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

[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