OSC Answers Questions
QUESTION:
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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