Dear SF writers of the world

[james_davis_nicoll]

I hit my lifetime tolerance for heroic tales of children drafted into draconian, high mortality super-soldier programs justified as required for the greater good sometime around the end of the novel version of Ender's Game. Please adjust your story lines accordingly.

Comments

[desperance.livejournal.com]

Oh. People are still doing that? (I, um. Quite liked Ender's Game. But it seemed enough, even then.)

[nojay.livejournal.com]

I don't recall any high-mortality bodycount on the human side of things in Ender's Game. Wasn't there just one death in the whole story up until the genocidal end, and that well before the super-soldier training deal?

[izeinwinter.livejournal.com]

The spaceship crews Ender was unwittingly put in charge of had their lives spent like gamecounters, because that is what he tought they were.

[skapusniak.livejournal.com]

I guess I'm waiting for the heroic tales of children drafted into 'men who stare at goats' style psychic soldier programs, who quickly learn to fake the desired results wanted by their trainers through mundane means (as all that psychic stuff is a load of crock in this particularly world) funded by the guys with too much money and too little oversight effectively paying the gang of crackpots pushing the program to shut up, go away and stop bugging them. Actual combat coming nowhere near any of the characters involved.

[schizmatic.livejournal.com]

I would happily buy said book.

[moonlithoughts.livejournal.com]

Speaking of the ending of Ender's Game, was there any decent explanation of why it had to be him and no adult could take his place? I know they went on and on about how smart he was, but it sounded like it was just that none of the adults had thought of suicide missions, which, uh.

[mme-hardy.livejournal.com]

Only the children could be trusted to be ethics-free, because they had carefully been raised to be so. The grownups, although they were the one who tortured a generation of children, were just not willing to commit genocide. Making good ol' Ender the Suffering Saint who takes on the sins of the world.

[moonlithoughts.livejournal.com]

But they were willing to trick him into committing genocide, which is basically the same thing as committing it themselves, isn't it?

[lederhosen.livejournal.com]

Morally yes, psychologically no. If Milgram's work is anything to go by, people find it easier to do bad things when they don't have to see the consequences.

[mme-hardy.livejournal.com]

Also, while I'm not convinced about the Holocaust links, the book is very carefully stacked so that we feel sorry for Ender no matter what he does; in every situation where he does evil, there's somebody else (or the situation itself) to blame.

[llennhoff.livejournal.com]

See Skylark 3, where the highly advanced Norlaminians jump out of the control station before Seaton uses the giant weapon they taught him to build to blow up a world full of intelligent beings. Seaton himself is unable to actually pull the firing lever, he stays in the control station but lets his 'barbarous' friend actually pull the lever.

[redbird]

And it never occurs to anyone in that book to look in prisons or mental hospitals for sociopaths.

[(Anonymous)]

Prisons? Mental hospitals? Meh. Just go to usernet SF, politics and alt history discussions...

Bruce

[halfassured.livejournal.com]

Is it OK if it's not heroic?

I actually kind of want to see this trope inverted sometime so that it's really old people recruited out of nursing homes, but I can't think of a plausible way to do it short of just going with some sort of anime-style "old people have magical hero powers" rationale.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

John Scalzi's Old Man's War.

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

Watch on the Rhine.

(be careful what you wish for)

I've thought of a way to send old people in space. Postulate that full-body cyborgs are a lot better in space, and that people don't want to become full-body cyborgs if they have a choice. "So, I see you have terminal cancer..."

James: have you seen the Nanoha serieses?

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

No.

[scifantasy.livejournal.com]

Heh. Nanoha's pretty firmly on the heroic side of the equation, though. (Well, except for the "no child labor laws" thing.)

What about Puella Magi Madoka Magica, AKA "Magical Princess Faustus"? That one's screwy.

[derekl1963.livejournal.com]

"Old guys recruited for One Last Incredibly Vital Mission"? That trope was old when Noah was a pup.

Clive Cussler even managed to pull it off with (a very carefully not named) James Bond in "Night Prone".

[halfassured.livejournal.com]

I'm imagining more a situation where the elderly (potentially civilians) are preferentially chosen to fill the ranks of a large-scale endeavour. Looking at the synopsis, Old Man's War sounds like it fits the bill; might have to read that.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure the Old Man's War universe really makes a lot of sense on extended scrutiny, but the justification here is a bit like mindstalk's idea about the cyborgs. To get into a milspec super-body, you basically have to die and have your mind uploaded. And it's a one-way trip from home, because the Colonial Union doesn't let the people of Earth even know anything about what's really going on off the planet. And, while admittedly nobody on Earth knows this for sure, you're deep in the shit forever after. So they recruit old people.

But there are also clone-soldiers with brand-new personalities (the Ghost Brigades of the second book), who seem to be used to commit war crimes for rather Enderlike reasons. So Scalzi's working both ends of the spectrum.

[michaelgr.livejournal.com]

Aren't these stories meant to be read by the same age group they describe?

[carloshasanax.livejournal.com]

Ender is what, six years old? Card tries to fuzz out the later details of his age, and one could claim that Battle School was a long extended period of several years, like Hogwarts, although I don't think the description of the curriculum supports this. At any rate, he hasn't hit the beginning of puberty yet by the end of the book.

But Ender's Game is an early junior high cult classic. Descriptions literally get passed down through the school generations.

[mme-hardy.livejournal.com]

I think that may be changing somewhat now that the book is required reading in middle school rather than a hand-to-hand classic. My son certainly classed it with all the holocaust fiction he was expected to read: YA is supposed to be depressing.

[ross-teneyck.livejournal.com]

When did Ender's Game start being marketed as YA? As best as I can remember when it first came out, it was just another adult SF book. It wasn't until some years later that I saw it with a different cover being shelved in the YA section, and it struck me as deeply weird.

I mean, it's not like I would forbid a middle-school/junior-high kid under my jurisdiction to read it; but if such a kid were to ask me for suggestions, Ender's Game would not be the first book to come to mind, nor even the 500th book.

[le-trombone.livejournal.com]

It can be marketed as both, I suppose. I saw Life of Pi in both the literature and young adult sections, in very different editions (differing size, cover, and font size).

[neowolf2.livejournal.com]

So, what did you think of Greg Bear's "Hardfought"?

[dbdatvic.livejournal.com]

Luckily Sucharitkul ... no, LJ, that K needs to be an H, thanks very much but don't try to predict what I'm typing sheesh ... had gotten his childsoldier armies up and running a little before Ender's Game came out. Though the "for the greater good" element was sort of twisted there, so it might not qualify anyway.

--Dave, one of our greatest natural resources