Ender's Game and the STEM Crisis

Ender's Game feels like a super-cut of itself - relentlessly focused on completion. I'm presuming that pace is meant to mirror the story's sleep deprived timeline. However, it may well leave the viewer unconvinced of various (particularly social) leaps in the protagonist's (arrow straight) story arc.
Harry Potter in space? I was quickly reminded far more of The Methods of Rationality. No coincidence - Orson Scott Card's novel must certainly have had huge influence on the later and my enjoyment of the zero-g training matches was largely borrowed fire from scenes in Eliezer Yudkowsky's fan-fic subversion.

Screen Grab from Ender's Game (2013)

Star Trek Into Darkness (2013) was another story about a perfectly Machiavellian intellect (Cumberbatch's type-cast). Well, 'competence porn' has long had strong audience appeal: witness the popularity of detective and forensic TV drama series. But, more interestingly, this theme mirrors a very real issue in contemporary society: as our technologies advance in complexity they demand ever greater levels of abstraction.

The Social Network (2010) would be a third movie example, while The real Mark Zuckerberg can certainly feel the pinch of contemporary cognitive workplace requirements, whittling down the pool of potential employees. Hence lobbying for immigration of STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) graduates.

Hydrogen Swan Song

This is a good novel. A good sci-fi novel by a great author. A great author who died last year, at an unfitting age, and will be fondly remembered by his body of fantastic works.

Photographed - Hydrogen Sonata. Front inset Iain M Banks. Rear inset Iain Banks.

It certainly held my attention, and looking back, the second 300 pages felt more like a last 3 chapters (in that the end of the story flew by far too soon). However, I didn't find it as exciting or stimulating as previous Culture books. Maybe I am just not as ravenously enthusiastic for this kind of material as I was previously; older and wise to these fantastic vistas. The concluding details didn't feel surprising, but it never really felt like they could have been; I was resigned to the plot arc being somewhat frustrating, inevitably stuck dancing around the familiar end of the rabbit hole (so to speak).

As I've said previously, there's no way to wrap up the Culture itself: they have been so well written as the epitome of a stable utopia: stubbornly determined to keep on partying forever, while making damn sure everyone else has as much fun as possible too! So I was hoping for a complete change of pace by having a prequel. There are teasers here, but little exploration of this direction.