The War of the Worlds and Ender’s Game – October CC Book Club Selection

[Mary13]

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@mathmom

As I was reading Wells I thought the artillery guy the most interesting character. Our narrator seems pretty hopeless - a good observer, but he doesn’t do a thing - and his motives are hazy to me.

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<p>Yes and yes. I loved the artillery man and his monologue was a highlight of the book for me. In the artillery man’s speech, H.G. Wells slyly lays the foundation for the future world he creates in The Time Machine. Those of you who have read it (or seen it) will recognize the Eloi and the Morlocks. He predicts the Eloi when he discusses those people who are weak and spiritless: </p>

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“Well, the Martians will be a just a godsend to these. Nice roomy cages, fattening food, careful breeding, no worry. After a week or so chasing about the fields and lands on empty stomachs, they’ll come and be caught cheerful. They’ll be quite glad after a bit. They’ll wonder what people did before there were Martians to take care of them” (p. 149).

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<p>And he predicts the Morlocks when he discusses those with the brains and determination to survive:</p>

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“You see, how I mean to live is underground. I’ve been thinking about the drains. Of course those who don’t know drains think horrible things; but under this London are miles and miles—hundreds of miles—and a few days rain and London empty will leave them sweet and clean. The main drains are big enough and airy enough for anyone. Then there’s cellars, vaults, stores, from which bolting passages may be made to the drains. And the railway tunnels and subways. Eh? You begin to see?” (p. 151)

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<p>The artillery man shares the Time Traveller’s theory that, “There is no intelligence where there is no change and no need of change. Only those animals partake of intelligence that have a huge variety of needs and dangers.” The artillery man, however, puts it more succinctly: “It’s the man that keeps on thinking comes through” (p. 147).</p>

<p>I realize that referencing The Time Machine is another literary digression, but as ignatius made clear by drawing in Things Fall Apart and Saint Maybe, it’s difficult to read these books (or any books) as isolated works. Those universal themes just keep reappearing.</p>

<p>As for the nameless narrator in The War of the Worlds, I thought that his blandness and his lack of a name were deliberate, in order to make him Everyman. He’s a bit of a blank slate, so that we the readers can more easily imagine ourselves in the same predicament. His experience could be ours.</p>

<p>gouf78 and musicprnt – thank you for your posts – so much to reflect on!</p>

[PATheaterMom]

<p>I had a difficult time getting through Ender’s Game. I think it was most difficult for me to get through all the battle game scenes. I found I was more drawn in by Valentine and Peter’s attempt to influence the world through their blogging.
War of the Worlds was much more interesting to me. I could feel the main character’s desperation and fascination with the aliens.</p>

[Mary13]

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@PATheaterMom

War of the Worlds was much more interesting to me. I could feel the main character’s desperation and fascination with the aliens.

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<p>Same here. The narrator’s journey reminded me more of apocalyptic fiction than sci-fi. Yes, there’s an overlap, but you know what I mean –The War of the Worlds isn’t so much Star Wars as it is The Road: the destroyed landscape, the narrator’s near-starvation, the frightened and filthy people he encounters, the skeletons at the side of the road, picked clean – it all had the same haunting quality as Cormac McCarthy’s book, with its desolate landscape and its survivors unsure of whom to trust and likely as not to end up as the dinner of a grotesque enemy.</p>

<p>That’s my kind of dystopia. :)</p>

[ignatius]

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@musicprnt

What is also interesting is that something often considered ‘inconsequential’, turns out to be valuable. In Ender’s game, the Aliens are defeated by a child (who interestingly thinks he is playing a game, in part because a child, unlike an adult, might have second thoughts about wiping out a civilization), and children are often dismissed as being inconsequential, not adults, not able to ‘be useful’. In War of the Worlds, the Martians are brought down by a microbe/bacteria, something so small we cannot see it, they are defeated, as are the Buggers, by something not consequential.</p>

<p>[…]</p>

<p>There are also critiques of class based politics in both books. In War of the Worlds, you see characters, even faced with the threat of annihilation, clinging onto ideas of class in society in terms of how people interact , and it isn’t until it becomes so desperate for the humans that class lines break down. In Ender, the state limits reproduction to basically replacement, except for those who are deemed ‘superior’, who can help create more of ‘better’ people, it is another form of class that Card is I believe critiquing. It ends up that Ender does end up being special, not so much for his work in fighting the buggers, but rather in his humanity and insight in being able to communicate with the buggers and seeing them as having the right to exist.

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<p>Two good, good points. I particularly like the first: bacteria defeats the Martians and children defeat the Buggers - unexpected because neither is considered of consequence.</p>

[ignatius]

<p>Mary: If you’re looking for your kind of dystopia, read *The Dog Stars *- Peter Heller. It’s our “one book, one city” for 2013. It’s quite dystopian. I’m about a third into it; it’s good so far. I’m surprised I like it, as I lean toward the Ender’s Game type of science fiction.</p>

<p>Eek, I’ve digressed again. I’m going to bed. I’ll keep on topic tomorrow - maybe.</p>

[Mary13]

<p>^ Thanks for the recommendation, ignatius! It just went on my “to-read” list.</p>

<p>Here’s a not-very-deep question to start the day: Anybody wonder how the three Wiggin children could be the offspring of their seemingly average and clueless parents?</p>

[ariesathena]

<p>I’ve heard of Ender’s Game referred to as a “book for INTJs,” which explains a lot of the love/don’t get it reactions. If ou are used to more overtly emotional writing, then it is hard to see the battle scenes as descriptive of human emotion and social interaction.</p>

[Momofniceguy]

<p>Yes I agree, good points. Both books were great. Nice to find some readers here- who like talking about what they read.</p>

[mathmom]

<p>My edition of Ender’s Game has an introduction, and he talks very much to the point about his writing style. He’s talking about how people seem to fall into two camps of either loving or hating the book:

For one thing, the people that hated it really hated it. The attacks on the novel - and on me - were astonishing. Some of it I expected - I have a master’s degree in literature, and in writing* Ender’s Game* I deliberately avoided all the little literary games and gimmicks that make “fine” writing so impenetrable to the general audience. All the layers of meaning are there to be decoded, if you like to play the game of literary criticism - but if you don’t care to play that game, that’s fine with me. I designed Ender’s Game to be as clear and accessible as any story of mine can possibly be.

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<p>So anyone want to play the game of literary criticism? ;)</p>

[NJTheatreMOM]

<p>I read Ender’s Game a number of years ago, at the urging of my sons. I liked it quite a bit…enough to read a couple of the sequels. </p>

<p>I was fully intending to re-read Ender’s Game for this discussion. But for some reason, I kept procrastinating and procrastinating, and I am ashamed to say that I never did re-read it! :(</p>

<p>I did read War of the Worlds, and am glad I did. It was different from what I expected. I thought it would be much wordier and more Jules Verne-ian. Instead it was an engagingly compact, relatively modern-seeming and very character-oriented story.</p>

<p>The dystopian aspect of War of the Worlds that was mentioned above appealed to me. It was such an intimate story of one person’s imaginings of what would happen if there were technologically sophisticated attacks on his very own neighborhood. I thought it was really rather touching in that regard.</p>

<p>(When I was reading War of the Worlds, I suddenly remembered that I had seen a sort of mediocre Tom Cruise movie that was loosely based on the book. The part I remembered was the character getting trapped in a house with an unpleasant fellow refugee. I think he had his little daughter with him, though, which was different. The movie was also pretty gory and showed the interior of a place where the Martians kept the captured humans they were going to eat.)</p>

<p>War of the Worlds is apparently an offshoot of “invasion literature” which arose when people were beginning to become aware of the potential horrors of mechanized warfare. </p>

<p>[Invasion</a> literature - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia](<a href=“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invasion_literature]Invasion”>Invasion literature - Wikipedia)</p>

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The invasion literature genre became most notable with The Battle of Dorking in 1870s. However, already a century earlier, at France in the 1790s, a mini-boom of invasion stories appeared soon after the French developed the hot-air balloon. Poems and plays depicting armies of balloons headed to England could be found in France, and even America. However it was not until the Prussians used advanced technologies such as breech-loading artillery and railroads to defeat the French in the 1870 War that the imagined fears of invasion by a technologically superior enemy became real.

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<p>It’s amazing to think that H.G. Wells actually lived long enough to be aware of the London Blitz in World War II!</p>

[ignatius]

<p>^^^ Good post. And I agree with:

I did read War of the Worlds, and am glad I did. It was different from what I expected. I thought it would be much wordier and more Jules Verne-ian. Instead it was an engagingly compact, relatively modern-seeming and very character-oriented story.

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<p>mathmom: I have that same edition with the OSC introduction. You start (the game of literay criticism) and I’m sure others will follow.</p>

<p>Orson Scott Card also wrote the introduction in my copy of The War of the Worlds. In it he discusses British Imperialism (one of myriad topics) and the role endemic African diseases played in thwarting conquerors for more than three centuries. Wells’ uses that knowledge in WotW to thwart the Martian invasion.</p>

[mathmom]

<p>I too was surprised by the spareness of H G Well’s prose. I’m not sure if I’ve actually read any Verne, I think I’ve tried and found it too tiresome to finish. I’m not sure I’d really call it character-oriented. Very interesting that Well’s may have been inspired by the British experience with tropical diseases. </p>

<p>I’m not much of a hand at literary criticism, but I have thought a bit about who reads sci fi and what it’s appeal is. The first sci fi I remember reading were short story collections that belonged to my grandfather. Most of them were sort of “What ifs”. Very short with some little twist. A classic of this genre is Asimov’s story “Nightfall”, about a planet with six suns, that hardly ever experiences darkness. In the story at least characters are not important. I enjoy these stories, but at novel length I am interested in characters. In fact, I have a really hard time reading anything if I don’t like at least some of the characters. </p>

<p>I’m pretty impatient with literary games (though for some reason, I like the same games in movies). So stories told backwards, too much symbolism, no quotation marks that are supposed to give extra closeness, using the second person all really really irritate me. I do appreciate style (I find Dan Brown’s writing excruciatingly bad though the plots have been annoyingly compelling, I read a whole lot of Henry James before I got tired of page long sentences, I love the way *Kite Runner *and Atonement are written beyond the plot.) I’ve never read Joyce, and only one story of Faulker.</p>

<p>Anyway, all that to say, I appreciate the spareness of Card’s prose. I think it is more compelling because it is so simple. It is sometimes surprising what isn’t described. For example, after seeing the movie trailer I thought, that is not at all the way I imagined the battle rooms. For me they are like giant white squash courts. I asked my son what he had imagined - and he’d thought they’d be black like space. I looked to see if they are described at all, and except for the door location, the fact that there are handholds on the walls, and a “gate”, and a little bit about the stars, we know nothing about them. He really lets you imagine what you want. </p>

<p>I spent last weekend arguing with my son who happened to be home about the way English teachers teach literature. We were talking about symbolism (what if the author says there isn’t any - should we believe him?) and what historical insights you can gain (none says son, it’s only one author’s point of view - i.e. don’t read Gatsby to learn about the Jazz Age.) Anyway, I thought it was interesting Card says the literary stuff is there if you go looking for it.</p>

<p>Like Ignatius, you are going to have to forgive me for bringing up other books and stories!</p>

[celesteroberts]

<p>mary13, In the first book clues are rather subtle, but as you read more books of the series, it becomes apparent that the parents are not as clueless as they seem. It’s an elaborate act.</p>

[mathmom]

<p>^I always thought that he did that because he realized they didn’t really work as characters in the first book. I don’t think it was planned ahead of time, but you never know!</p>

[mathmom]

<p>Oh here’s a bit of literary criticisim I thought interesting - regarding the role of fairy tales in the book: [Fairy</a> Tales in Ender’s Game](<a href=“Ender's Game Analysis | Shmoop”>Ender's Game Analysis | Shmoop)</p>

[musicprnt]

<p>“Oh there you are - I knew you’d be here” …c’mon, these are British people, of course they don’t make a big scene, public displays of affection and such not allowed. </p>

<p>It is interesting someone talked about invasion fiction, when the book was written, in 1898, we think of it as the gilded age now, a so called golden time before WWI, but there was a lot of anxiety in the times as well (Barbara Tuchman’s classic “The Proud Tower” is an amazing look at the times). There were arms buildups in place, and with the reunification of Germany and its smashing victory in the Franco-Prussian war (which no one expected), there were major fears of German imperialism and militarism, not to mention an arms race in naval technology, with dreadnaughts, heavy artillery and such building up. So it isn’t surprising if invasion fears spawned literature like that, I suspect Wells, being as tuned into the times as he was, saw what was happening and it influenced the book. Keep in mind that Wells was not writing SF in the same vein as Verne, he didn’t care about the technical nits as Verne was (in Verne’s book "From the earth to the moon’ he proposes a way to shoot a huge artillery shell to propel people to the moon, but in the name of scientific accuracy has a character describe, correctly, why it would never work, at least in terms of people being shot to the moon that way). His was about social commentary using science fiction as a medium.</p>

<p>As far as Card’s comments about literary writing, with deep meaning and so forth, I tend to like simply writing, even if I don’t do it myself. I personally consider Hemingway to be one of the greatest writers in the English language, not because of his content, but his style, he uses simple words but writes powerfully with them. The whole literary criticism approach to things generally makes me cold, while I appreciate trying to figure out what the author means, as with this discussion, I also find a lot of the criticism angle to ‘great literature’ to be quite pompous and full of itself. I also loved Mark Twain’s introduction to Huck Finn , where he says "PERSONS attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.</p>

<p>BY ORDER OF THE AUTHOR, Per G.G., Chief of Ordnance" (Twain also said of “Great Books” that “Great books are the books that everyone thinks they should read, but no one wants to”. </p>

<p>With Ender’s parents, I think the answer is probably twofold. Having read the follow on books, it is apparent they aren’t so ordinary, but rather that they may have hid what they were to try and keep themselves from being used by the government, and maybe protect their family. More importantly, in real life, ordinary people can spawn geniuses or those who do incredible things, a lot of the time the great have come from pretty ordinary backgrounds:).</p>

[Hunt]

<p>I’m in the camp of those who don’t care for Ender’s Game. In my opinion, it suffers in comparison to Heinlein’s juvenile and semi-juvenile novels, like Starship Troopers. Heinlein’s books have their problems as well, but they feature more memorable characters and situations, in my opinion. Ender’s Game relies too much on a big twist that isn’t really all that surprising.</p>

[NJTheatreMOM]

<p>I’m a sucker for bildungsromans…stories of journeys to self-realization. That aspect of Ender’s Game is what I liked best.</p>

[gouf78]

<p>I don’t think Ender’s Game relies on a twist. The story is more about social order and who gets to use whom. It’s Ender’s battle with himself as to whether he’s a good person or not. It’s a psychological battle not a physical one. The final battle’s “twist” ending is only one more puzzle piece–would Ender have participated in it and done as well if he’d known the truth?</p>

<p>As to Ender’s parents–after three kids no matter how bright you are things go a little dim…Hopefully I’m a bit smarter than my kids tend to think I am. I never thought of Ender’s parents as dumber than their kids at any point–only caught in situations of none of their doing. Did I miss something?</p>

<p>I’ve always loved sci-fi. I think it allows for a total psych story (lost in space, dead worlds etc) without having to worry about the details of real life. Fun “what-if” stories that can put the characters in extreme positions.</p>

[VAMom2015]

<p>My first thought on reading WOTW was “how did Orson Welles manage to start such a panic with this book?” As others have said the narrator is quite dry and giving observations and somewhat detached from the horrors. We get the idea, but not the intensity of the situation from his commentary. So how did this cause actual panic when heard on radio–I guess I need to go research that.</p>

<p>I enjoyed Ender’s Game but really didn’t understand Peter. He’s made out to be a monster, megalomaniac, and unredeemable when he is dealing with Ender (and I believed that he could and would kill him given the chance). It seems even after the war that Val keeps Ender away from Peter so Peter doesn’t destroy Ender. So how does Peter not destroy Earth with these same flaws? I was expecting that. Maybe because he used Val to be the more extreme one in the blogging and he took on the more reasonable role that he actually learned and changed? I find this somewhat hard to believe because of how Val made sure Peter could never get to Ender. </p>

<p>I enjoyed reading how Ender used knowledge, compassion, trust and power together to make everyone better fighters. He is the ultimate leader, especially since he doesn’t see himself as such. I knew they were building up to him destroying the enemy without knowing he was doing it, since he never wants to kill/hurt anyone. </p>

<p>I don’t understand how everyone was doing everything from a distance. Are we to assume that all the starships and fighters were unmanned–and commanded from a distance? How did they not lose any of his friends in the battle–who was actually flying the ships. I didn’t understand that part. </p>

<p>I agree with others that in WOTW the narrator would not be so concerned with returning the horse and cart that they would abandon their family. Of course he couldn’t have been the observer he was with his wife in tow (especially in the time the book was written). I think that was more a nod to the soldier off at war wanting to get home to his family. </p>

<p>I thought at times in Ender’s Game that although they were training for the buggers, that somehow it could have swapped to the terrestrial enemy of the Russians since the brother and sister were working at breaking down the current peace.</p>