Skip to main content

Two Books on the Games of Life





Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card and The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins are two books that I read last.  While the first was sent by a friend who wanted me to read it for reasons that have not been revealed to me yet, the second came as a complimentary copy from the parents of a student.  Coincidentally both are about a world that’s quite different from the one we are used to seeing in regular literature. Both the novels have children as characters.  Both are about the game of war, so to say.

Ender’s Game tells the story of a battle school where children as young as six are enlisted and trained to fight an ominous war with an ingenious and dreadful alien force.  Ender (a corruption of Andrew) is one such six year-old boy who is seen by his trainers as the saviour of our planet.  Ender wins games by circumventing rules.  His determination to win at any cost and the brilliance of his intelligence are what will lead mankind to success in the war against the aliens.

Science fiction has never fascinated me.  The plot of Ender’s Game did not fascinate me either.  Nor the characters.  In fact, science fiction is not meant to study characters; it is meant to give us a thriller of the star wars kind.  Yet I must confess that I enjoyed the wisdom that underlies many dialogues in the novel.  For example, “Human beings are free except when humanity needs them,” “... power will always end up with the sort of people who crave it...” or “... commanders have just as much authority as you let them have.  The more you obey them, the more power they have over you.”

As a teacher, I particularly enjoyed the following: “There are two or three thousand people in the world as smart as us.... Most of them are making a living somewhere.  Teaching, the poor bastards, or doing research.  Precious few of them are actually in positions of power.”

I liked Ender’s Game for such enlightening insights into life.
 
The Hunger Games is nothing more than a thriller.  It kept me delightfully busy during my two day-train journey from Ernakulam to Delhi.  It tells the story of a future world that comes up where the present day America is.  In that country, Panem, there are 12 districts.  One boy and one girl between the ages of 12 and 18 will be chosen by lots from each district to fight one another until only one winner remains alive.  The fight provides live entertainment (reality show) to the country.  In the capital (called the Capitol) the powerful people live in luxury while the poor people in the districts struggle for survival.  The novel can be read as a parable on the globalised world in which the poor are mere fodder for the rich.

The Hunger Games remains a parable, however.  There is no depth in it anywhere – neither in the plot nor in the characterisation.  The story takes place in a world that’s not quite ours.  We can’t identify ourselves with any of the characters.  The novel has already witnessed two sequels.  But I’m not going to read them unless another train journey sends me scouring for thrillers. 

Comments

  1. love the hunger games series.

    khanvibes.blogspot.com

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Nice to see that you like the Hunger Games series. The novel failed to fascinate me that way.

      Delete
  2. Good review. I will definitely have a glance!(The hunger games)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Best wishes with The Hunger Games. If you are fond of thrillers, you will enjoy it.

      Delete
  3. I remember watching Hunger Games movie sometime back, but I don't think I will read these two books! :)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. A student of mine told me that the movie wasn't good at all. Perhaps, the novel is better, he said.

      Delete
  4. Mateikal,

    The reason I sent Ender's Game was to disabuse of the notion that science fiction is fiction. Take Jules Verne; in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, the Nautilus setting is no fiction, but power games under the sea and above it too. Take any book of H G Wells, it is all about politics; for example, "The Invisble Man". Take Issac Asimov's Gods Themselves, his Foundation series, or Arthur C Clarke's 2001: A Space Odysee; Stanley Kubric's opening scene of the movie is enough for a dozen (an underestimate) Ph. D theses! Douglas Adams's stories. In each one of them, quotes or scenes of the calibre you have menioned are galore. For example, in the "Restaurant at the End of Universe" Doug Adams has a bull waiting as a server in the restaurant asks the protagonist what cut of himself (the bull's) meat he wants. This is almost exactly what sea food restaurant goers do when they point to a lobster in the tank and say, "I want him!" I am not making these up. Science fiction is NOT fiction. It is a commentary, as you yourself attest by quoting some statements from Ender's Game. By the way, I did not see Ender as a corruption of Andrew. Also, the basis of the story, written in the mid 1980s, is a criticism of family size control as is the case in China. The story reiterates the Universaity of life. The buggers are life too, fter all and Ender realizes it after killing them all.

    RE

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Raghuram,

      I don't enjoy reading science fiction. My explanation is as simple as that. I live in a world where my survival is at stake at every moment because of silly "surds" (the meaning of which may become clear if you read my most recent post). These surds and their likes are not found in any science fiction I have read including the ones you've mentioned. I like plain literature for the simple reason that it helps me deal with my life which is always a struggle, a struggle with idiots.

      I was reading Ender's Game in school and a colleague of mine was amazed to see the underlining made in the book. I must admire (like my colleague) the patience with which you read books.

      The corruption of Andrew in to Ender is given in the novel - it's not my invention. Ender's sister called him that name because she couldn't pronounce Andrew...!

      Delete
  5. There was no need for an explanation. As you reach a big audience through your posts, I used the comment space to give my take on what science fiction is not. It is neither science nor fiction.

    I obviously missed that Andrew-Ender corruption. Maybe Ender, signifying the last child of the parents, took hold of my mind to the exclusion of everything else.

    RE

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl

The Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart...

The Ghost of a Banyan Tree

  Image from here Fiction Jaichander Varma could not sleep. It was past midnight and the world outside Jaichander Varma’s room was fairly quiet because he lived sufficiently far away from the city. Though that entailed a tedious journey to his work and back, Mr Varma was happy with his residence because it afforded him the luxury of peaceful and pure air. The city is good, no doubt. Especially after Mr Modi became the Prime Minister, the city was the best place with so much vikas. ‘Where’s vikas?’ Someone asked Mr Varma once. Mr Varma was offended. ‘You’re a bloody antinational mussalman who should be living in Pakistan ya kabristan,’ Mr Varma told him bluntly. Mr Varma was a proud Indian which means he was a Hindu Brahmin. He believed that all others – that is, non-Brahmins – should go to their respective countries of belonging. All Muslims should go to Pakistan and Christians to Rome (or is it Italy? Whatever. Get out of Bharat Mata, that’s all.) The lower caste Hindus co...

Goodbye, Little Ones

They were born under my care, tiny throbs of life, eyes still shut to the world. They grew up under my constant care. I changed their bed and the sheets regularly making sure they were always warm and comfortable. When one of them didn’t open her eyes after a fortnight of her birth, I rang up my cousin who is a vet and got the appropriate prescription that gave her the light of day in just two days. I watched each one of them stumble through their first steps. Today they were adopted. I personally took them to their new home, a tiny house of a family that belongs to the class that India calls BPL [Below Poverty Line]. I didn’t know them at all until I stopped my car a little away from their small house, at the nearest spot my car could possibly reach. They lived in another village altogether, some 15 km from mine. Sometimes 15 km can make a world of difference. A man who looked as old as me had come to my house in the late afternoon. “I’d like to adopt your kittens,” he said. He...

Unromantic Men

Romance is a tenderness of the heart. That is disappearing even from the movies. Tenderness of heart is not a virtue anymore; it is a weakness. Who is an ideal man in today’s world? Shakespeare’s Romeo and Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay’s Devdas would be considered as fools in today’s world in which the wealthiest individuals appear on elite lists, ‘strong’ leaders are hailed as nationalist heroes, and success is equated with anything other than traditional virtues. The protagonist of Colleen McCullough’s 1977 novel, The Thorn Birds [which sold more than 33 million copies], is torn between his idealism and his natural weaknesses as a human being. Ralph de Bricassart is a young Catholic priest who is sent on a kind of punishment-appointment to a remote rural area of Australia where the Cleary family arrives from New Zealand in 1921 to take care of the enormous estate of Mary Carson who is Paddy Cleary’s own sister. Meggy Cleary is the only daughter of Paddy and Fiona who have eight so...