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» Hatrack River Forum » Active Forums » Discussions About Orson Scott Card » War of Gifts is fantastic!! (Page 2)

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Author Topic: War of Gifts is fantastic!!
El JT de Spang
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quote:
Originally posted by DDDaysh:
If you went into reading it expecting it to BE a novel, you will be disappointed.

Exactly. I think I read the whole thing in about 20 minutes. It was entertaining, but if it disappeared from the series it wouldn't negatively impact my enjoyment of it.

There've been a few Ender stories in IGMS that I enjoyed more than this one. OSC seems to be developing secondary characters in all of his enderverse short stories. My guess is that he doesn't want to deprive himself of any material that he might use in the already under contract enderverse novels, so he stays away from existing storylines entirely.

What he's actually doing, though, is setting up the world perfectly for other writers. Wouldn't it be nice if the Ender movie is a slam dunk success and it became profitable to open the universe to other writers (a la Star Wars).

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DDDaysh
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I guess the other way I thought about the story (to keep minor inconsistencies from bugging me) was to believe it was set in the "battle school universe" but wasn't actually part of the Ender's Game story line... sorta like an "alternate way things MIGHT have happened" as opposed to something that really HAD happened and just didn't get reported in Ender's Game.

If you tried to fit it truly into the story, the little things would have driven you nuts...

1) Socks - as everyone mentioned, Alai/Ender said they didn't wear socks anymore.

2) Zeck being in an army only a year after he was taken. According to Ender's Game, Ender was in his launch group & Salamander longer than that. Thus, if Zeck wasn't in Ender's launch group, he coudn't have been in an army for long enough to have a "reputation".... all the moreso because Army's only went into battle every two weeks.

3) Crazy Tom could NOT have been in Rat Army when Ender joined. Ender specifically commented on how lucky he was that all of his soldiers were younger than him when he got Dragon. If Crazy Tom was younger than Ender, then Ender couldn't be surprisingly young to Dink.

4) In Ender's Game Dink talks about playing with his older brother "in the cooridoors". Thus, going from "house to house" doesn't really make sense when he's thinking about what he "might have been doing". He also couldn't have really expected to have any younger brothers and/or sisters to make the holiday good for.

5) This wasn't REALLY inconsistant, but it made me wonder. If Muslim students were praying, wouldn't you have expected Alai to be among some of the most devout? Yet there isn't any mention of Alai getting arrested, and he was allowed to become a commander later - hmmmm...


If you really try to look for them, you will find problems everywhere. The universe is simply too elaborate to have so many stories that move back and forth between time for there not to be. Trying to add short stories with limitted space into it would always be problematic. It's much easier to let the story just "slide over the surface" of the "Enderverse" instead of actually tryong to squeeze it into an existing story line.

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sylvrdragon
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DDDaysh: You've probably read EG more recently than I have, but I might have something that saves point 3. Rat Army wasn't Ender's first army. Dink may have been surprised by Ender's Age when he joined Salamander rather than Rat. Of course, I can't remember off-hand how long Ender was in Salamander, so I could be off.

If we assume Ender started in Salamander right after they had a battle, that gives him 2 weeks in before the first battle when he couldn't shoot. Then another 2 weeks till the battle where he fired against orders. I don't remember if it mentions whether he got out right after that (my last loaned out copy never made it back home, I have to go get another next time I'm out...) but I DO know that he still had his near-perfect record when he got into Rat (Rose mentions it), so if he DID have battles after that, he didn't do anything.

If those were his only 2 games, then we can give Ender 6 weeks into Salamander if we go the far end of conservative. Of course, if EG doesn't say that he was transfered right before his next battle, then it stands that he MIGHT have been in Salamander for long enough for the next group of Launchies to kick Crazy Tom up to Rat. After all, I don't think Tom was MUCH younger than Ender, maybe only a matter of weeks. He was recruited into Dragon from the "Veteran" list after all.

Also, it could be that Ender was the youngest sent to Battle school THUS FAR. Perhaps after him, they started sending MORE kids up early (well... we KNOW they did with Bean, but maybe it was more wide spread than that).

As for point 2, he must have skipped a good amount of Launchy time. In his "Talk" with Ender, he says he's almost 9. Graff says he's been there "Nearly a year". If Zeck came up at 8, then maybe they didn't feel the need for him to go the full run as a Launchy.

For point 1 (sorry if I'm going backward, I'm doing em in the order I think of em, lol), maybe it's only launchies that don't have Socks. Maybe they get em when they join an Army? (Long shot, but possible, and enough to save continuity)

For point 4, I think when it was originally written, OSC was looking back on the original story of Ender's Game, in which Battle School was on Earth, but a more developed and futuristic version where everything was steel corridors and whatnot. I think I recall something mentioned about using real wood, as though it was a real luxury. For continuity's sake, you could say that the Corridors were referring to School?

Of course... it's much more likely that OSC is only human and didn't see the continuity errors till it was too late (if ever). None of them are really important to "A War of Gifts", so I'm sure he would have changed them if he'd noticed.

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Szymon
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Ive read the book (a 'booklet' more like) twice already, took me about two hours:p The book wouldnt have to be placed in Enderverse to keep its meaning but is nontheless a matching piece of it. Sociological and philosophical, as always. I liked it very much, made me think a bit. And that means the book was good:)
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DDDaysh
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Oh, I personally loved it. I laughed through most of the Dink parts. It sure made the afternoon at work go alot faster that day.
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Marek
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quote:
Originally posted by DDDaysh:

5) This wasn't REALLY inconsistant, but it made me wonder. If Muslim students were praying, wouldn't you have expected Alai to be among some of the most devout? Yet there isn't any mention of Alai getting arrested, and he was allowed to become a commander later - hmmmm...

I don't recall any indication that Alai was particularly religouse, aside from the being the Calif later, which I thaught was mostly because of his leadership ability not his faith. I know you said it wasn't a big inconsistentancy, but you clearly know/ recall Ender's Game better than I do, so why would Alai be one of the most devout?
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DDDaysh
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Only because it seems that if he IS going to accept being Calif later, he would be quite devout. It is really hard to imagine someone taking a religious role of that extremity later in life that wouldn't have been fervent as a boy... though not impossible.
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airmanfour
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I found the "only Ender can take care of this" a little flat. And I didn't think Ender from War of Gifts was very similar to Ender's Game Ender.

But since OSC does put words together so well, I'm not going to go crazy on his character continuity.

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C3PO the Dragon Slayer
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The Ender in Ender's Game didn't think much at all about religion; the Hegemony suppressed such practices. The Ender in Ender's Game was chosen because he could know someone else well enough to love them, and this is the skill he uses to give his gift to Zeck. Seeing Graff thought very highly, and for good reason, of Ender, I suppose it isn't much of a leap at all for him to propose that Ender would be the best man to help Zeck.

EDIT: Uff da typos [Grumble]

[ January 30, 2008, 06:24 PM: Message edited by: C3PO the Dragon Slayer ]

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