Paris, je pense...

For being a proudly Jewish dramatic writing major, I'd never in the past managed to make myself into a fan of Woody Allen. Maybe it's his persistent nebbishness: I never actively disliked him - I just wasn't a fan. I was perfectly ambivalent about Woody Allen movies, as strange as that may be.

And then I went to go see Midnight in Paris tonight, and it was brilliant, and oh, my goodness, you need to go and see this movie. Tomorrow. Do it. Because it is great. I mean, it's not a secret that I love literary inside jokes and time travel and magical realism, and this movie has all of them in droves. And it's lovingly shot. It's a love letter to the city. I want to go to Paris and try to speak what measure of French I have managed to retain. (Un peur, je suppose. Si j'arrete imaginer des mots, un peur plus...?)

Anyway, it's a great movie, and I'm not just saying that because I'm really fond of Owen Wilson.

I also within the last day finished reading Robert Sapolsky's book A Primate's Memoir about his work with baboons in Kenya, and it was fascinating right up to and including the point when all of the baboons got TB and died (although that was also really tragic and terrible). It was a nice change of pace after reading Sarah Gruen's Ape House, a novel which by all means should have been good (acclaimed author, interesting premise) but which was, in reality, just plain terrible.

Five books I have read more than once:

1. A book you loved as a child that has lost its magic.

Let's go with Ender's Game for this one. While I can respect it as a science fiction classic and as a book that had a huge influence on me, I don't enjoy rereading this anymore. Maybe it's because I read the sequels and realized they sucked. Maybe it's because I found out that Orson Scott Card is a misogynist and a homophobe and a religious fundamentalist. When I first read Ender's Game, I was about the same age as the characters and I thought that their interactions were totally believable, so maybe it's hypocritical that now, looking back on it, I cringe and think, "No kids talk like that." (Of course, Jessi Slaughter may well prove me wrong on this one.) Anyway, I'll always have a fondness for this book, and my copy of it has been read at least ten or fifteen times, but it doesn't hold the same appeal to me that it once did.

2. A book you loved as a child that has kept its magic.

This one's going to have to be Dogsbody. Ironically, Orson Scott Card loves it, too! You've probably heard of some of Diana Wynne Jones's other works (Howl's Moving Castle, The Dalemark Quartet...) even if you've never heard of this one, but believe me, it's beautiful and as you read it and grow into it, you understand it on so many different levels. While the main plot is engaging and original, I think that the way that DWJ weaves politics and Celtic mythology into the background of the novel that keeps it fresh - the older I get, the more I understand about what's going on behind the scenes of this vibrant and creative world.

3. A book that made you feel like an adult.

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay is the first grown-up novel I distinctly remember reading. I don't just mean that this was the first book I read that wasn't explicitly targeted at elementary or middle schoolers, because I read a lot of those, but I distinctly remember sitting in the back of the car on a long trip with my parents in ninth grade reading this book and feeling like I was sending out telepathic signals to everyone else there that there was DIRTY STUFF in here. (Although, in retrospect, I reread it last year and was not nearly as scandalized as I was in ninth grade, and there was nothing nearly as explicit as I seemed to think there was at the time.) This book actually has a lot in common with Dogsbody, although it's not immediately apparent - I love the way the different historical and mythological influences are woven together, although here it's the history of the comic book industry and the Golem legend. Which is awesome.

4. A book that has influenced your writing.

American Gods, hands down. I don't think it's any coincidence that a lot of the books on this list are also by authors who I admire in general. I love American Gods for the amount of detail that's crammed into it, for the vivid characters, for the imaginative plot... That, and it's just a fun read. I've read it at least a dozen times and it never gets boring. A lot of the universe of Like a Dog in Space was partially inspired by the universe implied in American Gods, particularly once Mister Papers got involved, although Ivan and the Sisters could exist independently. Not to say that I go out of my way to rip Neil Gaiman off, but... there are worse people to rip off! I think what really gets me about this book is that it's basically set in the real world. It's not alternate universe or some fancy future-that-never-was. It's just fantastic beings trying to get by and live their lives among us humans. I love that it's kind of a grab bag of myths, yet all of them are pretty well researched. I love all of the interesting, larger than life characters who get involved. I love this book.

5. A book that gives you something to aspire to.

Oh, my god, Oryx and Crake. Oryx and Crake, Oryx and Crake, Oryx and Crake. I think my favorite part of this is that it's an alternate future, but it feels so immensely believable based on current trends. Say what you will about the Dystopian genre, this series is Margaret Atwood's masterpiece. I am in awe of the way she connects frame story and narrative, explaining the world we're in without hand-holding us too much. The exposition feels effortless and the results are a breathtaking vision of a future that she convinces you very well could be. I wish I could create spec fic settings like this! (I'm going to try!)

Some runners-up:

Alas, Babylon

Brave New World

Daughter of Fortune

New Jedi Order: Traitor (With the caveat that it is great by itself but shit within the context of the series, for continuity and character reasons.)

Contact

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban

A Separate Peace

Clearly, I need to read more classic lit, right?

Orphaned Paragraphs

I didn't take my computer to Boston because it was going to be a thirty-hour trip and my plan was to spend all of it with Max (my brother) and Roma (a friend from an online collaborative writing project we both worked on starting when we were about fourteen, who before you freak out mom I had met before). So I read on the bus. On the way down I read John Lindqvist's novel Let the Right One In (Basis for two recent movies, one Swedish and one American) and all I can say is that I think Swedish reads funny in English translation. I've read a couple of novels translated from Swedish now, and they all have a sort of strange rhythm in the language, like there's an accent programmed right into the sentence structure.

Before my ride back to New York, I wandered around downtown Boston with Roma, who had her heart set on going to Fire and Ice before putting me back on the bus, and we stopped into Barnes and Noble while we were wandering. I picked up two Dystopian/Post Apocalyptic novels (a guilty pleasure) - Cormac McCarthy's The Road (interesting, but not anything that wasn't in the movie) and Suzanne Collins's The Hunger Games. Don't ask me why I'd been avoiding reading the series, because it's brilliant. It reminds me of Uglies, but in the best way possible.

So, the best place to read a post-apocalyptic novel is in an automobile on the highway in the middle of the night, when it's really easy to pretend that there's just you in your little bubble of light and the whole rest of the world has gone away.

I don't know if anyone else gets like this, but when I'm reading a really good book, it makes my thoughts feel more creative when I put it down. Like the way words fall together is energized. So let's mess around some and I'm going to post some orphaned paragraphs for a strange idea that will probably never go anywhere.

--------------------

He's the kidnapped son of a sixteenth-century playwright. She's a girl carved out of living marble. Between them, they've got a time machine, the shoes on their feet, and the only copy of Love's Labor's Won left in the universe. (THEY FIGHT CRIME!)

--------------------

He woke up to find both the man's daughters staring at him. One about twelve, the other about eight, but otherwise identical. Pool-blue eyes, flaxen hair piled on their heads like haystacks.

"I guess he's not dead," said the younger one.

"Nope," said the older one, and continued to stare.

--------------------

Only Kara stayed behind, and it was because she was too young to go, not because she pitied him. If she were seventeen instead of sixteen, there was no doubt she'd have gone into town with the others. Certainly she wouldn't have remained in the boondocks with a crippled houseguest; that wasn't how anyone wanted to spend their last weekend on Earth.

-------------------

He never let the girl have long hair, and she never asked for it. What good was long hair? It was just one more hand-hold for an enemy to grab you by in a fight. There was no such thing as vanity after the end of the world. Who was there to judge you as pretty? Zombies didn't have aesthetics. And here was a girl who had never read a copy of Vogue. So he cut his hair short, and then he cut hers, and that was just the way things went.

No one in YA Fiction has a memory longer than four years.

So I've been reading Robin Wasserman's Skinned series for what amounts to no good reason other than the cover art being a ripoff of Scott Westerfield's far superior Uglies. And while it does share similarities with that series, primarily in that they are both dystopian speculative sci-fi where society is far too superficial for its own good, while I was reading it, I couldn't help but shake that I'd read this before. Somewhere not Uglies. Somewhere far more innocent.

And then it hit me. I'd read this same premise some ten years ago at Camp Ramah, only then it involved chimpanzees instead of robots and far less sex and drug use. It was called Eva, and at the time I thought it was pretty awesome. Actually, it probably is still pretty awesome, because it was written in 1989 and contained pretty much every concept contained in Skinned, but with a protagonist who didn't make me want to claw my eyes out.

(Note to YA authors: If you are going to make us spend five hundred pages inside a character's head, at least make them someone likable. STEPHANIE MEYER ARE YOU LISTENING TO ME?)

The setting of Skinned is ripped, in parts, from both M.T. Anderson's Feed (another one of my favorite books from middle school) and Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake (A great, if grown up, novel). It almost seems like Wasserman read a lot of dystopian lit in developing her books, but forgot to add any touches to make it her own.

Oh. Wait.

She replaced the monkeys with robots. Because everything's better with robots.

The plot is essentially a pastiche of the aforementioned Eva and Uglies, but with robots. We are introduced to our heroine Lia who, like Eva, has through the power of science been transferred from her ruined-in-a-car-accident flesh and blood human body into a replacement. Cue hospital montages of our heroine learning how to use her new body, feeling angsty about it, and having existential crises over whether or not she is still herself. Our heroine eventually reintegrates into normal society, where she, like Tally, falls in love with a cute-but-not-up-to-standard boy who she eventually manages to betray. She later, like Tally, takes up with a boy who is "one of her kind" and they do daring and crazy things that run counter to the goals of boy number one.

This is not to say that Auden and Riley are exactly exports of David and Zane (David and Zane are far more interesting) - they have some of their plots switched around in terms of who gets severely injured and who our heroine winds up with - but they're still pretty close. One is quirky and impassioned, but imperfect. The other is a handsome daredevil. The difference is that in Uglies, we like these characters because of who they are first, and because our heroine likes them second. The only thing I ever felt for Riley was that he was sort of like Edward Cullen - strong, handsome, immortal, slightly off limits. Our heroine can't get over how perfect and mysterious he is, but we're sort of wary about the guy, not only because of the company he keeps. I eventually got over it, but, I mean... you can sort of tell I favor Zane and his crims, right? He was awesome.

So where does that leave Skinned? It's a pastiche of cliches from all over the dystopian lit genre. It is neither original nor particularly compelling, especially if you've read the source material and know what Wasserman is ripping off. Surely it's better written than the similarly-designed Eragon or Twilight Saga, but in the end it's a cliche that borrows heavily from its predecessors and puts too much riding on the back of a whiny, spoiled teenaged protagonist.

Three out of five. I don't feel like I should demand my afternoon back, but don't spend money on this drivel. Find it at the library if you're so curious, but you're better off reading the works it steals from.