similar topics, at similar settings, in similar order. especially if you remember that speaker for the dead was written first; OSC created EG as a prequel, liked it better, and published first. Speaker for the dead probably comes from card's life experience being a mormon missionary (hint: the piggies are the brown people he went to convert). Ender's Game comes from his life experience reading haldemann.
(OSC is also a weird and outspoken homophobe; easy to see him (a) misunderstanding forever war and (b) liking it for the wrong reasons).
Look, card is clearly the better writer between the two of them. He added a lot. But if you want to put forward war fiction as a case for empathy, it's irresponsible to look at EG before FW.
You can certainly say that Ender's Game makes a poor case for empathy, and you can make a case that it was inspired by The Forever War. But that's very different from saying it's a "photocopy".
> Ender's Game was written specifically to establish the character of Ender for his role of the Speaker in Speaker for the Dead, the outline for which he had written before novelizing Ender's Game.
(OSC is also a weird and outspoken homophobe; easy to see him (a) misunderstanding forever war and (b) liking it for the wrong reasons).
Look, card is clearly the better writer between the two of them. He added a lot. But if you want to put forward war fiction as a case for empathy, it's irresponsible to look at EG before FW.