Orson Scott Card, author of Ender’s Game, did an in-depth interview with New Zealand weekly magazine The Listener and in it talked about his writing methods for Ender’s Game and it’s sequels and also gave a brief opinion on the movie.
I wrote a script that showed great promise in achieving that.
However, I have no evidence it was ever read by anyone beyond a small circle of friends and producers whom I had worked with for years. Certainly, there is no trace of any of my scripts in the Gavin Hood script that was filmed. Hood gave the executives what they were looking for: a script that used elements of the original story within a format that followed the film-school rules that, although they don’t actually work, give executives in Hollywood a warm sense of recognition. Within those paradigms, the film Ender’s Game has been shaped into a tight, fast, hard-hitting film that rockets along at a breakneck pace — the adventure version of Ender’s Game. It is an excellent film of that type; it is, in fact, about as good a job of filming Ender’s Game as anyone could have expected Hollywood to achieve.
Readers who are disappointed at elements of the book that are not in the movie should keep in mind: my own scripts also cut sharply, because filming the entire novel would have taken about six hours. Huge swaths of material had to be omitted, and the movie actually includes elements from the book that I removed!
Only 11 day to go, Launchies! Today we’ve got a pretty cool prize thanks to the nice folks over at Smart Pop Books: a copy of Ender’s World autographed by Ender’s Game author Orson Scott Card.
This giveaway is open worldwide and includes some Ender’s World pins as well.
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For today’s comment, tell us which of the original Ender Quartet is your favorite book: Ender’s Game, Speaker for the Dead, Xenocide, or Children of the Mind?
Yesterday, The Digital Universe (Brigham Young University’s online news outlet) published a new interview with Orson Scott Card. None of the things he says about the book and the movie are entirely new, but the interview may clear up a few matters that people have been confused about. Here are a some excerpts:
About morality in Ender’s Game:
The novel doesn’t answer those questions, anyway — rather it raises them, and if anything it shows that the best you can do is muddle through, trying to do what’s right, as far as you can figure out what that is. That’s all that human beings can ever do. Even the great ones like Lincoln and Churchill are right only some of the time. Ender Wiggin, though fictional, is no better.
About his involvement in the movie:
My work as co-producer was all done in the early stages. Once Gavin Hood took over, my help was no longer required. […] The screenplay you see on the screen was 100 percent Gavin Hood. None of my writing was used. That was the decision that Odd Lot and Summit made; it was their money at risk, and they invested in the writer they believed in. I have no complaints.
In response to the flurry of controversy surrounding the Ender’s Game movie after a boycott gained national media attention, Lionsgate issued the following statement:
As proud longtime supporters of the LGBT community, champions of films ranging from Gods and Monsters to The Perks of Being a Wallflower and a company that is proud to have recognized same-sex unions and domestic partnerships within its employee benefits policies for many years, we obviously do not agree with the personal views of Orson Scott Card and those of the National Organization for Marriage. However, they are completely irrelevant to a discussion of Ender’s Game. The simple fact is that neither the underlying book nor the film itself reflect these views in any way, shape or form. On the contrary, the film not only transports viewers to an entertaining and action-filled world, but it does so with positive and inspiring characters who ultimately deliver an ennobling and life-affirming message. Lionsgate will continue its longstanding commitment to the LGBT community by exploring new ways we can support LGBT causes and, as part of this ongoing process, will host a benefit premiere for Ender’s Game.
Personally, I’m glad that the studio has come out in defense of the film and their hardworking cast and crew. Hopefully this will show people that the studio and its employees do not necessarily share the same beliefs as the author of the work they’ve adapted.
The internet is buzzing about Ender’s Game and it’s not in a good way. Skip Ender’s Game recently began a media push to encourage people to host events for their movement to negatively influence the box office success for the upcoming film adaptation. After the Huffington Post ran a story on their campaign, news outlets began to pick it up and the story spread like wildfire.
It’s not an issue that’s new to Ender’s Game fansite owners. I’ve been dreading days like today for years. The issue is one I think about constantly. Back in February I wrote an opinion piece about the controversy. Kelly and I dedicated an entire episode of EnderCast to discussing Card’s views on gay marriage and the effect it could have on the film and everyone involved.
What truly bothers me is that the cast and crew of the film are being forced to bear the burden of Card’s words and actions, which is definitely something that I hold against the author. The bulk of the cast is made up of child actors ranging in age from 12 to 19. They’re in essence being found guilty by association and suffering the consequences of a constant stream of negativity of what is no doubt the pride and joy of many of their careers.
Ender’s Game is set more than a century in the future and has nothing to do with political issues that did not exist when the book was written in 1984.
With the recent Supreme Court ruling, the gay marriage issue becomes moot. The Full Faith and Credit clause of the Constitution will, sooner or later, give legal force in every state to any marriage contract recognized by any other state.
Now it will be interesting to see whether the victorious proponents of gay marriage will show tolerance toward those who disagreed with them when the issue was still in dispute.
Orson Scott Card
To those curious, I personally am a supporter of gay marriage, which is probably why I think about this issue so much. I constantly feel torn in two different directions. And yes, I have read his anti-gay marriage and anti-government op-ed pieces. I’ve read the Salon.com article. I know he’s on the board of NOM.
I understand why Card is such an easy target. He’s painted a big fat bullseye on his forehead on more than one occasion. However, I don’t think that the right way to deal with his opinions and actions is with further hate. On the Entertainment Weekly article, someone casually commented that someone needs to assault Orson Scott Card, with a description I’m not even going to repeat here. Comments like that are disgusting, disheartening, and downright depressing and all people are doing with words such as those is sinking down to the very level they condemn.
Even though I don’t agree with it, I can respect what Skip Ender’s Game is doing, provided they go about it in a peaceful manner and allow the supporters of the movie the same respect to their own opinions. I don’t know what Geeks Out intends for people to do at their events, but there’s nothing I’d want to say against a peaceful boycott.
And yet, what exactly are people boycotting besides Orson Scott Card?
“He’s clean. Right to the heart, he’s good.”
They’re boycotting a young boy who is so good inside that he can find it in him to love anyone, even his mortal enemies. A boy who is astonishingly bright, a natural leader, and a savior of Earth who has everything dear to him taken away for the greater good of mankind. He is selfless. He is kind. He is a child.
If you haven’t read the book, have I piqued your interest? You don’t have to put money in Card’s pockets to read it. Visit a local library. Borrow it from a friend. You can even read the first five chapters of the book online for free.
My point is, the book is not the author, and you should find out for yourself who Ender Wiggin really is before you skip him because he’s one of the most compassionate and inherently good characters I’ve ever encountered in decades of reading books. Considering the world we live in, I ultimately think it’s more important for people to meet characters like Ender than it is to boycott the movie.
In short, in my humble opinion, the world we live in could certainly use more Enders.
Skyboat Media, the production company that has exclusively produced the unabridged audio versions of Orson Scott Card’s Enderverse novels and stories, has just announced that they will be producing ENDER’S GAME ALIVE, a full cast audioplay written by Orson Scott Card himself based on Ender’s Game, the novel that started it all. According to the producers,
Production begins mid-July here at Skyboat, and we will be updating [our] page with features from the production. The audioplay will be released in late October 2013, will have a cast of over 40 actors playing over 100 roles. The production will be originally scored with full sound effects. It will be directed by Gabrielle de Cuir and produced here at Skyboat by Stefan Rudnicki. All this brought to you by publisher Audible.com
Watch the author himself talk about this new project:
Check back here and watch the Skyboat site for updates!
Thanks to a tip from co-author Aaron Johnston, we now know that the title for the final book in the First Formic Trilogy will be EARTH AWAKENS.
If you haven’t yet read the first book, it’s currently on sale for $10 on Amazon. The paperback version is available for pre-order and will be out April 30. Book 2, Earth Afire, will be available on June 4, 2013.
In a video Q&A produced for Tor Books, author Orson Scott Card talked about his personal favorites in books, movies, authors, and tv shows. A couple of questions centered around Ender’s Game:
With Ender’s Game you’ve written young characters who appeal strongly to adult readers. What’s your secret for engaging both YA and adult readers?
If I knew that I would do it every time because not every book appeals to everybody. But I always try to appeal to everybody. I always aim at the widest possible audience. But the truth is the only difference between young readers and older readers is young readers are patient with one kind of bad writing and older readers are patient with another kind of bad writing. I try not to do bad writing. I try to write as clearly as I can, a story that I care about and believe in and then hope that there are readers that will care about it and believe in it as well.
Why did you decide to use a young boy as the protagonist in a book about a great war between humanity and aliens?
Gotta remember, this started as a short story and I had no plan for a book at the time. The story idea that I had was the Battle Room, a safe place to train people for zero gravity combat, for thinking in zero g. I had that since I was 16 years old, but I had no story and I knew I had no story until I was in my early 20s and I finally realized, no, the time to train people for space combat is not when they’re adults, not when they’re 18 or 19 years old, they have too many gravity bound habits. You gotta grab them when they’re kids. When I realized that they were children, that they would be starting with 6 and 7 year-olds, taking them away from their families, then I had a story. And that’s when I wrote Remember the enemy’s gate is down. But when I started that short story I had no idea that it would ever be a novel. I had no idea how it would end. I didn’t even know that it would ever leave the Battle School and go to another place and involve a wider war so I just used a placeholder alien. The standard giant insect alien from science fiction. It was a MacGuffin, nothing more, so it’s not a book about a war that happens to have a child as the protagonist, it’s a book about a child that happens to have a war as a setting.
Ender’s Game has often been cited as a good book to read by readers who are not fans of science fiction. Why do you think it appeals to both fans and those who do not usually read science fiction?
I think it’s because I’m in the latter category. When I was growing up, science fiction was part of my reading, but only accidentally. I read everything. I was reading classics. I was reading historical fiction, romantic fiction, I read whatever was interesting at the time. A lot of non-fiction as well. But science fiction was valued not because of the genre itself, I never thought of myself as a science fiction reader, I simply loved certain science fiction writers. So I first discovered Heinlein and Norton in junior high library and devoured everything that they had written in book form at that time for the juveniles, the young adult fiction. THen in college I discovered Ray Bradbury, Isaac Asimov and loved them for the things that they taught me and Larry Niven came the last of all, but those writers are the ones that I think shaped me as a science fiction writer. But, they were never the majority of my reading. I was as likely to be excited about other authors as I was about them. So I think that I bring to writing an awareness of both the inside and the outside. I know enough about science fiction to write, to use the tropes, to use the techniques and methods of science fiction, but then I’m also writing to people like me who are not committed to the field. I’m not writing to insiders. I feel like I’m starting from ground zero. I write for a bare stage, I’m a playwright before I’m a writer of fiction and I write for Shakespeare’s stage. I write for Shakespeare’s audience really, people who expect to have the actor’s words tell them everything that they need to know, so that results in a kind of writing that is very spare. I only tell you what you need to know. I wrote 250 audio plays when I was starting out in my career. This is truly voice alone storytelling, so that only what the character’s say to each other is going to convey the meaning and the setting, everything. So that’s the way that I write. I make sure that all the information is present in the story. I don’t expect you to already bring to it a full knowledge of this or that novel, this or that tradition in science fiction. I make everything self contained and I make it very spare. That’s why people who try to abridge my work despair. There’s nothing there for fluff or decoration. It’s there because it’s functional in the story.
Orson Scott Card, author of Ender’s Game, will be the Author Guest of Honor at the sci-fi fan convention MystiCon taking place later this month in Roanoake, VA.
The convention, which is being held this year from February 22-24 at the Holiday Inn Tanglewood, is an old get together that began back in 1980 and was recently revived in 2010.
Registration is still open. Smart Pop Books will be in attendance and will be giving out Ender’s World themed buttons to promote their new book, which will be released this April.
Thanks to an EnderWiggin.net reader, we got a tip that there are a series of videos from a book signing that Orson Scott Card did earlier this month for his book ‘Ruins‘ which was released on October 30. The signing was held at a Barnes & Noble bookstore in Orem, Utah.
In this first video, Card jokes about how he was offered a part that involved cool uniforms, but insisted that he’s improving the look of the movie by only appearing by voice as a pilot on a shuttle as Ender and Graff.
He goes on to reiterate what he said in a previous interview about how few scenes are in the movie from the book but this time says there are NO scenes from the book in the movie.
There are no scenes from the book in the movie, and there are no scenes in the movie from the book, but that’s actually not a surprise. That’s pretty much the way my scripts were too because Ender’s Game is an unfilmable book. That’s something we learned 20 years ago.
I find this particularly confusing, as if there are no scenes from the book in the movie, then what exactly is going to happen in this movie called ‘Ender’s Game‘? It certainly sounds like it follows the story. Perhaps he means that there are no lines from the book in the movie?
If you filmed every scene it would be a four and a half hour movie, and I don’t care how much you love Ender’s Game, four and a half hours is a long time to sit in a theater. We also discovered very quickly that one battle in the Battle Room is one too many. You gotta see it happening, but it’s like watching Quidditch. How exciting was that? You already know how it’s gonna come out, you just wanna see them fly around a little bit, bingo it’s over. And that’s kind of how Battle Room is. It’ll look great, but we’re not going to follow these battles closely.
Looks like I’m going to have to agree to disagree with Mr. Card on this one because I really preferred watching Quidditch over reading Quidditch! I also don’t really think that one Battle Room scene is necessarily enough to appease not just fans, but newcomers. Summit will of course want non-book fans to come to see the movie and I’m not entirely convinced that one or even no battle would make the point of Battle School clear to these viewers.
In the second part, Card talks a bit about how Harrison Ford is in person, mentioning that he’s a very shy, quiet person who goes off into a corner once the cameras are off. He goes on to talk about meeting the other kids and how they suffered doing their wire work, but ended up being in the best shape of their lives.
He touched more upon the script and how they went with Gavin’s script over his.
Here’s the thing about movie. It’s going to be different from the book. It has to be. It couldn’t be filmed the way it was, the way the book is. And so what I’m hoping is, it’s brilliant. I would love it if Gavin’s script was really good. Now I did a reading of the script that I was really proud of, but you could lose your job greenlighting a film scripted by the author. That’s just the truth. And you can’t lose your job over greenlighting a film scripted by the director. So they went with the one where nobody loses their job, whether it wins or loses.
He goes on to tell his fans to go see the movie once and if they love it, bring their friends back and if they don’t, bring their friends back to show them how awful it is. Still, he sounds confident about how things will turn out. “I am very hopeful that it’s going to be terrific.”
Later, Card takes questions from fans and the first one is actually one that I’d been dying to know as well, so it was great seeing this asked.
I read Ender’s Game back when I was 17 in the 80s. The thing that really grasped me is that in it you talk about the internet, you talk about laptops, wireless internet, chatrooms, […] and identities online. What gave you the insight?
The novel by 1985, while the internet was not open for public access yet, there were services like […] and Delphi. I had been on bulletin boards, I knew about flame wars. I mean there was all kinds of stuff like that.
Despite his answer, I still found the things he described in Ender’s Game to be very prescient in that the desks he “created” in the 80s are now the tablets of today. (not laptops imo)
There are three more videos that you can watch here: Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5
Authors Orson Scott Card and Aaron Johnston will be doing a book signing for ‘Earth Unaware‘ at Barnes & Noble at the Friendly Center in Greensboro, NC tonight from 7:00 PM.
Here’s the synopsis for the book:
A hundred years before Ender’s Game, humans thought they were alone in the galaxy. Humanity was slowly making their way out from Earth to the planets and asteroids of the Solar System, exploring and mining and founding colonies.
The mining ship El Cavador is far out from Earth, in the deeps of the Kuiper Belt, beyond Pluto. Other mining ships, and the families that live on them, are few and far between this far out. So when El Cavador’s telescopes pick up a fast-moving object coming in-system, it’s hard to know what to make of it. It’s massive and moving at a significant fraction of the speed of light.
But the ship has other problems. Their systems are old and failing. The family is getting too big. There are claim-jumping corporates bringing Asteroid Belt tactics to the Kuiper Belt. Worrying about a distant object that might or might not be an alien ship seems…not important.
They’re wrong. It’s the most important thing that has happened to the human race in a million years. This is humanity’s first contact with an alien race. The First Formic War is about to begin.
Earth Unaware was released yesterday, July 17. In the book ‘Ender’s Game’, Greensboro, NC is Ender Wiggin’s hometown.
Aaron Johnston, co-author of the upcoming Ender’s Game prequel Earth Unaware, has published a schedule of book signings for himself, Orson Scott Card, and Emily Janice Card (Card’s daughter).
Included in these book signings are the chance for you to buy Earth Unaware a few days early, as the book won’t be hitting shelves until July 17.
Friday, July 13
Orson Scott Card and Aaron Johnston – Earth Unaware
12:00-1:00pm
Tor In-booth signing – #2707
Saturday, July 14
Emily and Orson Scott Card – Laddertop, Volume 1
12:00-1:00pm
Tor In-booth signing – #2707
Orson Scott Card – Earth Unaware, Ender’s Game
3:00-4:00pm
A Wrinkle In Time Panel – Rm 23ABC
4:30-5:30pm – Scott Card and Aaron Johnston
Post Panel Book signing
Sunday, July 15
Emily Card – Laddertop, Volume 1
2:45pm – 3:45pm
Heroes for the Middle-Grade Reader Panel – Rm 5AB
Mr. Johnston has also informed me that only five copies of Earth Unaware will be available on Friday, so make sure you plan ahead if you mean to get one of those five. Otherwise, bringing their other titles is probably your safest bet.
Authors Orson Scott Card and Aaron Johnston will be doing a book signing for ‘