[littlemissattitude]

Umm...last things first. Jeremy, you ask:

What is religion doing in "science" fiction?

Science fiction regularly grapples with questions of religion/spirituality. See, for example, Robert Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land, Ray Bradbury's short story The Man, Arthur C. Clarke's The Nine Billion Names of God, to mention only three works from the masters, among many works and writers whose work does so.

You also say that:

I agree with the article that the simulated battle games that took up so much of the novel have almost nothing to do with the final battle with the aliens near the end.

Really? Well, you certainly have a right to your opinion. Still, it seems to me that the strategy and tactics learned in battle school had everything to do with the strategy and tactics used in the final battle.

Card's expositions on human nature and politics are mostly wrong.

Again, you are entitled to your opinion. And that is exactly what this is. I don't agree with a lot of Card's politics, either, not to mention some of the social positions he takes as a consequence of his religious belief, but that doesn't mean that I'm absolutely, incontrovertably right and he is absolutely wrong, either.

To begin with, Card has very little grasp of child behavior and psychology. Children, even the extremely smart ones, simply do not behave the way that Card describes.

First of all, it would be well to remember that Ender's Game is fiction. The characters within it are not required to act exactly as real people in the time we know behave. But having said that, I wonder exactly how many gifted - I mean, really gifted - children you have been around. At the risk of sounding arrogant, I was one of those children, or at least my school district at the time felt I was when they put me into a special MGM (mentally gifted minors) program at around the age many of the children in Ender's Game seem to be. I certainly recognized many of the general behaviors Card gives the Battle School students as slightly (and sometimes only slightly) exaggerated behaviors I saw as a participant in my program. I have also seen similar behaviors since then in interactions with honors students in other contexts. A lot of them are miniature adults, in behavior if not in psychology. That may or may not be exactly healthy for them, but that's the way it is. Goodness knows that I was much too adult as a child, something I've been trying to remedy as an adult. On another note, I suspect that Card was, himself, one of those "extremely smart" children, based on other things he's written and on some comments he made during a science fiction con I attended at which he was guest of honor.

Anyway, I really haven't heard too many people call Card "the greatest science fiction writer of our age." He is very good, I think, although I personally try to stay away from the more overtly religious of his fiction. That's my choice because I have had a not very satisfactory experience with his religion, though, not a critique of his writing in those books. I would recommend some of his stand-alones, not all of which are science fiction. In the science fiction genre, I would especially recommend Pastwatch as a fascinating exploration of the consequences of time travel.