Creating the Innocent Killer: Ender's Game, Intention, and Morality

by John Kessel

First published January 1, 2004

About the author

John (Joseph Vincent) Kessel co-directs the creative writing program at North Carolina State University in Raleigh. A winner of the Nebula, Locus, Sturgeon, and Tiptree Awards, his books include Good News From Outer Space, Corrupting Dr. Nice, The Pure Product, and The Baum Plan for Financial Independence and Other Stories. His story collection Meeting in Infinity was a New York Times Notable Book. Most recently, with James Patrick Kelly he has edited the anthologies Feeling Very Strange, Rewired, The Secret History of Science Fiction and Kafkaesque. Born in Buffalo, NY, Kessel has a PhD in American Literature, has been an NEA Fellow, and for twenty years has been one of the organizers of the Sycamore Hill Writers Workshop.

Reviews

[The Lazy Reader · Rating 5 out of 5]

Yeah...turns out your childhood favorites are not the most moral pieces of art, even though you thought they were so profound at age fifteen. Reality, as it happens, was just americans secretly grooming their kids into becoming soldiers(again) and you got caught in the crossfire, because you were just a teenager being handed a fully fleshed out revenge fantasy :')

[Rick · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love Ender's Game, so this was at times hard to read. John Kessel makes good points, and thinking back to the book I agree with a lot of his points.

If you hold Ender's Game to a very high standard, be warned that reading this essay will cause you to question that.

I still love the book, and it has had a big effect on me - reading this does cause me to think back and be a little more critical of it.

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