When you wrote Ender's Game, were you criticizing anything about humans or the world as we know it today?

-- Submitted Anonymously

OSC REPLIES: - August 2, 2000

In my books, I deal with issues that I think matter in human life. The way we treat and use children, sheltering them or exposing them to danger, is always an important issue. Our first instinct is always to protect children -- but then we send them off to war (and, from my ripe old age of nearly fifty, the difference between a twelve-year-old and an eighteen-year-old is trivial -- they're still children). Somehow we have to find a balance. So in a sense, yes, I was criticizing, or at least questioning, some of the ways we deal with children; in another sense, though, I was expressing my idea that it is impossible to ever get it "right," so instead we must simply do our best to balance the needs of the group against the needs of the helpless or needy within the group.

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