*emerges from haze*

[sub_divided]

It's too bad tarigwaemir is on livejournal sabbatical right now, because she would totally flip over this Hikaru no Go / Ender's Game crossover by flonnebonne (recced by issen4). OMG GENIUS. Here is some background so that you can read the fic without having read Ender's Game, because it is worth reading just for the reversal of roles between Shindou and Touya:


Orson Scott Card recently said he'd never let anyone make his book Ender's Game into a movie unless the movie was at least as good as Serenity. I guess he must have found some confidence, then, because Warner Bros is turning this book, and another called Ender's Shadow that takes place at the same time from the POV of a minor character, into a movie. I recently got into an argument with a friend about this movie: he said the most important thing would be how good the special effects were -- if they were good enough to be unnoticeable, except he used Star Wars Episode III as an example ugh -- whereas in my head an Ender's game movie looks more like the cover art, with big clunky green-lines-on-black computer screens. Like the movie Mind Games, both because the theme is similar (war as a game played by genius children) and because Card is SO EIGHTIES. I don't just mean the publication date, I mean everything about his books is Eighties.

I'm losing track of my point. Before I get back to it, let me just say that Ender's Game was always my least favorite book in the Ender series; it's also always been Card's most popular, and it will also make a really good movie. The reason for all three of these things is the same reason:

Ender's Game is not just about children, it is not juct written from a child's perspective, it is A CHILD'S STORY. One little boy is taken away from home and sent to a government-sponsored space station where he plays mock battles with other little children. There is a great deal of psychological drama, most of it intended by the behavioral scientists running the space station (Battle School) but some of it outside the scope of the program, like when a few very twisted individuals get away with more than they should be getting with. This happens because Battle School is an environment that encourages cruelty, and because sometimes the adults in charge underestimate the children EVEN THOUGH the whole point is that children can be really scary, and can be molded into scarily good military strategists.

In the end Ender saves the world, maybe. I won't give it away. The School is continuing a war against a race of bug-like aliens from the other end of the galaxy, who almost succeeded in wiping out humainity a few years ago but who were repelled by a single genius strategist -- hence the government's attempt to manufacture another.

Okay, now go read.

(Unrelated, but those of you who are chronic slashers: have you ever been reading something you know wasn't intended as slash, and seen possibilities, and wished you hadn't seen them? Like, "I know I used to be able to read things like this without drawing conclusions or seeing subtext and I WANT TO GO BACK TO THAT TIME"? When you're reading the lives of Saint Declan and Saint Ailbhe, for example. (blasphemy!)

If you answered yes then you know how I feel about class conflict. I swear I see it everywhere, and it's driving me crazy. )