Adam Roberts is in two minds about Blackwell’s latest pop-culture exegesis.
Asa Butterfield and Harrison Ford in Ender’s Game (dir. Gavin Hood, 2013)
Ender’s Game and Philosophy
Kevin S Decker (ed)
Wiley, Blackwell, £11.15PLATO: Since my master downed his hemlock daiquiri, oh how lonely I have been! And how keenly do I feel the lack of an interlocutor.
ARCRATES: That’s my cue.
PLATO: You?
ARCRATES: Permit me to introduce myself. I’m the embodiment of the Arc Blog, an online offshoot of the New Scientist.
PLATO: To speak of a new scientist implies that there might be an old and a new; when surely there can only be one scientist, whose guiding principle – truth – has nothing to do with novelty or age?
ARCRATES: That’s the spirit! Soon enough we’ll be dialoguing-it to the max. To the max squared!
PLATO: Yet how can this be? My master died twenty five centuries before your ᾄρκβλόγ was set in virtual motion. Yet here you stand, before me, wrapped in a toga!
ARCRATES: The nifty thing about the realm of Forms is its occupants have no sell-by date. Except for the Platonic Form of the Sell-By Date, but that’s a special case. You’re as fresh as a newly tossed salad, my friend. And the toga – yes. Well. I did wonder about the toga. Would it help you adjust to modern life, or would it just freak you out? I thought to myself: toga, or NOT toga? That is the qu— you’re looking pained.
PLATO: Forgive me, my friend. I have been sitting here, awaiting your arrival, with nothing to read but 21st-century philosophy. It has not been an inspiring business.
ARCRATES: I am sorry about the delay. The Toga Rental place didn’t open until – look, anyway, I’m here now.
PLATO: The library here is supplied with a complete set of the ‘Blackwell Philosophy and Pop Culture Series’, a whole series of books put forth under the general editorship of William Irwin. The volume I presently hold in my hand is Kevin S Decker edited volume of essays Ender’s Game and Philosophy, in which various eminences and writers spin-off philosophical propositions from Orson Scott Card’s 1985 prose romance, Ender’s Game. It’s a novel with a considerable following amongst science fiction aficionados – science-aficionados, if you will – with its tale of an isolated young boy at a military college trained to fight virtual reality games against an ant-like alien threat, the “Buggers”, only to discover he has been actually directing the battle-fleet to victory. Now, the book informs us, it is a Major Hollywood Film.
ARCRATES: And did you like it?
