Ender’s Game had some of that authority-questioning, but authority worked out in the end. All that moral ambiguity just stated (I felt) and any analysis postponed. If they turned the tides against the grownups it wasn’t in this volume, and I’m not overeager to read the sequels. I thought about analyzing the big twist, but I didn’t find it so big for one thing, and not so transformative.

I remember Crime and Punishment. It annoyed me enough to avoid Dostoevsky for the forseeable future.

K

One point: maybe I’m misremembering, but I thought one of the central themes of Ender’s Game is that children were being manipulated by adults – nothing so sci-fi about that, sad to say – and that the kids were not actually in training as they thought but actually fighting the war, albeit from the safety of their computers. And then, realizing how they’ve been betrayed, they take those skills and all else they’ve learned and turn them on the adults – becoming adult children in the process. But it’s been years since I read it and the rest of the series, which gradually went down the tubes.

Have you ever reviewed The Brothers Karamazov? I can’t remember if I read it way back in high school, but my wife gave me a copy of it for Christmas, and it sure is a fat one. So I’m reading Rushdie’s Shame instead. Grueling, funny, grueling, funny…

Keep up the good work and good writing. I appreciate very much your profound appreciation of literature.