Excellent Kessel piece, though I agree with y'all that this kind of thing is normal for adolescents to be into. Especially social-outcast adolescents. I suspect that part of what Card was doing (and doing quite well) was intentionally providing a strong reader-identification character. For example, I thought that Ender not being willing to tell his parents about Peter's abuse was pretty plausible—that's not part of my own experience, but it sounds to me very much like (a more extreme version of) the kind of thing kids often go through.
You wrote:
Resolved: That Ender’s Game, published in 1985, is in fact the last 1950s SF novel. Discuss.
I wouldn't say the last one. Perhaps the last great one? Interesting that it should follow so closely on the heels of Neuromancer, perhaps the first great 1980s SF novel. (In the sense of showing the future of the '80s instead of the future of the '50s, I mean.)
One of the several long scholarly papers on sf that an alternate-universe version of me who has some time might someday write is an overview of the superman theme in fiction, especially in science fiction, especially looking at reader-identification characters for bright adolescents, especially looking at questions of separatism and with particular emphasis on Wilmar Shiras's Children of the Atom and Nancy Kress's Beggars in Spain. It would also touch on the thirteen-year-old-girl-genius subgenre (Podkayne of Mars, Rite of Passage, Emergence). It would also have to venture into fantasy and folklore and history, looking at people who are considered superior by birthright in one way or another, which is to say that one reason I'll never get around to writing this is that I wouldn't be able to focus it narrowly on one topic. I'd probably have to title it "Fans Are Slans."
It would have to include a discussion of this from Disch:
Science fiction is read most avidly by precocious children, brainy adolescents and a particular kind of retarded adult. What these readers have in common is a need to assert the primacy of Intellect. The message that comes through in tale after tale is that it pays to be intelligent, and this is true at all levels of literacy, from sub to ultra. Fantasies about sex and money [in science fiction] are relatively scarce and, where they do exist, invariably feeble. The story that tears at an sf reader's heart (or cerebellum) is the story about someone (a child especially) who discovers that he possesses Secret Mental Powers: Theodore Sturgeon's More Than Human, Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End, anything by A.E. van Vogt. What sf fans require in their heroes they applaud in themselves as well, and the most zealous of them congregate annually in convention halls to do honor to the peculiar and elusive genius that raises them above people who like other kinds of junk.
Now there is one life-situation in which it is essential to be smart, smarter, smartest. Say you're fourteen years old, pulling down good grade at school (but never good enough), and already beginning to get anxious about college. In that situation your hero won't be Billy the Kid. Sf writers are cheerleaders of the Science Honors Society, whose membership they ever and again remind that the rollicking lamb of Youth must and should be sacrificed on the gray altar of Education. So long as this sacrifice remains the secret sorrow of one's life, so long will sf remain interesting.
—from "The Uses of Fiction: A Theory", from New Fiction Society (1975), reprinted in an appendix in Fundamental Disch (Bantam, 1980)
(I think the emphasis there on Intellect per se is somewhat missing the point, though; I'd say that's just part of a larger pattern of desire to feel superior to the society from which one feels outcast.)
It would also have to include, by reference, the entirety of Spinrad's essay "Emperor of Everything," from Asimov's in 1987, an installment of Spinrad's excellent literary criticism column, reprinted in the hard-to-find book that collects those columns, Science Fiction in the Real World. "Emperor of Everything" discusses the Hero with a Thousand Faces, and how easy it is to transform that story into the power fantasy Spinrad calls "The Emperor of Everything." About half the piece is devoted to discussion of Ender's Game and Speaker for the Dead. Most of the rest of the piece is discussion of the Dune books and Spinrad's own The Iron Dream and Bester's The Stars My Destination. If I could summarize it adequately, I would; since I can't, I'll just have to recommend tracking down the book. I gather Jon H found it in a library (maybe try interlibrary loan?), or you could borrow my copy if you're interested. Or maybe I'll drop a note to Spinrad and ask how he'd feel about posting the essay online somewhere.
(Turns out it was Jonathan Vos Post who coined the phrase "The Emperor of Everything".)
I think Kessel's article is fascinating, and clarifies a lot of stuff I've had in my head about that book for some time. On the other hand, he gives short shrift to the way Card plays around with intention and result (causality again?), and the way knowledge plays with those. In that vein, here's another essay question: Peter is set up as an anti-Ender. Yet the Hegemon is a succesful ruler, and is portrayed as having, on the whole, a more beneficial life than the Xenocide (up through the end of the novel). If you had to choose which to kill in infancy, which would you choose? Which would the Hive Queen choose? Which would Card choose?
Oh, and to vaguely hint at how I would answer your third question ... I came across Ender's Game in seventh grade, more or less. Well, eleventh, I suppose, but that was my own adolescent rage-and-shame peak, roughly parallel to Kessel's nuclear seventh grade. That was also when I was 'graduating' to specfic with more complex and darker themes. In other words, it was the right book at the right time. It remained the right book for many years, for a variety of reasons, in a way that Heinlein, also expressing much of the same things a few years earlier in my own journey through the canon, did not. The last time I re-read the book, though, in my thirties I think or late twenties anyway, I found it appalling and nasty. I haven't had the urge to read it since. I suspect that EG serves, in that sense, as a gateway book for a lot of adolescents and teens, and is put aside when we put aside childish things. Because of that curve, however, someone living in or near a college will find the book perpetually popular, simply because the river flows through at just the right time. It's always tricky to extrapolate from my own experience, which is usually anamolous even among specfic readers, but an outside observer stationed at college-age would have seen me, as Kessel did one of his students, a cynic who adored the book, and not have seen me later, a shul-goer who rejected it. In other words, it says more about the intersection of adolescence and genre than about genre itself.
Thanks,
-V.