What's Wrong/What's Right with "Ender's Game"?

How plausible does a novel have to be? Obviously not very or Candide, A Hundred Years of Solitude, or The Time Traveler's Wife could not be read. So maybe the question should be: At what point does the reader throw the book across the room?

I have just read Orson Scott Card's 1977 science fiction novel Ender's Game. I suspect virtually everyone else in the world has read it, but let me tell you what's wrong with the

story. Ender Wiggen, a pre-adolescent boy in a future setting, is being trained by a Colonel Graff to lead Earth's starfighters in a war against the "buggers." This implacable enemy wants to eradicate humanity and take our planet for itself. Earthlings have barely won two bugger battles and has a 70-year respite to breed and train a leader who is intelligent enough, analytic enough, charismatic enough to command Earth's forces. That's Ender.

Most of the novel describes Ender's training in Battle School. One of the novel's conceits is that Ender must be kept ignorant of the training's real goals. He must be tested, and tested, and tested until he is as strong as the steel in a samurai sword. Indeed, toward the end of the book one of Ender's fellow trainees threatens to kill Ender. And this is not a game. Card presents the situation as a genuine possibility. Cooler heads argue with Colonel Graff that he is going too far. He argues that if Ender thinks someone is going to step in to save him at the last moment, all his training will be wasted. Ender must believe he must kill or be killed.

What happens if Ender is killed? Humanity's only hope dies with him. There is no other leader. It's Ender or none. What demented military officer would risk all of humanity on the possibility that a school bully will kill the one individual that could make a difference? (Throw book across the room.)

If that's what's wrong with Ender's Game, what's right with it? It remains popular. It's still in print almost 30 years after publication. Hollywood made a movie of it in 2013.

My theory: It appeals to 13-year-old boys (and adults with the emotional maturity of a 13-year-old). The adults and older boys around him don't understood the hero. They don't realize that he is special. And not just special, the savior of humanity. The ordinary readers of Ender's Game don't care about the holes in the story (if they even notice them); they ignore questions about the Second Warsaw Pact(!); they accept the casual violations of known physical laws. Ender is the hero of this fairy tale. He does disable his tormentor at the end of the book—in fact, unknowingly kills him—and he saves humanity by—again unknowingly—virtually exterminating the race of alien buggers.

I wish I had the talent (skill? luck?) to write something as popular.

Why you need more than this to be unemployed

Although the subtitle to David Thomas Roberts' Unemployable! is "How to be Successfully Unemployed Your Entire Life," it is less a how-to guide than a sermon. Roberts is preaching to the dissatisfied and the hopeful. "Now is the greatest time in history to start a business,"

he proclaims. And his implied message continues, if you are unhappy in your job you can do what I've done and end up in the top 1/10th of 1 percent of incomes in America. Ah, if it were only so.

I am writing as a SCORE counselor (a free national business counseling resource Roberts does not mention), and as such meet with aspiring entrepreneurs regularly to help them realize their ambitions. Many of them would agree with Roberts: "Success for me is the freedom to do the things I love without others controlling my time, income or schedule, and without worrying about money." Who wouldn't? Unfortunately, this book is more inspirational than useful, superficial rather than instructive.

Not that there is anything wrong with Roberts' advice. His chapter "Are You Financially Illiterate?" is astute and worth embracing. "Most Americans," he claims, "live above their means, financing their lifestyle with debt. The vast majority don't have an income problem; they have spending problem." He is sensitive to this issue because "I've gone broke—twice." When revenue dropped in his first enterprise, an air freight business, the firm could not survive. He immediately started another company and I would like to know more about both the failure and the process behind the second startup.

The chapter "Do I really Need a Business Plan?" is also right on. Roberts' first sentence: "The simple answer is 'yes.'"  SCORE counselors spend an inordinate amount of time guiding our clients through the creation of a business plan. I can only concur with the "Lessons Learned" (a feature at the end of each chapter): "A business plan helps you organize your thoughts and plans for your business. Every business should have a business play. Your business plan will likely morph over time with changing business conditions, unforeseen events and new opportunities. A formal business plan with pro forma financials is always necessary if you are borrowing money or taking investment from others into your business equity . . ."

One last example, from Roberts' rules of business: ". . . the very nanosecond you realize you have made a bad hire, end it. Nothing is more disruptive and destructive to a company than a bad hire, with the possible exception of the divorce of the owners." No question.

So the advice is solid. My criticism is that there's not enough meat on these bones. At the end of a course I teach on how to start a business, I provide students with a long list of additional sources. In addition to the "Lessons Learned," Roberts does provide a useful glossary—"accounts payable aging," "accounts receivable financing," "amortization," etc.—but no citations for further information. I am always looking for works I can suggest to prospective entrepreneurs; read Unemployable! for encouragement, embrace the nuggets of good advice, but you're going to need more than this to be successfully unemployed.

Charles Bowden's extraordinary Blue Desert

Anyone interested in writing (or reading) creative non-fiction will be interested in Charles Bowden's Blue Desert.

Anyone interested in more than a tourist brochure of the Southwest will be interested in Charles Bowden's Blue Desert.

The book is not new. It was first published by The University of Arizona Press in 1986 but the essays are timeless. It is a collection of ten essays about bats, antelope, tortoises, fish

(specifically the Yaqui topminnow), Latinos, the opening of the Glen Canyon Dam (and the concomitant death of Glen Canyon), striking copper miners, Native Americans under pressure from a Tucson developer to lease their land, and a walk from the Mexican border through the desert to Interstate 8, the route immigrants take "for a job I would not take if offered."

Putting an essay's subject into a phrase necessarily distorts it unrecognizably. I read Bowden for the information and for his perceptions. Here is his observation of a U.S. Fish and Wildlife tracking several pronghorn antelope—for the best of reasons, to safeguard the beasts: "A kind of collision between cultures has taken place. Huge machines that fly at eighty miles per hour and drink more than seventy gallons an hour have snared an organism that has raced at fifty miles per hour for millions of years."

He writes in the first person and the present tense and is not shy about putting himself into the story. In his piece about the desert tortoise (the desert tortoise! who knew there was such a creature?), he covers a desert tortoise conference that takes place in a casino: "The women working the place are a problem also, bursting out of their britches, bending down to pour coffee and slapping my face with deep cleavage. I can think of few things more pleasurable than to sleep on the desert, watch the rabbits bounce around and then at dawn walk into a casino where time has stopped and everything always promises to be juicy."

A thread running through the book is Man's—and primarily the white man's—impact on the land, wiping out entire species either because they are a threat to commerce (like wolves) or through development. Bowden observes, "In the West, nothing done by Americans is for keeps, everything—farms, cities, towns, mines, everything—constitutes a brief raid on the dry land and then becomes tumbleweed, ghost towns, lost mines, real estate empires that go up in flim-flam, and the like."

We rip open the earth to extract the copper ore, denude the mountains of trees to fire the smelter, dump the poisonous tailings wherever, and, when the ore is gone, move on. In his piece about a copper strike in Ajo, he writes, "The copper industry is dying. The union is dying. The whole way of life based on ripping up the earth for good wages and then going home to a company house after picking up a six-pack at company store is all dying." Make no mistake; there's money to be made despoiling the earth.

The last piece in the book, "Blue," an account of Bowden's walk with a friend across the desert migrant trail, is a tour de force. "These are the rules," he writes. "Get caught and you go back to Mexico. Make it across and you get a job in the fields or backrooms. Don't make it and you die." He and Bill are pushing forty, in good physical condition (Bowden has trained for the walk as if for a marathon), carry packs with food and water. They start at the El Suguaro truck stop where they have to leave abruptly because the Mexican proprietor is about to shake them down. They walk at night, stumble, grow thirsty, are sliced by thorns on small shrubs and large trees. And yet, and yet:

"Everywhere the earth is beauty. the mountains lift sharply off the valley floor, rockpiles almost naked of plants. Beauty. The moon flashes off the stone walls. Beauty. The creosote, the much derided greasewood, stands spaced like a formal garden. Beauty. Stars crowd the sky and I can hear them buzzing with the fires of their explosive gases. I tear the wrapper from a Granola bar and crunch the grains between my teeth. I top the plastic jug up to my lips and swallow. I look on the moon. Beauty."

I am astonished that Bowden is able to record his perceptions so vividly, grateful to the friend who recommended the book to me.

Offended the gods? Give them your daughter

Kwei Quartey is an American physician whose father was Ghanaian and his mother black American. He was born in Accra and spent his childhood in Ghana. He attended medical

school at Howard University in Washington, DC, currently runs a wound care clinic in Pasadena, CA. He says that he was "your classic nerdy kid reading on a Saturday instead of our playing soccer." And, "Reading as voraciously as I did inspired me to write my own 'novels' when I was around eight to ten years old." He now writes virtually every morning before beginning his day at his clinic.

Wife of the Gods was Quartey's first mystery. It is set in Ghana, not a "Ghana-like African nation," which lends verisimilitude to the setting, actions and attitudes of the characters, and plot. The main character is Darko Dawson, an Accra homicide detective who is happily married. The couple has a young son who was born with a defective heart, a complication that plays a role in the novel.

Another complication is the custom of trokosi. A helpful author's note explains that "even the English translation of the word is debated (wife of the gods, slave of the gods, child of a divinity, and so on)." If a family member does something seriously bad, the gods may begin to punish the family: crops fail, mother has a stroke, cousin drowns. Who knows what's next?

The answer is to deliver a female child to serve at the village shrine where the High Priest, who is an intermediary between the physical and spiritual worlds, will teach her "moral ways." "This would restore good fortune to the family. As a trokosi, though, she officially belonged to the gods and was to bear their children through Togobe Adzima," the village priest, who already had three other trokosi. We're not in Pasadena any more.

A young woman is found dead in the forest. She's an outsider. A medical student from Accra who is working to reduce AIDs in this backwater town. She's already apparently had a fight with the local herbal medical practitioner (he thought she was trying to steal his cures). And she was seen going into the forest with a young man.

Because the death has political ramifications, Dawson is ordered to the town to investigate because  actually has relatives locally and he speaks the local language. (Apparently Ghana has nine government-sponsored languages.) The big city cop showing up in the small town does not sit well with the local police chief, a relationship that does not improve when Dawson establishes that the young woman's death was homicide, not an accident.

I know nothing about Ghanaian society and I had to focus to keep names straight (i.e., Efia, Boateng, Fiti, Chikata, Gyamfi, Kweku, Osewa, Akua, and more). Nevertheless, Wife of the Gods held my interest to the last page as Darko Dawson slowly unravels the mystery while dealing with local superstitions, small town gossip, and his own demons. And while the book is not written as a sociological study of village Ghanaian society, I came away with a fascinating picture of a traditional culture in the midst of change. Cell phones and witch doctors. Intriguing.