I finished Ender in Exile. This post doesn't really have spoilers.
On page 279 I think (don't have my copy at hand right now) we are in one character's point of view, while he speaks to his mother, and she disagrees, and expresses it in the hilarious typo, "Mother shook her heads."
Either Abra's mom has two heads (due to some failure of the otherwise excellent Xenobiology staff to combat various plagues), or, my favourite interpretation, she carries around a little stick with three shrunken heads on it that rattles when she shakes it.
I know typos can creep in at many places during the publishing of a book. It seems Tor has more than it's share though, but that's just anecdotal.
Also, I don't approve of rewriting Ender's Game to make it fit with the sequels. Or at least, the original should still be available... revisionist history... violates Heinlein's rules for writing... George Lucas... grr.
Fortunately I have an original copy. Had two, but post office lost one. I had better hold onto it.
Posted by neo-dragon (Member # 7168) on :
quote:Originally posted by Seatarsprayan:
Also, I don't approve of rewriting Ender's Game to make it fit with the sequels. Or at least, the original should still be available... revisionist history... violates Heinlein's rules for writing... George Lucas... grr.
Did you know that Tolkien rewrote a chapter of "The Hobbit" years after its original publication in order to make it fit with "The Lord of the Rings?" If you have an original version now it's probably worth a fair bit of money.
And technically, the original version of EG is already unavailable. I mean the one where Ender jokingly calls Alai the N-word in the battleroom.
Posted by Lyrhawn (Member # 7039) on :
Really?
Current versions have that edited out?
Posted by rivka (Member # 4859) on :
For years, Lyr.
Posted by Blayne Bradley (Member # 8565) on :
quote:Originally posted by neo-dragon:
quote:Originally posted by Seatarsprayan:
Also, I don't approve of rewriting Ender's Game to make it fit with the sequels. Or at least, the original should still be available... revisionist history... violates Heinlein's rules for writing... George Lucas... grr.
Did you know that Tolkien rewrote a chapter of "The Hobbit" years after its original publication in order to make it fit with "The Lord of the Rings?" If you have an original version now it's probably worth a fair bit of money.
And technically, the original version of EG is already unavailable. I mean the one where Ender jokingly calls Alai the N-word in the battleroom.
I have that one i was stunned for like 5 minutes.
Posted by Seatarsprayan (Member # 7634) on :
Yah, I really wish I had an original of The Hobbit. But, at least Tolkien provided an in-story explanation as well as a notation in The Hobbit itself, so we all knew. And, since what we were reading was theoretically written by Bilbo and Frodo and only translated by Tolkien, it works.
Then again, if I'd been around when that was going on, I don't know how thrilled I'd totally be. Tolkien may be the greatest writer of the 20th century, but it didn't mean he couldn't make a mistake either. Sure I'm okay with it now, decades later, but then I'm okay with living on former Mexican land which was formerly Indian land. If I'd been around when the land stealing had been going on, I would have opposed it. It's just it's history now so I don't get all upset any more.
I was fine with the way Mazer's presence on Earth was retconned: "We lied." I'd have been a lot less fine if EG was rewritten to remove any mention of him piloting the colony ship.
Fortunately I have the original version as well as the now-misnamed "Author's Definitive Edition." If the so-called definitive edition had only changed the N-word scene, I'd probably be okay with it, but at least two changes were made from the original (minor word choice changes, I'm sure they seemed to be) that actually destroyed the emotional punch of some of my very favourite scenes.
The thing is, when you come up with a story, it is your story. When you package it and sell it and thousands or millions have read it, they internalize it and becomes somewhat theirs as well. I think there is a certain moral responsibility to respect that fact. "I made it, I can destroy it" works for a while... but then the created becomes tied to others, not just the creator, and there's a certain insensitivity in not recognizing that.
Not saying OSC crossed that line here, necessarily, but enough creators have done so that it leaves me a little sensitive... I'd certainly prefer it if he'd just leave written works stay writ, I wouldn't say it was *wrong*, but I don't have to like it either.
Posted by Blayne Bradley (Member # 8565) on :
Ender Shot First.
Posted by Sean Monahan (Member # 9334) on :
quote:Originally posted by Seatarsprayan: On page 279 I think (don't have my copy at hand right now) we are in one character's point of view, while he speaks to his mother, and she disagrees, and expresses it in the hilarious typo, "Mother shook her heads."
I just read this part too, and laughed out loud, because it is quite conspicuous. The word "heads" is used correctly in the following sentence, so maybe the typesetter just visually stuttered or something.
Posted by Aris Katsaris (Member # 4596) on :
The problem is that (other than the n-word line), most of the changes OSC makes are utterly meaningless.
Tolkien's rewrite of the Hobbit chapter made it fit far more with the huge importance that the ring ended up having in LOTR. And as mentioned: Tolkien even provided an in-story explanation for the two different versions of the story.
But there's no real reason why OSC decided that it was Peter and not Valentine that wanted Ender gone: He just seems to have forgotten his own story, and not cared enough to reread it before writing the new one.
Likewise, there seems no real reason why OSC keeps bringing back characters like Graff and Rackham both in prequels and sequels even when they aren't needed -- and even when they mess up the timeline of events as recorded in previous books.
"We lied" or "Peter didn't know everything" are still retcons. And I wouldn't mind if they were useful retcons, but they are largely useless retcons. There was no need for Rackham in "Shadow of the Giant". What does he do in the whole of that story, hand Hot Soup a blowdart? Gee, I guess he was absolutely crucial then. Nobody else could have ever handed Hot Soup a blowdart.
I don't plan to buy any more of OSC's Enderverse stories. In each quartet, it seems to me only the second book was actually well-designed: Speaker for the Dead in Ender's Quartet, Shadow of the Hegemon in Bean's Quarter. Those two books were brilliant, and I still hold them among the best SF books I've ever read. But that very brilliance is what deceived me into buying the horrible sequels that followed them.
The prequels to these (Ender's Game, Ender's Shadow) were needed backstories, perhaps. (And Ender's Game is a very good book in its own right) But the sequels were preachy useless trivialities that destroy many of the characters of the previous books.
In the Ender Quartet they are essentially OSC babbling about a random assortment of half-stewed ideas and not very well-integrated ones at that (the aiuas, the Edge-Center division of civilisations, the search for the center of power in the galaxy, the Godspoken).
And in the last of the two Bean Quartet books, the trivialization of the forces needed to overthrow any government (China's, the Caliphate's, FPE's) makes this ludicrous to accept for me. So Achilles managed to overthrow the FPE from the inside, because the monitoring program had a bug? Han Tzu overthrow China's government, because the previous president was stupid enough to bring untrustworthy guards with him?
When has any government ever been overthrown in as stupid a fashion as we see in Shadow Puppets or Shadow of the Giant?
And, Peter, one of the most ambitious and driven characters ever, needs his parents to pull him out of bed?
N-word, PLEASE.
Posted by Seatarsprayan (Member # 7634) on :
quote:He just seems to have forgotten his own story, and not cared enough to reread it before writing the new one.
Well, yeah. :-( I hate to be rude on OSC's own message board, but I also can't help thinking, how hard is it to reread these books and take some notes? I understand that people here will know his books better than he does, he wrote them once, and we reread them several times, so more details stick in our minds. I get that. But when writing a new book, why not go back and reread the others? Each book only takes a few hours, just stop watching American Idol and he'd have all the time he needed.
The result of not rereading his own work is that contradictions creep in that could have been avoided, and the older works then "need" to be rewritten to accommodate them...
Retcons are one thing, and should generally be avoided if possible. Actually going back and changing the original story is another thing entirely.
SPOILERS
Another retcon: in Ender in Exile, it's revealed Ender killed Stilson because he was wearing steel-toed shoes. What? Why would they have insisted a six-year old wear steel-toed shoes? That came out of nowhere. I thought it was plenty believable that Stilson died from the original description.
I don't want this to turn into a list of all my problems with the Enderverse. Here's some things I really liked in the latest book:
Ender not being frank with Valentine. Doesn't tell her about the hive queen. Doesn't tell her his plans. I actually liked that because it helped explain why in Xenocide Valentine learns about Jane for the first time. Because Ender doesn't tell her things! It's a little crummy of Ender, but then again Valentine casts herself in a mother role when she shouldn't so it's no wonder he doesn't want to open up to her.
Alessandra's mom turned out to be a horrible mother. Actually I figured she was a pretty bad mother right at the beginning; there are other ways of getting a relative out of your life than bribing them and having your daughter be hungry.
Too bad she couldn't overcome her insanity from being raised by a monster, but she couldn't. I'm glad Alessandra found the strength to get away from her in the end. However I was a little disappointed in Ender for not helping her more. What if she didn't have the strength? She was only fifteen, under her mother's thumb her whole life. It's SCARY to be on your own, and abused people tend to cling to their abusers because it's all they know. Would he really have let her go with her mother as her "free choice"? I don't mean force her to stay, but a little more convincing and advice might have been useful. I mean it did work what he did, but it came so close.
Admiral Morgan, what a creep! Why did the IF send that guy? How does a guy get to be an Admiral but decide he'll disobey orders and usurp authority? But power-hungry people can do strange things, and it was clear he was adept at the mental gymnastics necessary to rationalize anything he wanted to do.
I enjoyed the way Ender played him and then handed him that note. But I don't know why they didn't send Ender some marines as personal bodyguard or something. I mean, if Ender hadn't played things the way he did, was there still much chance of Morgan winning? Would the marines under his command really have gone along with "forcibly place the hero of mankind in stasis"?