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I'm doing research for a paper I'm writing about Ender's Game and I came across a criticism by Elaine Radford. In her criticism she claims that you purposely modeled Ender after Hitler and your novels are a defense of genocide and race hatred. There are many similarities between the two that she points out and much of what she says makes sense.

Did you in fact mean to create such parallels? If so, why would you want to model a character after perhaps the most hated man of the twentieth century?

-- Submitted by Rachel Tyhurst

OSC REPLIES: - March 12, 2001

Nothing that she says makes sense. Ender is in no way modeled after Hitler. Her "parallels" are absurd. Do you have any idea how many "third children" there are in the world? I, for one, am one of them. Radford wanted to write a hate-filled attack on Ender's Game, and in that effort she succeeded. But not one of her analyses make even the tiniest bit of sense, and none of them hold up for even a moment as any kind of serious literary analysis.

In the original publication, I published my refutation of her absurd and mean-spirited piece immediately following it. If you have your hands on her original essay, surely you also have access to the answer I gave at the time. If someone is circulating her piece alone, then you can be sure their purpose is to continue her slander, because if they were even remotely fair-minded, they would have included my refutation along with it.

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