Alternative Ending: Ender's Game

[polarisdib]

Righteo. I realize the whole alternative ending activity ended a few days (a week? I've been really busy lately) ago, but today I got struck by random inspiration from some serendipitous recall of Ender's Game, a book that to me was quite peculiar. It is like Stranger in a Strange Land in that it is somehow canonical SF literature even for people

Comments

[gertie_flirty]

I haven't read Ender's Game since I was 14, but I remember being pretty impressed with the ending, actually. But I like your version too. :D

[jamoche]

The short story packs a lot of awesomeness into a small space.

My trouble with Card as an author in general is that he's really good at packing awesomeness into small spaces, but the longer it gets, the more the original awesomeness gets spread out until you can't find it anymore.

Also he wrote this well before there was much of an Internet outside .gov and .edu; Usenet was mostly researchers and students, and the few online services were expensive - Compuserve was about $12/hour IIRC. It was not something the average youtube commenter of today would even think about using.

[polarisdib]

The original text above contained some elaborate parenthetical about how much of the awesomeness I see in Ender's Game is this looking forward to the Internet as opposed to how it ended up, based on the preliminary usage at the time. But I got really sidetracked and deleted the parenthetical completely.

--DiB

[chickadee1607]

Sounds like a totally awesome story, but it was actually Ender's other brother (name escapes me) who had the secret internet personality. But if you were to eliminate that brother, who as I remember was a complete asshole, and give Ender his role, this would be a pretty fantastic story. I think the book should have ended after Ender realized he wasn't just playing a game.

[polarisdib]

I could have sworn it was a sister, but that's what reading a book once half my lifetime ago will do to your memory, I guess. I was nervous about posting this because my memory of the novel is poor, and mostly surrounding a very adolescent "WTF?!"

--PolarisDiB

[cyranothe2nd]

A lot of people have a problem with the ethics of Ender's Game. The series gets *really* weird thereafter, too.

[alienfish]

*chuckle* This is because, I'm guessing, the original short story Ender's Game was, in fact, a short story.

It wasn't meant to have a sequel, much less a spinoffs.

[alienfish]

As a secondary point, the alternative ending you propose for Ender's Game was written by Orson Scott Card. About his brother, as his brother was the one on the discussion boards forcing their sister to help him gain power.

The "rival" in battle school was not a rival. He was a classmate who eventually was given his own book which, to my irritation, was at least half a poorly re-worded version of Ender's story told from the other boy's viewpoint.