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?

[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.

[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.

[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.

[michaelgr.livejournal.com]

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

[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