Well, it's not like the story's gonna sell this heap.

no joke, I remember reading it in school and thinking the big twist at the end was lamest-ass literary device EVER. I was actually really angry at the book because I felt like Card cheated and we never got the big battle at the end, just the lame mindfuck.

I thought the third act would have made for a decent Twilight Zone episode (or was it already?), but everything else about the book rubbed me the wrong way.

Magical genius at everything protagonist. Why were the Wiggin kids so special? They went to an average public school and their parents were idiots.

The really creepy bullying revenge fantasies.

The ridiculous child dialog. Card defends this saying that's how HE talked when he was a kid, because he's such a MARY SUE MARY SUE genius.

The fact that training for the alien invasion is mostly playing Laser Tag for years, with a crash course at controlling the actual fleet for a month.

Right, but I don't understand the mentality of selling this as an acting movie. Surely, in a big budget science fiction movie, "Harrison Ford" would be a better sell than "Academy Award nominee [dubiously, and almost 30 years go] Harrison Ford."

oh, and taking over the world via message board posts

The trick to selling a lot of DVDs now that nobody buys DVDs is to only make movies based on Core Curriculum novels.

Might sound mediocre, but I can think of worse things to base a movie on.

HOWEVER I will note that in this novel Card predicted blogs/social media networks and other stuff, which was interesting

meh, so what? AT+T predicted more shit than I can comfortably believe back in 1993 with just a few commercials..

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4PJcABbtvtA

William Gibson:cyberspace::Orson Scott Card:sockpuppeting

It was kind of a dead on description of hyper competitive online games. You have people who have only ever played against the computer (which is brainless and predictable but can multitask the shit out of you) and the first game they play against a decent human they get zerg rushed to death. So the next game everyone knows you need zealots out by the 3 minute mark yuk yuk.

It got silly though that in all the years the school existed Ender was the only one who ever thought up new tactics.

And then somehow the idea of shooting your own legs to form a shield was a useful skill when it came time for the real war.

Currently Neuromancer is in the works, starring Mark Wahlberg and Liam Neeson:(

I can't even comprehend how you could make a movie out of Neuromancer these days. It's a cool book, but everything in it has been mined so thoroughly into other movies and culture that basically as a film it would have almost nowhere to go unless it was really, REALLY well made, like Blade Runner well-made. the whole "cyber" bullshit of the 90s in pop culture pretty much undercut everything in Neuromancer. To read it now, you might even think it some kind of awful fanfic or parody of that culture without realizing it helped give birth to the whole thing.

Stanley, that didn't hold back the Lord of the Rings movies.

Good thing the book came out 30 years ago. If it were released today, it would come off as overindulgent nerd wish fulfillment. And sell 90 billion copies as a result.

He was working on M. Night's sci-fi film.

Speaker of the Dead was one of the most painfully dull novels I've ever read. You might as well just read an anthropology textbook; it might be more enjoyable and it'd certainly be more educational.

There was also the one book that had nothing to do with any sort of interplanetary war, but was about Muslim and Christian children fighting over holiday celebrations.

I gave up on the series halfway through the agonizingly dull novel about the girl who obsessively traced lines on the floor and who had some vague connection to Ender which really never made sense or mattered.

What was that book called again?

I hated every character in this book and every character in Speaker for the Dead, which I read because my best friend at the time urged me to.

I wanted to set fire to the entire planet he created. It was weird and awful. Sort of like a kids puppet show from the 60s.

oh hey and I'm totally going to ruin that book for all of you that haven't read it...

So a bunch of Brazilian people have been living on this planet. There's this chick with a fat blind kid with robotic eye implants and somehow everyone is super boring and Mormonish even though they are Brazilian and no trace of their original culture has somehow managed to come with them.

There are these aliens called piggies. They look like little pigs! And a bunch of stuff that isn't important or memorable happens. And then at the end you get to find out in a HUGE TWIST ENDING that the piggies turn into trees. Like when they "die". So essentially it's the same plot as David the Gnome. Like they don't even turn into trees gradually...more like instantaneously and I think some of them just turn into logs or some shit which the other piggies "plant". It's fucking stupid because there are only a few species of animal/plants and they all do the same thing, transforming from eels or worms to grass and some other stupid thing he came up with.

Then Ender invents a religion where you talk shit about people when they die, because fuck them. In honor of this I hope to have a bunch of people come to Card's funeral and call him a Neo Nazi asshole who condoned violence against gays, so fuck you and your cunt of a book series.

SIM-YOO-LAY-SHUNS dude!

simulations!

Card (who co-produced the movie) made two changes: one is that he excised the subplot of Ender's siblings taking over the world via the internet, the other is that the the beginning of the movie spoils the twist. Not a joke.

Please, Hollywood, make this happen. For the delicious Mormon tears.

Just make ALL of them gay.

And they just adopt children.

BLACK children.

Gay Black Taliban Children!

I love how his worthless brother becomes dictator of Earth. And his sister is a historian who only writes good things about him. Is their family magic? It seems like their family has the only smart or capable children on the whole stupid planet.

Then there was the character of Bean, who was...literally Ender. Like, they're the exact same character. He couldn't come up with another character. So he just repeated Ender.

" In 1990, Card called for laws that ban consensual homosexual acts to "remain on the books, not to be indiscriminately enforced against anyone who happens to be caught violating them, but to be used when necessary to send a clear message that those who flagrantly violate society's regulation of sexual behavior cannot be permitted to remain as acceptable, equal citizens within that society." He no longer advocates this, and says that the 1990 stance must be seen in the context of the times (such laws were still deemed constitutional at the time) and the conservative Mormon audience to whom his essay was addressed. "[N]ow that the law has changed," Card states, "I have no interest in criminalizing homosexual acts and would never call for such a thing, any more than I wanted such laws enforced back when they were still on the books."[35]" - from his wikipedia

That's just a taste, kids.

Oh and in another one of his shitty books, which I did not read, his brother becomes dictator of Earth because, and this is especially awesome, his internet persona is SO FUCKING POPULAR he is voted leader of Earth based on how AWESOME his internet articles are.

I am so not shitting you. He wrote that.

Oh and according to the book synopsis, in another one of his shitty books, (because I just lump them all together in one huge mess) a psychopathic China tries to take over all of Asia and then it's psychopathic leader holds Peter's embryos hostage.

His embryos.

Hostage.

...

well you had me up till the embryos

So the "he became dictator because his articles were popular" thing. Is that a dig at everyone who berates him for putting his old-man-bigot rants up online, a fantasy he has about himself someday, or a swipe at someone who he sees as undeserving of praise for their blog?

All this rage but nothing about the preteen boy naked shower fight in the book?

"So the "he became dictator because his articles were popular" thing. Is that a dig at everyone who berates him for putting his old-man-bigot rants up online, a fantasy he has about himself someday, or a swipe at someone who he sees as undeserving of praise for their blog?"

That plot was from the first Ender's Game book from the mid 80s. So no, not a backlash against internet activity.

Yes the shower fight! Magic genius Ender outsmarts everyone by soaping up his hot bod to slip out of his opponent's grip. WHY DO ALL THE MEAN BULLIES FORCE ME TO MURDER THEM!

How about the fact that the whole space station only has one token girl? And of course she's the character to have an emotional breakdown later on. Plus the woman he ever related to was his sister.