Chronicide Online

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.

The argument, although compelling, falls prey to a couple of logical fallacies: Hanlon’s Razor (“Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity/ignorance”) and cum hoc ergo propter hoc (correlation does not imply causation).

Her essay shows that there are a few loose parallels between Ender (if you turn him a bit and squint just so) and Hitler, so of course (she says) the ONLY explanation is that the book must ACTUALLY be a secret apology for Hitler. But of course, that’s not the only explanation.

Take her example of why Ender is the youngest of three children, known in the population-controlled world of Ender’s Game as a Third:

Why is it so important that Ender be a Third, to the point that Card gives the word a capital T?
…
It’s all here, isn’t it? Hitler was three times a third — the third child of a third marriage, and, because his older siblings died in infancy, the third child actually present in the house. Since his mother didn’t conceive again until Hitler was six, Hitler, like Ender, spent his formative years as the third of three children.

Clearly, she says, Ender is a Third to make him just like Hitler. It couldn’t be that there’s a rich literary and sociological resonance with the number three; that the concept of “third time’s the charm,” or the Goldilocks model of “too hard, too soft, just right” could be in play.

Or look at the abuse of Ender, which is just like (except in that it’s not) the abuse that Hitler suffered:

Similarly, both children’s lives were deformed by physical and emotional abuse. Ender escapes the abuse of his peers to join the Battle School — where he is, of course, abused by adults. Hitler was literally treated like a dog by his father, who expected him to answer to his whistle and accept vicious beatings — beatings which were all the more terrible to the boy because he had an undescended testicle and deeply feared losing the other. Both cases represented awful violations of a child’s body and spirit in the attempt to mold the kind of character that adults decided the child should have.

It has to be another Hitler parallel, not a device to demonstrate Ender’s outsider status and make him more sympathetic (the latter result which she admits is its purpose).

Radford’s argument basically comes down to, there are all these similarities, so they must not just be coincidence. But there’s no reason to believe they’re not. There’s a line, I want to say Garrick said it in an episode of Deep Space Nine, that I think applies: “I believe in coincidence. It happens all the time. I just don’t trust it.” What’s happening here is, she sees the coincidence, and she doesn’t trust it, but rather than seeking out independent evidence to prove it’s deliberate, she points to the coincidence as evidence. (There’s another logical fallacy for you: circular reasoning. The coincidences hint at the conspiracy, so the conspiracy must be true because otherwise, why would there be all these coincidences?)

I’m not saying that the coincidences and parallels Radford sees are non-existent; obviously, they’re there. And if she’d approached this essay with an approach of “look at the way you can read this text” I’d have had no complaint. But to suggest that the interpretation is intentional requires that she go beyond the text to prove her point, something she does not do. (Card printed a response to her essay that appeared in the same issue of Fantasy Review, but so far I’ve not been able to find a copy online.)

When Radford wrote her essay, only Ender’s Game and Speaker for the Dead were published. It is suggested, both in a “20 years later” note she includes at the end of her essay and in the original post that Jason sent me, that Card deliberately postponed (and possibly changed) the third book in the series, Xenocide, because of what she wrote. Needless to say, there’s zero evidence to support this claim. (It’s not impossible that that’s the case, of course, but I’ve nothing to suggest to me that it is.) A lot of what she says is undermined by what Card wrote in the later books of the series, but that doesn’t really mean anything — if her essay really did influence Card, of course he’d make an effort to disprove her in later works.

Both Radford and her friend present interesting theories about Ender’s Game, but unfortunately, when you build your theories on nothing but coincidence and anecdote, you more often than not will find that it’ll fold like a house of cards.

Tags: argument, ender's game

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 13th, 2008 at 11:53 pm and is filed under Chronicide, Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.