My 10-year-old nugget, who by the way is now also a political commentator you can follow on Twitter, was asking about the official trailer for the new Ender’s Game movie – partly because he’s inspired by the idea of kids using online media to effect political discourse. Unfortunately there is no trailer since the release date is still a year away. Instead here is (allegedly) Orson Scott Card‘s favorite of the many, many fan trailers. See how many sci-fi clips you can identify! Winner gets an official tweet from LiamCS10.
Charli Carpenter is a Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. She is the author of 'Innocent Women and Children': Gender, Norms and the Protection of Civilians (Ashgate, 2006), Forgetting Children Born of War: Setting the Human Rights
Agenda in Bosnia and Beyond (Columbia, 2010), and ‘Lost’ Causes: Agenda-Setting in Global Issue Networks and the Shaping of Human Security (Cornell, 2014). Her main research interests include national security ethics, the protection of civilians, the laws of war, global agenda-setting, gender and political violence, humanitarian affairs, the role of information technology in human security, and the gap between intentions and outcomes among advocates of human security.
- Charli Carpenterhttps://www.duckofminerva.com/author/ccarpenter
- Charli Carpenterhttps://www.duckofminerva.com/author/ccarpenter
- Charli Carpenterhttps://www.duckofminerva.com/author/ccarpenter
- Charli Carpenterhttps://www.duckofminerva.com/author/ccarpenter
- Charli Carpenterhttps://www.duckofminerva.com/author/ccarpenter
- Charli Carpenterhttps://www.duckofminerva.com/author/ccarpenter
Charli, is it ever problematic for you to reconcile Card’s exceptional Sci Fi writing with his more distasteful political views (i.e. opposition to homosexuality and same sex marriage; denying global warming; etc.) I’d like to think that I like Card for his gifted writing and dislike him for his political views, but I’m not sure I can separate the two.
Does this ever play into what you give to your kids to read?
What a terrific question.
Well, first, I don’t give my 10-year-old mature sci-fi to read; I read it with him or to him. We spend a lot of time talking about and thinking about representations in fiction and how they reflect the politics of the time in which they were written. Movie adapations are wonderful moments for generating discussions about that since world-time has often shifted by the time films are made. In the Ender series, for example, the gender issues are legion, and Liam was quick to catch onto them when we read the book (and the Shadow book) together. He finds it very interesting that Major Anderson has been cast as a black woman for the movie, and we’ve had some interesting discussions about why that choice was made, and also whether Anderson’s gender was actually ambiguous in the book or not and what it means that we both visualized that character as a white male.
b) We DON’T spend (yet) as much time thinking about authors as we do about representations in texts. I generally think it’s possible to separate the two unless you’re majoring in literature. I tend to find Card’s writing much more progressive than his politics; or maybe he was more progressive prior to 9/11 – certainly that is the sense one gets from Pastwatch and the Red Prophet series. On issues of gender, intersexuality, etc I think Treason and Wyrms are fairly subversive. (Though these books are at present too mature for Liam, as are the Ender and Bean sequels.) The books where I think Card has let his politics show through more (like the Empire series) frankly just didn’t grab me, so I didn’t read them.
Curious if you have children and how you would answer the question?
No children yet, and no idea how I would answer this question. That’s kinda why I asked it. Good answer though.