Chronicide Online

Each year, when the Oscar nominees are announced, I set myself a challenge to see as many of the nominees as I can before the awards are given.

I never do particularly well with this challenge — for example, of the 44 films nominated last year, I saw only 12. But this year’s nominations have been announced, so once again I’m going to give it a try. It’s a little easier this time in that there are only 36 films nominated this year, and I’ve already seen five of them.

Will I be able to see 31 movies in the next 31 days? Almost assuredly not, but I’m going to give it my all.

(For the record: the five I’ve seen are The Dark Knight, Iron Man, Rachel Getting Married, Tropic Thunder, and WALL•E. Not a Best Picture nominee in the bunch, but at least I’ve knocked out two Best Supporting Actors, a Best Leading Actress, and a Best Original Screenplay…)

I’ve never been shy about my fondness for Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game and (to a lesser extent) its sequels. I’ve read the book several times, and the earliest sequels (Speaker for the Dead, Xenocide, and Children of the Mind) at least twice. At times, it’s been hard to defend this fondness: Card is a good enough craftsman as a storyteller, but his prose is hardly the stuff that will inspire generations; he can get pretty un-subtle and heavy-handed with a lot of his messages; and, in recent years, he’s come to espouse a lot of politics that I am, to put it mildly, in strong disagreement with.

Still and all, the story of Ender and his army, put in a situation they never should have been in, facing decisions no one should have to face, is a compelling one.

At least, it’s compelling to me. This afternoon, Jason drew my attention to a post from a few years ago that spoke of a less-than-admirable Orson Scott Card, a controversial interpretation of Ender’s Game, and a theory that Card wasn’t actually involved in the writing of the series. The post itself is hardly worth paying any attention — it’s nothing but anecdotal evidence (and twenty-year-old anecdotal evidence at that!), based on the author’s interpretations of events he was witness to or involved in — but the controversial interpretation of Ender’s Game gets a bit more of my time.

The author points us to his friend Elaine Radford’s 1987 essay Ender and Hitler: Sympathy for the Superman which appeared in the now-defunct Fantasy Review. As the title suggests, Ms. Radford makes the case that Ender’s Game is actually an apology for Hitler’s genocidal atrocities. Now, this is not a new essay, so I’m sure I’m hardly touching on new ground, but it was the first time I read it, and I had a few responses to it.

The short version is: I don’t buy it. The longer version is after the jump.

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