My argument is that an explanation is never given. Elqui SEEMS to answer that. Porteiro, you seem to think that because the Soviets collapsed in reality, OSC must offer no explanation for what jappened in the Enderverse. The Enderverse may try to stay 'realistic', but in the Enderverse, the Soviet Union was around 2165, and apparently so was the Warsaw pact some time after that. I don't find that very realistic.
Posts: 2121 | Registered: Oct 2005
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OK, I went and did a search for all mentions of the Soviet Union in Ender's Game and the Shadow series.
There are only two references to the Soviets in all the books. It's never mentioned in Ender's Game, and we've got the following two quotes from Ender's Shadow and Shadow of the Hegemon:
quote:So it was Russia that forced the creation of the New Warsaw Pact, bringing its effective borders back to the peak of Soviet power -- and beyond, for this time Greece was its ally, and an intimidated Turkey was neutralized.
quote:"This is precisely how nations rise and fall," said Bean. "France in 1940. Napoleon remaking the map of Europe in the early 1800s, creating kingdoms so his brothers would have someplace to rule. The victors in World War I, cutting up kingdoms and drawing insane lines on the map that would lead to war again and again. The Japanese conquest of most of the western Pacific in December of 1941. The collapse of the Soviet Empire in 1989. Events can be sudden indeed."
----- In Ender's Game, the Soviet Union is never mentioned. It just talks about Russia and the Warsaw Pact. Here's a sample quote:
quote: You know Russia? Big empire? Warsaw Pact? Rulers of Eurasia from the Netherlands to Pakistan?
In the Shadow series, it no longer talks about the Warsaw Pact, it talks about the New Warsaw Pact, like in the first quote in this post.
Again, this was changed because the possible future from 2004 is different from the possible future from 1984. The world changed, and OSC changed his book as a result.
In Ender's Game, it talked about the Warsaw Pact. But in the Shadow series, it basically pretends that it had been talking about the New Warsaw Pact, which OSC probably invented himself to make it as consistent as possible with Ender's Game and a possible future.
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All absolutely excellent superlative points that end this argument, porteiro. There's just ONE problem. The Soviets ARE mentioned in Ender's Game. I don't own the book , so I can't point out the page, but they ARE mentioned.
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But of course, since in the copy of EG I read in Border's was new, that just brings up a new inconsistency: Soviets according to shadow series collapsed in 1989, but in EG still currently around. This may be explained by the new Warsaw pact though.
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Oh, I don't think that was about the Russians. From the way it was used, it seemed more likely that they were talking about the new kid on the geo-polical block, South Vietnam, the citizens of which were referred to as SoViets.
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It is enough to make me glad I've never wanted to be an author, if readers are going to be so picky over things I would have no control over -- like knowing the future.
Just like one of my favorite books of all time is Alas, Babylon. And I still re-read it, even though I know that Russia is no longer our primary enemy, and that our weapons arsenal is much different than in WWII. However, I realize this was the world as the author knew it at the time it was written, so in writing futuristically, he kept with that premise.
posted
I love Heinlein's book Have Space Suit, Will Travel. It takes place in a future where lunar travel is common enough that the rich can vacation up there. The great thing though is that everything is still calculated with a slide rule.
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Except if our copies don't say "Soviets": I checked my 1991 paperback edition (complete with an introduction explaining that OSC's editors wanted him to write something for the new hardback...hmmm) and flipped to the end of Ch. 14, Ender's Teacher, to where they tell him the truth and we get to deal with the aftermath. Mazer refers to "the Warsaw Pact" and "the Russians" a lot--"'Americans claiming the Warsaw Pact is about to attack, and the Russians are saying the same thing about the Hegemon...All of them want you. The greatest military leader in history, they want you to lead their armies. The Americans. The Hegemon. Everybody but the Warsaw Pact, and they want you dead.'" Then when Alai comes in, he talks about "all the Warsaw Pact people" and "Some of the Russians," and a little while later Petra updates Ender on the situation of the I.F. and what the Locke Proposal is: "'It's very complicated, but what it means here is that the I.F. will stay in existence, but without the Warsaw Pact in it. So the Warsaw Pact marines are going home. I think Russia agreed to it because they're facing a revolt of the Islamic States.'" I can imagine some of the "Russia" references coming from "Soviet" references in earlier editions, though...which would indicate that it's not an inconsistency because it got edited to fit into the revised situation. The latest version is the correct one, except when they call "Battle School" "Battleschool" and other things like that. I'd only have considered it a possible continuity error if "Soviet" had been left in all the later versions--and only possibly, because I'm sure we can all come up with reasons why they'd all have called Russians Soviets. (Remember, you have to be xenophobic to get to a high position in the I.F., Graff said, so maybe all the people letting in literature to Battle School weren't too concerned about going around talking about the Russians instead of the Soviets in old documents they let the Battle School kids read, so everyone who grew up in it was used to referring to Russians as Soviets, including Mazer, and then later in the series the people talking about them had been exposed to more information in the course of their information-harvesting back on Earth. By the way, in earlier versions of the book, did the Peter-Valentine conversations talk about the Russians, or the Soviets?)
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Oh, does it really does use the word Soviets in the original Ender's Game? That makes sense that he would edit it to Warsaw Pact later.
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, so I can't point out the page, but they ARE mentioned.
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