Ender's Game/Trivia


 * Defictionalization: The job description for a Speaker for the Dead is to do historical and narrative research into the dead person's life, and then get up at the funeral and tell the deceased's life story-as they would've told it. OSC reports that people have started to do this in Real Life, and that it is just as powerful as you might imagine.
 * Card allegedly wants someone to speak at his funeral.
 * Executive Meddling:
 * Ender's Shadow was originally titled "Urchin". That title was re-included as that of the first chapter.
 * An accidental example: Card intended for only Speaker For the Dead and Ender's Game to be written. His agent accidentally pitched them as "the Ender trilogy", and Card decided to use the opening to write Xenocide.
 * Science Marches On: Notably averted in the remarkably accurate descriptions of tablet-sized computers, the Internet and the blogosphere, in a book written before the creation of the World Wide Web. Although, as xkcd points out, it missed the mark on the blogosphere in terms of scale if nothing else.
 * Xenology. In part thanks books like this, the xenologer's assumption would scarcely be considered at all. In fact, even the study of the piggies would probably be avoided, given advances in remote probes.
 * What Could Have Been: The Shadow books were originally going to be written by different authors, each centering on a different member of Ender's friends.
 * Word of God: In one interview on National Review, Card says that he was inspired by Bruce Catton's histories of the American Civil War and that part of the message was that war means sacrificing the innocence of young people for the Greater Good and that it is the duty of the old to make sure their civilization is worth it.