by Black, Jake
In the screenplays not written by Card, the endings are very different from the novels. In one version, the I.F. is holding a banquet in Ender’s honor after the war. Mazer steps to a podium and introduces Ender as their guest of honor. To everyone’s surprise, Bean comes to the pulpit instead and Ender is nowhere to be found. Bean then proceeds to read a statement written by Ender in which Ender details his intent to carry the Formic cocoon to a safe planet and reintroduce the Formic species. At that moment, Ender takes off alone in a ship and flies overhead. Bean and everyone at the banquet look heavenward and watch Ender fly away.
The problem with this idea is that if the I.F. knew that Ender had a Formic cocoon and intended on reintroducing the species, wouldn’t they try to stop him? Wouldn’t they shoot his ship out of the sky? They just sacrificed thousands, if not millions, of I.F. soldiers to defeat the Formics once and for all. Why would they allow Ender to get away with a cocoon? That would negate everything they had just done and sacrificed. No, for Ender to reveal his intentions to the I.F. would be suicide.
In the other screenplay, the writer goes even further. In his version, Ender himself tells Mazer his intentions. He shows Mazer the Formic cocoon and divulges his plan to fly to a planet where the queen and her people can be reintroduced. Inexplicably, Mazer gives his blessing and even supplies Ender with the ship he’ll need to make the journey.
This defied all logic to me.
Why would Mazer do that? Wouldn’t he seize the queen and destroy her instantly? Wasn’t that the purpose of the fleet, to find and destroy all remnants of the Formics? Why would Mazer have such a sudden change of heart? Wouldn’t that go against everything he had stood for? Wouldn’t that be the most un-Mazer-like decision he could make?
9. ENDER
I’ve discussed many of the story changes among the various screenplays, but as I mentioned earlier, the success of the film depends largely on the filmmakers’ ability to capture the true character of Ender. Changes in story can be forgiven, even applauded, as long as Ender is Ender on the big screen.
Scott Card’s screenplays achieve that. Though they differ in many ways, the Ender on paper in each version is the Ender I remember from the novels. He’s determined, but never cocky, compassionate, but never soft with his soldiers; brave, but never reckless, inventive, but never demeaning. He demonstrates an understanding of command and proves through his actions that he’s deserving of the confidence the I.F. places in him.
The writing team and the screenwriter that followed, however, created two other versions of the character. In their scripts there are instances in which Ender glares, scowls, storms out of a room, tells adults to piss off, tells Mazer to screw himself, smashes Battle School property in a show of defiance, yells at teachers, makes demands of the teachers that inexplicably they comply with, deceives Mazer, and even threatens other students with vengeance.
In one scene Ender gloats to Peter for having his monitor longer. Then Ender threatens to give back to Peter every abuse that Peter gave him—in essence saying, “When I’m older, Peter, I’ll have my revenge and give you a taste of your own medicine.”
Hmm. Not exactly the Ender I remember.
And there’s more.
In another scene, Ender calls Peter a loser, boasting that he made it to Battle School and belittling Peter because he didn’t.
When Ender reaches Battle School, this new behavior doesn’t change. He mocks Bonzo in the cafeteria. He gloats to the teachers, telling them he beat them. He complains to Graff that Battle School is too hard and whines that he can’t shoot or play the game well.
When Bonzo is rough on him, Ender hurries to Graff to beg to be transferred.
When Ender goes to the arcade, he insists on playing several strategy games at once, systematically defeating all of the soldiers who oppose him and humiliating them all in the process.
There were of course many instances in which Ender behaved like any fan of the novels would expect him to—showing courage, showing that he loves his family, being inventive in his approach to the game, and demonstrating true genius.
That said, fans would have a hard time looking past the instances in which Ender acts more like Peter or Bonzo. Those moments stand out like bright red stains on an otherwise stark white garment. They’re hard to forget and forgive. And even though much of the scripts played out exactly as I had hoped they would, I couldn’t see past those moments in which Ender was simply not himself.
GETTING ENDER RIGHT
I haven’t told you everything about the existing screenplays or their development. Not even close. There are countless plot points, story changes, and other surprises still unmentioned. A full analysis of them all would require a much thicker book than this one and possibly spoil some of the fun of seeing the film.
Some of you may think me a harsh critic and that I’ve been too unforgiving with the screenwriters’ deviations from the original material. If so, I wouldn’t blame you. Ender’s Game had a profound effect on me when I was younger, so I’m naturally more protective of the story and more critical of those who alter it for reasons I can’t understand.
Die-hard Ender fans would likely side with me. And since you bought this book, you’re probably one of them. Like me, you have very high expectations indeed. You want the film to be just as moving, engaging, and memorable as the novels are.
I’m convinced it can happen. People in the industry with the means to bring it to life are showing great interest. A very good script exists.
Anything could go wrong, of course, and Orson Scott Card isn’t the only man capable of writing a great script. Other screenwriters could be brought in, and the process could begin again. Who knows? If I’ve learned anything in my limited experience, it’s that Hollywood is as predictable as lightning strikes. And sometimes just as painful.
But take heart, fellow Ender fan. Ender’s Game will come. Of that I am sure. How and when is anyone’s guess. But when it does, you can bet your flash suit that Orson Scott Card will make sure it’s the same Ender he created thirty years ago, the same Ender all of us remember and expect.
THE
TECHNOLOGY OF ENDER’S GAME
Some Thoughts on How the Battle School and
the Battle Room Might Function
—BY STEPHEN SYWAK
Orson Scott Card was aware of Stephen Sywak’s early work on the Battle School technology, and it informed his thinking as he worked on the Shadow books and Ender in Exile, though it is not authoritative, since the final look of Battle School and the Battle Room will be worked out in conjunction with artists working on the comic book series for Marvel and designers working on the movie.
THE CREATION OF THE INTERNATIONAL FLEET
After the first invasion of the Formics against the Earth, the independent national governments (led by the three economic giants of China, the United Arab Emirates, and the United States of North America) created an international consortium dedicated to creating a war machine capable of defeating the Formics in any and all subsequent invasions.
Earth heavy industry was redirected toward the production of a massive defensive and offensive infrastructure. The U.S. and Chinese space programs were redirected from their mission plans of landing men and women on Saturn’s icy moon, Enceladus, and focused on creating an interstellar war-time fleet capable of interstellar travel, close-in fighting, and deep-mission support.
The fleet was modeled on the successful organization of the naval fleets of Japan, Germany, and the United States during World War II, and included interstellar surrogates for aircraft carriers, battleships, cruisers, destroyers, corvettes, minesweepers, patrol boats, and various amphibious assault ships. In addition to the surrogates (analogues) for the naval vessels, surrogates for bombers, reconnaissance aircraft, and long- and short-range fighters were also produced.
Aircraft carriers became immense interstellar hives, carrying everything from small one-person fighters up to twelve-person minesweepers, support ships, and
most everything in between. Battleships became heavily armored cities, bristling with energy-based and kinetic-kill weaponry. Corvettes became high-speed attack craft, capable of “orbiting” the larger, high-mass, slow-moving vessels such as the carriers and battleships as they protected them.
STAR DRIVES
At the time of the First Invasion, physicists were already in the early stages of what would eventually become the “Alcubierre drive,” based on the work of physicist Miguel Alcubierre in the late twentieth century. The Alcubierre drive was an attempt to create a controlled volume (a Cleaver/Obousy space-time sphere), within which a vehicle could be made to move at relativistic velocities with respect to its surroundings. Complications in the propagation speeds of the space-time wave front at the leading edge of a moving vessel had stalled the research until the Formic drive systems were retrieved from captured starships. The discovery of the crystalline “Eggs” within the drive bays of the Formic ships and the eventual realization that they were the basis of a field-based star drive generator was the breakthrough required to move the Alcubierre drive research forward. Lessons learned from the Formic drives (primarily, the ability to create and manipulate vectors of the subatomic strong-force), coupled with the knowledge gained from the separate development of the Alcubierre system, brought about the creation of highly controllable relativistic drive technology to power Earth’s interstellar fleets.
The Formic Eggs develop a spherical force field (an analogue to the Cleaver/Obousy sphere, as mentioned previously), whose diameter is configured to extend beyond the major dimension of the ship within which the drive is situated. Interstellar dust, molecules, atoms, photons, free electrons, and—as was eventually learned—dark matter are attracted to the sphere’s surface like dust is attracted to a static-charged balloon. However, these interstellar particles are not the only material attracted to the surface of the sphere. Space-time itself is attracted to and becomes wrapped around the sphere—the sphere injects itself into a fissure it creates within space/time. The Alcubierre drive then draws the space-time geodesics around it through the application of directed atomic strong-force vectors. The space-time draws away from the front of the sphere, wraps around it, and closes up behind it, drawing the sphere (and the spaceship within it) through space-time. The particles present on the surface are broken down into their constituent subatomic constituents, and the energy from the breaking of those bonds is supported in the force field—held on the surface of the field as potential energy, used to continue and strengthen the cycle. The subatomic remnants of the particles also flow around the surface of the sphere and are ejected off the trailing end. Research is continuing as to exactly what happens to the dark matter that is entrained and ejected by the sphere.
A common analogy used to explain this mechanism is to compare it to modifying the surface tension on the forward end of a flat disk placed on the surface of a body of water. The disk is drawn forward toward the disruption in the surface tension. Obviously, the Alcubierre drive is far more complicated in that it involves nine additional spatial dimensions and the breaking of molecular, atomic, and subatomic bonds.
One of the great benefits to the fact that the Cleaver/Obousy sphere slides along a self-made fissure in the multiple dimensions of space-time is that the ship itself and the crew and equipment onboard do not experience any acceleration as the ship changes speed from Newtonian to sublight Einsteinian speeds. The ship and its contents remain in a zero-G (“free fall”) condition as they travel along the slip-plane in the fabric of space/time. Without the Alcubierre drive, the “normal” acceleration required to make the distance between the stars achievable would crush or disable the crew onboard any ship. Countering that acceleration with artificial means would be difficult if not outright impossible. As an example, centripetal force (such as is provided by rotating habitation wheels or rings; commonly used to simulate gravitational acceleration), cannot be used to reduce an imposed acceleration. Electrically driven electro-synthetic planar gravity fields, often used where centripetal wheels are not an option, were explored in early pre-Alcubierre drive experiments. Unfortunately, the slightest dropout of one of these generated gravity fields would subject the ship’s payload to sudden, high imposed accelerations, leading to the loss of both the payload and the test vehicle.
The Cleaver/Obousy spheres have the advantage of being self-sustaining—to a degree, based on the density of the matter surrounding the drive sphere. Upon the loss of the central Alcubierre drive (such as from a power loss or the failure of one of the inner generating fields), the energy stored from the dissociation of the particles on the surface of the sphere maintain the integrity of the sphere and allow a steady, stable collapse of the field, eventually bringing the ship to a safe stop.
ARTIFICIAL GRAVITY
Studies in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries had already shown the critical need to maintain near-Earth gravity onboard spaceships for the long-term health of their occupants. Trips to Mars in the first quarter of the twenty-first century relied on large, rotating habitation wheels to provide 85 percent Earth-normal gravity for the duration of the voyage. Around that same time, the first electro-synthetic planar gravity generators were being developed. Early efforts with Bose-Einstein condensates, running at subfractional 0K temperatures, proved successful, but highly impractical. The ability to fabricate nanotechnology-engineered superconducting materials eventually led to the creation of Bose-Einstein resins, and resulted in reliable, moderate-power, room-temperature planar gravity generators. Furthermore, the discovery of similar Formic technology on ships captured during the First Invasion allowed important increases in efficiency and control of the generated fields, including the addition of three-dimensional volumetric (or “shaping”) control.
Reliability issues and the need to provide single-point-failure-proof artificial gravitational systems led to the choice of building dual-mode systems into all starships and similar long-term space assets, such as the Battle School. These dual-mode systems rely on both large, rotating habitation wheels to create gravity through centripetal acceleration, and electro-synthetic planar gravity generators. The failure of one system does not cascade into the failure of the secondary system, providing a safe haven for the crew until the failed system can be repaired.
Normal production electro-synthetic artificial planar gravity generators have a short effective range and only effective over 5 to 10 meters (at which point they exhibit a rapid falloff). The specialized focusing generators used by the “Hooks” within the Battle Rooms have an effective range of 45 meters.
MOLECULAR DETACHMENT DEVICE/MOLECULAR DISRUPTION DEVICE
As mentioned previously, the Cleaver/Obousy (C/O) spheres are self-sustaining, to a degree, in the relative vacuum of deep space. The subatomic dissociation of trace amounts of interstellar gasses, dust, molecules, and atoms, along with sparse amounts of dark matter, allow the creation and storage of potential energy in higher-dimensional waves along the surface of the sphere.
In a denser environment, however, the amount of energy created and stored by the C/O spheres is immense. In the presence of dense solids, such as another spaceship or a planetary body, the energy created cannot be long contained. The C/O sphere may rapidly grow in size in an attempt to provide the necessary surface area to store the energy. The sphere acts in a manner similar to electron orbitals surrounding a hydrogen atom. Intentionally imposing certain harmonic frequencies in the field energy can cause the C/O spheres to jump to higher and higher macro-orbital energies at an increasingly rapid rate. The growth in the size of the macro-orbitals increases the rate of energy creation, and the system heterodynes (exhibits runaway feedback) to the point where it becomes unstable. Cleaver/Obousy spheres, when manipulated into instability in the manner described, will expand until the material density surrounding them exhibits a sudden dropoff, at which point they continue to destroy the subatomic bonds of the denser material and eventually collapse onto themselves and dissipa
te.
As one might expect, a controlled force field with the ability to disrupt every molecule and to disassociate every atom that touches it makes a nearly irresistible weapon. None of the Formic ships was found to contain the modifications that Earth’s scientists and engineers made to weaponize the Alcubierre drive system. It has therefore been assumed that this weapon was not in the Formic arsenal.
The weapon that was developed from modifications to the Alcubierre drive was initially named after the molecular disruption effect of its operation, and was called—quite simply—the “Molecular Detachment Device” or “Molecular Disruption Device.” This name was changed, with colloquial use, to “MD Device,” subsequently “Dr. Device” (MD equaling “Medical Doctor” in the English language), and eventually the “Little Doctor.” This device was of course used, as history recounts, by the fleets controlled by Andrew (Ender) Wiggin in the final battle of the Third Invasion against the Formic home world. The chain reaction set up in the planetary material by the Cleaver/Obousy sphere caused the complete destruction of that planet.
Early designs of the MDD required that the field generator equipment be relatively near the center of the Cleaver/Obousy sphere, leading to the need to place the devices in physical projectiles or missiles. Later designs were able to form and project the sphere away from the central generator, actually separating it from the generator completely. This allowed the weapon to be used remotely, more akin to a high-powered beam weapon such as a laser or proton beam device. An additional advantage of projecting the C/O sphere is that due to its self-sustaining nature and its origins as an interstellar-drive, once created it accelerates forward toward its target at a high rate. Upon striking its target, the field generators adjust the frequency supporting the C/O sphere, in order to halt the acceleration and lock the sphere to its target.