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...and one of the professors said that somewhere on Hatrack, OSC mentions that Ender was "genetically engineered." She, and everyone else, disagreed, and said "No he wasn't!" Now, I'm a loyal Hatracker, and I haven't seen it on the site, nor had one of the other guys that was there. If anyone happens to know where this is, or if it doesn't exist, let me know.
However, I'm only in high school, so I don't get to see this professor at all. Maybe at one of the next lectures on EG (Monday, Oct 4), I can either A) Concede the point or B) Rub it in her face Posts: 206 | Registered: Jun 2005
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He was only "engineered" in the sense that dogs are "engineered", in that there was scheming done to get Ender's parents together to produce genius children.
Posts: 16551 | Registered: Feb 2003
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Ender wasn't-- but Bean was genetically engineered (in a sense); that's mentioned in Ender's Shadow. Perhaps she's thinking of the wrong character.
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Your professor is both right and wrong. Right in the sense that it does say that Ender was genetically enhanced. Wrong in the sense that it wasn't said by Card.
This text comes from the inside flap of the dust jacket of the Hard cover edition, and as most of us know, it's mistaken. Yes, you can say that he was bred due to the I.F.'s interest in his parents (as explained in the short stories "The Polish Boy" and "Teacher's Pest" from the collection titled "First Meetings"), but I doubt that that is what was meant. The people who write the descriptions for the dust jackets or backs of books very often get details wrong, or exaggerate them. I don't know why they just don't let the authors do it themselves.
Posts: 1569 | Registered: Dec 2004
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Yeah, a few (three) of us there were like, "Well, he was kind of 'bred', but not genetically enhanced per se." We had all read the other 8 books (including FM).
Special thanks neo-dragon. She was mistaken, and I wasn't sure, so I'll have to let her know.
JTK -- I doubt it. She was the only lecturer there who had actually read the book BEFORE she knew she was giving a lecture on it. She didn't even have to make notes.
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They don't let authors do flap copy because: Flap copy is about selling the book. Authors are notoriously bad at knowing how to sell their own books. Just as authors tend to want the covers to be faithful illustrations (and yes, that's why I love the cover to Memory of Earth and loathe the covers of all the Speaker trilogy), so they want the flap copy to be a plot summary or a statement of the elements of the story they think are most important, instead of the elements that will entice readers to buy the book.
But the "genetically enhanced" is flat wrong, and irritating, especially when people use the flap copy like Cliff Notes. Ender was "bred" only in the sense that, having noted that the first two children of this marriage were brilliant and very close to what they wanted, the I.F. authorized a third child in order to spin the wheel on a third child being somewhere between the two.
As to whether the I.F. had anything to do with getting Ender's parents together in the first place, I thought that was the father's plan, not the I.F.'s ... or have I once again forgotten some story decision I made as a whim?
Posts: 2005 | Registered: Jul 1999
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First Meetings,The Polish Boy p.57 and Teachers Pest p99-100 first edition hardback. OSC is sufficiently vague that we don't know for absolute certianty whether the IF (Graff) rigged John Paul into Theresa's grad class section or not, but OSC throw a whole bunch of innuendo there, and even does a sneaky reference to Rumplestiltskin in both stories.
AJ (Teachers Pest is one of my all time favorite OSC stories)
Posts: 11265 | Registered: Mar 2002
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I haven't read the novellas in a while, but I do recall there being the suggestion that the I.F. may have wanted to get Theresa and J.P. together because he had already proven his intelligence, and she, in addition to being quite smart herself, was the daughter of some military genius or something, wasn't she? So the two of them possessed just the type of genes they wanted.
Also, the flap text doesn't actually say, "genetically engineered", I believe it says, "the product of a genetic experiment" or something to that effect. So although we've clearly established that it's incorrect, one could pretend that it means his "breeding". Rolling the dice and hoping that he came out 1/2 Peter and 1/2 Val is kind of a genetic experiment, in a way. Yeah, I know, it's still wrong.
And yeah, you should print this page, Genius. You can't get better proof than the author himself saying it's a mistake. Posts: 1569 | Registered: Dec 2004
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Something else that came to me last night in my insomniac state, was that the IF did stipulate that Ender was to be a boy, so there was some means of controlling the gender of the child.
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Actually, they stipulated that Valentine be a girl because they were hoping for Peter-lite. I don't think that they chose a gender for Ender.
Posts: 1569 | Registered: Dec 2004
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the fact that they stipulated that Enderr be a boy IMO is irrelvenet to genetic experimentation as it is already almost possible to choose gender by invetro using invetro testing eggs that are likely ot be boys or girls and onlyt using those, or something like tha. I dont remeber the exact process but it was on the news a few years ago that a college was testing this idea out.
Posts: 26 | Registered: Apr 2005
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