I just finished reading a more recent Ender’s Game book, from around 2011. This book is about Ender’s father Bean, who is sort of an omnipresent giant. He has three kid geniuses, one of which is Ender. Bean has to live in a cargo bay on the space-ship, and can hardly move due to being too huge and weak, yet he controls the ship through a hub. Bean’s kids have been travelling the speed of light, aging slower than the society they left (which has now forgotten them) in order to find a cure for their issue, which is basically being giants. A lot of snobby whiney six year old genius type arguments fill the early parts of the book, as the characters begin to have good development, through the scope of personal traits. Ender punches and breaks his brother Cincinatus’ (referred to simply as Sargent) nose, to end his dominance over himself and his siblings.
One interesting thing is how the sip has its own sustainable life food supply and garden, using the crew’s waste as fertilizer. The author also does a good job scientifically describing hydro-jet propulsion and a handful of other neat sci-fi concepts. If you saw that film the Martian, you will realize that the part where Matt Damon is growing a garden from his waste was heisted from earlier stories such as this one. Much of the book is written in Illuminati coding, otherwise known as metaphors. The Hive Queen which Ender and his siblings take on represents government and corporate control and programming. Ender alone maintains the belief that the worker class of aliens can survive and have meaning in their lives without the Hive Queen.
The major theme of this book is the enslavement of the individual to the state and whether or not the working class can survive without being directed by a strong dictator of sorts. The author, and the main character Ender, have faith in humanity, so he superimposes that on the alien species in regards to the Hive and its workers. I also assume that when card refers to the clones , he is thinking of them as part of the state’s enforcement apparatus, to be viewed as the strong arm necessary to keep the ranks in file.
Lets take a look at a passage from the book. On page 189 of the hardback, it reads, “Thinking of the workers made him realize that the workers who obeyed the Hive Queen as perfectly as they could, they were slaves. They were her daughters, but she refused to let them have minds of their own.”
Later, a few lines down it says, “they had their own wills, just like humans, but she had the power to force obedience.” I read this as meaning Card thinks we are mostly all debt consumerist debt slaves to the Federal Reserve and Federal Government (the clones), ultimately owned by a handful of wealthy families, including the Queen of England, whose portrait is on roughly half the world’s currency.
On page 231, a society where people are damned if they do and damned if they don’t is described. Work hard, and die from the strain of it. Don’t work, and die of deprivation. An economy so bad that there are no good choices, and everything becomes a Hamlet-like paradox. Card phrases it like this,” Creating the ultimate serfs,” said Cincinnatus. “And the perfect soldiers. They fight and die when she tells them to. If they balk, she’ll cut them off and they die anyway. It is a desperate kind of life for them.” Card hints to us that the only way we can win is to not play the game. To succeed from within the Matrix, one has to find a way to live by one’s own rules, and assert their own will to power, even if you have to bloody someone’s nose, or destroy a whole species to do it once in a while. Because that is the smart thing to do.
“Alien: Covenant” inspired me to re-watch the third and fourth “Alien” films. “Alien Resurrection,” the fourth one, did nothing for me but I really love “Alien 3.” As a stand-alone film, it is one of the most frightening and despairing films I have ever seen. The first film by the great director David Fincher (“Seven,” “Fight Club”), it finds Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) crashed into a prison planet, with her friends Newt and Hicks (from “Aliens”) dead. There was an egg on her ship, and now the Alien is haunting the prison planet. Can she stop the alien and save humanity? Is this the bleakest film ever made? I’d vote for the most underrated.
I assumed I would never like a movie with a talking raccoon, but “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2” is a blast. The secret, I think, is in the casting. I am not a big fan of Chris Pratt, but he is perfect as Starlord in both films. Zoe Saldana is also good, but the show is continually stolen by Bradley Cooper as a foul-mouthed talking raccoon. Throw in Dave Bautista and Vin Diesel as the voice of Baby Groot and you have a cast of outcast heroes worth cheering.
This movie is not the Eddie Murphy, Martin Lawrence jail comedy. Its about a crew fighting a killer amoeba. Although the overall quality of films the last five or ten years has spiked downward, sci-fi has spiked upward in quality with some wonderful films that haven’t gotten the attention they deserve. The current film “Life,” for example, is a very interesting “Alien” knockoff about what would happen if we discovered alien life on Mars. The answer: nothing good. We think we’re getting “E.T.” and instead we’re getting something worse than The Thing. This film has interesting characters, some believable science, and is a tremendously inspired production. The director uses long, painstakingly crafted sequences to draw us in and (hopefully) make us forget we’re watching a movie. The performances of Jake Gylllenhaal, Rebecca Ferguson, and Ryan Reynolds draw us in, and, although the film is similar to “Alien,” it scares us.
I thought I knew what to expect from “Ghost in the Shell.” I assumed it would have great visuals and a mindless plot. I was right about the visuals. Although the futuristic city portrayed in the film looks a little too close to “Blade Runner,” overall the film is convincing and occasionally mind-blowing in terms of its visual impact. The surprise about the new film is that director Rupert Sanders has a story to tell, and tells it well. What would it be like to be an android (or, actually, a cyborg) with no body to call your own and memories you can’t trust? This film tells you.
