Hmmm! This is interesting. I just read this, about all the nudity in Ender's Game. Yes, it's one of the reasons Ender will probably end up being my one favourite book not to be ruined by Hollywood (or, in the case of Gormenghast, the BBC) - even if the usual suspects are pumping up the rumour-mill again. But it doesn't necessarily mean Orson Scott Card was a paedophile either.
The point about Card is that he was working with science-fiction clichés about children saving the world from aliens. It's worth bearing in mind that this sort of thing was well established even in the 1970s, decades before Harry Potter had even been heard of. There was John Wyndham with Chocky's kids, there were G-Force (although not yet in English, admittedly), there were The Tomorrow People, and The X-Men, and so on and so forth. But where Card rises above the rest of the dross is in his ability to transcend the old hackneyed memes of his genre. So instead of the usual clean-cut, all American kids (or nice, middle-class English girls and boys), who have super powers and secret identities, Card gives us a realistic Arthur C Clarke-style space world future, with a futuristic "battle school" that is part Hitler Youth and part Lord of the Flies.
Well, I posted my point about Lord of the Flies on the Super Punch comics blog post about the nudity. (Was Golding himself a paedophile? Did he know T H White? I wonder.) But then I noticed that the reason I'd visited this blog in the first place was because I'd been looking for a new picture of Ender that I hadn't seen before. It's a cutting from a bigger picture and was used to illustrate the new film news on IGN. The full pic is shown above, and it turns out it's a new cover for Tor Books' new online edition of the novel. It's by the artist Sam Weber.
Well, blow me down if Mr Weber hasn't already done an illustrated edition of Lord of the Flies for the Folio Society. But then it takes all sorts, I suppose. Lord of the Flies itself remains a classic with the same sorts of people who like Ender's Game. (The sorts of people who like this sort of book, indeed - Michael Jackson and, er, others amongst them!)
