Sunday 30 March 2008

4.Ender's Game


We can't avoid meeting bad people, as we can't avoid being bad from time to time. As we already know by watching 'The kids', films are about coping with bad, and what is more, I can risk saying that most of them won't exist without that problem. We wouldn't recognize good then.
The same situation is with books. A bad character, a mistake of a protagonist or an evil that rules the world.

I would like to write about Ender's Game , one of my favorite books.

Orson Scott Card created a world in danger of destruction.
The only solution was to teach a little boy - Ender, whose genes were perfect, how to fight with an unknown race (which is called the Buggers), and how to understand the enemy. The problem occurred, when he discovered that the simulation wasn't just the part of lesson, but real war. He destroyed the Bugger's planet. He didn't want to kill them...but he did. Firstly, people loved him and called him their rescuer. But the situation changed really quickly, after the publication of a book about the Buggers (in fact, Ender was its author. He wrote that book to make people understand the Buggers), they started to hate him, calling him the author of massacre. Finally, he found a cocoon with a Bugger's queen and on the new planet, he made her alive. What is interesting, she didn't blame him.
The war for Buggers, and they started this war, was all about finding more life territory. Buggers are very specific. The queen is as a head, and the rest of population is like her hands and legs. So, it is not a problem, for one Bugger, to be killed.
The queen thought that the same situation is with human beings. When she killed somebody it wasn't real killing for her.

It is all very complicated, and there is more books about him.
Generally, the question is: was he the killer?

Yes, he killed them, but without knowing it. He was not responsible. It was done in order to save the world. That was the war.
But they were dead, that is the fact. He felt guilty, and all his life he was trying to expiate.

There is an interesting essay 'creating the innocent killer' by John Kessel.

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