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And one of the most instructive.

Science-fiction writer Orson Scott Card wrote one of my favorite books of all time. So when he came out with a sequel, I was delirious with the desire to interview him.

"Ender's Game," which won the Hugo and Nebula awards in 1985, is the best book I have ever read about violence. Who would have thought it would result in an interview in which I wanted to throttle the author? "Ender's Game" is also about loving your enemies, a goal so important to me that I wrote a book about it myself. How could I guess that interviewing the author would make me question that entire project?

Ender's Shadow By Orson Scott Card Tor Books Fiction Buy this book at B&N.com Ender's Game By Orson Scott Card Tor Books Nonfiction Buy this book at B&N.com Ferocious Romance: What My Encounters With the Right Taught Me About Sex, God, and Fury By Donna Minkowitz Free Press Nonfiction Buy this book at B&N.com

A strangely empathic novel about 6-year-olds forced to be military commanders, "Ender's Game" brought together a fan base that might reasonably be expected to be at one another's throats (in some cases literally): progressives, children and soldiers. It was cherished by middle-schoolers and adults harrowed by child abuse; it was passed around by Gulf War bomb-droppers and used as a text by the Marines. And as for me, well, I'm a Jewish lesbian radical who wrote a book about what I have in common with the Christian right, so Card's paradoxes are right up my alley.

Card's hero, Ender, is an abused little boy being trained to fight alien enemies called the Buggers. His teachers have chosen him because he's compassionate enough to love (and hence to understand) his enemies, but ruthless and scared enough to wipe them off the face of the earth.

The sequel, "Ender's Shadow," is about another child who thinks he has to choose between love and survival. Its hero, Bean, is a starving toddler in a hellish future city where children fight each other for food. Bean eventually makes it into the Battle School where Ender's being taught to exterminate the Buggers.

I knew that Card, like his readership, was an outrageous hodgepodge. He writes strange, passionate books full of yearning but no sex and ardent little boys frisking around in zero gravity pretending to shoot each other. A devout Mormon, he is squeaky clean but adorably perverse and the author of a hit Mormon musical called "Barefoot to Zion," which celebrates the sesquicentennial of the entry of the Mormon pioneers into Salt Lake Valley. (I wanted to get my hands on a copy of that musical, badly.)

But I'd somehow failed to ascertain that Card was a disgustingly outspoken homophobe. And given his book's brilliant, humane examination of the ethics of violence, I couldn't have predicted he'd be someone who thought it was dandy to bomb and massacre civilians.

Now, I'm someone who loves contradictions, especially in writers. I think Ezra Pound should have been allowed to remain in the Poets' Corner of New York's Cathedral of St. John the Divine because his fascism and anti-Semitism will never make him a less beautiful poet. I have great fun reading Andrea Dworkin, even though I agree with her about exactly one thing: Rape is bad. And Allan Bloom's translation of Plato's "Republic" is fantastic and remains fantastic, even though his politics were gross.

But it's one thing to admire a bigot on the page, and another to endure a two-hour conversation with one. And my love and admiration for Card only made it worse. Talking to Klansmen was nothing compared to talking to the author of the most ethical book I've ever read.

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When Card comes on the line from Greensboro, N.C., I immediately tell him how ecstatically I love his work. I know I sound like a gushing teenager, but I can't help it. Writers I like are like people I have crushes on -- my feelings for them are among the most intense feelings I have. But, with difficulty, I collect myself. As a reporter, I'm here to draw out contradictions in my hero, not just celebrate them. "You seem to like the military," I begin, "but you're also hugely concerned with ethics. What's your opinion of most of the wars the U.S. has been involved in since World War II?"

"I have great respect for the people who offer themselves in that sacrificial role," says Card, whose voice is mellifluous and macho at once. I could listen to it all day. "But I also have great criticisms of the way the military is currently organized. I'd hate to have it on the record that I 'like the military.' But our entry into the Korean and Vietnam wars reflect very well upon the American people. The motive was not imperialistic at all, but genuinely altruistic. We were willing to send our children off to war to protect, as we saw it -- as we were told to see it -- to protect the freedom of other nations. And like Ender, if we were lied to, we're still not responsible for the actions we took based on what we believed. Our leaders, in both cases, made mistakes. The Grenada thing -- I think the record is absolutely clear that that was a good thing."

That's OK, I tell myself nervously. I expected us to have different politics. It's on the really big issues that he and I will find our commonalities. "But what about the issue of the specific means that were used in those wars, like killing civilians? In Grenada, the U.S. bombed a mental hospital."

Next page | When is violence justified?