Richard Koman of the O'Reilly Network has published an interview with me about my upcoming book and my recent writing projects:
RK: A few years back I interviewed the chief scientist for the Army's simulation command and he explicitly mentioned Ender's Game as the novel that many military people read and said, "That's me!"
CD: Yeah, it's part of a tradition of military science fiction like Starship Troopers and so on that kind of glorify the military training process and what it means to become a military man and go through that process.
Heinlein and lots of other writers have written these stories where nerdy but very intelligent people try to find a way to make their outsides match their insides by going away and joining the military and becoming physically strong and proving themselves by engaging in military bravery. There's certainly a strong thread of that running through Ender's Game; it's really about someone who becomes strong in body and mind and becomes a kind of ascetic–it's got its pluses and minuses but I thought it was worth talking about a different way that children find themselves used in online worlds and what it means to have a truly global online world.
In Ender's Game there's a kind of One World government, where you have these people from all over the world gathered together to defend humanity and so on, and he kind of glosses over what it means to have people who come from great economic disparity all join together in a virtual environment in the same system of governance. And I thought it would be worth taking a couple of pokes at that anthill and see what comes up.
