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Summary: A comparison of the difference in storyline between Ender’s Game and Ender’s Game Alive.

After I listened to Ender’s Game Alive last week (a radio-styled audio drama) I decided to re-read Ender’s Game in print.

Ender’s Game is a story that has had lots of versions.  It was originally a short story.  Then Card expanded it into a full length book.  Then Card revised it to the ‘Author’s Definitive Version’.  And now there is Ender’s Game Alive and the Ender’s Game movie.

In addition there have been a number of short stories that have expanded on scenes from the book or provided background.  There is a whole book that was falls between the last two chapters of Ender’s Game and a whole series that starts by telling this same story from a different character’s perspective.

So when I listened to Ender’s Game Alive and commented on my disappointment with the abridgement I got a little push back.  I was going to re-read Ender’s Game anyway.  But I read it with an eye to see the places that were handled differently.

Having read both within a couple days of each other, I agree, Ender’s Game Alive is really a different version of the story more than an abridgement.  But I stand by the fact that I think it does not give enough character development to Ender.  (Stop reading now if you don’t want any spoilers.)

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This book delivers on a fascinating concept: find real-world people who embody the virtues and vices of the protagonists and villains in Ayn Rand’s novels. It’s a creative angle to look at the lives of Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Milton Friedman, Barney Frank, and others through the lens of Ayn Rand’s characters and philosophy. Some of the descriptions lack depth–for example, I understood that the U.S. Government went after Bill Gates for supposed antitrust issues, and the book is obviously defending Gates, but I never got a clear grasp of what the government’s argument was, specifically.

The stories of the Randian heroes (Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Milton Friedman, TJ Rodgers, and John Allison) were interesting, but the villains really delivered the best reading. The chapter on Paul Krugman was the most emotional, as it involved Krugman’s personal demonization of the author. I worried that the account might be less than objective, but I know enough about Krugman from other sources that I don’t doubt he’s the dirtbag the book portrays him as.

The architects of the recent housing market meltdown (and subsequent wrecking ball into the general economy), Barney Frank on the government side and Angelo Mozilo (Countrywide) on the business side, are portrayed as arrogant and greedy collectivists that align perfectly with Rand’s worst villians. The authors trace in great detail how Frank’s pursuit of increased homeownership and the subsequent availability of billions in government-backed funds created a huge opportunity for Countrywide to exploit for massive profit, processing thousands of risky sub-prime mortgages and then selling them to the government.

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