Mandy Kaplan has been handed a Hugo-winning, Nebula-winning, Mormon-authored military sci-fi classic about a six-year-old being psychologically tortured into committing accidental alien genocide, and reader, she has THOUGHTS. This week, her son Casey's high school chemistry teacher — the proud Trojan, theater company founder, and science-and-theater double-nerd Erica Cochran — walks Mandy through Orson Scott Card's 1985 novel Ender's Game, a book that predicted the internet, iPads, online political discourse, and rogue AI with such unsettling accuracy that you kind of want to check if Card also has next week's lottery numbers.Before they even open the book, there's The Orson Scott Card Problem to address — namely, that he is an anti-gay-rights activist who appears to have written a scene in which his six-year-old protagonist convinces a naked bully to also get naked before their fistfight. Mandy has some thoughts about this. Erica has some thoughts about this. Everyone has some thoughts about this. They proceed with their "art vs. artist" disclaimer firmly in place, with Mandy reserving the right to get in a few jabs. She gets in several.What unfolds is a joyful, slightly unhinged, deeply thoughtful conversation about a book Mandy read every word of and still couldn't quite follow ("I got a lot of beeps and boops"), while Erica — who has reread the series multiple times and done "a lot of therapy" — sees the full emotional architecture underneath. They dig into why so many of these dystopias center on children (the innocence, the smallness, the inability to consent), why Ender is Valentine with the capacity to be Peter, why the government commissions a third child from a family whose parents are, diplomatically speaking, not geniuses, and whether the book's climactic religion-founding is a defense of the Book of Mormon or a sly admission that anyone can make up a religion. Also discussed: Scientology's youth promotion track, the 2013 movie (Erica: "two thumbs down"), the inexplicable prevalence of the insult "fart-eater," and the fact that Petra is doing her absolute best and does not deserve Mandy's Gen-X scolding.By the end, Mandy is converted — not to loving the book, exactly, but to seeing what she missed in it. Which is, honestly, the whole point of this podcast.Connect with the ShowFollow Mandy on Instagram: @mandy_kaplan_klavensMake Me a Nerd runs on curious people. If that's you, the inner circle is at makemeanerd.com/join — it's where the show goes deeper between episodes, and where Mandy's most embarrassingly enthusiastic fans have found their people.
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