Alice Sheldon known as Tiptree/ I chose you to end this list.

[gamerchick]

So by now most of you are probably aware that Orson Scott Card wrote a pretty bad novella about Hamlet's gay dad. It took me a while to find out this was happening, because despite the profound importance that Ender's Game held for me as a teenager, I've been really ambivalent about its quality and about all other things Card for a long time now. I

Comments

[invader_tak_1]

He trashed the greatest story in the English language to write an anti gay hate screed.......

[gamerchick]

He sure did.

[invader_tak_1]

You do not know how much I love the story of Hamlet. I have the Brannagh BBC version and the movie version on my iPod, I have it on my kindle, I watch the KB version 4-5 times a year. It leaves me wrung out to the very fibre of my being and in tears.

In a lifelong love of literature I love no story more. I am almost beyond words from this......

[jedi_of_urth]

You know, as much as I still do like Ender's Game the reasons I can't consider it a favorite anymore have more to do with Cards'...Card-ness than anything.

Yes a lot of the things that bother me about Card are in this book too, but most of the time he integrated them into the characters or story rather than the characters/story just being a mouthpiece for his ideas. And I think it has to do with EG being a very small and personal tale rather than being about a world or a particularly large cast of characters. Because it's not about such a large world most of the things I don't like I can attribute to the characters involved rather than the author making a statement about how the world should work.

I have to say though, I'm not sure I agree with the essay yu linked to. Not completely anyway, and I think the tone bothered me more than the content. It definitely raises some valid points about the "moral" of the story.

[gamerchick]

Ender's Game spoke to me REALLY strongly when I was 12. Now it just kind of bothers me. I don't feel comfortable bringing Card's views on homosexuality into Ender's Game because, well, I didn't really feel that any form of sexuality was represented in any way, positive or negative, in that book. There are other Card novels I've read where those views come out a lot more strongly, but not in Ender's Game. The moral universe it posits, though, is really troubling to me - probably because I've become really hardline in my own ethics about believing that what we actually do matters more than what we intend to do. Intention needs to be a piece of it, of course - that's where mercy comes from - but so often I find that good intentions just mean dickall to me nowadays when the result is something purely toxic. The mileage of others, of course, may vary.

I didn't link to the one Ender's Game-related essay I know of that, while interesting, does have a really awful and inflammatory tone in my opinion. (It's cited in the Kessel piece, though

[chia_rhino]

That poem made me giggle. :<)

[gamerchick]

Song parody and not poem, technically - but yeah, it cracked me up too. (c;