Card lays out (something like tongue-in-cheek) some of the similarities between the story in Ender's Game and in the Potter series: "A young kid growing up in an oppressive family situation suddenly learns that he is one of a special class of children with special abilities, who are to be educated in a remote training facility where student life is dominated by an intense game played by teams flying in midair, at which this kid turns out to be exceptionally talented and a natural leader." (And that's just to get started.)


He must have not been paying a lot of attention when he read HP, because Harry is far from being 'exceptionally talented' and is definitely not a natural leader. If by 'exceptionally talented' he meant 'horribly mediocre', then I wouldn't have a problem with the statement. That's probably not what he meant though. Harry does get some leadership points from the DA, but he is not a natural leader. He wouldn't have done the DA if Hermione hadn't tricked him into it. He's too immature, anti-social, gullible, naive, and impetuous to be a good leader. He barely qualifies as being above average in intelligence and magical skill.

Just wanted to clear that up.

 

Oh no, you're quite mistaken here. See, the "exceptionally talented and a natural leader" thing was quite clearly referring to Quiddich.

 

Its sadly true that I have met more Ender's Game fans on the internet then IRL I must of read it at least ten times by now.

On that topic who was your favorite character? Mine was Valentine.

 

I hope it was. He didn't expand the statement further, so we can not be 100% sure what OSC meant by the statement.

He should have added Quidditch as a qualifier.

It's like saying Ron is exceptionally talented. Maybe in chess, but in everything else, fuck no.

If he gets to call Harry exceptionally talented because of his Quidditch skill, I get to call Ron exceptionally talented for his chess skill. They are both useless statements.

Also, when has Harry been a good leader in Quidditch? He's the 'new guy' for the first few books, gets banned in 5th year for not being mature enough to take a gradeschool insult and walk away, and even when he becomes captain in HBP, I don't recall him doing anything that screamed "Wow, what a good leader he is". Also, he played favorites when he let Ron on the team in HBP when he knew Hermione confounded McClaggen on his last shot. That's not being fair, or a good leader. How did he know that Ron would perform better in an actual game, and not McClaggen? He didn't. For all we know McClaggen is 5x the keeper Ron is, but we will never know because Harry wasn't fair during the tryout by letting Hermione get away with cheating because she wanted Ron's penis.

 

He probably posted dozens of articles without getting real publicity. My guess is that a bored nerd googled J.K Rowling every five minutes and found this by chance. Hardly attention seeking.

My favorite character is Bean. After I read Ender's game series I thought Ender is a genius. After reading Ender's shadow series I thought Bean is a god.

 

I like Bean, but the Ender's Shadow series turned him into something of a Gary Stu.

 

Many of the authors are taking the route of having a forum and communicating with their fans.

Eric Flint at Baen books basically used that model for his 1632 universe to grow it from a single book into a series.

As for the whole natural leader thing - inside the Trio, Harry was the leader and the other two were his followers. Hermione was the brains and Ron was the sidekick comic relief. I think Card's analogy holds for more than just Quidditch.

 

Well, yes. That last statement from the analogy was just very directly aimed at Quidditch (the words "at which" pretty much directly connecting it to the previous statement about playing the game itself).

 

I have never heard of Scott Card. Judging from most people here he has to be a good writer. What is his story about anyway?

 

He's most famous for Ender's Game and several sequels/derivatives in that universe that are of varying quality. The two sequels to Ender's Game were quite a bit worse than the original (itself a story I consider to be of mediocre quality).

Some people on here are OSC fanboys, though. (There's no accounting for taste).

 

He had an answer for EVERYTHING. It was insane. My friend is a tech-geek, and had a list of questions about the workings of the little doctor, battle school, Ansible, and other stuff. He had at least a semi-viable answer for everything. Talked about doing an Ender's Game movie a lot too.

Peter and Achilles. Bean was awesome as well. I actually prefer Shadow. Peter is still my overall favorite though.

@Bucks - He's a sci-fi writer who can't write a child to save his life . Try reading Ender's Game or Ender's Shadow, both are good. If you can suspend disbelief, they're great, IMO. He kinda fucks with your head, if you think about it after you're done.

 

I liked Bean too, but IMO the most realistic child (assuming all these children are perfect and Gary-Stu/Mary-Sue) was Petra. She stuffs up a couple of times, breaks down under the pressure, like a normal kid would if they had to deal with this.

I also kind of liked Bonito in Ender's Game, he was kind of cool.

 

That he can't, but the world would be just a tiny bit more depressing if he could.

 

I loved the first two Shadow books ( Ender's Shadow and Shadow of the Hegemon) but didn't like Shadow Puppets.

As for Ender's series- I liked Speaker of the Dead more than the first book though it took awhile for me to get into, and liked Xenocide though less than the other books. I have yet to read Children of the Mind.

And yeah, Peter is awesome.

 

Hardly. Sure, they are brilliant, but they have the emotional development of a retarded 2 year's old.

 

So am I the only one here who liked Valentine? That....well it doesn't bug me at all really...

 

I've met an insanely large number of authors, and I can say that while some of them like Brain Jacques are nice generally they suck. I've never met Card or Colfer though I do wish that I had met the latter of the two as I am a fan. I do actually usually end up eating dinner with the authors that I meet on campus through a university program I'm in so it is just a small group setting with no craziness of a crowd there. My old English professor, and I used to talk about the general horridness of most authors in small settings away from the public eye, and she has met quite a few more authors than I have though we both agree that out of all of the authors we have met David Sedaris is the biggest bastard of the lot.

On a side note, I would like to say finals suck, and I'm enjoying the one day I have no finals this week. Tomorrow is going to suck again.