Mile
Zero

It is never a bad time to remember that Orson Scott Card is a terrible person. But this week, as millions of people will go to theaters to see a movie based on his most famed work (sorry, Lost Boys), it is good to also remind ourselves: Ender's Game is not a good book. It's barely even a bad one. Consider the following three essays, ranked in descending order of plausibility:

• Creating the Innocent Killer, by John Kessel, is a comprehensive debunking of the book's "morality." Kessel details how Card stacks the deck, again and again, so that Ender can do the most incredibly awful things but still be a "good" person.
• Kessel mentions Sympathy for the Superman, by Elaine Radford, which notes a wide range of similarities between Ender and Hitler, and theorizes that the original trilogy was meant to be a "gotcha" on his audience.
• Finally, Roger Williams writes a conspiracy theory of his own: that Card didn't even write the original books.

Williams' story is unlikely, I think, but it's too much fun not to mention (and for a long time, his account was the only place you could read about the Nazi connection). Radford makes a stronger case, but chances are much of Ender's similarity to Hitler is just coincidence: Ender ends up on a planet of Brazilians because Card is a hack who went on Mormon mission to Brazil as a young adult, he's a misogynist because his author is one, and he justifies his genocide with a lot of blather about "intention" because Card chickened out on the clear implication of the first book: that his protagonist really was a psychopath that wiped out an entire civilization based on an elaborate self-deception.

It's Kessel's essay that's been the most quoted over the years, and for good reason. It's a brutal deconstruction of the tropes used to build Ender's Game, and ends in a deft examination of why the book remains so popular:

It offers revenge without guilt. If you ever as a child felt unloved, if you ever feared that at some level you might deserve any abuse you suffered, Ender’s story tells you that you do not. In your soul, you are good. You are specially gifted, and better than anyone else. Your mistreatment is the evidence of your gifts. You are morally superior. Your turn will come, and then you may severely punish others, yet remain blameless. You are the hero.

Ender never loses a single battle, even when every circumstance is stacked against him. And in the end, as he wanders the lonely universe dispensing compassion for the undeserving who think him evil, he can feel sorry for himself at the same time he knows he is twice over a savior of the entire human race.

God, how I would have loved this book in seventh grade! It’s almost as good as having a nuclear device.

Like a lot of people, I did have this book in seventh grade (or earlier — I'm pretty sure I read it while attending junior high in Indiana). And I did love it as a kid, for most of the reasons that Kessel states: I was a bright kid who didn't have a lot of friends, felt persecuted and misunderstood, and struggled to find a way to express those feelings. Eventually, I grew up. Looking back on it, Ender's Game didn't really do any harm — like a lot of kids, I wasn't actually reading that critically. It's just kind of embarrassing now, and I definitely don't want to go to a theater and relive it.

Feeling embarrassed by your childhood reading material is a common rite of passage for many people, and science fiction readers probably more than others. Jo Walton refers to this as the Suck Fairy. It's tempting, when this happens, to wish we could go back in time and take these books off the shelves — or stop readers now from encountering them in the first place — but it's probably a better idea to foster discussion (a happy side effect of an active adult readership for "young adult" titles) or have alternatives ready on hand.

Recently I re-read another beloved book from my childhood: The Westing Game by Ellen Raskin. If you haven't taken a look at it lately, you really should. Apart from the titles, the two books have aged in radically different ways — in fact, it's probably better now than it was then. I remember reading it mostly as a puzzle: first to solve it, and then again to appreciate the little clues that Raskin works in. But as for the warmth, the sympathetic characterization, and most of all the humor (seriously, it's an uproariously funny book): I missed out on all of these things when I was a precocious youngster identifying with Turtle and her shin-kicking ways, just like I missed Ender's fascist tendencies.

And so ultimately, I'm not worried about young people reading Ender's Game and being influenced for the worse, because I suspect that what they take from it is not what Card actually wants them. It's sometimes difficult — but also crucial — to remember that the reader creates the story while reading, almost as much as the author does. Should we speak out against hateful works, and try not to give money to hatemongers? Sure. Will I be going to see Ender's Game at the local cinema? Definitely not. But I'll always understand people who have a soft spot for it anyway. Despite my bravado, despite the fact that I dislike everything it has come to stand for, I'm one of them, and I'm not going to let Card make me feel bad about that.