Ender's Game/Trivia

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• 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 that piggies have similar biology to humans (a pivotal part of Speaker for the Dead would scarcely be considered at all. In fact, even the study of the piggies would probably be avoided, given advances in remote probes.
• Technology Marches On: Oh, Speaker for the Dead, let me count the ways:
  • Right at the end of the book, Miro is very impressed by the AI's unique capability of... auto-completion.
  • The fact that the Xenologists have no unobtrusive recording devices. We already have cameras attachable to eye-glasses, shouldn't be too hard to place a couple in their clothes or wherever.
  • Olhado's mechanical eyes aren't quite yet possible, but we can be sure that within five years of the first, very obviously mechanical version that we get, there will be ones that aren't easily distinguished as such from a distance. Also, even today, no one in their right mind would insert the plug in the other eye socket rather than at the side or back of the skull.
    • Olhado mentions that he could have opted for binocular vision instead of the socket, but decided on the latter. As it is, he sees everything as a flat image with people appearing as cardboard cut-outs.
  • The concept that a husband and wife can automatically gain complete read access to all the files of their mate, even the very important ones pertaining to their job, is rather ridiculous from today's information security standpoint. Of course, one must remember that they were living in a Catholic Mission colony in which marriage was still a high sacrament with lots of strings attached.
  • Likewise the concept of a team of a handful of people doing the work of dozens (Xenologists and Xenobiologist both) is completely ridiculous. As mentioned above in Science Marches On, it's unlikely that Xenologists would even be allowed to make contact, due to great advances in remote probes.
  • In Xenocide, Card mispredicted how searches for information would go. Waiting hours for information to turn up simply doesn't happen anymore; the problem is figuring out how to word your queries in such a way to turn up adequate information.
• 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.
• Write What You Know: OSC's Mormon mission trip was to Brazil. Lusitania is a colony made up of Brazilians.