Posted on 03/20/2012 12:36:10 PM PDT by fremont_steve
In South Carolina a teacher has been placed on administrative leave for reading excerpts of Orson Scott Card’s science fiction classic Ender’s Game to his middle school students.
(Excerpt) Read more at forbes.com ...
i concur this book is not pornographic except to the left. they probably thing STARSHIPP TROOPERS is pornographics. what do they think 14 year olds see on the interent? and why is the teacher reading it it to the class.
using this same logic i think anything by that commie bastard howard zinn is pornographic.
Forget pornographic. I can’t for the life of me figure out what the “profanity” is that they would object to. I guess there must have been some language in there, but I’ve read the book once, and listened to it on tape twice, and I don’t remember anything to be offended at.
In fact, I have either read or listened to the entire Ender’s series at least twice, and there is hardly anything at all sexual, and the violence is contained and entirely appropriate for the story. And I don’t remember any language issues, or thematic problems either.
Now, these are not religious books, nor do I find much religious allegory. I’d say they lean a bit toward humanist, although Catholicism plays a part in many of the books in the series (as it does in another good book by Card, “Empire” and the sequel “Hidden Empire”).
I wouldn’t look to these books for christian themes. The main character is agnostic at best. But I even found the bizarre “theology” of the latter books to be interesting. If you read SciFi to be put in an alternative reality, these books do that well.
Card is perhaps the most uneven author I’ve ever read.
Some of his stuff, such as Ender’s Game and Tales of Alvin Maker, is innovative and excellent.
Others, even some in the two series started by the books above, are almost unreadable.
His SF retelling of the story of the Book of Mormon, The Homecoming Saga, is atrocious.
Well that eliminates Romney as the author.
I enjoyed Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus.
You had paint, a ladder, and yet you did nothing. That's why we're losing.
I had to stop reading Xenocide because I didn’t want it to spoil the Ender legacy for me.
LOL
Nice to see that it’s likely not Ender’s Game but some other materials that the parent was objecting to.
Some of Card’s stuff has very Mormom themes. Ender’s Game doesn’t. It’s one of the top ten SF novels ever written and probably the best description of brilliant children I’ve read. Card is genius with character and knows a lot about writing (his books on writing are among the best I’ve read) but a lot of his books are kind of lame. Ender’s Game is a classic though.
The movie sucked so bad because the screenplay and director literally threw away every good idea Herbert wrote, and tried to replace them with nonsensical flash. If you haven’t seen the mini-series the Sci-Fi channel made, you missed a much better treatment.
I think the later books in the “Ender” series would be too much for middle-schoolers . . . but “Ender’s Game” is a fine short story (actually I think maybe it’s a novella? can’t recall right now) and a fine book. They *are* pretty rough emotionally, sort of like Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” and I think they might be upsetting to some kids. But I would let my middle-school kid read them.
Similiar in the sense that both get into what it means to be a true warrior, and how the mind is the greatest weapon - and the greatest vulnerability.
In any event, if you read Dune, you MUST read Ender's Game.
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