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QUESTION:
I don't suppose you could just lay out for me the entire metaphor of the
mind game (in Ender's Game). I'm very curious; I've been thinking about it for
a long time, some pieces are obvious and that's no problem. It's other things
that just don't make sense. You mention plenty of times the fact that the mind
game is developing with the child, etc., and in that sense you can see how it
works with Ender in some stages. But what I'd like to know is how those very
peculiar scenes fit in (e.g., the giants corpse, how it grows old with time, how it
becomes a home for the buggers, Ender and Valentine walking down the stairs
with all those fairy tale creatures, etc.).
-- Submitted anonymously
OSC REPLIES: - December 20, 1999
The problem with laying out the "metaphor of the mind game" is twofold:
First, the mind game is not working as planned. The adults already knew
what to expect from student interaction with the mind game -- they knew what
various responses to the game meant about the child. But with Ender, the game
moves into new territory. You'll notice that they are worried about where some
of the images come from. In later books Ender discovers that the hive queen was
manipulating the game (creating Jane as a byproduct) but which elements come
from the game itself and which from the hive queen? And what was the hive
queen's objective? At times, it seems the idea is to drive Ender crazy or terrify
him and thereby cripple him, make him ineffective as a commander; at other
times, the idea seems to be to communicate with him, to make him think
differently about the hive queen. Which images arise from the game and which
from the hive-queen-as-saboteur and which from hive-queen-as-peacemaker?
You'd have to sort that out yourself.
Second, I did not want to create a "plotted" mind game because I would
inevitably use "known" symbols and fall into cliche. So ... as best I could, I
free-associated my way through, from the giant's drink on. I had no plan. When
I caught myself having a plan, I subverted it. I did not decide what was causing
the game to do what it did until after ... I did not know that the hive queen had
anything to do with it until I got Ender to the colony planet and was trying to
solve the problem of how they would leave him a message that nobody else
would get. So even though I found explanations after the fact, I was simply
drawing on images as they came up and felt right to me for that moment in the
story ... So I can't plot out the metaphors because not only do I not have the
faintest idea, I don't want there to be a plot. I want them to be received
viscerally as I received them.
The only thing that matters is that both the game and the hive queens
were taking images out of Ender's unconscious, and the only way for me to do
that effectively was to take situational images out of my own unconscious -- that
is, I wasn't free-associating "as Orson Card" but rather was responding to images
that felt right (to me) "for Ender." A weird psychological process, but one that
fiction writers go through all the time as we imagine what characters would do
and say.
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