On my list, one I always wanted to read and I just keep pushing it into the back burner.

I read the three books of this series in the Army. I picked up the first two, Ender's Game and Speaker for the Dead, and read them during the same 30-day field problem. Absolutely loved them. But like Dune, the rereading was entirely different. I'd recommend Elaine Radford's essay, "Ender and Hitler: Sympathy for the Superman." I've just read it. My own take: Orwell had said that to really write well about fascism, it helps to have a little bit of it in you. This was Orwell writing about Jack London and his book The Iron Heel (a book about fascism / a futuristic fascist society). Later writers have pointed out this applies equally to Orwell himself via his writings on colonialism, and his own totalitarianism novel 1984. So it is with Card and Ender's Game. Ender is cast in the same light as every small, intelligent and gentle outcast who is only an outcast because they are "special." It's a well-worn trope all the way from the old English boys' novels to Harry Potter and a slew of afternoon TV specials. He's painted as weak, a third, all outsider clichés. When really it's the regular children around him who, like a herd of sheep, sense the wolf among them. One of us does not belong. So, I believe Card's narration is sincere. He really believes in the mythic outsider. Instead of Harry Potter, what we have in Ender is a sociopath, whose first instinct upon being bullied is to murder his bully. Not once but twice. We are told these are accidents, and that whatever the consequences, Ender's intentions are all that matter. Ender himself seems to have no guilt, even suffering a kind of selective amnesia, or an unwillingness to know, that he murdered them. Knowledge that doesn't surface until near the end of the book. When he learns that Stilson and Bonzo are dead, he seems to have at least subconsciously known. This attempt at guilt arrives with more than a small sense of "they made him do it." The exact mechanism of these fratricides is at play with his Genocide. It's now an entire race that made him do it. Again, Card feeds us the idea that he kills almost as a reflex, and that as long as he didn't know what would happen, he's somehow guiltless. Upon realizing that guilt, as long as he feels the guilt, he is then also blameless.

@Krista Baillie MST3K did a riff on that. I do love both the old and new

@Rory Veguilla My view is overstated a bit. The direction was for a “hot take”. I did my best lol. I don’t think anyone can say an author’s view of their own work is wrong; it’s their book after all. The question is more whether other people are able to read your intention. I agree with Herbert’s defense, which I think you summarize very well. My only caveat is that we don’t get anything close to a hint of that until later. Herbert himself didn’t seem to speak on it until after Dune Messiah. The book exalts Paul exactly at the times it should be giving some hints, if the defense is to be trusted as genuine. I will say, for myself, I tend to compress things to the extent that they’re easy to overlook while reading. A complete poem for me might only be 25 words in 6 lines, which is an entirely different contract with the reader than a full prose 80k word novel. I admire Herbert’s ability to dance in between those two styles. From where I am skill wise it seems almost impossible task. The issue is not with his writing. It’s what’s smuggled in with it. To take an extreme outside example: The poet / pundit Wilfrid Bade wrote beautiful, rousing, heroic verse. The problem is he wrote it for Goebbels. It’s Nazi propaganda, and at some point you can’t separate the writing from the message. I’m not putting Herbert in that company, just making the point that craft and cargo aren’t the same thing, and skill in the first can carry the second past you.

I’m Al Bancroft. American, nineteen years in Japan, en partibus infidelium. I keep a golf course alive on a military base, which turns out to be its own kind of war and world building: weather, systems, things trying to die on you. Army before that. Civil Affairs, Iraq, ’03. I came to fiction the long way around, through poetry, still where my instincts live. Always been a heavy reader of scifi. Compression, precision, trusting the reader to carry their share is my goal. I’ve got a completed first-draft manuscript, military SF, first of a possible trilogy, sitting on Randy’s desk. It’s a short story with room. Book two’s structure is laid out. So I’m not here to find out whether I can finish a story, but to get better at the doing, the craft and the skills to produce a good book that I don’t currently possess. Favorites: Steakley’s Armor, Hamilton’s Fallen Dragon, Vinge’s A Fire Upon the Deep. Anything military sci-fi I absolutely inhale. Glad to be aboard. Helmet’s on.