Book Qlub 8: Ender's Game and Sci-Fi Weekend

What a Weekend!

First, some of us (one of us) made it out to the SF in SF reading  by Kim Stanley Robinson and Cecilia Holland. The readings were great, especially Kim Stanley Robinson's dialogue text which he and Cecilia Holland acted out. If you've never been to a reading at SF in SF, you should think about checking it out. To date, they've raised $25,000 for local charities, all off booze and donations! It's great! Plus the question and answer portion, moderated by Terry Bisson (They're Made out of Meat), is great. We had an awesome discussion of book proposals, titles, and a Brown University post-modern deconstruction and Marxist-dialectic debate on the connection between history and Science Fiction, with Kim Stanley Robinson arguing that Science Fiction is, at it's most basic level, a Historical Literature, inasmuch that it is a literature that is presumably connected to this reality's history to the here-and-now, which is unknowable, so actually connected to some point or another. We also talked about the Raiders.

Then: BOOK QLUB 8! This time around we met up at Zeitgeist for veggie burgers, beers, and a discussion of Ender's Game in 45 degree weather. The Qlub had a variety of reactions to the book, though most of us agreed that while Orson Scott Card did not write a particularly sophisticated book (somewhere around a 12th Grade reading level, which might explain its great popularity), he was still effective in making a connection with the reader: for some with the ending, for others with the characters. We also mostly agreed that the buggers did Ender and humanity a big favor by placing all their queens on one planet for Ender to destroy with one shot, a favor that is due every great military genius. Some of us had some big logistical problems with the book: why exactly Ender was so smart was never actually portrayed; why they didn't just use Mazer Rackman didn't quite make sense; the whole the world-dominance-through-blogging was particularly hard to swallow, and Valentine's blackmailing of Peter via pictures of tortured squirrels was a laugh-out-loud moment for some of us. We had a brief discussion of two interesting essays on Ender's Game: Elaine Radford's Ender and Hilter: Sympathy for the Superman and John Kessel's Creating the Innocent Killer: Ender's Game, Intention and Morality: break a kid's arm, murder two boys, annihilate an entire race (Xenocide), but it's never Ender's fault. So, reviews were mixed: from rubbish to enjoyable. 

But that's not all! We then biked over to the Castro Theatre where we saw a double feature of Flash Gordon and Dune. It was a long night. Flash proved to be quite entertaining and a ton more campy then remembered from youth, while Dune remained gorgeous, strange, and totally befuddling to most of the group that hadn't read the book or seen the movie before. No surprise there, as that's what the studios thought the first time when they released the movie and gave movie goers a flyer just to try and follow along. Most of Book Qlub stayed awake for 90% of the movie, though afterwards, only two of us could pronounce Kwisatz Haderach. This book should probably never had been made into a two hour movie. More like a multi-season series, like Game of Thrones. That was Book Qlub and Sci-Fi Weekend! And, just for Laughs: Oil Emperor of Dune.