review of enders game

very imaginative and well ahead of its time 

nets, different personalities, idea of influences, personal you create for your self 

desks you carry around 

super prescient 

concerns 

1. dense. needs a great degree of visualisation to understand what is going on... like floating and fighting in non gravity spaces 

2. the psychological elements. the fairy tale. the brother in the mirror. the sister as serpent 

3. violence. not as graphic as hunger games but present. children hurting each other very badly. biting off a ear. kicking in the groin.

4. sadistic torture of squirrel

5. he could walk between my legs without touching my balls. in the context of bullying newbies . 

6. brief mentions of religions. not really a concern I think 

7. multi layered narrative. kids could get confused with the Russia Netherlands narrative on earth.  needs unpacking. the idea being that the threat of inter terrestrial attack is keeping the people united but otherwise they would just tear at one a others throats . Warsaw pact. quite some reference to cold war I think

8. a number of historical allusions must see if teachers are comfortable with these, also to discuss if students do.need to know these and to what extent to better appreciate the text 

1. Cold War (Russia & Warsaw Pact v. America & League of Nations) -- Think about the similar alliances and various military and governing groups that Card uses.  How do the historical alliances help us better understand the fictional ones?

2. Catholic, Mormon, and Muslim Religious Beliefs -- You don't have to know everything about these, but since there are believers who speak and act in a way that is motivated by their faith, look into what these actions mean to the people of these faiths.

3. Napoleon/Wellington, Caesar/Brutus, Alexander the Great -- Ender tries to learn from these ancient leaders.  We need to know something about them to understand what he finds valuable and to see what he does that emulates them.

4. Locke, Demosthenes -- Peter chooses these names for himself and Valentine's personas.  Why does he choose them? What associations do they have that match how the Wiggin children write and act?

5. Hitler, various genocides – We know that Ender feels conflicted about killing a species.  What do we know from history about other genocides?  When has this happened or been attempted and why? What is similar or different about Ender or other characters and the motives behind historical genocides?

6. Colonization -- What motivates people from history to move or to migrate as a 'colonist'?  What are the positive and negative aspects to colonization that we might anticipate for the people in Card's fictional universe

" The Cold War in the 1980s

Ender's Game takes place in Earth's future, one in which all countries are cooperating together to save the planet from alien invasion. Nevertheless, the novel does suggest that the international conflicts of the twentieth century will not be forgotten, as an American hegemony (a group of nations dominated by one) will be pitted against a Second Warsaw Pact, led by the Russians. In this world, Russia rules Eurasia from the Netherlands to Pakistan. Peter believes that Russia is preparing for a "fundamental shift in world order." Once the bugger wars are over, the North American alliances will dissolve, and Russia will take over. This conflict may have seemed inevitable in the early and mid-1980s, when the novel was written. Since the end of World War II, the United States and the Soviet Union had engaged in a "cold war" which involved..."