Something Short and Snappy

This chapter is a bit of a swerve. (And possibly less hilarious than usual; my apologies if that's the case.) There was a moment as I grappled with a plot twist in which I wondered if I had actually been misjudging the book all along and nearly reversed my position. Then I remembered that I was blocking out all of the main characters so their vast heaving egos wouldn't obstruct my view of nice things. But it's still an interesting ride.

(Content: depression, coercion. Fun content: Ghostbusters, Slownx.)

Ender's Game: p. 138--153

Remember what I said about timeskips last week?

Nothing was different, nothing had changed in a year.

Doin' it wrong.

Well, it's not quite true; some things have changed:

At the age of nine he was a toon leader in Phoenix Army, with Petra Arkanian as his commander. [....] Alai was also a toon leader, in another army, and they were still good friends; Shen was not a leader, but that was no barrier. Dink Meeker had finally accepted command and succeeded Rose the Nose in Rat Army's command.

I'm not sure I can express my disdain for that last line. First, really, can no one drop 'the Nose' from Rosen Spaceberg's name? What happened to Ender's dislike of racial slurs? But secondly, what happened to Dink's entire characterisation as someone who rejects the philosophy that's pushed on them that they must seek to dominate and take command for the approval of the teachers? What happened to his refusal to give up the game he loved and his refusal to play the game they wanted him to? All of that reasoned morality is thrown aside for 'Dink's a commander now, yay!' Why? The most plausible theory to me is that it won't be long before Ender gets command, and if Ender became a commander while Dink still maintained that command is a morally dubious position, Ender would look like he might have made the wrong (that is to say, less-than-perfectly-pure) choice. How do we keep Ender unquestionably untainted? Total protonic reversal of Dink's worldview. Whatever, it's not like it made him interesting or provided a desperately-needed dissenting opinion to the story.

Ender is deeply depressed and can't figure out why, given that it seems everything is going so well. (He just hasn't gotten over Dink's replacement with the Dinktron 4X Victory And Friendship Unit.) He comes to the conclusion that he receives too much respect. No one goofs around with him, no one jokes or reminisces, there's just excitement about the games and tactics. Shen and Alai joked with each other in that night's practice, calling back to the 'go nova' incident from the zero-G fight, and then remembered Ender was standing right there:

And they apologized again. Back to business. Back to respect. And Ender realized that in their laughter, in their friendship, it had not occurred to them that he could have been included.

How could they think I was part of it? Did I laugh? Did I join in? Just stood there, watching, like a teacher.

Here's an idea, Ender: maybe the problem isn't that it didn't occur to them, but that it didn't occur to you. And your best friends noticed that you weren't laughing along with their joke, and they remembered that while they escaped that day unscathed, you dove protectively into a brawl and hurt a lot of other kids defending yourself, and they remember how that bothered you too, and that no one ever talked about it afterwards, and you still weren't talking about it as they laughed. Maybe it occurred to them that you might hate thinking about that day and they were being insensitive. Maybe, in short, they apologised because they actually give a damn about your feelings.

Nah, it's probably because he's so intimidatingly brilliant. I'm trying not to judge Ender too harshly here, because he's suffering from some kind of depression and so he's naturally not going to come to conclusions like 'people care about me'. However, I really don't think Card intended us to read anything into this other than what he tells us:

That's how they think of me, too. Teacher. Legendary soldier. Not one of them. Not someone that you embrace and whisper Salaam in his ear. That only lasted while Ender still seemed a victim. Still seemed vulnerable. Now he was the master soldier, and he was completely, utterly alone.

From what I've read, Card believes that the essential core of this story that makes it resonate with so many people is exactly this: the lonely child--a figure that anyone empathetic both identifies with and wants to help. He kind of meta-comments on this in the Shadow series, making the case that an elemental story will resonate with people even if they realise how contrived and simplistic it is. Personal mileage may vary on how true that is, but what really leaps out at me about this point is that it comes at a moment that could be easily explained (as above) by people actually trying their hardest to be Ender's friends. The loneliness might not be Ender's fault (depression is a jackwagon) but it still might just as easily be all in his head as a reflection of his actual circumstances.

He keeps playing the mind game, and apparently it's been the same all year--the rest of the game world doesn't acknowledge him now, no one has puzzles for him to solve, no one fights him, everything is quietly and peacefully simulating life around him, except in the tower at the End of the World, where he always kills the snake and sees Peter's face in the mirror and something kills him. He does this yet again, and finally comes to the realisation that his place stuck in the game mirrors the way he feels about his life, and he calls it 'despair'.

Aside for a moment: this looks a lot like what we might call depression, as I will tend to do, and generally despair is not recognised as a clinical illness, although it might be a symptom of a broader problem. I don't think Card refers to it as depression, which is just as well given how rapidly and unrealistically he's going to purge it, but I'm not sure that's a mercy so much as part of the broader problem that our depression narratives in our society are completely useless to actual depressed people. Depression exists for lots of reasons, and while it can have instigating events, it is not as simple as 'this aspect of my life makes me sad' and it cannot be cured by a hug. Fortunately for Ender, he doesn't live in the real world. (Sucks to be us.)

Valentine comes to school to find I.F. guards at the doors, and a message at her desk calling her to the principal's office. Demosthenes is getting to be a bigger name--discussed extensively on the international nets for having "outraged too many wise men and pleased too many fools", so Valentine is feeling the heat and is sure they have finally tracked her down. Inside the principal's office, she finds Graff, who has been upgraded to "soft-bellied", and she continues to panic as he explains that he's there to talk about her brother, until she realises that they don't mean Peter.

...it was little Ender, who had disappeared so long ago, who was no part of Peter's plots now. You were the lucky one, Ender. You got away before Peter could trap you into his conspiracy.

They just brim with scorn for Peter, eh? Valentine apparently considers begging equivalent to blackmail, and partnership equivalent to conspiracy. Without her, the entire plan would utterly fall apart, and she admits that she joined partly because she too hungers to have great influence on the world, but... sure, it's all Evil Peter's diabolical scheme.

There's a brief and amazingly gratuitous bit where Graff says that they should take a walk, away from the listening devices that the assistant principal has bugged Dr Lineberry's office with, and produces one from behind a picture frame with an "I thought you knew" before walking out. Just in case we forgot how much normal people suck compared to Our Heroes. (Given that Graff is a supervillain, I half-suspect him of planting it there just for misdirection and discord. He is a principal himself; he doesn't need others bucking for his position. It's the Battle School way!)

Graff continues to be terrible at his job:

"Valentine, we need your help for Ender."

"What kind of help?"

"We aren't even sure of that. We need you to help us figure out how you can help us."

"Well, what's wrong?"

"That's part of the problem. We don't know."

I'm sure the point here is to impress upon us how incredibly complicated child psychology is when combined with the process of hammering a person into the perfect murder coordinator, but: seriously. They can tell Ender is unhappy in spite of how wonderful his life is, they can see that he's been stuck at the tower room for over a year, but they can't guess why at all? This is exactly what I'm talking about: Ender looks very much like a clinically depressed person, and the conviction that depression has a simple cause that needs to be fixed and then he'll be cured is flatly wrong and counterproductive. Where the hell are the competent analysts? Someone get Major Imbu in here. He's probably busy programming a computer to find Jesus.

Graff fills Valentine in on the nature of the game, and she dismissively says that if Ender solved the unsolvable problem once before (the Giant's Drink) he'll solve this one in time as well, but Graff presses on to ask why Ender would see Peter in the mirror, and Valentine insists that they are complete opposites and it makes no sense, and once again I am disoriented by the vast gulf between the case that the book makes and the one that Card seems to believe it makes. Graff starts getting pushier, explaining that Ender needs to be made okay and therefore he will get as invasive with the Wiggin family as he must, but he hopes Valentine can help him solve it neatly.

So she told him about the children in every school that Peter attended. He never hit them, but he tortured them just the same. Found what they were most ashamed of and told it to the person whose respect they most wanted. Found what they most feared and made sure they faced it often.

But, Valentine tells us, he never did this to Ender, because "Ender never did anything to be ashamed of". (I am suddenly very curious what life would have been like if Ender hadn't been taken away the day after he killed Stilson.) Valentine insists that Ender "never gave in [....] to being like Peter", whereas she did because she wanted to kill Peter to protect Ender. (See previous parenthetical, redoubled.) She thinks Graff doesn't understand and believes that Peter and Ender are the same, and quite freaks out on him:

"Well maybe I'm like Peter, but Ender isn't he isn't at all, I used to tell him that when he cried, I told him that lots of times, you're not like Peter, you never like to hurt people, you're kind and good and not like Peter at all!"

Well, I'm convinced. (It's moments like this that make me wonder if I'm being pranked and Card doesn't honestly believe Ender and Peter are opposites at all.)

Graff wants her to do exactly that again, in a letter rather than in person, admitting that they never let any of her previous letters through. When Valentine tries to bargain to see Ender (whose first leave will now be at 18 rather than 12 because "we changed the rules"), Graff says they can just fake her letter using the ones she already sent before. She demands to know why she should help at all, what kinds of terrible things they are doing to him, and I assume thunder rolls and Graff steeples his fingers as he chuckles and says "the terrible things are only about to begin". Who says that? WHY WOULD ANYONE SAY THAT AT THIS MOMENT?! The scene ends right there, but can we just take a second to imagine how it goes as Graff realises that he used his outside voice and Valentine just stares at him and slowly plots how Demosthenes will harness 'his' vast mob to tear the International Fleet apart brick and beam?

Ender gets a letter, and it takes him a moment to realise it's from Valentine. It's a short thing, only eleven sentences and weirdly badly punctuated considering that Val is such a genius writer--I suppose she's trying to play down her intelligence still, except that Graff already told her he knows she's smarter than most university professors now (because that is clearly a standardised unit). It is the platonic ideal of awkward, basically leaping segue-free into 'so I bet some people think you're a cruel person now but I know you aren't'. She of course takes some time to insult Peter before the end, because after being separated from her beloved baby brother for three years, that is her priority.

Ender notes all of Valentine's quirks that make it plausible that she wrote the letter, things like calling Peter "a slumbitch" and spelling psychoanalyse as "sikowanalize", which we are told are old in-jokes between the two of them because Card wants us to know that showing-not-telling is for losers who probably don't even have one Nebula Award. He's not certain that she sent it, but he's smart enough to realise that even if she did, the only reason this letter got through when all the others didn't is that the teachers want to manipulate him with this one. The theme of this chapter seems to be 'knowing people are manipulating you and letting them do it because you want to be changed', first with Peter and Valentine, and then with Valentine and Ender. Interesting, given that Valentine is apparently convinced that helping Peter represents her fall to the Dark Side of the Smart, but she was easily won over to helping manipulate Ender. Right after Graff did his supervillain act, too? Questionable.

As ambivalent as I am about the characters' choices here, the writing is once again pretty good:

And the despair filled him again. Now he knew why. Now he knew what he hated so much. He had no control over his own life. [....] Only the game was left to him, that was all, everything else was them and their rules and plans and lessons and programs, and all he could do was go this way or that way in battle. The one real thing, the one precious real thing was his memory of Valentine [...] and they had taken her and put her on their side. She was one of them now. [....] They knew about Peter in the mirror in the castle room, they knew about everything and to them Val was just one more tool to use to control him, just one more trick to play. Dink was right, they were the enemy, they loved nothing and cared for nothing and he was not going to do what they wanted, he was damn well not going to do anything for them.

(Of course Dink was right, Ender. His name is Dink Meeker. Being right about everything is a survival mechanism at that point.) He goes back to the tower in the game, confronts the serpent in the carpet, catches it, and kisses it (accidentally, because apparently the controls in this game are as graceful as a 6-year-old N64 C-stick) and it transforms into Valentine, who embraces him. The mirror shows a dragon and a unicorn, and the wall opens onto a hall lined with cheering crowds and Valentine goes with him out into the world. And every face in the crowd is Peter.

I confess this baffles me deeply. The serpent who declared that Ender's only escape was death is revealed to actually be Valentine, who will now just follow him around everywhere he goes in the games? (You know, they added this feature in the latest Pokémon editions. I choose you, Female Passive Motivational Object!) The most plausible interpretation I can see here is that Ender has been 'killing' his empathetic side for the last year because he is stuck thinking only in terms of 'how do I fight' instead of 'should I fight'. So, by making the breakthrough that not all problems are best solved with murder, he is rewarded with a companion to help explore the universe.

It's been building for some time, but this is the point at which I have to conclude--despite having never yet read Speaker For The Dead--that this book is not meant to make sense on its own. The last revelation and tragedy of this novel is that all of these lessons that Ender learns about empathy and the advantages of not murdering everyone you meet get thrown out the window and the remorseful aliens are obliterated. It's a vast exercise in futility and rejected character development. I could maybe be sold on that, the final sudden reversal that is about trying to understand the people you've been thinking aren't people, but more galling, the primary activity of these characters is to tell each other how virtuous and pure they are while they grievously fail all over the place. If that message of desperate radical empathy were the core of the book, I might look on it much more kindly, but ultimately it is not about that: it's about a troubled child and his torments. It's about identifying with a wearily-perfect character and feeling sorry for him at the same time. It is, in point, a narcissistic story masquerading as a lesson in empathy. I begin to suspect that I will have to read Speaker eventually, just to see if that book has the payoff that this one throws away.

Valentine is secretly awarded the "Star of the Order of the League of Humanity, First Class, which is the highest military award that can be given to a civilian", and judges herself harshly for having helped them, spurring her to write a Demosthenes article denouncing population laws and calling for humanity to spread across the universe, naming 'Third' "the most noble title any child can have". Peter thinks she's trolling. At this point, all I can wonder is how 'Third' even became a stigmatised title in broader society if they're often government-requisitioned geniuses. It's one thing for children to mock the kid who is in any way different and another for society at large to be all "Ugh, I hate those really competent people".

And that's it for chapter nine and now things get cereal, because next week Ender takes command of his own army. And I fly to Hawaii! I'll try to make sure that doesn't throw off the schedule, because that is the infinite love that I have for my readers.

I know some of you have been missing the 50 Shades posts, and don't worry, I am reading book 3! There will be more (although different) 50 Shades posts in the future! However as a break from the SRS BUSINESS (and because this week has been rough health wise), here are two storifys of my live-tweeting trying to read 50 Shades Freed. This spans roughly page 100-200 if memory serves. While it is a better written book, it makes me suspect that if there is a god, we have angered them.

Part 1

And

Part 2

Hopefully health stuff will be less rough next week and I'll be able to write something more substantial for you all. For those of you who follow me on twitter and already saw all those, yeah, sorry, I got nothing. Wait, not true, I have puppies. Have a puppy.

Also a palate cleanser from 50 Shades.

Tune in Sunday for the next installment of Ender's Game! Till next week readers!

You turn your collar up and head up the wide stone steps to the small red farmhouse. The air is thick and heavy with the late summer's humidity. Bloated clouds hang above waiting to open up and pour down on you. You'd rather be inside with a book on a day like today but a phone call had brought you out in this near storm. Your friend had called you, frantic, because they didn't know anyone else in the city. Their baby sister Molly had gotten real strange lately and now wasn't answering her phone, could you, maybe, swing by and check up on her? Your friend didn't want to call the police, she knew her sister lived out in the country and maybe her phone line just got knocked out or something? There had been a lot of storms lately... So now you stand in front of the modest old farm house, key that was express mailed to you in hand. You knock, hoping that this was all a mistake and your friends sister will answer the door and explain that her phone's been out and apologize for the trouble. There's no answer. You try the bell, if it makes a sound, you don't hear it. After a few minutes you give up and try the key. It clicks open and you knock as you enter, hoping to alert whoever lives there.

"Hello?" your voice echoes off of the walls which all seem dusty. At your feet is a pile of mail. Out of habit, you scoop it up and take it to the kitchen. The house seems to be well maintained, although it looks far over due for a good scrub. Once you reach the kitchen (to the left, they always seem to be to the left) you do a lap of the main floor. There's a thin layer of dust over everything, but if this place was abandoned, it wasn't done intentionally. There's still food in the fridge, a shopping list scribbled to the front, an empty tea mug with a moldy bag sitting at the table...

You give up on the main floor and go up the narrow staircase. The stairs creak loudly as you mount them, a sense of dread growing in your stomach as you do. The rain has started and you notice the hall window is open. Out of habit you close it before you begin to search the upstairs for signs of Molly. The bed was made, not an object out of place, but a thick layer of dust covered everything up here, too. The bathroom and second bedroom were in the same shape. Just the office left. Shelves lined the walls, heavy leather bound books that look older than you. This room is less dusty than the others, and you try the light switch by the door. It seems the power was cut some time ago. There isn't even the sound of the electrical discharge that you're used to from trying a dead light. You fumble to pull your phone out of your pocket and flip the flashlight on it on. The room isn't so dark you can't see, but you want to see if you can find some scraps of paper that point to where Molly went.

On the desk you find more clutter than you had in other parts of the house. Books scattered about, and a sturdy, plastic covered notebook. You can see through the clear cover some writing, and you idly flip it open, shining your light onto the page of cramped red inked hand writing. The page is filled top to bottom, corner to corner with text.

If you find this book it is too late for me. I am gone from this world past the land of dreams and sleep. I am somewhere where there is no smell of life of flicker of light. All that remains is the deafening silence. Silence screaming as you frantically try to scream back to banish it but no sound comes out. Only silence. I am gone from this world and can not save it now. But you can. Heed what you find in these pages no matter how impossible or fantastical the words seem. Heed these words. I have left for you they are this worlds only hope. Oh brave and lonely soul! You must stop them! Let this book guide you where I failed. You must stop them. They are coming. They will come and they will consume all. They will consume the earth and the stars from the sky and the vast cold emptiness of space. They will consume all until not even nothingness remains. Only silence. Screaming, deafening silence. Time is short they are coming time is short they are coming time is short they are coming time is short they are coming time is short they are coming time is short they are coming time is short they are coming time is short they are coming time is short they are coming time is short they are coming time is short they are coming time is short they are coming time is short they are coming time is short they are coming time is short they are coming time is short they are coming time is short they are coming they are coming they are coming they are coming they are coming for you next

You stare in horror as you drop the book down to the desk you found it on and without a second glance behind you leave the house into the downpour outside, barely remembering to lock the door behind you. You don't think about what you'll tell your friend about Molly, or where you're going. You're just filled with the overwhelming urge to get away from this place right now. Hoping that space will protect you from what you just read, but the sick twisting feeling in your gut tells you that doesn't matter. You know it with more certainty than you've ever known something before. It's too late. The sky is now a dull, empty grey, the rain gone, and everything is quiet. So quiet.

So this post is a week late because I thought I forgot my book at home while in Hawaii, and only discovered too late that I had actually packed it more securely and secretly than I remembered. This will push our schedule back a bit; I've lost all hope of finishing before the movie comes out, but it'll still be in the ballpark.

On the plus side, we have reached the halfway point! (Pagewise, specifically. Chapterwise this is 10 of 15, but they're often twice the length they have been up to now.) Are you as excited as I am? Up until now, there have been limiting factors on Ender's awesomeness, because he is always under someone else's command. Now he takes command and the indulgent "I am so awesome I broke the winometer" is going to rev up and roll for most of the rest of the book. Except for this chapter, which introduces Bean, who is the protagonist of Ender's Shadow, and that means that this chapter is one in which Ender screws up (maybe) and everyone acknowledges it. (They even acknowledge it in this book, although it gets compounded in Shadow.) So, there is some hope of refreshing narrative-supported critique here.

Some.

(Content: bullying, bully apologism. Fun content: blatant queer fanfic fodder.)

Ender's Game: p. 154--172

Chapter Ten: Dragon

Today's fifteen minutes of Ender Time contain the order to go ahead and promote Ender to command. Graff is a little reluctant to give the order, because, as he explains:

"I'm not a commander. I'm a teacher of little children."

Good lord'n'butter, Graff, you are a colonel and a godawful teacher; you'd better have some kind of command skill. Anyway, having received Valentine's letter and conquered the End of the World a couple of months ago, Ender is apparently happy now, and so ready for command. There's some of the typical supervillain banter between Graff and Anderson about how they're doing terrible things to him in order to save the world, but it just bores me now.

Ender has apparently been top of the standings for three years now, so no one is surprised that he's getting promoted at age 9.5 instead of 11 (apparently the normal age, except that makes Bonzo even more ridiculous). Given that Ender's big thing is supposed to be tactics and strategy, it just seems completely gratuitous to me that he's also the best soldier of all time. In three years no one has shown up with even the physical potential to surpass Ender? No one's a better shot, or more coordinated and thus better at maneuvering in zero-G? I'm all for emphasising the importance of hard work, but Ender being The Best At Everything is tiresome. Anyway, while being fitted for his new suit, he checks the name on the form: Dragon.

"I've never heard of Dragon Army," Ender said.

"That's because there hasn't been a Dragon Army in four years. We discontinued the name because there was a superstition about it. No Dragon Army in the history of the Battle School ever won even a third of its games. It got to be a joke."

We've discussed this before: armies have names like Rat and Rabbit and Salamander and then Ender gets goddamned dragons. It's such a blatant cool-factor thing. How does Card justify giving the Ender the ridiculously cool name? By making it the in-universe loser name. I'm a bit torn on this, and I think it's the type of thing I'd probably let slide in a book that wasn't already causing me to primal-scream so often. Occasionally, by being good, an author earns the right to indulge in simple cool factor. Ender has more than tapped his supply and everyone else's.

Graff issues him his commander 'hook'; a gravity-warping hand gadget that will basically allow him to fly freely in the Battle Room during his regularly-scheduled practice sessions, and delivers the usual congratulatory speech, then adds that they've done something funky with Ender's new army by giving him a specially-selected roster mixing extremely fresh students with moderate veterans. I'm not totally sure what the point was of this aside in this book; it'll be explained in much more detail in Shadow, possibly just to retcon more importance to Bean. Right now it just looks like more emphasis on how special Ender is. He's also forbidden to trade any of his soldiers, and told that if he has any problems with them, he'll just have to "get along with him" (foreshadow foreshadow).

Ender arrives at his new barracks and "took charge at once", telling his soldiers to arrange themselves so that the most senior are at the back and the newbies are at the front, the opposite of the usual. He's so brilliant! He has even revolutionised the dorms. On his initial assessment, he guesses he has 30 straight out of their launch group and the remaining 10 are soldiers, but not standouts, not toon leaders, and not older than him. As soon as they're bunked, Ender orders them into their flash suits for morning practice, and we get the hilarious introduction of Ender the Hardass Drill Sergeant:

"Officially you have a free hour between breakfast and practice. We'll see what happens after I find out how good you are." After three minutes, though many of them still weren't dressed, he ordered them out of the room.

"But I'm naked!" said one boy. [Drink!]

"Dress faster next time. Three minutes from first call to running out the door--that's the rule this week. Next week the rule is two minutes. Move!" [....]

Five of the boys were completely naked [drink!], carrying their flash suits as they ran through the corridors; few were fully dressed. They attracted a lot of attention as they passed open classroom doors. No one would be late again if he could help it.

Just in case anyone was still holding out hope that when Card says 'naked' he actually means 'only wearing their longjohns' or something like that: NOPE. I know that it's pretty normal in armies for soldiers to become completely inured to each others' nakedness, but that's, y'know, infantry who are expected to face a huge variety of dire circumstances where modesty can't be a priority. Ender and his classmates are proto-generals who need to embrace their nakedness about as much as law students do. This isn't about breaking down inconvenient cultural baggage, this is about shaming and bullying.

They get to the battleroom, the naked ones finish dressing, and Ender tells them to deploy into the room as if they were attacking the enemy gate. They're expected to leap up to use the ceiling handholds for this, which makes no sense to me because they're leaping into zero-G and there's no obvious reason why the ceiling (in the gravity-bound hallway) would give them a better controlled launch than taking off from the floor, but apparently it does. They're all bad at it, shockingly. The last one to take off is the smallest boy, "obviously underage", whom we shall discover is Bean, and he immediately wins my heart:

"You can use a side handhold if you want," Ender said.

"Go suck on it," said the boy.

This whole scene appears in Ender's Shadow as well, from Bean's perspective, where it is even better, but the important thing is that at last we have a character who is even more the underdog than Ender, is his intellectual peer, and has no awe whatsoever for the Legendary Soldier. (Of course he'll be won over in time, but never to a worshipful degree.)

Bean is also bad at flying: he misses the handhold, twirls off like a gyroscope into the room, and Ender muses on whether he likes the kid's determination or disapproves of his insubordinate frownyface. All of the soldiers eventually form up at the far end and it's time again for Gravity Games With Ender Wiggin as he 'stands' upside-down in the battleroom and demands to know why everyone else is standing on their heads. Someone eventually dares to say it's the hallway orientation, and Ender continues his loud rant about how directions work in zero-G: "Whatever your gravity is when you get to the door, remember--the enemy's gate is down." Then we get some typical drill sergeant shoutiness about how bad they are at flying, Ender tells them to form up again on the ceiling, and starts mentally grading them based on how quickly they realise that by 'ceiling' he means the wall their own gate is in, and not the wall that he now calls 'north'. Bean gets it first, and Ender judges him to be smart, cocky, rebellious, and probably resentful because he had to run through the halls naked. Uh, exactly as planned? Or something? I'm sure resentfulness is part of the plan.

Ender quizzes Bean, who responds quickly and correctly, and Ender finally asks:

"Name, kid?" ['Kid'. Ender is nine, Bean is six or seven at this point.]

"This soldier's name is Bean, sir."

"Get that for size or for brains?"

Et cetera. Ender immediately goes on to praise Bean, and starts explaining his maneuvering methods in zero-G. At first I wondered why Ender would need to explain these things as if they're secret, given that he's been working with armies for two years and he explicitly notes that his 'sudden assault' methods have permeated the entire school, but then I remembered that this group is 75% newbies. Maybe that is why Card decided to give Ender a weirdly fresh army; so that he could justify explaining techniques starting from first principles (his personal fetish). In addition to making it clear that Ender has the deck stacked against him and all his victories are through personal awesomeness, obviously.

At last Ender realises that his simultaneous verbal abuse and pointed praise of Bean ("At least I have one soldier who can figure things out") is exactly what Graff did to him back in the day, making the rest of the army hate him for being the commander's favourite. He suffers an attack of conscience, wishing he could somehow tell everyone to support the little kid and not hate him:

But of course Ender couldn't do that. Not on the first day. On the first day even his mistakes had to look like part of a brilliant plan.

People with training in real leadership positions are free to comment here, but is projecting an aura of infallibility (especially when your subordinates already think you're screwing up) really that vital to leadership? Or is this just Ender buying into his own PR and worrying that he'll be considered inadequate if he admits mistakes? (Everyone loves and trusts commanders who refuse to reverse and adjust when they realise they've made a mistake, right? LEADERSHIP.) But I suppose the real message here is that Ender's conscience is wrong, that picking on Bean really will make him stronger, and that he must learn to stamp down on softness in order to be a good leader. Sigh. At least there's some brief acknowledgement that Ender is being a total jackass here and might not always make the perfect decisions every time? I'm not sure anymore.

There's more demonstrations and training, which will be way more interesting in Ender's Shadow because Ender is actually being deeply unreasonable and not thinking things through--he quizzes them and asks them to describe their attack position, because apparently he thinks forty boys will be able to improvise in unison a description of a stance with their legs folded up against their chest and their arms stuck between their knees with their gun pointed straight ahead as they descend face-first towards the far wall. Bean just demonstrates and everyone else follows when Ender shouts at them more. I'm not sure, reading this, whether Card actually had Bean's side going on in his head, or if he went back later, re-read, and constructed the parallax scene to match. There are moments when Bean just stares at Ender for a moment before answering questions, which in Shadow will be filled with paragraphs of internal monologue that make much more sense. If Card wasn't imagining a whole lot going on in Bean's head, I'm not sure what those silences are meant to indicate--yet, in the one scene in this book from Bean's perspective, he's very obviously not the same character. Questions for the ages, but mostly of interest to me as a writer rather than a reader.

Training goes on, Ender muses that he has to work fast because the teachers will probably not give him the usual three months' prep before his first battle. Bean sticks around after practice to continue mavericking:

"Ho, Bean."

"Ho, Ender."

Pause.

"Sir," Ender said softly. [....]

"I want a toon."

Ender walked back to him and stood looking down into his eyes. "Why should you get a toon?"

"Because I'd know what to do with it."

"Knowing what to do with a toon is easy," Ender said. "It's getting them to do it that's hard."

Ender explains that his shoutiness and singling-out helped Bean because otherwise no one would have noticed him, but now he's going to be the centre of everyone's attention and just has to be perfect in order to win their respect. After all, that has clearly worked so well for Ender. It's not like Ender's life is (Stilson) riddled with strong and (Peter) aggressive people who saw his perfection and hated it and wanted nothing (Bonzo) more than to hurt or destroy him, cough. (In Ender's Shadow, Bean of course gains an archnemesis, but shockingly it has nothing to do with this. It's a completely different context in which Bean's genius earns him someone's malice.)

Now my unfavourite part, because verbal abuse just isn't the same without its complement--as he lectures Bean, Ender pushes him back into the wall to remind this tiny six-year-old which one of them is the Legendary Soldier, and when Bean is awesome and refuses to let Ender's loomingness intimidate him and just snarks back, Ender grabs him by the collar and shoves him into the wall. (Bean continues to smirk.)

Ender let go of him and walked away. When he got to his room he lay down on his bed and trembled. What am I doing? My first practice session, and I'm already bullying people the way Bonzo did. And Peter. Shoving people around. Picking on some poor little kid so the others'll have somebody they all hate. Sickening. Everything I hated in a commander, and I'm doing it.

This is the kid whose superpower is his ability to get inside someone else's head so completely that he fully understands their worldview and can't help but love them. This is him in a moment when he seems, for just a moment, to realise that maybe the world is more complicated than warrior-saints and reavers. This should be the moment, in a less-monomaniacal book, in which it occurs to Ender that maybe his 'enemies' aren't that different from himself, that maybe people sometimes make bad decisions because they followed the wrong whim and they aren't strong enough to admit their fault now, that a bully might need to be healed instead of destroyed.

Picture my hand sweeping over my head with a great voom.

Why had he done to Bean what had been done to Ender by commanders that he despised? [....] It wasn't an accident. Ender realized that now. It was a strategy. Graff had deliberately set him up to be separate from the other boys, made it impossible for him to be close to them. [....] Graff had isolated Ender to make him struggle. To make him prove, not that he was competent, but that he was far better than everyone else. That was the only way he could win respect and friendship. It made him a better soldier than he would ever have been otherwise. It also made him lonely, afraid, angry, untrusting. And maybe those traits, too, made him a better soldier.

Ender, one chapter ago you were in the Pit of Despair because you realised that all of your respect and reputation had done jack-all to help you form or maintain legitimate friendships. You hated the respect and you fell into an ineffectual funk until your favourite psychic video game gave you a virtual doll shaped like your sister to be your friend. I don't know how to make that situation sadder. Talk to any real and competent soldier, anywhere. Ask them if directionless fear, mistrust, anger, and a disconnection from their comrades makes a soldier more effective. Please upload their reaction to youtube.

Ender's elite practice sessions are brought to an end by teacher fiat, and anyway other commanders don't want their soldiers practicing with Ender now that he has his own army. I'm not really sure why being commander is considered a much bigger conflict of interest than being Petra Arkanian's second-in-command, but whatever. (At least the book acknowledges this too.) Ender complains to Major Anderson, who dismisses Ender's concerns and tells him to grow up and take responsibility. He holds another practice, then goes to the arcade to mess around a bit before bed, where he finds Alai.

"Don't you know? We're enemies now. Next time I meet you in battle, I'll whip your ass."

It was banter, as always, but now there was too much truth behind it. Now when Ender heard Alai talk as if it were all a joke, he felt the pain of losing his friend, and the worse pain of wondering if Alai really felt as little pain as he showed. [....]

"Salaam, Alai."

"Alas, it is not to be."

"What isn't?"

"Peace. It's what salaam means. Peace be unto you." [....]

Ender turned around. Alai was already gone. Ender felt as if a part of himself had been taken away, an inward prop that was holding up his courage and confidence. With Alai, to a degree impossible even with Shen, Ender had come to feel a unity so strong that the word we came to his lips much more easily than I.

But Alai had left something behind. Ender lay in bed, dozing into the night, and felt Alai's lips on his cheek as he muttered the word peace. The kiss, the word, the peace were with him still.

I complain on occasion that the lack of same-sex romance in media is one of the reasons it took me so long to realise I am bi, but reading something like this, I wonder just how gay a scene would have to get before my teenage self would have noticed. The fanfiction writes itself so easily that I think my desktop is spontaneously generating textfiles of extended makeout scenes after Ender and Alai are teenagers at Command School within the dark tunnels of the asteroid base Eros. (Note to those who haven't read the book before: except for the makeouts, all of that happens. Yes, Eros. No, I don't know what Card thought it symbolised. We'll see when we get there.)

The most terrible thing, though, was the fear that the wall could never be breached, that in his heart Alai was glad of the separation, and was ready to be Ender's enemy. For now that they could not be together, they must be infinitely apart, and what had been sure and unshakable was now fragile and insubstantial; from the moment we are not together, Alai is a stranger, for he has a life now that will be no part of mine, and that means that when I see him we will not know each other.

So awkward when you're just walking around space military school and you see your ex and they're with their new commander. I legitimately can't see any other way to interpret this--the only times I can think of when I have felt I had to choose between the most intense closeness or staying as absolutely far away as I possibly could were romantic relationships (or failures thereof). I wish this had been written by another author, so that I could just call it good. Instead we've got this weird scenario where I have to take joy in the fact that plenty of queer readers picked up on this, simply read Ender as a gay hero, and Card has accidentally given support and succour to the people he so desperately wants to erase.

When they had turned Valentine into a stranger, when they had used her as a tool to work on Ender, from that day forward they could never hurt him deep enough to make him cry again. Ender was certain of that.

And with that anger, he decided he was strong enough to defeat them--the teachers, his enemies.

Yes, Ender. Defeat your enemies, the teachers, by following all of their rules and doing everything they say, falling directly into the agony and mortal danger they intend you to face, and doing the shockingly immoral jobs they have planned for you. That'll defeat 'em real good. Mon Dieu, the pretension of badassery here is incalculable. I can only guess that Ender's 'victory' consists of hanging onto his sanity and reputation through all of this, but if you want to be considered a defiant hero, you actually have to defy. Otherwise you're just a Left Behind protagonist and people make fun of you on the internet.

Next week: Ender wins at everything because obviously.

I wanted to write a post about being sick for invisible illness awareness week (not to be confused with invisibility illness) but my body decided it hates me so, so much. I'm in too much pain to concentrate on actually writing anything at the moment, and there are no drugs I can take to help with that right now because it's a fun, NEW kind of pain! If it doesn't get better by tomorrow morning I'll be off to the doctor's bright and early, because despite being nearly nocturnal, I doubt I'll sleep in (or at all). Hopefully this time they'll be able to do something or figure it out, you know, unlike all the other pain I've been in. It seems to be a new beast, but given that I've yet to get a diagnosis (which is a whole other series of adventures in doctors' offices. Are you jealous of all the fun I get to have?) it's impossible to say. Yet to look at me right now, you'd assume I was fine, miserable, maybe, but fine.

I realized when I was trying to write that the above was probably the best way I could sum up everything. I have no brilliant insights or eloquent words on the topic, maybe I'll find some on a better day, but for today all I leave you with is this. Not all illnesses have obvious, visible signs, but that doesn't mean their effects aren't real, or major. The lack of visibility means that people dealing with them are dealing with extra shit from people making assumptions.

See also see my other post on illness: How not to be an asshole to someone who is sick.

This chapter mostly consists of Ender winning at everything. To my shock, the first half is probably my favourite part of the entire book. Honestly didn't see that coming.

(Content: bullying, fat shame. Fun content: this chapter is actually mostly not awful.)

Ender's Game: p. 173--199

Chapter Eleven: Veni Vidi Vici

Ender has had Dragon Army for three and a half weeks and Major Anderson has delivered the schedule of battles to Graff, to begin immediately--from Graff's reaction, we may conclude that it is rickdiculous. Anderson and Graff discuss the reliability of the computer projections, with Graff protesting that the computer is famously merciless:

"I just have this picture of Ender a year from now. Completely useless, worn out, because he was pushed farther than he or any living person could go."

"We told the computer that our highest priority was having the subject remain useful after the training program." [....]

"My eagerness to sacrifice little children in order to save mankind is wearing thin."

This shocking turn for the not-supervillain in Graff is inspired by the work of Peter and Valentine, more specifically Demosthenes, as the nets are now filled with people speculating on how the first post-alien job for the Fleet should be to dismantle the Russian empire. Graff considers this to be a stupid nationalistic rivalry that brings into question whether humanity deserves preservation. Huge irony, given that the human-Formic war is ultimately a nationalistic rivalry brought about by failure to communicate; I'm going to be nice and assume Card means for it to retroactively appear that way.

Ender lies in his bunk at night, mulling his army--apparently he never sleeps more than five hours a night now, and so has plenty of time to think. His ten outcast veterans have, in three weeks, transformed into capable leaders, so he's broken his 40 soldiers into five toons of 8, which can then split into half-toons of 4 under the the leader and secondary, which does sound interesting, although the narrative must belabour for us how most armies only practice huge mass formations with "preformed strategies":

Ender had none. Instead he trained his toon leaders to us their small units effectively in achieving limited goals. Unsupported, alone, on their own initiative. [....] He knew, with less than a month of training, that his army had the potential of being to best fighting group ever to play the game.

(Ender's Classmates Are Legitimately As Smart As Him tally: 3)

Ignoring the fact that three weeks with Ender apparently turns a green seven-year-old into a devastating war machine, this is actually one of the parts I rather like, and we have been setting up for it. Most of Ender's genius through this section of the book applies outside the battleroom: instead of constantly directing soldiers to move as he wills, he focuses heavily on training subcommanders, figures out a general shape of approach on the enemy, and then unleashes them and trusts them to do well. There still won't be much discussion of coordination and communication during battle, but it's at least hinted at.

Ender wonders whether his army was secretly stacked in his favour with hidden potential, "or was this what any similar group could become under a commander who knew what he wanted his army to do, and knew how to teach them to do it?" Ender's Shadow spoiler: it's the first one. I'm a bit curious now what would happen if Ender had to work with seriously unhelpful and unsuitable soldiers.

Anyway, in the middle of the night he gets the notification that he's fighting Rabbit Army in the morning, and at 0601 next morning he's at the Dragon barracks to tell them it's time to run through the halls naked. [Drink!] Anyone who doesn't already sleep naked strips down, tucks their flash suit under their arm, and they jog down to the gym to warm up, obstacle course and trampoline and such. The excitement of the incoming battle gets so high that some of them start wrestling. Still naked. Just sayin'.

They dress and jog to the battleroom, and along the way Ender occasionally jumps to touch the ceiling and everyone in line behind him touches the same point, and I actually kind of love this bit. Forgetting where I am for a moment, this whole sequence evokes the atmosphere for me well--it has the energy that I love about waking up early in the morning, well-rested with the day full of potential and something big to anticipate. The camaraderie even comes through, now that Ender has stopped with the regulation shouting. Even the battleroom is grey-lit like the midpart of dawn. I dunno if this bit works as well if you're not a morning person.

Ender sizes up the grid of stars in the battleroom, gives some basic directions and contingencies, and they deploy, while Rabbit Army creates their formation at the far end. Ender reflects on how in any previous army he'd be worrying about his own place in the formation at a time like this, and I wonder why three years of following the stolid old tactics haven't damaged his genius, if we're supposed to think that actually reading about existing military theory somehow would.

The battle lasts for about a page, three minutes, and mostly consists of Ender's forces feeling bad that Rabbit Army doesn't realise how completely out-of-date formation warfare is. We briefly meet Crazy Tom, leader of C toon, and Han Tzu/"Hot Soup", D leader. They carve up flawlessly, losing only one Dragon, even better than Ender expected. Obviously.

Carn Carby is mild about his defeat, having only been promoted at age 12 instead of them cocky 11-year-old whippersnappers. Ender makes a mental note to have similar dignity when he is defeated someday, a remarkable flash of humility--I said this was a weirdly good chapter. Ender skips breakfast because food is for losers (it's not all good) and showers twice while thinking about how awesome he is. At practice, he's back to being a hardass, but still no shouting: he just observes that their aim is still wretched and sets them to groups, and the narrative points out that one-on-one Ender is infinitely patient and constructive, drifting around dispensing advice, presumably sitting on a lotus blossom and radiating sunlight.

At lunch, he arrives at the commanders' mess, and of course on the scoreboard Dragon is top in everything, since it ranks by unweighted percentages: zero defeats, few casualties, shortest victory. Everyone forcibly ignores Ender until Dink Meeker arrives halfway through lunch. Sadly, the Dinktron 4X Victory And Friendship Unit continues to be a pale shadow of the original. Ender insists that his victory was not a fluke or easy:

"Carn Carby isn't exactly on the bottom of the rankings." It was true. Carby was just about in the middle.

"He's okay," Dink said, "considering that he only just started. Shows some promise. You don't show promise. You show threat."

"Threat to what? Do they feed you less if I win? I thought you told me this was all a stupid game and none of it mattered."

Dink didn't like having his words thrown back at him, not under these circumstances. "You were the one who got me playing along with them. But I'm not playing games with you, Ender. You won't beat me."

So much for characterisation. Dink moves on and Ender scans the other commanders, including Petra and Bonzo. Math interlude: commanders normally get promoted at 11 or 12, and students normally graduate at 13. Bonzo was a commander, and not brand-new, when Ender was less than 7. Bonzo can't be younger than 14 now, plausibly 15. Graff is keeping him in the school for years extra for the sole purpose of being Ender's nemesis, even though they haven't apparently interacted since Ender was 8. Graff might have sympathy for Ender still, but he's quite literally plotting Bonzo's death.

Carn Carby, at least, is a cheerful guy:

"Right now I'm in disgrace," he said frankly. "They won't believe me when I tell them you did things that nobody's ever seen before. So I hope you beat the snot out of the next army you fight. As a favour to me."

He goes on about how commanders normally get a cheer when they first arrive, because they only join the commanders' mess after their first win and have several losses, but Ender obviously deserves a cheer and instead he's getting frozen out. Ender "mentally added him to his private list of people who also qualified as human beings", because apparently the only way Commander Empathy grants you personhood is if you're kind of obsequiously nice to him personally. Idea, Ender: maybe Petra's just wondering why the hell you didn't share your god mode strategies with her at some point over the last two years when you were her second-in-command.

Next morning, they're immediately sent up against Petra and Phoenix Army, and the Dragons are upset about the late notice and getting battles two days in a row, not believing it until A toon leader Fly Molo reads the order himself. There's more banter and Ender and Bean snark at each other a little, in case we thought they had become friends off-page.

Phoenix Army takes out 12 Dragons before they're down, and Petra is predictably furious, but Ender figures that once he steamrolls a few more armies she'll realise she hit Dragon harder than anyone will again. A week later, he's right--they've fought a battle every day, won all, and none have done better than Phoenix. Ender freely tells anyone who asks how he won his latest battle, because he's done with humility and he's "confident that few of them would know how to train their soldiers and their toon leaders to duplicate what his could do". Ender, your secret shouty training methods are basically stolen directly from TVtropes. Tone down the ego.

There were many, too, who hated him. Hated him for being young, for being excellent, for having made their victories look paltry and weak.

Possibly also for being insufferably smug about it? Despite Ender's conviction that people are only people if he says so, other meatbags do have feelings and brains, and Ender strikes me as the type who thinks he's far more poker-faced and enigmatic than he really is. The sort to think that no one around him can tell how much contempt he feels for them. He starts getting bullied again in traditional grade school manner, shunned in the lunchroom and shoved around in the halls and pelted with spitballs.

Ender despised them--but secretly, so secretly that he didn't even know it himself, he feared them. It was just such little torments that Peter had always used, and Ender was beginning to feel far too much at home.

I'm not buying this. Peter is a Machiavellian egotist, a manipulator and a psychological abuser. When would he ever have thought spitballs weren't beneath him? Jostling people in the hall? This is just more of the Peter-is-bad-therefore-everything-bad-is-Peter illogic. I notice that it consistently pops up in the times when Ender is most obviously supposed to be the reader-insert for Underappreciated Smart Children. Need to think about whether there's a clearer link there beyond simple projection of all Ender's issues onto his Evil Brother.

Ender's techniques have begun to suffuse the school again, kneeling attacks (didn't that one already become standard years ago?) and sliding along the walls to prevent flanking. Since Ender has nothing to learn from other people (Alai is still kept away by narrative fiat) he starts spending more time in the video room, watching films of Mazer Rackham and the battles of the previous two alien wars. He has to skip a lot of propaganda:

But Ender began to see how well the buggers used seemingly random flight paths to create confusion, how they used decoys and false retreats to draw the I.F. ships into traps. [....] He began to see things that the official commentators never mentioned. They were always trying to arouse pride in human accomplishments and loathing of the buggers, but Ender began to wonder how humanity had won at all.

You and me and all our readers, Ender. He tries to learn strategy from watching the aliens instead, though their overall strategy is straightforward and he sees no sign of individual ingenuity, which he blames on strict discipline. Mazer Rackham's actual victory is also blatantly censored, with videos that show the huge alien fleet victorious over the human defences, Mazer's tiny strike force darting in, firing the first shot, and then cutting away. This is pretty good foreshadowing on Card's part, but given the tremendous secrets involved, I am baffled as to why they'd even show that much. Alternatively, it's at least the 2100s by now if not 2200s; they can't CGI something together for a fake battle? After all his forethought about the internet, Card seems to have missed the potential of Photoshop. Narratively, instead of being a big question mark, it would be an opportunity for Ender to be deeply unimpressed by the apparent ultimate final battle, and become convinced that it was fake because it looked so amateur.

Graff calls Ender into his office, where there is some notice about how super-fat the Colonel has become because god only knows; evil makes you fat or vice-versa. It's a rather boring conversation and Ender gives terse answers to everything: how is he, how are his soldiers, why is he watching invasion vids, why doesn't he play the mind game anymore. Ender bitterly laughs off the idea that they want him to be happy and assures them that they are succeeding at turning him into the greatest soldier ever, and asks to be given a real challenge. They hand him the order to fight Salamander Army in ten minutes. Dragon is still in the showers from their morning battle and practice, and again unwilling to believe it:

"Same day nobody ever do two battles!" said Crazy Tom.

Ender answered in the same tone. "Nobody ever beat Dragon Army, either. This be your big chance to lose?"

I feel we're missing some fingersnaps in here, maybe a 'gnarly'.

When they arrive, the gate has been open for at least five minutes and Salamander is nowhere to be seen. The room is bright and cavernously empty, and Ender immediately figures out that Salamander has deployed around the Dragon gate, ready to open fire as soon as they come through. He has Crazy Tom kneel and freezes him, then has Bean kneel on Tom's legs, stick his arms under Tom's, and the result is that Bean is dual-wielding lasers inside a human armorsuit. They set up a bunch of these, have other soldiers toss them through (facing the gate) and immediately start firing. It takes less than a minute for the Dragons to wipe Salamander out.

Ender is furious with Anderson and has Bean describe how he'd have fought Dragon (constantly shifting movement around the door), apparently not caring that adding "As long as you're cheating [...] why don't you train the other army to cheat intelligently" will enrage Bonzo even more. Seriously: this battle, these circumstances, it could not be more obvious that Graff meant to re-ignite their rivalry. He is trying to get Bonzo killed.

Ender texts Bean to see him that night, ten minutes before lights out. Bean thinks like a normal soldier, exhausted, average, which will look very weird when this scene comes back in Shadow. Ender queries him about his performance, whether he should have been made a toon leader after all, and Bean thinks he's being baited. Ender presses Bean to remember what the school is actually for, and Bean bursts out that it's about the war, and Ender agrees that this is why they're trying to hard to see if the students can break.

"They can't break you."

"You'd be surprised." Ender breathed sharply, suddenly, [...] Bean looked at him and realized that the impossible was happening. Far from baiting him, Ender Wiggin was actually confiding in him.

Ender explains: Bean is research and development, toon leader of a special squad that's not so much Special Ops as Ridiculous Ops, because Ender realises he can't be the only source of genius in the army.

"What's the worst that could happen? You lose one game."

"Yes. That's the worst that could happen. I can't lose any games. Because if I lose any---"

He doesn't explain, and I really wish he did. (Bean wonders in Shadow, of course, particularly if this is just about Ender the Legendary Soldier.) Earlier in this chapter, Ender looked at Carn Carby and tried to remember how to be dignified in defeat. Now he's convinced that defeat means the end of all hope. What has changed? It's got to have something to do with the incoming war, the vids, everything. Bonzo and Dinktron 4X are upset because of the game, while Ender trusts Bean because he remembers the alien menace, but Ender still can't afford to lose at laser tag. The best I can slap together is the idea that Ender knows he has the potential to win everything, so if he ever loses, that means he has stopped trying as hard as he could, and he can't stop doing that because there is a war that he has to win. That makes a certain amount of motivational sense if we assume both that Ender is right that he has the potential to beat every other commander under every possible circumstances, and that the battleroom still should be his priority while he learns more about aliens and actual space combat. If he's wrong about either of those things, then losing a single match either means that someone else has skill comparable to his, or that he has intelligently put his efforts into fighting what he believes to be a war of survival instead of varsity laser tag. I think these assumptions could probably use some contestation.

The lights go out; Ender gets into bed and Bean climbs in with him and for a change it doesn't brim with queer romance. See, I don't read everything as gay.

Next week: Graff successfully reinstates gladiatorial arenas IN SPACE.

Alright, a few housekeeping things. Something Short and Snappy is now also on tumblr as well as blogger! It will be run by Will. We will not be transferring the full archives, although moving forward everything will be cross-posted between here and there. This is Will's ~~punishment for refusing to be on twitter~~ thing because I'm bad at technology.

On a less fun note, I am going on hiatus until January 2nd. Will's Sunday Ender's Game posts will not be affected by this. There will still be occasional Thursday posts. Either from Will, a guest post, or myself. I will still post on occasion if there is something topical that I want to write about, but by and large I will step back for the time being. I will still be on twitter, and in the comments (probably a little more now than before) but between struggling with my health problems, work complications, and getting ready to get married in two months (and then the holidays right after) it's best if I take a step back for now. The plan in this time is that I will get back to writing features, edit the crap out of it, and come back with a buffer of high quality, ready to party posts. I'll come back with what I estimate to be a 4 part series on the 3rd 50 Shades book, and then I'll start running a deconstruction of Eat, Pray, Love.

I am sorry to have to prioritize like this, and I will miss you all, but my body is a traitorous asshole. I hope you will all have learned from my posts and now see how you too can add snark to your every day life. Until the January 2nd my dear readers!

It's been a long time coming; here at last is Ender's completely unnecessary orchestrated deathmatch with Bonzo Madrid, Graff-designated archnemesis. Ugh, this chapter.

(Content: adult negligence, violence, death, minor self-harm. Fun content: the Patrons.)

Ender's Game: p. 200--227

Chapter Twelve: Bonzo

Dap, who still has a soul, has caught on to Graff's plans and filed a report, so today's Ender Time for Graff is about playing stupid.

"He feels--paternal toward the students here. He feels your neglect of a potentially lethal situation is more than negligence--that it borders on conspiracy to cause the death of serious injury of one of the students here."

DING DING DA-DA-LA FUCKING DING.

"Colonel Graff, the name of Ender Wiggin has percolated through the high command. It has even reached my ears. I have heard him described modestly as our only hope of victory in the upcoming invasion. [....] You have known for eight days that there is a conspiracy among some of the more vicious of these 'children' to cause the beating of Ender Wiggin, if they can. [....] And you, fully warned of this danger, propose to do exactly--"

"Nothing. [....] Ender Wiggin has been in this situation before."

Graff and General Pace--just a second here. This guy's name is General Pace. PACE. The person who is trying to stop Graff from getting Ender to kill Bonzo is named for an old word that means 'peace' and is used in the modern day to indicate 'person whom I acknowledge but disagree with'. That is an impressive amount of meaning to fit into four letters, but seriously, Card, you named the guy who tries to prevent Bonzo's death COMMANDER WRONG?! I am no longer sure I believe this book is real. Am I being punk'd?

Apparently not.

So they both know that Ender has been harassed by bullies before, and Graff specifically cites Stilson as precedent that Ender can take care of himself, which is interesting to me because Stilson is also precedent that Ender absolutely will murder a kid to make himself feel safe, so I can't figure out what Graff thinks he's going to learn from this second kill. Graff goes on about how Ender needs to know when he holds the future of the fleet in his hands that no one will come to save him, and that if he graduates Bonzo now Ender will know that he was rescued, because "heaven knows Bonzo isn't a good enough commander to be promoted on merit". This at least collapses the waveform--we were introduced to Bonzo as hardass but reasonably effective, then told how stupid he was, and now we're told that he just sucks in general. Yet somehow he's been able to hold command for over four years. Graff, you know that demotions are a thing too, right? Bonzo has been in command twice the normal length of time and we've already done the math that command positions should be rare and coveted; how has no one else taken command of Salamander? How has Bonzo not gone wherever it is that non-commanders go when they graduate? Where would Bonzo be if you had actually graduated him two years ago like you should have? Is it possible he'd have found something else in life that he's actually good at, and his honor obsession might have been redirected? What would have happened to Bonzo if he'd been given a fraction of the attention and special treatment you're giving Ender?

Graff snarks that, while he will deserve to get court-martialled and globally shamed if he is wrong, he deserves a few dozen medals if he's right, "for keeping you from meddling". He is, without question or mitigation, a monster.

Ender is watching Bean's Ridiculous Ops toon practice weird techniques, like disarming an enemy with their feet in close combat. Bean has somehow acquired a deadline, the near-invisible near-indestructible cord used to anchor objects in space during construction. By tying himself to a wall, he can take a great arcing leap at ridiculous speed. We don't find out until Ender's Shadow how he got this, but it's a bit bizarre--I can only think that Card either felt he had run out of ideas or he was just deadset on using particular scenes that he couldn't justify any other way.

As they leave practice, they start noticing the students in the halls are improbable--too many older students, too many Salamanders and others known to hate Ender, all just casually hanging around or pretending to very slowly leave the area. The Dragons catch on, but fake relaxation. Ender knows his army is young and worries what will happen if they're attacked now.

Petra shows up to look like a complete fool and this, again, will not be explained until Shadow. She asks to talk to Ender, who refuses to break his stride, and when she finally jogs to catch up, she warns him that there are students planning to attack him--she admits that she hated him too after he beat Phoenix, and Ender says he doesn't blame her, which is still weird to me. Why is the immediate reaction to losing a game in this school to hate the other commander with the fury of ten thousand suns? Is this supposed to be part of them being realistic children?

Ender points out that they just passed a tons of kids waiting to ambush him, and asks if Petra really didn't notice them. She angrily declares that she did not and that Ender should learn to recognise his friends. Given that this message was useless and her attempt to deliver it was dangerous, the options are that 1) Petra is supposed to look totally incompetent here or 2) Card knew all along what she was really thinking (get in a fight, take a few punches, win, everyone will have vented their feelings and no one dies) and just waited a couple of decades to let everyone else know. 2 seems implausible but 1 seems excessive even for him. I dunno.

His toon leaders honor-guard him to his private cabin, where he finds a text from Dink Meeker: Don't be alone. Ever. This is our first hint that the Dinktron 4X Victory And Friendship Unit has broken down and the real Dink Meeker is back to remind everyone that they're playing goddamn laser tag so chill out. Ender dreams of Stilson, and sees him now as a posturing 6-year-old bully rather than a monster, but in his dreams they beat him anyway, and when Ender wakes up he reassures himself that he's too brilliant for the teachers not to protect him against real threats even if they skew the game against him. It's a fairly neat bit of work--in a couple of paragraphs Card undercuts Ender's first kill to tell us that murdering Stilson isn't actually proof that he will still kill freely, and he assures us that Ender really is in fact counting on protection from the teachers just like Graff suspects. Which will apparently hold him back from reaching his full potential, somehow? That part still isn't clear, even if you buy this part.

The morning's battle is a long slugging match with Badger Army, in a thicket of stars and with Badgers recovering from partial damage over time--only complete freezes are permanent. Dragon wins, obviously, but they've missed breakfast and Ender cancels practice, and instead naps all morning, which--upon waking--he considers "slacking off" and so forces himself to climb the rope in the gym three times before finally going to shower. He's alone in there for some time before seven people arrive at once, led by Bonzo. He reaches for his towel.

It wasn't there. One of the boys was holding it. It was Bernard. All it would take for the picture to be complete was for Stilson and Peter to be there too. They needed Peter's smile; they needed Stilson's obvious stupidity.

Taking a moment to note that Stilson's intelligence can apparently be judged by looking at him and that stupid people hate Ender. Yes, folks, we're back into the Sullen Judgmental No-One-Understands-Me Smart Kid Fantasy mode. Ender quickly decides that Bonzo is the only one he really needs to worry about--the others want to humiliate him; Bonzo wants him dead.

"You can go home and tell your father, Yes, I beat up Ender Wiggin, who was barely ten years old, and I was thirteen."

Not to interrupt the drama, but seriously. Ender was "six years, nine months, and twelve days old" when he transferred to Salamander Army. That was three years ago--almost exactly three years, based on the age estimates we've been given and the duration Dragon Army has been in operation (which is, near as I can tell, less than two months). In order for Bonzo to be 13 now, he would have had to have been 10 then. He wasn't a new commander, either--Ender told us earlier that armies normally have a game every two weeks, Bonzo declared in his first appearance that Salamander was rising out of obscurity by winning twelve of its last twenty games, and Ender also told us that commanders don't inherit the records of their predecessors, which means at minimum Bonzo had been commander for a full year at that time (40 weeks of games plus the two-month warm-up period after promotion). In order for Bonzo to be 13 now, he would have had to have been promoted at age 9, the same as Ender, and Ender's promotion was unheard of, whereas Graff assures us that Bonzo is an incompetent fool.*

All of this can be avoided by two things: either make sure your timeline is vague, or don't seed incredibly specific information throughout the book that adds up to a blatant contradiction. (Option three, of course, is that no one actually cares, which I imagine is what Card would say really matters--it's about the story, not about being fussy over details. Except that this is the kind of story that falls apart because of details, and in point of fact that's perhaps the most important thing about this story: it only works if you want to believe it does. Very meta.

"You shut up," said bonzo. "Shut up and stand out of the way." He began to take off his uniform. "Naked [drink!] and wet and alone, Ender, so we're even. I can't help that I'm bigger than you. You're such a genius, you figure out how to handle me."

I'm going to skim the fight proper, because it is of itself just not that interesting. There are plumbing fixtures everywhere which they realise are the key weapons. Bonzo's stance shows that he's taken ground fighting classes more recently than Ender. Ender starts turning on faucets for the steam, so that he'll be more slippery, with the soap and the sweat. Bonzo declares that he's not afraid of hot water, and moves in.

If there isn't yet a pornographic parody based on this scene, there will be by the end of the year.

Dink Meeker bursts in and begs Bonzo to stop, which feeds Bonzo's need for power, but then screws up by declaring that the games don't matter, the point is the war with the aliens, and Ender might be the only one who can win it. Dink has regained perspective, but the thought that Ender is important and Bonzo is not just locks Bonzo into murder mode and the brawl begins.

"If you touch him you're a buggerlover!" cried Dink. "You're a traitor, if you touch him you deserve to die!"

Etc. There is much talk of being "too slippery" and how "Bonzo's tight, hard ribs came against Ender's face" and Bonzo thrusting his hips away "to keep Ender from reaching his groin" and finally Ender smashes Bonzo's nose with his face. Ender does his whole 'I must win extra-hard or I will have to fight this fight again' rationalisation and so sets in with further savage kicks (specifically including the groin), until Bonzo collapses under the hot spray and doesn't move. At last the medics show up and Dink hauls Ender away to his room and tries to comfort him by telling him how awesome he is.

There was no doubt now in Ender's mind. There was no help for him. Whatever he faced, now and forever, no one would save him from it. Peter might be scum, but Peter had been right, always right; the power to cause pain is the only power that matters, the power to kill and destroy, because if you can't kill then you are always subject to those who can, and nothing and no one will ever save you.

Within the context of the school, sure, okay, but only to the extent that he is in an environment completely controlled by people who are actively trying to destroy him. What isn't at all clear to me is how this is supposed to make Ender a better commander in an environment where he is supposed to lead and plan and be brilliant and, above all else, count on other people to back him up. If I wanted to dwell on this longer, I would point to nonviolent resistance and to basically every part of human history that shows how the threat of destruction is useless against those who would rather be dead than surrender their ideals. The power to destroy is the greatest power only as long as you assume destruction is the worst fate. But addressing that would be another novel. Ender bursts out again that "I didn't want to hurt him! [...] Why didn't he just leave me alone!" and eventually falls asleep.

Ender awakens again at 1820 that same day to find another battle notification--Dragon versus Griffin and Tiger at once. The Dragons are excited; Ender goes to shower again and wash off Bonzo's blood.

In the dark battleroom, their view is immediately blocked by stars, so Ender sends Bean's Ridiculous Ops squad to scout by using the aforementioned high-speed deadline arc flight hurricane howling scorpion strike technique art move. Bean reports that, after the first block that Dragon is assembling on, the battleroom is completely empty until they reach a fortification of stars on the far side where the enemy has gathered.

"In a real war, any commander with brains at all would retreat and save this army."

"What the hell," said Bean. "It's only a game."

"It stopped being a game when they threw away the rules."

"So you throw 'em away, too."

I can't believe they didn't use that dialogue in the film trailer. It sounds exactly like every action movie with a maverick hero. Anyway, Griffin and Tiger lie in wait and are eventually baffled to see a huge formation move out from Dragon's blockade--a literal wall of frozen soldiers, with a cylinder stretching back from it, tied together in a close formation with active Dragons shielded inside and firing. Bean has used the deadline to make a giant (phallic, sorry to say it but it is) armored vehicle of boys to penetrate enemy lines. The formation abruptly splits apart and most of it reverses direction, drawing enemy attention back towards the Dragon gate. The Griffin leader realises something is weird, scans the room, spots a bunch of Dragons near his own gate, takes aim, and the lights come up because Dragon won. They skipped the actual fighting portion of the battle and sent a little squad to dash through the gate. (This is a very thematically-inspired battle, with the sacrificial shields and the complete disregard for normal safety in favour of laser focus on the goal.)

In several decades of Battle School operations, apparently no one has ever thought of just going straight for the goal. Does Earth no longer have capture-the-flag games? This is such a revolutionary tactic that Anderson declares they're going to change the rules so you can't go through the gate until the entire enemy army is out of commission. Ender is first calm, then furious when Anderson walks away, but everyone (Tiger and Griffin included) just start cheering him and saying that as long as he's on one team, no match can ever be equal anyway, so forget the rules.

Ender cancels practice forever, declares he's finished with the game, and hides in his cabin until Bean arrives to tell him Dragon has been dissolved--all of the toon leaders have been promoted to command of their own armies, including Bean, the new Rabbit Leader. Ender rants at Bean while Bean fumbles at being a comforting friend, and again I'm skimming this because it's more wallowing in Ender's angst at how he was 'forced' to beat Bonzo, and this is a much more interesting scene in Ender's Shadow. Anderson arrives, rebukes Ender for his 'insubordination' in the game room, and then gives him a graduation slip--he's going to Command School, which Bean assures us never happens before age 16.

They leave, and Bean goes back to his bunk and tries to understand his own sorrow, until at last he realises that it's Ender, Ender is gone and Bean will never see him again. "He bit down on his hand to stop the feeling, to replace it with pain. It didn't help." Wow, okay, so this version of Bean medicates with self-harm. I had not caught that before. That'll get retconned out. He forces himself to calm down and fall asleep:

his breathing was quick and light. He was a soldier, and if anyone had asked him what he wanted to be when he grew up, he wouldn't have known what they meant.

Bean is maybe age seven. He's been at Battle School for a year. We don't know it yet, but Battle School is a goddamn paradise compared to his early childhood as a starving scavenger in the Netherlands. This school is absolutely unconscionable child abuse, but the idea that it's converted him into an adult in a matter of months still doesn't make sense to me. It's possible to abuse people without magically causing them to mature as well. That which does not kill you does not necessarily make you stronger.

Ender gets onto a shuttle to go home, and Graff is coming with him. They have to return to Earth to get a long-range shuttle to fly to Command School, and that means Ender gets to see family. They land in Florida, and Ender finds it strange, and it's the best and truest bit of the chapter:

Everything was far away and flat; the ground, lacking the upward curve of Battle School floors, seemed instead to fall away, so that on level ground Ender felt as though he were on a pinnacle. The pull of real gravity felt different and he scuffed his feet when he walked. He hated it. He wanted to go back home, back to the Battle School, the only place in the universe where he belonged.

We get a final scene with Imbu and Anderson, the new principal, discussing how Graff has been maybe-arrested by Pace and ordered to report to the Polemarch, and we get the Shocking Reveals that Bonzo is dead, not that they will tell him, and that this is the second time:

"They didn't tell him about Stilson, either."

"The kid is scary."

"Ender Wiggin isn't a killer. He just wins--thoroughly."

If we're not defining 'killer' to mean 'person who kills' anymore, I am seriously not sure how to English. Ender absolutely is a killer. What they're saying is that Ender doesn't kill anyone they care about. If Ender really wanted to win, if he wanted freedom, he would kill Graff, and that would scare the fuck out of them. Then he would have taken out the greatest threat to his own safety and health. Ender only kills the people they throw into the arena with him, and that is what makes him useful, but it does not make him innocent.

Next week: Ender breaks, Valentine fixes him, rinse, repeat.

---

*How much more sense would all of this make if Bonzo wasn't incompetent, but was in fact a potential Chosen One? What if he was almost Ender, but not quite good enough, and his ego had only become his fatal flaw when Ender appeared and he realised that he wasn't Graff's favourite anymore? What if he had gone through all of these same trials that Ender has gone through, but sometimes he slipped up, he never made it past The End of the World, he made it through two unfair fights but lost his third one, and Ender arrived and suddenly Bonzo was told that being the best student Battle School had ever seen up to now meant nothing, because they only needed one supreme commander? What would Ender have become if, just now as he's become a commander and weathered all this abuse, some new kid showed up and was even more brilliant?

(Content: emotional abuse, violence. Fun content: I am tired this week so it is just a post, enjoy.)

This would be a really good scene if it were set in a different book.

Ender's Game: p. 227--242

Chapter Thirteen: Valentine

No clue who's handling the Faceless Featureless Plane of Dialogue duties this week, except that one of them's spoken with Graff. The I.F. has apparently learned how to track IP addresses through more than one link and finally discovered that Valentine and Peter are Demosthenes and Locke. They're freaking out because:

"The Wiggin is a third. They are one and two."

"Oh, excellent. The Russians will never believe--"

"That Demosthenes and Locke aren't as much under our control as the Wiggin."

They are for-reals referring to Ender as The Wiggin. That's apparently how he's known in the highest ranks of the International Fleet. Amazing. Also, as much as the International Fleet is supposed to be International, I'm not really seeing how they aren't just Americans. Apparently the Hegemon is American, all the Battle School teachers are American, and they refer to "the Russians" as a completely separate group. I find all of these machinations a lot less interesting if this really is just a flat repetition of the Cold War, with the USSR reborn as the bad guys to the I.F.'s NATO. The idea of the I.F. as the neutral global party trying to keep its constituent parts from fighting is much more fun. There's a bit later that talks about how "the Second Warsaw Pact was not abiding by the terms of the League" but since the League is apparently as mighty as the U.N., it's still just regular nationalism. (I'm not even sure what this is for, unless it becomes relevant in the later Ender books somehow? It doesn't mirror the human/formic war in any illuminating way.)

More to the point, the I.F. folks are GOBSMACKED that Valentine could be writing Demosthenes and Peter writing Locke, given that Val is all that is good and light "and the boy has the soul of a jackal". (About five pages ago we watched Ender fight Bonzo to the death, but as long as he was sad about it, apparently that's cool.) The fact that they can work out that Locke and Demosthenes are siblings working together and yet still be baffled that they're writing against type is also some pretty convincing evidence further towards the conclusion that at this point in humanity's future, we're all goddamn stupid. No wonder being pretty good at laser tag is enough to get military high command turning your name into a title with the definite article. (The Wiggin: worst timelord ever?)

The I.F. are, for the moment, just going to confirm that Locke and Demosthenes don't have any secret connections or agendas, but they're aware that if they wait too many more years to expose them, there'll be no shock value left and they'll be taken seriously even if everyone knows who they are--which, they think, also might not be a bad thing if the Russians really are planning war. Of course, if the Russians are 'planning war' then they've apparently been massing troops on the borders for two years and yet the I.F. hasn't been able to confirm it despite having satellites scattered across the entire planet. (They also think that Demosthenes might be useful to have around if the Russians are planning war, because apparently xenophobia is awesome for making good decisions?)

Valentine is still having fun with it, though--her columns are read across the country, she nudges politics a little here and there with donations to candidates and causes, and she gets diplomatic/furious/interrogatory letters from heads of state to read with her brother. Normal bonding stuff. They still fight sometimes, because Demosthenes is more popular than Locke--'he' gets invited to serve on some useless blue ribbon panel, and Peter is jealous that dignified statesman Locke isn't getting the same attention.

Graff arrives to pick up Valentine from school and take her to see Ender--the dialogue isn't bad, particularly for Valentine, but it's patter. The point is that Ender doesn't want to see anyone, doesn't want to do much of anything, but they've cajoled him into meeting with Valentine. Val is skeptical about what he's asking her to do, but Graff lets drop that he is one of the six people in the world who know Demosthenes' real identity. So: blackmail, cool. Is there anything about Graff that isn't supervillainous? I'm honestly trying.

Ender in this chapter is almost animalistic, like he's spent the last years on a deserted island punching leopards and never having any human contact, rather than playing laser tag in space. It's an interesting characterisation, the idea that he's been boiled down to this utilitarian instrument and doesn't know how to navigate humanity anymore, but I really don't think it's justified by what we've seen over the last few chapters. He's had friends and enemies and triumph and sorrow and pain, and I don't think any of it adds up to forgetting how to people. So while I like bits like this, I wish they were justified:

Ender didn't wave when she walked down the hill toward him, didn't smile when she stepped onto the floating boat slip. But she knew that he was glad to see her, knew it because of the way his eyes never left her face.

It's not that this is bad writing, but that it's unjustified writing. Unearned things are hollow, which I might say is the four-word explanation of what's wrong with most stories that have super-perfect protagonists.

They talk awkwardly and finally manage to reconnect over how terrible Peter is--Ender has built a raft, which he connects to the wooden block buildings he and Valentine would build as infants, ones that would stand up even with their obvious supports removed, and Peter would in turn remove the important ones and leave the obvious ones to turn them fragile even though they looked fine. I hope the metaphor is intentional, because it could be great--Ender and Valentine made things that stayed strong even when they looked broken, and Peter made things that looked good but fell apart at a touch. One side substance, one side style. The problem, of course, is that Ender and Peter are basically the same, both care very much about their appearance (Peter wants to be the respected leader, Ender wants to be the perfect commander and won't ever apologise or ignore a game for any reason) and both have plenty of substance (they both want to befriend or kill everyone).

They swim a bit, then sunbathe. There's a wasp, which Valentine notices but decides to ignore: Let it walk on this raft, let it bake in the sun as I'm doing. Ender crushes it instantly, saying that this breed attacks unprovoked and he's been studying pre-emptive strategies.

Which: again, no. Ender does not do pre-emptive strategies. He didn't try to find a way to stop Bonzo's plotting or resolve it before it became a deathmatch. He didn't try to integrate with his fellow students in a way that might give him mutual friends or allies the way he already saw work with Alai and Bernard. He didn't try to force Graff's hand by bringing the teachers into it in advance. Ender doesn't do pre-emptive. Ender waits to be provoked before he kills. Ender does justification. Pre-emptive strikes have to be justified, but justification does not make pre-emptive.

Valentine tells Ender about Peter's plan and how they might take over the world. She says they can all be Alexander the Great, which possibly misses the central concept behind 'unilateral dictatorship'.

It's hard to do a meaningful recap/analysis of this chapter, because it is a recap/analysis of itself. Ender talks about the games, the way they change the rules whenever they feel like it and he tries to escape but they drag him back. Valentine acknowledges that she's there to do the dragging. Ender says he honestly doesn't care about anything anymore, and mentions that they won't let him see the secrets of Mazer Rackham's victory, which matters to him because he needs to understand them. EMPATHY EXPOSITION TIME.

"Being here alone with nothing to do, I've been thinking about myself, too. Trying to understand why I hate myself so badly."

"No, Ender."

"Don't tell me 'No, Ender.' It took me a long time to realize that I did, but believe me, I did. Do. And it came down to this: In the moment when I truly understand my enemy, understand him well enough to defeat him, then in that very moment I also love him."

What was I saying about unearned characterisation earlier? He murdered Stilson because he didn't understand the difference between bullying and gladiatorial arenas. He made Bonzo's hatred of him worse and worse over the years because he didn't know or care to know what mattered to Bonzo. And he was able to kill him in the end, not because he understood everything that mattered to Bonzo, but because he knew how to goad Bonzo into a disadvantage. That took a bit of taunting about honor, nothing more.

Let's have at this a little deeper: if Ender truly understands someone, everything that matters to them, then why is he never able to offer them another way out? If he really got what made Bonzo tick, why was there a deathmatch instead of a speech saying 'I know what you really need, and here's how we can do this with neither of us dead'. The simple answer for the Bonzo case is that what Bonzo really and truly wanted was Ender's death, so there wasn't anything else that he could offer. That is the only way to justify Ender's self-defence kill. But that flows backwards as well, because it means that if Ender destroys someone and he really understands them, he had no choice except to destroy them. That's the inescapable conclusion: Ender destroys people by understanding them, and he only destroys them because he has no other choice, otherwise he wouldn't have done it, obviously, because he loves them.

Ender's empathy assures us that everyone he kills must die.

"I think it's impossible to really understand somebody, what they want, what they believe, and not love them the way they love themselves. And then, in that very moment when I love them--"

"You beat them." [....]

"No, you don't understand. I destroy them. I make it impossible for them to ever hurt me again. I grind them and grind them until they don't exist."

After all this time, I can't but read this as a meta-admission that this whole book is a geek fantasy about revenge against bullies.

It occurs to Valentine that, much as Peter has found a way to channel his energy 'constructively' and now plays politics instead of torturing bystanders, Ender has changed too, and really might be the more dangerous one now. Well. I say 'now', I mean 'hey remember when he murdered a kid at the start of this book?' They acknowledge this, as Valentine semi-defends Peter and comes to the conclusion that the three kids aren't really as different from each other as the Battle School testers claimed.

"We aren't just ordinary children, are we. None of us."

"Don't you sometimes wish we were?"

She tried to imagine herself being like the other girls at school. Tried to imagine life if she didn't feel responsible for the future of the world. "It would be so dull."

On the one hand, children are our future. The ones who truly do their best to change things for the better deserve to be celebrated. On the other, I'm willing to bet that there are a lot more who think of themselves as wearily bearing the fate of humanity on their shoulders because the idea that other people are also competent and important is weird and foreign to them.

Valentine decides that, no matter how unmotivated Ender thinks he is, he still has too much ambition to really have stopped--he wants her to get him moving. Of course, when simple 'don't you want to be the famous hero' fails to work, she moves on to emotional blackmail:

"When you were little and Peter tortured you, it's a good thing I didn't lie back and wait for Mom and Dad to save you. They never understood how dangerous Peter was. I knew you had the monitor, but I didn't wait for them, either. Do you know what Peter used to do to me because I stopped him from hurting you?"

I realise that there are many times when implying is more effective than detailing, but it's just really hard to be sold on how awful Peter is when we only see him do it once and have every reason to believe that incident was exceptional. But that aside: this is brutal, and I wish we got more of Valentine's story, because her life is a parade of terrifying and courageous decisions made to try to save other people (Ender, then Peter, now the world) and I would like to know her better. Yes, she fits the usual female stereotype of being the nurturer and passive/reactive and servant to men, and we need many more characters who aren't that because sweet jebus, but all the same: I wish I knew more about Valentine.

Valentine decides at last that what weighs on Ender is Peter, undefeated--no matter what enemies he faces, the memory of Peter having power over him is inescapable. Ender corrects her:

"You don't understand. [....] I don't want to beat Peter."

"Then what do you want?"

"I want him to love me."

She had no answer. As far as she knew, Peter didn't love anybody.

It does seem plausible. Then again, all the way back in chapter two, we had Peter coming to Ender's bedside to weep and beg forgiveness and swear that he loved him, and I wonder what this story looks like from his perspective, too, and whether they aren't all rubbish at empathising. The fact that everyone apparently knows Peter was monstrously broken as a kid but no one has tried to help him kind of contributes further to the idea that all of these monsters we supposedly meet (Peter, Bonzo, and Ender whether they admit it or not) are the direct result of Graff's meddling and negligence. By taking up his heroic blogging crusade, Peter has done more to heal himself than anyone else ever did.

They drift back to shore and Valentine swears to Ender that she loves him more than ever, no matter what he decides, and she leaves and doesn't expect to be forgiven again, because she knows she has convinced him to go back to his studies. Being the motivational object is a terrible job.

Next week: more Graff than anyone should ever have to listen to.

(Content: biphobia; transphobia and rape culture at the Dan Savage link. Fun content: math! No, really. Come back!)

This may be considered a sequel to another 'enrich your life through queer math' post from my old blog.

This isn't a post about Dan Savage, but it was inspired by things he's said that really neatly embody one of the major forms of biphobia. (He's also painfully transphobic and sexist and so many other things; I am not a fan. I am sure he's done good things, yay for him, but he desperately needs to not be The One Mainstream Queer Voice.)

This specifically is about the idea that bisexuals--both men and women, though Savage speaks more often regarding men, obviously--are just playing around and are still going to settle down in a hetero relationship once they've had their homo fun. The specific quote is thus: "And here’s another thing that is: Most adult bisexuals, for whatever reason, wind up in opposite-sex relationships. And most comfortably disappear into presumed heterosexuality." The implication (often made an explication) is that we bi people are users, happy to get all countercultural with our sexytimes but ultimately intending to ditch a same-gender partner and spend the rest of our lives taking advantage of all that sweet, sweet straight privilege while leaving said same-gender partners adrift and emotionally abandoned. (This feeds nicely into the similar claim that bi folk are all promiscuous sex-fiends, which I have laughed at enough for the time being; just noting the way one line of bigotry usually supports another.)

Now, it's difficult as hell to get actual reliable numbers on the proportions of queer folk in the world, for obvious reasons: first being that no matter how many times you swear that your survey is completely anonymous, queer people are generally going to need a good reason to single themselves out in a crowd, and 'the curiosity of straights' tends not to be it. A quick scroll through this wikipedia page on orientation demographics shows the hilarious level of variation in surveys, ranging from 1 in 7 to 1 in 200.

Fortunately, this is napkin math, so we don't need exact numbers to prove my point. Let us once again oversimplify tremendously and go with 10% of the population, all else equal, being in some way attracted to people who are theoretically the same sex as them (so including gay, lesbian, bisexual, and gender variants that tend to have trouble getting recognised, let alone catalogued). That's our starting assumption: 90% straight (P = 0.9), 10% queer (P = 0.1). You may see where I'm going with this.

I was waiting for a bus the other day and I saw this guy: gangly and a little stubbly and just generally ridiculously attractive and reading Perdido Street Station. Knucklebite. And I did some quick math in my head: the independent chance of flipping heads on a coin is 0.5, so the chance of getting two in a row is 0.5 * 0.5 = 0.25, the chance of getting three is 0.5 ^ 3 = 0.125, and the chance of getting four is 0.5 ^ 4 = 0.0625.

Say the chance that this ridiculously hot dude waiting for the bus next to me was interested in dudes is 0.1, like we said. That means that, the moment I see him, if I grab a quarter from my pocket, I have a better chance of flipping three heads in a row than I have of even being the right gender for him to be attracted to me. If any of the three are tails, sorry, he only likes women, better luck next time.

Whereas every time I meet a woman I find attractive, the probabilities are reversed: keeping in mind that both straight and bi women might be interested in me, I'd likely have to flip four heads in a row for her to say "Sorry, I only like the ladies." (So far this has only happened 1.5 times. The 0.5 is for when I didn't even have time to start flirting before she brought it up of her own accord.)

Most people have more than one romantic relationship in their lives before they settle down, if they are the settling type, meaning that, if not restricted by institutional homophobia, bisexuals will probably date a range of people with differing genders and orientations over the course of their lives. And while I might be equally attracted to men and women, the feeling is not mutual. Should I be fortunate enough to meet someone so perfectly matched to me that we decide to spend the rest of our lives together, raw probability says that person is probably going to be a woman. That's not my evil bisexual heartless fucklust driving me to use and discard innocent gay men: that's all that math will allow. Most of the people I'm attracted to in my life will probably be straight. I am as upset about this as anyone I mean seriously you should have seen that guy's face I just wanted to congratulate him on owning it--

Where was I?

Oh, right. Biphobes can shut the hell up and either do their math homework or (should they unfortunately be afflicted with dycalculia, like my lovely and non-biphobic sister-in-law) just start flipping coins every time they see someone hot, until the lesson sinks in.

(Content: apologetics for privilege and conquest. Fun content: elephant art, astrothermodynamics.)

Time for Graff to justify a bunch of things that he can't actually justify and, in some cases, doesn't actually need to be justified. I didn't notice that until Ender's Shadow, when they keep a bit of information from Bean while saying they had to give it to Ender--but I am getting ahead of myself. The point is that Graff is useless.

Ender's Game: p. 242--254

Valentine has gone, and Ender literally walks up off the beach, into the house, and asks Graff if they'll leave right away. Have to give him points for decisiveness, I guess. For the fifth time in the book, Ender reflects on how he's not taking anything with him, and I'm trying to find a progression now--when he left home, Graff told him everything would be provided and he didn't need to bring anything; when he joined Salamander and then Rat, he was forbidden to bring anything; when he left Battle School, he was comforted to see that Graff also came away empty-handed; now, leaving Earth, there isn't anything he can imagine wanting to bring with him. Perhaps not a progression, then, but (if not for how bizarre some of those 'he can't bring anything' moments were) it is perhaps an interesting way of checking in on his mindset. Ender is committed to the goal now; he's going back to school to win the war and save the world, not to do well on tests. Not that Graff will let that go by without bludgeoning us with some blunt metaphors along the way.

"Back when the population was growing [...] they kept this area in woods and farms. Watershed land. The rainfall starts a lot of rivers flowing, a lot of underground water moving around. The Earth is deep, and right to the heart it's alive, Ender. We people only live on the top, like the bugs that live on the scum of the still water near the shore. [....] When you live with metal walls keeping out the cold of space, it's easy to forget why Earth is worth saving."

Weeeeeeelll no. Not really, no. (And not just because space isn't 'cold' unless you are in the shade.) The Earth is indeed deep, but anything that could be considered 'alive' is pretty much done once you get a surprisingly short distance underground. Then it's thousands and thousands of miles of increasingly hot stone and metal. There are a lot of living things in the world other than humans, that's a good thing to keep in mind, but 'save the whales' and 'save the plate tectonics' are rather different concepts and only one of them makes a good rallying cry.

"We train our commanders the way we do because that's what it takes--they have to think in certain ways, they can't be distracted by a lot of things, so we isolate them. You. Keep you separate. And it works."

Just in case we've forgotten, Graff: in the seventy or eighty years since the Second Invasion, you've been running Battle School and you have never had a candidate who was capable of passing all your tests. They fail or they burn out. It's not that there was once a great one or two but it was long ago and they're too old now--this method has never worked. So why, Graff, why are you so sure that the problem is with the students and not the tests? Mazer Rackham wasn't trained like this. Mazer Rackham wasn't anything special--he was a nigh-unheard-of low-ranking commander with a history of disciplinary problems. But we'll start getting into that more next week.

They march through the Fleet base to the shuttle; Ender notices that at first everyone pays attention to Graff with his Maximum Clearance Ball (he's carrying around some kind of pingpong ball that opens every door), but as they get into high-clearance areas they're more interested in Ender, who seems even less likely to be there. Ultimately, just the two of them board the shuttle; Graff confirms that his only job now is to stay with Ender. Ender thinks about what this implies for his importance, and basically starts channelling every white guy who has just stared into the face of privilege theory.

Peter could have fantasies about ruling the world, but Ender didn't have them. Still, thinking back on his life in Battle School, it occurred to him that although he had never sought power, he had always had it. But he decided that it was a power born of excellence, not manipulation. He had no reason to be ashamed of it. He had never, except perhaps with Bean, used his power to hurt someone.

I was deeply tempted to bring in Five-Tongue Fleming again to tell Ender that he is Wrong about this, but eventually I had to conclude that he is right that he did not use his power to hurt Bonzo. He got away with killing Bonzo because he's the favourite son, the Chosen One, but I will grant that if he had been in the same situation and was not Graff's favourite, he would have killed Bonzo anyway. (Possibly not the most sterling absolution ever.) And in the years leading up to that point, when he could have apparently revolutionised tactics and training for Rat and Phoenix and ultimately the entire Battle School, and perhaps given insights and skills to hundreds of students rather than saving them all so he could show off when he got command of Dragon, strictly speaking he wasn't using his power to hurt people, but instead actively failing to use his power to help people. Ender is innocent of not abusing his power by only the slightest margin, and he has benefitted from it anyway, but because he never intended to hurt people, he assures himself that he's a perfectly moral person.

Sometimes I am embarrassed for just how accurately and ruthlessly this book portrays its morality.

There's some competent SFing about the shuttle up to Inter-Planetary Launch and Graff requisitioning a ship to a secret destination. Graff takes a moment to show affection to Ender with a gentle touch while he thinks Ender is asleep, which is shockingly not-creepy, before he gets right back to being a supervillain. The pilot of their little ship thinks they're going to Inter-Stellar Launch, but is corrected that he'll actually be taking them to I.F. Command, the location of which which he does not have clearance to know (rather, his ship will guide him with the help of Graff's Ping-Pong Ball of Leadership).

"And I'm supposed to close my eyes during the whole voyage so I don't figure out where we are?"

"Oh, no, of course not. I.F. Command is on the minor planet Eros, which should be about three months away from here at the highest possible speed. Which is the speed you'll use, of course."

"Eros? But I thought that the buggers burned that to a radioactive--ah. When did I receive security clearance to know this?"

"You didn't. So when we arrive at Eros, you will undoubtedly be assigned to permanent duty there."

Graff adds jokingly that the war might be over in fifteen years and so the location can be declassified and their pilot will be free to go. Seriously, this happens. There's no advance planning to make sure a pilot with clearance is available, there are no volunteers for 'a one-way trip' to help with the war effort; Graff just decides 'You look like a convenient pilot; your life and career are now over because I need a ride'. The pilot is predictably furious; Graff benevolently 'overlooks' his insubordination. Skipping temporarily ahead to when they leave the ship, three months later:

The captain was bitter at having to leave his tug; Ender and Graff felt like prisoners finally paroled from jail. When they boarded the shuttle that would take them to the surface of Eros, they repeated perverse misquotations of the lines from the videos that the captain had endlessly watched, and laughed like madmen. The captain grew surly and withdrew by pretending to go to sleep.

Even here on a black rock in space at the end of humanity, Ender and Graff can take time to amuse themselves by bullying someone who can't fight back. It is especially hilarious that we're told they feel like prisoners freed from jail, given that their pilot is now literally a prisoner until the end of either the war or his life, whichever comes first. Ender Wiggin, master of empathy and sweetness.

But before that, they have three months aboard the shuttle, during which Graff jeopardises everything for no reason at all by giving Ender a lot of information that he absolutely does not need. I understand giving him information on the formics--how they're all drones and they've never managed to hold one in captivity for long before it just fell over dead, how they lack any apparent sex organs but are probably mostly female, which doesn't stop Graff from calling them 'he'. That's worth knowing, the hive structure and all. What Ender really doesn't need to know about is the philotic effect: instantaneous telepathic communication, which humanity has now built into our ships.

"So they knew about their defeat the moment it happened," said Ender. "I always figured--everybody always said that they probably only found out they lost the battle twenty-five years ago."

"It keeps people from panicking," said Graff. [....] "We've taken some terrible risks, Ender, and we don't want to have every net on earth second-guessing those decisions. You see, as soon as we had a working ansible, we tucked it into our best starships and launched them to attack the buggers home systems. [....] Our timing was pretty good. They'll all be arriving in combat range within a few months of each other. Unfortunately, our most primitive, outdated equipment will be attacking their homeworld." [....]

"When will they arrive?"

"Within the next five years, Ender."

Graff explains that the master ansible is waiting for them at I.F. Command, ready for humanity's greatest command to lead those ships into battle. They want it to be Ender. Ender says he can't possibly be ready in five years. Graff says then they'll make do with what they have, which he immediately clarifies is "nobody". Ender at least sees this for the transparent rubbish that it is, but thinks to himself that he doesn't need the extra motivation anyway:

I'll become exactly the tool you want me to be, said Ender silently, but at least I won't be fooled into it. I'll do it because I choose to, not because you tricked me, you sly bastard.

Which is in turn hilarious because Ender is absolutely being fooled, and it baffles me that he doesn't expect it at all. In Ender's Shadow, Graff specifically says that Bean mustn't be allowed to learn about the ansible because he'll guess the whole thing from that, but that Ender had to be told in order to do his job. Except that as far as Ender is aware, his job for the next five years consists entirely of study and testing. The entire point, supposedly, of letting Ender fight Bonzo, of bringing Valentine to fix him, was to make sure that Ender was independent and committed to saving humanity--this bit with the ansible and the five-year timeline is unnecessary for motivation. Graff will also insist later that his whole plan desperately depended on Ender not knowing what he was doing--so why in hell is he telling Ender right now the two facts that he needs in order to puzzle it out?

The answer is of course purely Doylist: Card needs the reader to have this information so that he can spring the big reveal on us quickly later instead of having to throw in all this stuff about philotic physics and the human assault fleet in order to have it make sense.

Also, because we skipped it over--Ender asks if the Third Invasion (humans attacking aliens) is necessary, and if they aren't just going to leave us alone now that we've beaten them twice. Graff says that they have to be safe, that the aliens already tried to exterminate us twice without provocation, and we can't risk it again. But he also acknowledges that with the whole human fleet flying out to invade, we're defenceless on Earth and if there is a third alien invasion coming our way, we'll probably all get wiped out. In other words, they're attacking the aliens because they might invade us again, but our military strategy is also completely built on the assumption that they aren't attacking us again, despite having had seventy years to build and launch their own fleet.

At this point I'm pretty sure that humanity's military would drastically increase in efficiency and effectiveness if they gave absolute power to one of those painting elephants.

As they take the final shuttle down to Eros, Ender asks why they're fighting the war to begin with, and Graff rattles off the list of unproven hypotheses--it's their religion, or their need to colonise, or they picked up our TV broadcasts and decided that we were too evil to be saved. (If only they had caught the right anime series, they might think we were just delightful and ridiculous. "My queen! The blond ones grow delicious mushrooms to express despair!") Graff's explanation is simply that, with the insurmountable communication barrier (their inborn telepathy keeps them from grasping how else beings might communicate) they decided we just couldn't be trusted and so had to be subjugated for their own safety, and humanity has made the same decision about them. Basically, 'this might be an us-or-them situation, so let's assume it is and let's make sure we win'. Graff also evopsychs about how nature can't produce a species that doesn't have a collective desire to survive, even if it allows individual sacrifice, because apparently he's never heard of panda breeding programs, but more to the point:

"As for me," said Ender, "I'm in favour of surviving."

"I know," said Graff. "That's why you're here."

Weeeeell, actually, Ender is in favour of defiantly doing as he pleases and handling threats to his safety through the focused application of violence. That's not quite the same thing. There are a lot of things Ender could have done, as we've discussed before, that would have let him survive without having to kill other children. That is why he's there. Because he has a toolbox full of solutions to your problems and all of them are murder. Remember? That's why Valentine couldn't be the Chosen One? Yeah. That. It's about the killing, not the survival. And in the end, it turns out you didn't need to make those things touch anyway.

Next week: Ender meets someone who should have replaced Graff from the very beginning.

This is the big one, the penultimate chapter in which all secrets begin to be revealed and all of the hell we've gone through up to now pays off. As a depressing side-note, we are suddenly faced with the realisation that Graff is not only the worst person ever, but that narratively there is someone who could have filled his role so, so much better.

(Content: violence, discrimination based on fertility. Fun content: sweet abs, Greek history.)

Ender's Game: p. 255--273

Chapter Fourteen: Ender's Teacher

We actually get both names in the first Scene of Faceless Unnarrated Dialogue--Graff and Admiral Chamrajnagar of the interstellar fleet--and it has some lampshaded poetic moments (Chamrajnagar gets mystical about the majesty of spaceflight, Graff snarks) but is otherwise pure filler. Graff has no interest in influencing Ender's curriculum; he is "only here because I know Ender". Funny how you keep needing other people to fix Ender for you, then.

Ender gives us some establishing SF about living on Eros--the cramped hallways cut through the stone, the weak gravity and permanent slope of the corridors, etc. He makes no new friends, partly because he never stays in any classes for long: he attends a lecture or two, then gets some private tutoring, then immediately moves on. For the first time in half a book, we get a sense of what he's studying: astrogation, military history ('Oh my god, 1910s Germany stole my ideas!'), abstract mathematics that he has a hard time consciously understanding but intuits easily.

The new game is the simulator, "the most perfect videogame he had ever played", which basically means an RTS. Ender starts out playing a single starfighter, but then they scale up to squadron-versus-squadron, and the computer learns quickly from his new techniques. With very little fanfare or acknowledgement, Ender loses quite a few games as he re-learns the same lessons he's learned twice in this book already: use all your troops in concert and give general orders instead of micromanaging. I'm not sure how this runs into Ender's total phobia of losing games--he's realised that the simulator is Command School's equivalent of the battleroom, but apparently losing to the computer doesn't count.

After a year at Eros, he's back to winning every time, and he asks Graff if it isn't going to get harder again. Graff shrugs it off, and the next day Ender wakes up to find an old man apparently meditating on the floor in his bedroom.

Ender got up and showered and dressed, content to let the man keep his silence if he wanted. He had long since learned that when something unusual was going on, something that was part of someone else's plan and not his own, he would find out more information by waiting than by asking. Adults almost always lost their patience before Ender did.

I am struggling to figure out what this could refer to. The last time he stayed quiet and tried to watch someone else's plan in action to get the upper hand, he ended up in a deathmatch in the showers. This only makes sense if they've continued to randomly screw with Ender's head over the course of the year he's been on Eros, which is on the one hand predictable but on the other weird that we haven't heard details.

Ender studies the old man--sixtyish, staring at him with total apathy--and asks him why the door is locked, with no response.

Ender didn't like games where the rules could be anything and the objective was known to them alone.

Which is a weirdly accurate description of the human-formic war.

So he starts exercising around the room, self-defence techniques and forms, and when he gets near the man, a hand snaps out, yanks him off-balance, and Ender tumbles to the ground, but when he looks up again the man is back in position, perfectly still.

This whole scene is such an obvious play on the enigmatic martial arts master testing a new student that I'm not sure what to say, except that it doesn't become any less stupid and orientalist when you whitewash it. (Mazer Rackham is half-Maori, and since his other half is undefined we can probably assume it's white, but he's still not an Okinawan raising an army to repel the invaders.)

Ender stood poised to fight, but the other's immobility made it impossible for Ender to attack. What, kick the old man's head off? And then explain it to Graff--oh, the old man kicked me, and I had to get even.

As much as I approve of Ender's long-awaited grasp of self-control, he's still operating on the fantasythat his previous two kills (or 'fights', in his mind) were purely driven by self-defence, conveniently forgetting that in both cases he kept on attacking even once Stilson and Bonzo were incapacitated on the floor. That's how he murdered Stilson--in Bonzo's case, it's likely that the mortal injury had already been dealt, but that didn't stop him from continuing with the kicking. Self-defence does not include killing the incapacitated--nor do I think it can only apply when someone is actively trying to kill you. Ender could, for example, knot up his sheets and try to bind the stranger until he can be safely detained--that might require force, but as long as it was only the force Ender needed to be assured that he wasn't going to be attacked again, rather than Ender's normal default-to-lethal, I'd have no problem with it. Why are Ender's only settings Kill and Angst?

Wait, no, I forgot a setting: Uncomfortable Homoerotic Subtext. It's been hours, Ender is exhausted and frustrated, so he heads back to his bed to work on his desk, and as soon as he bends over, the strange old man lunges in behind him, grabs him by the hair and the crotch, and throws him down to pin him face-first into the floor. That's how that goes.

"I surprised you once, Ender Wiggin. Why didn't you destroy me immediately afterward? Just because I looked peaceful? You turned your back on me. Stupid. You have learned nothing. You have never had a teacher."

Ender was angry now, and made no attempt to control or conceal it. "I've had too many teachers, how was I supposed to know you'd turn out to be a--"

"An enemy, Ender Wiggin [....] the first one you've ever had who was smarter than you."

There's an extended reflection on how the enemy is the only real teacher--nothing that folks who have been reading along can't predict, although it's got a nice rhythm. This teacher/enemy/Shaolin master lets ender up, and Ender responds by attacking in a frenzy that ends with him against the door and the stranger sitting cross-legged on the floor again. Dude approves, and says that he will now be in charge of Ender's simulator training, and thus things are, once again, about to get still more real.

"In this school, it has always been the practice for a young student to be chosen by an older student. The two become companions, and the old boy teaches the younger one everything he knows. Always they fight, always they compete, always they are together. I have chosen you."

Dammit, Card, there are only so many times I can try to find alternative explanations for you. That time has ended. You brought this on yourself with your inexplicable fixation on the ancient Greek military. You're on your own now. If it happens again, I'm just going to link to art from Free!.

As the teacher leaves, Ender attacks him yet again, delivers a solid kick to the back before getting thrown across the room, and they both do that 'smiling while bleeding from fresh injuries because this is how men bond' thing, and Ender asks what to call his teacher, and it is revelation time: "Mazer Rackham".

The explanation is straightforward enough as to how the hero of a war seventy years ago could still be around--they put him in a ship, sped it up near lightspeed, and brought him back again for the sequel. From his perspective, he spent twenty years confined to Eros because he knew too much, then eight years in flight equivalent to fifty on Earth. This creates a really interesting dynamic which the book unfortunately doesn't get into at all. When the campaign comes, the soldiers fighting it will be people Mazer Rackham knew and fought beside, but from their perspective it's only been five years versus his twenty-eight. He's not just going to watch friends die in battle, but friends who exist exactly as he remembers them from decades ago. Not just colleagues, but the living memories of them as they were in the days of glory that they shared. That is a psychology and a tension that would be worth telling. Not in this book, though! (Or any that I know of.)

In the days that follow, Ender and Mazer bond over videos of human fleets fighting formic ships, contiguous videos instead of the patchwork ones that Ender constructed, and Ender is delighted to find that Mazer is pointing out things even he hadn't noticed: "For the first time, Ender had found a living mind he could admire." We could read this as Ender being a total jackwagon about basically everyone he's ever heard of, but I am trying to be positive, so I instead take it as a tragic commentary on how the warped course of Ender's life has caused him to lose all awareness of or interest in people in any discipline other than military theory. Art, science, medicine, history, whatever--plebes.

Ender finally asks to see how Mazer won the Second Invasion, after he describes himself as "the only person who had ever defeated the buggers by intelligence rather than luck". Ender describes what he knows of the final battle: the enormous formic fleet versus the tiny human strike force, Mazer's reckless charge, a single shot, and then nothing of the battle. Mazer rolls his eyes at what passes for secrecy and shows Ender the proper video, which shows exactly the same, except that there simply is no battle. Mazer destroys a single enemy ship and the entire formic fleet goes dead. Mazer fast-forwards through three hours of footage as the humans boggle.

Because we haven't complained about how geniuses are hated by lesser geniuses in a while, Mazer explains that all the xenobiologists told him he wasn't qualified to have an opinion on what happened, despite having won the battle based on his theory--that the formics are a purely hivemind race, with sentient queens but all the drones merely very complicated telepathically-controlled limbs. Mazer identified and killed the queen, and the invading fleet died en masse. Mazer shows Ender the videos of the formic fleet destroying the humans further outside the solar system, and Ender quickly identifies the same ship as the "I" of the fleet, which OBVIOUSLY no one else in seven decades has been able to do.

You know, Ender would be a more interesting character if his defining trait wasn't supposed to be 'empathy' but 'empathy with the formics'--if he were human on the outside, 'alien' on the inside, unsuited to normal society but serendipitously perfect for fighting an aggressive hivemind.

There's a whole lot more SF about formic psychology--why they thought nothing of killing human crews (which they assumed were mindless drones) but left mechanical transmitters running in captured ships, how they used Eros as their own base for the Second Invasion and humans scavenged gravity control and such when they took it back. It's neat enough, but narratively whatever. Let's talk about why Graff shouldn't have existed in the first place.

Graff's problem as a character is that he has no history. He's supposed to be a teacher, but we never see him teach, and he definitely doesn't develop curricula. His job mostly seems to consist of psychological analysis, except that he's not very good at that, either--he keeps relying on reports and unaccountable computer spasms and such. His whole thing is that he somehow knows that he has to make Ender's life a living hell in order to make him a good commander, in spite of all intuition and theory and history, but we don't know where he got these ideas or why he is convinced that they will work when they never have before. Who could have the justification for this?

Mazer Rackham. Graff should have been Mazer--'Hyrum Graff' was a pseudonym that he could use to administrate the Battle School, only to reveal his true identity to Ender when they arrived on Eros. Mazer Rackham does have special qualifications no one else has: based on near-to-nothing, he was able to extrapolate the nature of the formic hivemind and successfully use it against them. For reasons they never explain (said to have something to do with 'psychology', presumably because he'd be too emotionally involved?) he can't command the Third Invasion, so he's got to replicate himself. Whether the military had found Ender or not, Mazer was going to be around for the end of the war--that's just a fact of the way his near-lightspeed time-travel trip worked. And then because he's a genius he quickly spots Ender and is all 'This kid is the one' and the military is all 'Whatever, loser' and Mazer is all 'Fine, you train your favourites as well but I'm going to focus on this one until you bring me one you can prove is better'.

Mazer could pull all of the ridiculous mind-torturing stunts that Graff pulls, but instead of being explained by his having attended Franz Kafka's Military Academy, they would be 'justified' by Mazer trying to inflict all the same twists that created him on Ender. It would be a fantastic commentary on the way people often replicate the abuses that are done to them against others. Instead of just assuming that Graff knows what he's doing and he's following some textbook, people would have much more obvious and legitimate grounds to demand Mazer explain himself, which would fit even better with the book's overall theme of 'the commoners are stupid and will try to stop geniuses because they don't understand what's good for them', which is a terrible theme but at least he could try to execute it well.

Ultimately, what does Graff bring to the story as a result of his character rather than his role? I'm coming up with nothing. Whereas Mazer brings a whole host of psychological questions and implications that we never get to spend any time exploring.

Where were we? Is Mazer still talking? Goddammit, he is.

"They probably thought they were routinely shutting down our communications by turning off the workers running the tug. Not murdering living, sentient beings with an independent genetic future. Murder's no big deal to them. Only queen-killing, really, is murder, because only queen-killing closes off a genetic path."

There are a couple of reasons this bit is spectacularly stupid, the first and lesser of which is that this 'genetic path' definition of murder is a very strange position for Mazer Rackham to hold--it's kind of got to be Mazer acting as Card's mouthpiece. But more importantly: who the fuck defines personhood based on the ability to reproduce?! If this is taken literally, then murder ceases to be murder once a) a person has already reproduced, b) a person physically incapable of reproducing, and possibly even c) a person chooses not to reproduce. So: post-menopause women, anyone infertile (including, for example, anyone who undergoes SRS), and all those damnable queers. Totally not murder, because they can't have kids! I can at this point confirm that I have found the maximum possible scorn I can have for a sci-fi author, because I cannot scorn any author more than I do Orson Scott Card. What a tool.

Lastly for this week, Mazer lists humanity's advantages against the formic fleets: first, of course, our indomitable human spirit of creativity, allowing each one of us to be independently more brilliant than expected, while the formics rely on mass numbers and coordination of simple strategies. Second, and substantially more impressive, is Doctor Device: the M.D. Device, Molecular Detachment, which focuses a pair of beams (they are extremely specific about this, it's a pair of beams) on matter to create an expanding field in which electrons get interrupted and all matter falls apart. Whenever the field hits more matter, it creates a new expanding field, potentially allowing for a chain reaction that leaps from ship to ship to wipe out an entire fleet. Bonus points to anyone who can guess how the final battle at the formic homeworld will go!

Next week: the return of everyone, ever, including that one guy, you know, the one who did the thing.

So there was no Ender post last weekend. That was a thing that didn't happen, because my brain was exhausted from a marathon tabletop RPG session the day before. My first attempt at GMing! It was good times. So, to make it all up to you, I'm going to blitz through the entire remainder of the chapter. This is because we are friends, and not because there are a lot of 'action' sequences in this part of the book that are really easy to skim over. It's time for the final campaign! It is time for the game to ender. End. Warning: incoming game.

(Content: sexism, self-harm, genocide apologetics. Fun content: trailers that lie, Bustopher Kobayashi.)

Ender's Game: p. 273--304

Ender gets to the game room and the controls are gone, replaced with a switchboard. He'll be playing as commander from now on, with a team of lieutenants, who speak as soon as he puts on the headphones:

"Salaam," said a whisper in his ears.

"Alai," said Ender.

"And me, the dwarf."

"Bean."

And Petra, and Dink; Crazy Tom, Shen, Hot Soup, Fly Molo, Carn Carby, all the best students Ender had fought with or fought against, everyone that Ender had trusted in Battle School.

And the scarecrow and the tin man and so forth. We're told there are three dozen of them in total, despite Card having run out of recognisable names after nine of them. A couple more names will come up over the course of the chapter, and Ender's Shadow. Vlad. Who was Vlad? I feel like I would have remembered a Vlad. Still, twenty-six more unnamed heroes helping save the world! I'm just going to assume at least one of them is named Bustopher Kobayashi. If Card didn't want this to happen, he should have said there was only a team of a dozen. Was he afraid Ender wouldn't seem special enough if his elite team was too elite? Also, they made a huge deal about bringing Ender to Eros, but nine months later they ship in thirty-six more kids like it's no big thing? And it's not like they're all the ultimate geniuses--Shen's biggest on-page achievement so far is refusing to let catcalls get to him a few years ago. Is it just narrative convenience that Battle School's greatest students are all Ender's best friends, or are they giving him his friends regardless of their skill level? The latter is sort of plausible, but it will fail utterly in short order.

They start having a great time with the games now that they are reunited, and over the next three weeks of practices Ender gets to know everyone's skillset: Dink is great with orders but terrible at improvisation (despite having had years more command experience than Ender--remember, he was a commander even in Rat when he had his independent toon), Bean gets overwhelmed with large groups but shreds up with a small strike force (that will get retconned to bits in Shadow), and Alai is a master strategist almost equal to Ender (not that we've ever seen or ever will see proof of this, nor will it affect the plot at all; Ender suggests replacing himself with Alai at one point but Mazer shoots it down instantly by telling Ender to "be honest").

Ender and Mazer analyse the latest practice and observe that his team basically moves like a formic fleet now, their coordination is so perfect, but they still have independent thought and innovation. Go humanity. So now it's time for the next course of testing, in which they'll simulate an entire invasion campaign just like the one that's going to really happen when the fleet arrives. Mazer also takes a moment to tell Ender not to complain about how hard it is going to get, because he lost his wife to time-travel, which is a pretty good trump card. (Did she not want to come along? Did they think it was too expensive to send her too, ignoring as usual the possibility of compromising their own geniuses with crushing despair?)

The next morning, at 0340, Mazer rouses Ender from a dream of being vivisected and brain-scanned by the formics and takes him to his first campaign mission. They chatter about who'll take what ships (Alai, Petra, and Vlad share a carrier's complement of fighters) and Ender assigns Bean one fighter from each carrier, which echoes back to his Ridiculous Ops squad, but seems like a terrible idea to me in this kind of scenario. If he sees something that requires a ship from someone else's group, can't he just relay the command? What do squadrons get out of having one of their fighters inexplicably not under their own control?

The formics have a spherical formation with an obvious core ship that Ender realises they want him to believe is the queen. Ender ignores it and orders them to try to compress the formation, not telling his friends about Dr Device as they protest the weirdness, and then they sit back to watch as Alai's first shot devours the fleet in a chain reaction. Mazer explains that, for a proper campaign, they had to have one fight in which the formics didn't know what the humans could do, and they'll learn rapidly from now on. He then proceeds to critique their technique, and gets increasingly harsh--a harshness that Ender passes on to his team.

"You're too kind to us," said Alai one day. "Why don't you get annoyed with us for not being brilliant every moment of every practice. If you keep coddling us like this we'll think you like us."

Some of the others laughed into their microphones. Ender recognized the irony, of course, and answered with a long silence. When he finally spoke, he ignored Alai's complaint. "Again," he said, "and this time without self-pity." They did it again, and did it right.

Their friendship withers, their trust in Ender as a commander grows, and somehow Ender knows that "it was to each other that they became close; it was with each other that they exchanged confidences", even though he never talks to them outside of game time or sees them in person at all. Obviously, this makes them all even more effective soldiers, because the Enderverse runs on the Omelas principle and making people sad and wounded always makes everything around them better. I bet whichever general thought they should supply Ender with his friends instead of all their assorted best students is feeling kind of stupid now.

Ender starts having more nightmares, dreaming of the Giant's corpse shaped into a formic village, and child-faced wolves that hunt him, not just the obvious threats like Peter and Bonzo, but Alai and Valentine and Dink, but in his dreams he still kills them all in the river, sobbing as he does so. He accuses Mazer of cheating at programming the game, and feels like his dreams are being watched. This section is just randomly trippy on its own, but it's foreshadowing a bunch of stuff, which is sort of cool. It'd work better for me if more of the stuff it was foreshadowing was in this book and not the sequels, but this is what happens when a standalone novel gets drafted into becoming backstory for an unrelated series.

It finally occurs to Ender that all this psychological stress might be affecting his brilliance, but the first big burnout is Petra, and the contrast between the way it's described here and the way it will be in Shadow is interesting. In Shadow she literally blacks out in the middle of a battle because eleven-year-old children are mortal; here she just makes a stupid maneuver, "and she discovered it in a moment when Ender wasn't with her" and gets shot up. When Ender does notice, he immediately tosses command of the surviving ships to Tom and has to salvage the battle because Petra's forces were the core of his strategy.

Ender knew at once that he had pushed her too hard--because of her brilliance he had called on her to play far more often and under much more demanding circumstances that all but a few of the others.

So, I'm mixed on this. Petra falters because she's been pushed too hard, and she's been pushed too hard because she's too awesome not to use, but "a few of the others" like Bustopher Kobayashi have been even pushed harder and they're apparently doing fine. Ender's pushing himself even harder and he still reacts as perfectly as he can, because Petra needs handholding through emergencies? Shen saves the day with a perfect Dr Device shot that eats a swarm of the enemy, and Fly Molo mops up.

She was not there for the next few practices, and when she did come back she was not as quick as she had been, not as daring. Much of what had made her a good commander was lost. Ender couldn't use her anymore, except in routine, closely supervised assignments. She was no fool. She knew what had happened. [....] The fact remained that she had broken, and she was far from being the weakest of his squad leaders.

I try not to link to TVtropes very often, but this is just such a flawless Faux Action Girl scenario. Petra, we're told, is totally hardcore and badass and brilliant. She also fails, utterly, and never recovers, and is the only girl we're aware of in the entire group. If you believe what the narrative tells you, then there's nothing wrong with this because Petra is so strong. If you consider the narrative unreliable for two seconds, Petra has been just barely not good enough for the entire book and of course the girl needs her hand held through everything. This comment thread also has some good previous discussion, if you missed it.

Ender's stress continues to mount; he chews his hand in his sleep until it has to be treated by a medic, and starts getting ideas like thinking that any prior candidate who washed out died--he doesn't say whether he thinks they get executed or if they just wasted away or what, but Mazer assures him this is ridiculous and he's perfectly safe.

"I think that Bonzo died. I dreamed about it last night. I remember the way he looked after I jammed his face with my head. [....] My whole life keeps playing out as if I were a recorder and someone else wanted to watch the most terrible parts of my life."

"We can't drug you if that's what you're hoping for. I'm sorry if you have bad dreams. Should we leave the light on at night?"

"Don't make fun of me!" Ender said. "I think I'm going crazy."

But Mazer remains unsympathetic and so Ender resolves not to tell him about this ever again, and continues to weaken. The battles get worse, longer, he has to rotate commanders in the same battle, then one day Ender blacks out in the middle of practice and is confined to bed for three days, then back to battles every day.

During the night he thought he felt hands touching him gently. Hands with affection in them, and gentleness. He dreamed he heard voices.

"You haven't been kind to him."

"That wasn't the assignment."

"How long can he go on? He's breaking down."

"Long enough. It's nearly finished." [....]

"I can't bear to see what this is doing to him." [...]

"I know. I love him too."

So here we have Mazer and Graff acting as audience surrogates to be ineffectually kind to Ender. Of course this kindness takes the form of unsolicited touching and invading his privacy at night, because that is how these jackwagons roll. Ender thinks he's dreaming it: "If there was love or pity for him, it was only in his dreams. He woke up and fought another battle and won. Then he went to bed and slept again and dreamed again and then he woke up and won again and slept again and he hardly noticed when waking became sleeping".

And then one day he wakes up and no one's there to shepherd him around, but he can't think of anything he could do other than eat breakfast and go to practice. There are other people in the simulator room, but he doesn't ask; Mazer explains that today is his final exam and these are the evaluators. Mazer adds that to switch things up, the test battle will occur around a planet, and Ender lists a few effects (gravity changing fuel costs):

"Does the Little Doctor work against a planet?"

Mazer's face went rigid. "Ender, the buggers never deliberately attacked a civilian population in either invasion. You decide whether it would be wise to adopt a strategy that would invite reprisals."

Humans are raised on vids of terror; one of the famous incidents of the First Invasion was the Scouring of China; suddenly they only ever struck purely military installations?! If they weren't slaughtering civilians, ever, why is the military so convinced this is a war of extermination? How does this not raise any questions in anyone's minds?

Ender runs through some warm-ups with his team and muses on what training will be left for him between today and the war.

And as he waited for the game to appear, he wished he could simply lose it, lose the battle badly and completely so that they would remove him from training, like Bonzo, and let him go home. [....] Failure meant he could go home.

Then the battle appears: ten thousand formic ships swarming around a planet, constantly shifting through random patterns, versus his own twenty old-model carriers with eighty fighters. Ender hears his team breathing heavily over their microphones (hot) and one of the evaluators swears behind him. They start to shift nervously as they realise how unevenly matched it is.

Ender once said that all Bonzo knew how to do was fail with style.

"Remember, the enemy's gate is down."

Bean says that, and they all laugh. Ender decides to remember that it's just a game and so to pursue a strategy that breaks Mazer's rules. He won his last game in the battleroom by ignoring the armies and going for the gate. ender decides that if he goes for the war crime, they'll consider him too dangerous to put in command, "and that is victory". He orders the ships into a 'thick cylinder', to better penetrate the enemy formation, and the enemy happily engulfs him. Supply your own subtext. Ender's ships fly in seemingly random patterns, then at a word they burst in all directions, firing madly, then at another a dozen fighters form up on the far side of the enemy fleet and dive for the planet. The formics cut off his escape, but he doesn't care anyway, because the only point is to get close enough to fire on the planet.

In three seconds, the planet is gone and the fleets as well, with only a few human ships surviving at the edge of the system.

Ender took off his headphones, filled with the cheers of his squadron leaders, and only then realized that there was just as much noise in the room with him. Men in uniform were hugging each other, laughing, shouting; others were weeping; some knelt or lay prostrate, and Ender knew they were caught up in prayer. Ender didn't understand. It seemed all wrong. They were supposed to be angry.

Graff and Mazer embrace him and thank him, tell him how proud they are. Ender remains confused until Mazer explains that the entire campaign up to this point wasn't testing, but the actual campaign, humans versus formics, and Ender has just won the war forever by destroying all their queens and committing xenocide. Ender walks out of the room, ignoring everyone, back to his room, strips down [drink!] and gets into bed. He wakes up to find Graff and Mazer in the room, informing him that Earth has heard what happened and every government in the world has given him their highest medal.

So here, in full, is the defence of this entire book.

Ender grabbed Mazer's uniform and hung onto it, pulling him down so they were face to face. "I didn't want to kill them all. I didn't want to kill anybody! I'm not a killer! You didn't want me, you bastards, you wanted Peter, but you made me do it, you tricked me into it!" He was crying. He was out of control.

"Of course we tricked you into it. That's the whole point," said Graff. "It had to be a trick or you couldn't have done it. It's the bind we were in. We had to have a commander with so much empathy that he would think like the buggers, understand them and anticipate them. So much compassion that he could win the love of his underlings and work with them like a perfect machine, as perfect as the buggers. But somebody with that much compassion could never be the killer we needed. Could never go into battle willing to win at all costs. If you knew, you couldn't do it. If you were the kind of person who would do it even if you knew, you could never have understood the buggers well enough."

I don't know what to say to this that I haven't said before. Ender's big thing at Eros has been lack of compassion, has been his refusal to be any kinder to his subordinates than Mazer has been to him. If he had been given a raft of brilliant lieutenants who had never met him before, they'd have quite reasonably hated him even if he was a genius. He's running on the love that he supposedly earned from them back when he was in Battle School. Maybe that's why they shipped in Bean and Dink and Bustopher, so that Ender would have subordinates who would put up with his hardassedness. 'Compassion' as a superweapon would also have worked better if it were clear how it actually affected Ender's strategy--it's been a long time since he needed to, for example, identify a queen in an enemy fleet.

"And it had to be a child, Ender," said Mazer. "You were faster than me. Better than me. I was too old and cautious. Any decent person who knows what warfare is can never go into battle with a whole heart. But you didn't know. We made sure you didn't know."

Well, apparently any decent person except the ones who plan the campaign, deploy fighters, and pull the trigger to destroy a civilisation. Who planned this war? I mean, the ships have been in flight for seventy years and they successfully scheduled them all to arrive over the course of, what, two, three weeks? Just to maximise the possible burnout of their tacticians? The formic worlds are light-years apart and communications are instant, so there's no actual tactical value in hitting everywhere at once; they can't reinforce each other world-to-world. The battles could have been spread out over months to the same effect. Don't generals like Ender normally have some say in the way the war proceeds and not just individual firefights? What was the entire invasion fleet for, anyway? Wouldn't ansible-equipped drones have been about a jillion times more effective, what with being able to survive much greater physical stresses and save room/weight on life support? That way those could also have been piloted by genius children who think they're playing a video game. Has Earth ever had a competent Polemarch or Strategos or whoever planned this gong show? (Actually, it turns out Mazer plotted the campaign. Graff reprimands him for not leaving the minor outposts for later. Mazer tells him to screw off.)

Anyway, just as Peter and Valentine predicted, Earth has erupted into war. The Russian soldiers aboard Eros are leading an attack, and so Ender is locked down under guard. He dreams, has nightmares of the Giant's Drink again and of the End of the World, where he watches the formic homeworld burst and sees the Queen except it's his mom and her children are his friends and a dying formic is Bonzo accusing him of having no honor and his reflection is Peter. And at last he wakes up and Alai is there in his room, and there was much rejoicing.

"Some of the Russians who came in told us that when the Polemarch ordered them to find you and kill you, they almost killed him. [....] There's a million soldiers who'd follow you to the end of the universe."

Ender just wants to go home--good luck with that. The war ends, the lights come on, and Bean enters the room, followed by Bustopher, and Petra and Dink holding hands because of course she needs a man. They further explain the terms of the peace, stuff that won't be relevant until the second Shadow book. The banter is mostly pretty sweet and realistic. And maybe others don't read it the same way, but recalling what Dink taught Ender while naked in the battleroom ages ago:

"You OK?" Petra asked him, touching his head. "You scared us. They said you were crazy, and we said they were crazy."

"I'm crazy," said Ender. "But I think I'm OK."

I could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure that the message that mental illness is not shameful, not a mark or cause of evil, and not life-defining is the only consistent positive message in this entire book.

They joke about what they'll do next, and how they'll probably be forced to go to school until they're 17 because it's the law, and the chapter has the chutzpah to give us an Everybody Laughs Ending after slaughtering an entire species. But at least they were a species of monsters! And the people we like are alive! And if you talk to enough fans of Ender's Game, you'll find that some people stop here, because they aggressively miss the point. The graphic novel stops here. I'll be curious to see if the movie stops here. There's one more chapter to go, and it's not easy, but it's the only chance this book has at redemption. Next week: everything is terrible forever.

It's eight months to the day since I started this thing. For those of you who have endured from day one: thankya kindly. For those of you who dropped in along the way: welcome. For those of you who have some sadomasochistic tendencies and are really excited to see me continue with either Ender's Shadow or Speaker for the Dead, leave your preferences in the comments below. The Ender's Game movie (which was in development hell back in the late 1990s when I first read this book) opened Friday and everything I have seen, such as Ana Mardoll's film corner, suggests that it is terrible. So I'll get you some commentary on that as well in due course. You know; once I somehow obtain completely legal access to the film. But first, the final chapter, which gets better as it goes along.

(Content: abuse apologetics, ableism, colonialism apologetics. Fun content: pirates, Phoenix Wright, aliens Jesus.)

Ender's Game: p. 305--324

Chapter Fifteen: Speaker for the Dead

The featureless plane of disembodied dialogue is gone; Graff and Anderson are hanging out at the lakeside. We open with some gratuitous fat hatred because obviously--Graff is apparently slim again, stating that while the stress of the war caused him to gain weight, the stress of being court-martialled took it off again. He explains that he was never worried that he wouldn't be acquitted:

"As much as anything, I think the videos saved me. The prosecution edited them, but we showed the whole thing. It was plain that Ender was not the provocateur. After that, it was just a second-guessing game. [...] We got the judges to agree that the prosecution had to prove beyond doubt that Ender would have won the war without the training we gave him. After that, it was simple."

OBJECTION!

It's like some kind of nightmarish reversal of presumption of innocence. Graff has apparently been acquitted because no one can prove that murdering Stilson wasn't a completely essential module of Ender's curriculum. Murder is presumed necessary unless proven optional (which I guess fits with the rest of the military philosophy we've seen so far). I hope Ender wore a helmet in the courtroom. You know, to protect him from all the kangaroos.

They also discuss how Ender is never coming back to Earth, despite Demosthenes pressuring the Hegemon. Graff says Demosthenes has retired, and refuses to reveal Valentine's identity, which I guess is a not-terrible thing to do. He does say that Demosthenes wasn't really the one who wanted Ender back on Earth--Locke did (while publicly arguing that Ender needed to stay away) and Demosthenes talked him out of it, what with the whole Invincible Warrior God-Child thing Ender would have had have going for him. They're all going to rest instead. Anderson's the new football commissioner. Graff is the first Minister of Colonization, because clearly a life in military education makes him... an ideal policy-maker for the appropriate way to organise and disperse the human population? ("The second rule of Colony Club is you do not talk about Colony Club.") Mind you, Graff does have the mind of a colonist in the old meet-new-people-take-their-land-and-commit-war-crimes style.

"As soon as we get the reports back on the bugger colony worlds. I mean, there they are, already fertile, with housing and industry in place, and all the buggers dead. Very convenient. We'll repeal the population limitation laws [...] and all those thirds and fourths and fifths will get on starships and head out for worlds known and unknown."

You know, I hadn't thought about it until last week's comment thread, but why aren't there queens on any of the formic colony worlds? Why didn't Ender have to bust planet after planet to eradicate them all? And why in the world would formic housing and industry be remotely suitable for human use? Colonists are going to get to these worlds and find decaying, rusty cemetary-cities filled with the desiccated husks of millions of nightmares. Honestly, who wants to sign up for that instead of, you know, base camp? I want to hang out at base camp. Forget hive cities.

Back in space--Ender's remained on Eros for a year. He's been awarded the rank of admiral, because that's how the space navy works, obviously, and that gave him the authority to watch Graff's trial, so he knows everything now, knows how Stilson and Bonzo died, hears the case made against him by eeeeevil psychiatrists:

[He] listened as the psychologists and lawyers argued whether murder had been committed or the killing was in self-defense. Ender had his own opinion, but no one asked him. Throughout the trial, it was really Ender himself under attack. The prosecution was too clever to charge him directly, but there were attempts to make him look sick, perverted, criminally insane.

Trying to court-martial a colonel by instead expounding roundabout ableist psychological slander against the colonel's prize student who is the favourite person of everyone on the entire planet does not sound like the actions of someone 'too clever'. That sounds hilariously inept. You court-martial Graff by asserting that he gambled humanity's survival on the belief that a miraculous military strategist would find a way to survive a fistfight to the death, and put it on Graff to somehow prove that it was necessary to do this, despite the thirty-six other genius commanders all performing so well without killing two classmates. Then you move on to handling Ender by screaming "THERAPY, THERAPY FOR EVERYONE, IS ANYONE PAYING ATTENTION" and so forth. Obviously.

All of Ender's friends go home, one by one, and he watches the videos of their triumphant returns, but then nothing more until the first colonists start to come to Eros, because apparently the secret headquarters of the International Fleet makes a much better docking hub than, say, the other non-secret place we know to exist that is called Inter-Stellar Launch. My god. Did they just cancel the military now that the formics are dead? Is that how that works?

The one thing he could not bear was the worship of the colonists. He learned to avoid the tunnels where they lived, because they would always recognize him--the world had memorized his face--and then they would scream and shout and embrace him and congratulate him and show him the children they had named after him and tell him how he was so young it broke their hearts and they didn't blame him for any of his murders because it wasn't his fault he was just a child--

He hid from the as best he could.

Sounds about right, yeah. Ender refuses to let himself off the hook for Stilson, for Bonzo, for the entire formic civilisation, and I suspect we're supposed to think he's being too hard on himself, but anything less would be even more terrifying, and so this rings true. All too much of human history (and present) tells us how quickly we forgive murderers if they're on 'our side'.

And then one day, as Ender is helping with starship construction--he's decided he needs a new profession, also a good move--Valentine appears and asks him to go with her on the first wave of colony ships. Two years from their perspective, fifty years to the rest of the universe. Valentine implies that it's quite intentional that they would never see Peter again, and apologetically adds that she made sure Ender can't go back to Earth, because Peter is halfway to ruling the Hegemon's Council already. The war on Earth a year earlier was ended by the culmination of Peter's plan, Locke and Demosthenes combining their forces like the Wonder Twins: Shape of--an insufferable snob! Form of--a screaming racist mob!

"He decided to be a statesman?"

"I think so. But in his cynical moments, of which there are many, he pointed out to me that if he had allowed the League to fall apart completely, he'd have had to conquer the world piece by piece. As long as the Hegemony existed, he could do it in one lump."

Ender nodded. "That's the Peter that I knew."

Yeah, Ender, that does sound like someone you'd feel superior too. That rat bastard of a brother of yours who just goes and benefits from saving the world. I have a wild guess that exactly zero of those still-breathing civilians would prefer to be dead as a statement on Peter's supposed moral vacuum.

"Funny, isn't it? That Peter would save millions of lives."

"While I killed billions."

"I wasn't going to say that."

Well, what were you going to say, Valentine? Because that's a really weird thing to just throw in there. Peter has always been about power over people; wanting to have as many subjects as possible is exactly in-character for him. Your conviction that he's made of murderousness is fanon. But Valentine explains that Peter intended to use Ender as his last stepping-stone to planetary domination, so she threatened him with compilations of videos of him tormenting Ender as a child and pictures of slaughtered squirrels, "enough to prove in the eyes of the public that he was a psychotic killer". Remember what I said before about this book being consistently sympathetic and positive about having and handling mental illness? I take it back. Mental illness is only a reason to be sympathetic to people we like; for the people we hate, it's an incurable condemnation and a weapon to be used against them.

Valentine further explains that in her final Demosthenes essay she announced that she was going to take the first colony ship out, and for some bizarre reason Graff announced that Mazer Rackham was going to be the pilot, which probably confused a hell of a lot of people who aren't very familiar with relativistic time dilation or who would like to know what qualifies a military tactician from eighty years ago to drive a modern civilian space ark, and that Ender would be the colonial governor--though Valentine quickly adds Ender has time to cancel the announcement if he doesn't want to, which is I guess the kind of agency that you get when it's your loving sister manipulating you instead of the military dictatorship. Ender agrees, he says, because he wants to see the formic worlds and try to understand where they came from.

Just saying: not hard to empathise with a corpse.

The voyage passes uneventfully (hah, no, Card went back and wrote an entire interquel about it, which I made the mistake of reading) and years pass on the colony world as Ender learns to govern and sets up an economy and tries to study what remains of the formics. There isn't a lot, because their species had a literal living social memory and so they never kept books or whatever--though I wonder if they didn't have, say, specialised drones whose job it was to maintain continuity of thought, or if they just had flawless/eidetic memory or what. Regardless, Ender looks at their architecture: strong roofs hint that winters were hard, staked fences show that there are wild animal problems:

And from the slings that once were used to carry infants along with adults into the fields, he learned that even though the buggers were not much for individuality, they did care for their young.

So, the vast majority of the population are made up of female drones that can't reproduce anyway, and all young are derived from a tiny handful of queens, but they lack the specialised labour to maintain nurseries and instead prefer to have random drones haul larvae around while they're doing agricultural work? I'm guessing this is a remnant of the original story where the aliens functioned in some completely different, vastly more humanoid way?

The colony stops caring much about what things are like back on Earth, although they hear that Peter finally becomes Hegemon. Valentine, still writing under the Demosthenes name, writes history books, seven volumes of the human-formic wars. She says she'll write one more, the life of Ender Wiggin, but Ender tries to talk her out of it. When there's a year left before the next colony ship arrives, Ender goes to scout out a new place for a village, and takes an eleven-year-old kid named Abra with him as his, I don't know, caddy. Three days away from their town, they find strange hills:

A deep depression in the middle, partially filled with water, was ringed by concave slopes that cantilevered dangerously over the water. In one direction the hill gave away to two long ridges that made a V-shaped valley; in the other direction the hill rose to a piece of white rock, grinning like a skull with a tree growing out of its mouth.

"It's like a giant died here," said Abra, "and the Earth grew up to cover his carcass."

It looks, in point of fact, exactly like Fairyland in the mind game. There's an overgrown playground nearby, like the one where Ender fought the child-faced wolves. The formics built it, fifty years earlier, during the war. Ender tries to send Abra away; Abra warns Ender that it might be a trap; Ender says he doesn't care if they want revenge. They keep flying (apparently they've been in a helicopter all this time? Three days by helicopter seems like a hell of a long way between the only two human settlements on the planet) and find the cliff and the ledge and the tower at the End of the World. Ender leaves Abra in the chopper and climbs the wall. The same room is there, with the mirror that showed Peter's face, though it's just a dull sheet of metal with a rough humanoid face scratched into it. Behind that, a dormant, silk-wrapped pupal formic queen, and Ender instantly knows that she carries enough fertilised eggs to start a colony on her own. She links to his mind, the philotic effect, and Ender realises why he had so many nightmares at Eros--as the formics traced his mind back through the ansible and tried to understand him. She shows him her birth, the old queen preparing her, memories of the campaign as the human fleets destroyed the formics over and over.

She had not thought these words as she saw the humans coming to kill, but it was in words that Ender understood her: The humans did not forgive us, she thought. We will surely die. [....]

We are like you; the thought pressed into his mind. We did not mean to murder, and when we understood, we never came again. We thought we were the only thinking beings in the universe, until we met you, but never did we dream that thought could arise from the lonely animals who cannot dream each other's dreams. How were we to know?

Ender takes the cocoon and promises to find her a world to start again. When he returns to the colony, he writes a book, a history of the formics from the memory of the queens. They lament the tragedy of the wars, and it's really very beautiful aside from the terrifying undercurrent of pro-colonialist appropriation apologetics:

But still we welcome you as guestfriends. come into our home, daughters of Earth; dwell in our tunnels, harvest our fields; what we cannot do, you are now our hands to do for us.

They did 'start it', as wars of annihilation go, but it's hard not to see this as the kind of thing that makes people think it's okay to co-opt the possessions of subjugated cultures, dressing up in warbonnets for Halloween and fracking for oil on sovereign First Nation land because, really, it's all our country now and all that killing happened a long time ago and it's not like those people are really around anymore, right? And now we have the slaughtered people literally forgiving and welcoming their killers.

Ender signs this book as the Speaker for the Dead and it starts a tradition back on Earth, people who arrive at funerals and say "what the dead one would have said, but with full candor, hiding no faults and pretending no virtues", which just sounds like the most passive-aggressive eulogy in the history of I'm-just-being-honest-here. The religion spreads; among the colonies, it's the only one that matters, because apparently Jesus' jurisdiction doesn't extend into space.

When Peter reads the book, he calls Ender by ansible, seventy-seven years old to Ender's twenty-three, asks Ender to write his biography as the Speaker, and pours out his life story. (It's not told here, obviously, because it's a retcon in addition to being a huge spoiler, but since there is no way I'm wading through the entire Shadow series, I'll mention that at this point Peter is married to Petra and they have like a dozen kids.) The Hive-Queen and the Hegemon become "holy writ", because in addition to being the greatest general of all time and a starshipwright and a governor and a judge, Ender is also a prophet and poet, I guess?

One day, Ender asks Valentine to leave, says they should skip across the galaxy at lightspeed and let centuries fall away. Especially disturbing:

"We have to go. I'm almost happy here."

"So stay."

"I've lived too long with pain. I won't know who I am without it."

Gluuuuuuuuuurge. Apparently no one else in the last decade has thought to suggest that Ender should get a therapist either. But he does have a real goal, because he needs to find a world for the formic queen to hatch, so they travel, Andrew Wiggin the Speaker for the Dead and Valentine Wiggin "writing down the stories of the living while Ender spoke the stories of the dead". And for once I don't know what happens next.

I will confess that I hated this chapter the first time I read it. What a backhand, what a theft, to have everything that the heroes suffer for be taken away: it didn't have to happen, it was a tragedy that it happened, it would have been better if they had failed. That is a bitter fucking pill to swallow, especially for a teenager who thought he was smarter than everyone else and wished he could make the bullies see just how much better he was than them. (By 'he' I mean 'me', if that could be more obvious.) In theory, it's what gives the book its weight and teaches kids the value of compassion and communication, and rescues the book from the last 300 pages of 'I have to torture him to make him stronger and save everyone' by explaining that it was all for nothing.

Except... well, the last-minute twist comes in the final ten pages and the "I did what I had to do" abuse and endangerment and murder got the whole book. They say that François Truffaut once claimed it was impossible to make a true anti-war movie because any war movie by its nature glorifies war. (I'm going to crack again and just link to TVtropes'"Do Not Do This Cool Thing"--they may be stamp collectors, but that's a hell of a collection.) The pro-empathy, anti-abuse, anti-violence message at the end of this book is about as compelling and hilarious as an abstinence message would be at the end of Fifty Shades of Grey. (Worse, actually--Fifty Shades does make sex look terrifying.) And while we might be told the war wasn't worth it, nothing has yet tarnished Ender's flawless goodness in the eyes of the narrative, despite that time he murdered a boy on the playground because they shoved him, and everything he's done since then.

After this comes Speaker for the Dead, the story that Card actually wanted to tell, for which he turned Ender's Game from a short into a novel-length backstory. In theory, that whole book is the response to this one, and I'm curious enough to keep reading it, though I'll have to track down a copy first--I think my mother still owns one. (I'm sure as hell not giving Card any more money.) And there is also Ender's Shadow, which tells Bean's story during these same few years, from childhood to the destruction of the formics, which I do own. Bean is a better person than Ender in most ways, and I think I might actually enjoy that one, which makes me want to leave it until I've endured Speaker. Not sure. Thoughts from the audience?

As a terrifying epilogue, next week I'll go back and look at the introduction to Ender's Game. It might seem weird to leave it for now, and I've wanted to make reference to it in just about every post since I started, but I've left it this long intentionally. After all, everyone in the introduction has already read the book--that's why I wanted to do so as well, and that's why it scares the hell out of me. So that'll be fun.

One last Ender's Game post. Think of it as the bonus scene after the credits. Most of y'all have expressed a wish to see Speaker next rather than Shadow, and thanks to a friend oft called Mad Scientist Alex, I will have my hands on a copy of Speaker next weekend without letting Card have any more cash. Not sure how much I'll actually manage to get done, what with Erika getting married next Saturday (and her continued efforts to hook me up with one of her friends just because she thinks it would be funny), but I shall try to get something started.

Ender's Game: p. xi--xxvi

It's not really the point, but I'm kind of amused that Card opens the introduction by saying the first thing he wanted to do for the new hardcover edition of Ender's Game was to "fix the errors and internal contradictions and stylistic excesses that have bothered me ever since the novel first appeared", and I wonder if no one else has ever pointed out that, for example, Bonzo's timeline is complete nonsense. There, now we've got the pettiness out of the way.

Card says that Ender's Game started with speculation fuelled by Asimov's Foundation series and trying to imagine what the future would be like if technology advanced but people mostly didn't, except for the few people "who, not through genetic change, but through learned skills, are able to understand and heal the minds of other people". Not sure what to make of that when there's such a huge undercurrent of 'breeding true' in Game which gets bumped up to literal genetic engineering in Shadow. The healing, I assume, doesn't refer to Game but to Speaker, because if it refers to anything in Game that is hilarious.

The military side of Game, Card explains, was largely drawn off Bruce Catton's"Army of the Potomac" trilogy, which involved the Union having a fantastic army but no general to match Lee until Grant, who lost so many soldiers but always made their deaths count.

It was because of Catton's history that I had stopped enjoying chess, and had to revise the rules of Risk in order to play it--I had come to understand something of war, and not just because of the conclusions Catton himself had reached. I found meanings of my own in that history.

If you stop enjoying chess because you realise it bears no similarity to real war, I'm not sure you ever really understood the point of chess, or games in general. (Okay, I lied, the pettiness is not out of the way.) I will refrain from commenting on the meanings that Card drew from military history any more than I already have, which you may recall was when I pointed out that Card/Ender determined that the best soldiers are isolated, lonely, afraid, angry, and untrusting.

And even though I could not then have articulated what I understood of military leadership, I knew that I did understand it. I understood, at levels deeper than speech, how a great military leader imposes his will on his enemy, and makes his own army a willing extension of himself.

This actually does match up okay with military modern theory as I understand it--the goal of combat as the Canadian Forces phrase it is 'to impose our will upon the enemy throughout their depth', basically meaning that the fighting is over once you are in such a good position that you can demand the enemy stop fighting. This is what they teach you in some of the very first officer leadership courses, so I'm not sure it's quite the level of numinous epiphany that Card is phrasing here, but I haven't read Catton, so I can't comment.

Card then goes over his thought processes in creating the battleroom, which he states will clearly be used in real military training some day if there is "a manned military in space", leading me to wonder why it's in use in Battle School when they don't seem to have any use for footsoldiers. He pauses to tell us all how unbearably boring archaeology is (sorry, Alex) before summarising the rise of his writing career in plays and short stories, leading to the publication of Ender's Game as the unexpectedly-improved retroactive backstory for the story he really wanted to tell, Speaker for the Dead.

It's not hard to find a record of how incredibly popular Ender's Game is. Card recognises that there are some people who also hate the book--the degree of hatred astonished him. As noted before, he says he expected some of it because, while he wrote in 'layers of meaning' for anyone who cared to analyse them, he also made it as accessible a book as he knew how, and thus those ivory-tower snobs felt that it was crude and were terrified of literature that didn't need them. Et cetera.

[...] A guidance counselor for gifted children reported that she had only picked up Ender's Game to read it because her son had kept telling her it was a wonderful book. She read it and loathed it. Of course, I wondered what kind of guidance counselor would hold her son's tastes up to public ridicule, but the criticism that left me most flabbergasted was her assertion that my depiction of gifted children was hopelessly unrealistic. They just don't talk like that, she said. They don't think like that.

Card goes on to explain how Game scares people because it asserts that children are people and not just simplistic little monkeyfolk; how he is writing from his own sense that he has always been a complete person with fully developed thoughts and feelings. I agree that what changes in us is our ability to predict, to express ourselves and--I might argue most importantly--our ability to empathise with others. What's unrealistic about the children of Ender's Game to me isn't their complexity but their narrative convenience: the way Bonzo looks at Ender and on sight, without a word, knows that he has met a great and compassionate leader who will crush his dreams. The way Ender can be at school for a few months out of his seven years of life and suddenly not know what it means to 'just live' like an ordinary civilian. The way Graff (not a child, but no more realistic) can somehow know the perfect way to raise the perfect general despite apparently no one else approving or even recognising his strategies which have never worked before. There are reasons that these people don't feel like people to me, and none of them are Petra Arkanian using the word 'polyglot' at age nine.

Also, I think there might be a difference between saying 'my son loved this book but I hated it' and 'hey everyone my son has terrible taste in books', and Card's inability or unwillingness to consider this might say something about the objectivity of aesthetics in his views.

Because the book does ring true with the children who read it.

He includes a letter from a girl named Ingrid on behalf of a dozen friends, all gifted teenagers at a two-week summer residential program at a university.

We are all in about the same position; we are very intellectually oriented and have found few people at home who share this trait. Hence, most of us are lonely, and have been since kindergarten. When teachers continually compliment you, your chances of "fitting in" are about nil.

All our lives we've unconsciously been living by the philosophy, "The only way to gain respect is doing so well you can't be ignored." [....] However, in choosing these paths, most of us have wound up satisfied in ourselves, but very lonely. [....]

You couldn't imagine the imapct your books had on us; we are the Enders of today. Almost everything written in Ender's Game and Speaker applied to each one of us on a very, very personal level. No, the situation isn't as drastic today, but all the feelings are there.

I don't want to single these kids out--that would be stupid, millions of people have read this book and I think Card is not wrong when he says that the people who love it best are the people who feel that it is deeply personal, that they are Ender. Card also says that adults tend, not to identify with Ender, but to love or pity him. One option is that this is a matter only of condescension, but another is that people don't stay one way for their whole lives. As the popular wisdom goes, when we think about who we were a decade ago, most of us will agree, perhaps with reluctance, that we were bloody stupid. And all probability is that a decade from now, we'll look back on our current selves and think we were/are bloody stupid. This, in my opinion, is a good thing and vastly preferable to the alternative, that we never grow and improve.

And just maybe it's a good thing if we grow up and we stop thinking of ourselves as the forever-shunned unmatched genius on whom everyone is counting to save the entire world because they're all so inept and they need us even though they hate us. Yes, kids need someone to identify with, and maybe that means they need to identify with someone who has the same misconceptions they do. That's not something to be ashamed of. But I wonder how much people remember that the ultimate secret of Ender's Game is that everyone was wrong the whole time, they were saving the world from a threat that didn't really exist, and they were so focused on their own egos and their imagined victories that they hurt and killed other children along the way.

Maybe sometimes people pity Ender, not because they don't understand him, but because they know what's coming when he gets some perspective.

There is a second letter excerpted, from an army helicopter pilot in Saudi Arabia, written during the first days of aerial assault in the Gulf War. Ender's exhaustion in the book resonated with his own experiences in training and gave him inspiration to keep going. He tells Card of their conditions, of the way outdated equipment keeps betraying them and people die from stupid mistakes, and suggests that maybe Card and his other favourite military author, John Steakley, could collaborate on a story of helicopter pilots of the near future.

Card goes on to tell us what this means--that this aviator did not read the book as a scare-quotes "work of literature" but "as epic, as a story that helped define his community", which... is not actually something the guy says in the portion of the letter that gets excerpted. Hm. Anyway, Card sees this as the man hoping for "a 'speaker for the dead' and for the living". Author as eulogist. It's an interesting idea, at least.

Card dismisses the idea that we read fiction "to be impressed by somebody's dazzling language--or at least I hope that's not our reason", because apparently fuck Shakespeare. (This might explain why he was apparently unconcerned about the atrocities he visited upon the play Hamlet in his inconceivably homophobic fanfic, which is so incredibly disgusting that I will not link to anything about it and I advise no one to google it. If it's too late for that, then you know what I mean.) Anyway, he starts waxing on the mythic truth of fiction that allows us to identify "our own self-story" and then lists many examples of different people using Ender's Game as a text or subject for analysis in schools and papers and suchlike, which is a little funny after his earlier dismissal of angry lit profs who hated him for not writing something indecipherable.

All these uses are valid; all these readings of the book are "correct."

YOU HEARD HIM HE SAID IT ENDER/ALAI IS CANON NO TAKEBACKS.

The story of Ender's Game is not this book, though it has that title emblazoned on it. The story is one that you and I will construct together in your memory. If the story means anything to you at all, then when you remember it afterward, think of it, not as something I created,but as something that we made together.

This, ultimately, is actually what I hope for more than anything. Because this book is so very popular, and we have just spent eight months looking at all of the reasons that is terrifying, but "Ender's Game" as a cultural phenomenon isn't the words on the pages, it's the storystuff bouncing around inside millions of heads. And if those people are better than Card, then there's a chance they were in it for the lessons that it mostly doesn't teach, about remembering that communication can change everything and that trying to be someone's friend when no one else is willing just might be a small and vital step on the path to saving the world. Or destroying the world. Just... be careful with the world when you're making friends, I guess?

Hello one and all! Erika sneaking out of hiatus early for a post! Did you miss me? I missed me you. Will should be back with the next round of Ender's Game posts next Sunday, but for today you get me! Today I want to write about something important to me, something I've written about before. Sort of. Let's talk about "The War on Christmas".

As I point out frequently, I live in Canada, and grew up in a small town. I come from a mixed background, and grew up celebrating both Catholic and Jewish holidays*. I've also had to work jobs that involve customer service. One of those was even in a boarding school cafeteria. As such, I have seen "first hand" what the war on Christmas actually looks like, even in the context of "What it's doing to our schools".

Growing up, I would see Christmas lights and Christmas decorations and signs that screamed MERRY CHRISTMAS and hear Christmas songs everywhere I went from November to January. I used to adore every minute of it, but I wondered, why were there no Hanukkah decorations? Why was half of who I was celebrated loudly and publicly, while the other half wasn't acknowledged, and even more rarely even remotely understood? Why did my teachers get nervous, and why was I mocked as a little girl by my peers (and sometimes their parents) when asking "What about Chanukah"?

I was a kid. I didn't understand things like minority oppression, I didn't understand that White Christian Straight Men were the default, I didn't understand antisemitism, bigotry, and privilege even as they all affected me. As I got older I found out the reason I saw no Hanuka decorations was because those houses tended to get vandalized. Like the synagog was several times over the years. I came to understand that being able to celebrate your culture and your religion openly was a privilege, not a right like I had thought. I realized the privileged people, on top of having no idea what sort of privilege they had, felt entitled to shoving their holiday and their tradition down everyone's throats. It's tradition, after all, and heaven forbid you mess with tradition. They would seize up and get panicky if you asked for change.

They didn't want to make room for other holidays and traditions. When token efforts were made, it was always with a smirk as they mocked the "Hernikah candle sticks" and sneered at "Jew beanies" (actual examples I have heard from adults). It wasn't safe to try to make space for our own culture in the main stream, and they didn't want to change theirs to be more safe, let alone inclusive, for us. It didn't matter what harm it did, it was their right to celebrate their own holiday in every way they wanted! They think if they say it is a right to practice and celebrate your culture and religion openly enough times, it will be true. They're willfully blind to how hostile it is for so many others. I used to believe that it was obliviousness, not willful ignorance, but when I see people get red faced and angry in discussions about it and change it back to their precious holiday being under attack so many times I no longer can. It is willful, deliberate, malicious ignorance, and nothing else.

This, by the way, is all the "War on Christmas" is. People who don't celebrate Christmas wanting to make room for their traditions that fall at the same time or year and do so safely, or people who are just exhausted of having to deal with the two month marathon of non-stop Christmas propaganda. Which is to say: there is no war on Christmas. There is a war on equality and inclusion.

Show of hands, how many among you wish people "Happy Holidays" instead of "Merry Christmas" for what ever your reason? Now, show of hands, how many of you, when cheerfully wishing people joy, have acidly been told "It's merry Christmas" and had people demand you change your greeting**? All the same hands, huh? Who's ever been told to wish someone happy holidays instead of Merry Christmas? Because I have never had it go the other way. I use both, because I can't safely always use "Happy Holidays" though I die a little bit every time I do. I have never seen a cashier get reamed for wishing someone a "Merry Christmas" even in a school, and I've been watching and listening and waiting for five years. Never have I seen someone get told off for saying "Merry Christmas" only "Happy Holidays". We make it hard for people to be inclusive, and sometimes make it hostile for people trying.

People feel so entitled to have their culture catered to that they fight to protect that catering. They protect it by starting fights with someone offering a simple, kind greeting that they think will threaten the status quo. They protect it by silencing people trying to speak up when their own culture is being pushed out. They protect it by making other people too scared to put a Star of David in their window at Hanukkah because someone might break the window and scare the kids. They protect itby running propaganda saying that no, they're the little guys, and all those mean old ethnic people are threatening their way of life by celebrating their holiday, too!

The war on Christmas boils down to privileged people having their privilege challenged. I get it, no one likes being told that they're blindly causing harm simply by being born into a certain group of people and it's a normal human response to get defensive and double down when you're told that. I'm white, I've been chewed up over the guilt of my own privilege before before too. I get it. But you know what? I don't care anymore. I don't care that you feel icky. I care that there are people who suffer, who are mocked, who have their homes vandalized, who feel unsafe being able to practice and celebrate their culture and holidays because there's so little room for them because Christmas takes up so much. Then they have the gall to claim there's a war on it.

*I use all Jewish holidays and examples because that is my own lived experience. I just want to acknowledge that Hanukkah isn't the only one, and I'm still talking from a position of privilege.

**I opt to smile sweetly and wish them a happy Chanukah when they do this.

That hiatus went on a bit longer than intended. November wasn't a great month. (Parts of it were good! The blogqueen got married and it was pretty awesome even though I didn't get to swordfight anyone as had been suggested!) But things have calmed down again and I am in possession of a borrowed copy of Speaker for the Dead, the book whose essence was apparently so wonderful that the author wrote Ender's Game just to give Speaker its hero. Unlike Ender's Game, I've never read this book before and I only know tiny fragments of what happens, so rather than the kind of long-view thread-picking I was doing with the last series, this is going to be a much more as-it-hits-me analysis and I may make hilariously wrong predictions or interpretations along the way. Sound good to everyone? Cool. Let's roll.

(Content: colonisation, racism. Fun content: I'm just going to link everything ever.)

Speaker for the Dead: p. 1--7

Prologue

The book doesn't quite start with the prologue; first there's the introduction again (which I'm skipping because it again has spoilers and because doing the Ender introduction at the end of the book was far more effective), then some family trees of Portuguese-named cast members, then some explanation of how to pronounce letters in Portuguese names, which kind of hilariously devolves into 'this is obviously all much too complicated for you readers so don't worry about it, ahah'. Card keeps on keepin' on. Then we get to the prologue.

The calendar was apparently reset when the Starways Congress was established, which I'm going to assume is the Space UN, so it's the year 1830 when a robot scout ship identifies a planet suitable for humanoid life and Congress gives the high-population planet Baía (that i is accented, but it's hard to tell in this font) permission to explore and thus spread out some of their excess people. They land 56 years later, 1886, relativity being what it is, and they are all Portuguese-speaking ethnically-Brazilian Catholics, because if we can be sure of one thing it's that three* millennia into the future we will definitely still have the same nationalistic, religious, and linguistic categories that we have today. (English has mutated into 'Stark', probably short for 'Starways Common' or something, and it is everyone's first language, obviously. Portuguese is still Portuguese, though.)

I suppose from their perspective it's been less than three millennia by some degree, since people keep losing decades whenever they travel, which should lead to interesting situations for some people and terrifying transformations of the universe from the perspective of others. I mean, imagine that back in 1900 CE we were all in contact by magic instant radio with England, and they're all "Oi, Germany seems like it could be the centre of some big trouble, want to pop over and help keep an eye on things" and we're all "Hell yeah,let me get in my relativistic boat", and then we arrive a century later and now they're all "No worries, nothing a couple of world wars and the devastation of Russia couldn't solve, too bad you missed the Beatles, but have you heard of One Direction" and in a panic we radio home and Canada is like "We're still super-racist to First Nations and Inuit but check out this marriage equality" and then the USA busts in with "Check out mah nukes I'VE BEEN TO THE MOON" and this is happening all over the galaxy all the time. You might as well have Leifr Eiríksson trying to make conversation with Neil deGrasse Tyson. The idea of 'history' becomes a complete mess. God, I hope that's what this book is about.

Anyway, the people of Baía aren't quite in that situation, since they presumably descended from a single Earth colony ship and spent less than 2500 years of Earth-time travelling through space, so the implication should still be that their planet is well-established and old and they're just very set in their ways. (It occurs to me that it must be kind of hard to be Catholic when contact with the Vatican is disrupted by time dilation.) They are so dedicated that when these Portuguese-speaking ethnically-Brazilian people land on this new planet they name it Lusitania, last used as the name of Portugal in 891 CE. Four thousand years later they can't think of a better name for this planet they're colonising that already has native sentient life. Well. That seems appropriate, but probably not for the reasons that Card thinks it does.

Within five days of landing, they have found the indigenous people, whom they originally considered animals, named them porquinhos/piggies, and realised they're actually sapient and "not animals at all".

For the first time since the Xenocide of the Buggers by the monstrous Ender, humans had found intelligent alien life. The piggies were technologically primitive, but they used tools and built houses and spoke a language. "It is another chance God has given us," declared Archcardinal Pio of Baía. "We can be redeemed for the destruction of the buggers."

Really, first 'buggers' and now 'piggies'? Can I suggest humanity put someone else in charge of naming alien species? Maybe a sociologist should hang out with these scientists to point out that dismissive and diminishing nicknames are squished right up against slurs and both already contribute to the devaluation of humans so they'll probably do a real number on our views of 'primitive' aliens?

Also, modern North Americans mostly don't give a fuck about the genocide that their ancestors and country-founders conducted on this very continent less than five hundred years ago. Here we're given to believe that the people of the galaxy are still super-guilty about Ender's single-handed destruction of the Formics from three thousand years earlier, the only evidence for which is an anonymous biography/eulogy also from three thousand years earlier? But at the very least this apparently plays well politically, so everyone agrees that above all else "the piggies were not to be disturbed". Of course, the Lusitanians are still allowed to form a colony from Baía on that world, guaranteeing that sooner or later they're going to run into each other and there will be disturbance. They're not quite in Prime Directive territory yet. If they're that concerned, settling at all seems like a hugely unnecessary risk. A scientific outpost at most. Goddammit, humanity.

Chapter One: Pipo

In place of the old Featureless Dialogue of Faceless Voices, we have a fragment of a letter from Demosthenes "to the Framlings", which I understand better than I should because I've encountered the words 'raman' and 'varelse' before.

The difference between raman and varelse is not in the creature judged, but in the creature judging. When we declare an alien species to be raman, it does not mean that they have passed a threshold of moral maturity. It means that we have.

'Raman' are beings we can understand and value in the same way that we do humanity; 'varelse' are aliens that are more foreign and so harder to empathise or interact with. This is, broadly, a good point. I just find it so weird coming from a sexist, racist, homophobe who named his innocent and worthy aliens 'buggers' and 'piggies'.

Despite the whole 'they are not to be disturbed' deal, we now join Pipo, who apparently meets semi-regularly with a porquinho (god, I hope we get a better name for them) called Rooter (get it, like pigs?) in a clearing somewhere and they talk, although Pipo apparently isn't allowed to ask direct questions. Rooter is basically a rebellious teenager, but smart enough that he apparently manipulates Pipo as well--into doing what, it doesn't say. Also, he's already learned Portuguese. Portuguese. Either they really, really suck at this 'no disturbing the indigenous people' law or Rooter is a linguistic genius who would put most humans to shame.

The earliest visitors to this world had started calling them [piggies] in their first reports back in '86, and by the time Lusitania Colony was founded in 1925, the name was indelible. The xenologers scattered among the Hundred Worlds wrote of them as "Lusitanian Aborigines", though Pipo knew perfectly well that this was merely a matter of professional dignity; except in scholarly papers, xenologers no doubt called them piggies, too. As for Pipo, he usually called them pequininos, and they seemed not to object, for now they called themselves "Little Ones." Still, dignity or not, there was no denying it. At moments like this, Rooter looked like a hog on its hind legs.

The correct name for a person is what they say it is. Little Ones. Gotcha.

Rooter has been clambering around and Pipo calls him an acrobat, from which he quickly deduces that humanity must have people whose job it is to leap and tumble for show. Pipo sighs and curses himself because he's let loose information about humanity and that is verboten. I'm not sure how the hell the existence of acrobats is a state secret but the existence of interstellar-venturing aliens is considered okay. He changes the subject, but Rooter quickly gets back by asking Pipo to show off his hovercraft to Rooter's friends, trying to put Pipo in the position of either breaking the law or humiliating Rooter and showing disrespect. Oh, and apparently Rooter speaks Stark as well as Portuguese and at least one of their own languages. Rooter quite reasonably asserts that this is because his people are smarter than humans, and then tells Pipo to shove off, which he quickly does, picking up his teenage son/apprentice as he goes.

On the way home, Pipo muses on words in Stark (xenologer) and Portuguese (zenador) and how the ansible is the only thing keeping all of humanity speaking a common language. He muses that without constant outside contact, the Lusitanians would probably end up speaking some fusion of Stark and Portuguese and be mutually incomprehensible with any of the other hundreds of dialects that would form across human civilisation. And this too is weird to me, because here on our one world of Earth we've already seen English transform into potentially-incomprehensible dialects within single countries (consider, for example, AAVE) and that's with people speaking the same language in the same city, let alone across a hundred different planets. Stellar clusters don't have variation? Language transforms all the time. The introduction of a specific kind of blogging interface is arguably responsible for new vernacular grammatical constructions in English that make no sense when compared to the lessons we were taught at home or school. The ansible is, for all purposes, the galactic internet, or more accurately the infrastructure on which the galactic internet resides, and it's not going to preserve Stark any more than Pinterest has contributed to the preservation and spread of Received Pronunciation.

Anyway.

Pipo figures it'll be the usual long evening of making notes with Libo and reviewing each other's reports before uploading them to the ansible network for the benefit of xenologers across the galaxy. Instead, he finds the monastic Dona Cristã waiting to talk to him.

Dona Cristã was a brilliant and engaging, perhaps even beautiful, young woman, but she was first and foremost a monk of the order of the Filhos de Mente de Crista, Children of the Mind of Christ, and she was not beautiful to behold when she was angry at ignorance and stupidity. It was amazing the number of quite intelligent people whose ignorance and stupidity had melted somewhat in the fire of her scorn.

I'm not sure if that's supposed to mean that she unreasonably thinks everyone is stupid, or if she's so smart that she even shows smart people that they're lacking. I'm a tiny bit surprised that we've apparently abandoned the Ender's Game tradition, ignoring women to talk about beautiful adolescent boys, in favour of the more popular tradition of women needing to be beautiful and having their looks commented upon even when their defining characteristics are completely unrelated. But I guess there's still time.

Dona Cristã is there to talk about Novinha, orphan daughter of the genius xenobiologists who cured the Descolada plague that almost wiped out the colony eight years earlier. The description of the plague is beyond hideous, so no quoting of that--Pipo muses on types of grief, sharing his mourning (for his lost daughter Maria) with the community in requiem mass, whereas Novinha lost her parents while the rest of the colony rejoiced because they found the cure.

After the mass she walked in bitter solitude amid the crowds of well-meaning people who cruelly told her that her parents were sure to be saints, sure to sit at the right hand of God. What kind of comfort is that for a child? Pipo whispered aloud to his wife, "She'll never forgive us for today."

"Forgive?" Conceiçāo was not one of those wives who instantly understand her husband's train of thought. "We didn't kill her parents..."

"But we're all rejoicing today, aren't we? She'll never forgive us for that."

"Nonsense. She doesn't understand anyway; she's too young."

She understands, Pipo thought. Didn't Maria understand things when she was even younger than Novinha is now?

Lady roll call! We have: the aggressive beautiful angry teacher-nun, the wife who doesn't understand her husband or respect small children's maturity and awareness, and the memory of the tragically-dead smart daughter. Awesome. Top marks.

I see we're also keeping the Ender's Game moral that no one appreciates children as actual people, although instead of six-year-olds to save the day we've now got Rooter, Libo, and Novinha around. Not sure when Ender will show up (not for a couple of chapters, I think), but he should be, what, in his mid-twenties now at least, so he probably isn't a good candidate to validate and vindicate unappreciated brilliant teenagers. I wonder if that was always an aspect of Speaker, or if it came in after Ender's Game had already been written. Or maybe it'll be dropped entirely after this acknowledgement. I legitimately don't know! It's exciting. Are you excited? I'm excited. Come back next week when we find out exactly what Dona "Angry Hot Nun" Cristã has to tell us about Novinha and we muse further on the alienness of aliens!

---

*I originally got the times wrong; I assumed that the Starways Congress was established not longer after Ender's Game, but apparently it took something like a millennium just for that. So, three thousand years since Ender's Game. Not for everyone, certainly not for Ender, but for Earth, it's been three thousand years. For a sense of scale, three thousand years ago from our modern day, the Phoenicians had just invented their alphabet, South Asians invented Tamil, the Kenyans started farming, and the Philistines stole the Ark of the Covenant. Latin hadn't been invented yet. It's a long freaking time.

We left mid-scene last time, so not much to introduce here. Since I no longer have a movie-related deadline to set the pace of posts, and this is the first chapter, I'm going back to smaller chunks of book and greater detail each week. Let's draw this sucker out, eh?

(Content: religious coercion, parent/guardian negligence, identity policing. Fun content: taking a level in science, oven-fresh science.)

Speaker for the Dead: p. 8--19

We return to Dona Cristã and Pipo considering what's wrong with the orphan girl Novinha, and I am not sure about these generalisations--Pipo thinks that "There was no teacher who genuinely liked her, because she refused to reciprocate, to respond", and all I can think is that this colony world is painfully unequipped with teachers qualified to teach, for example, autistic children. I suppose that's quite possible, even three thousand years into the future, but they have an instantaneous galactic internet and no one has maybe looked into taking a course on care for children with social/emotional disabilities, because I guess Novinha's situation is obviously impossibly unique and there are no known techniques to aid such a case? Teachers knowing what they're doing or caring about emotionally-isolated children? SILLINESS.

Mind you, the rest of the people in the town of Milagre are also pretty realistically terrible. The Pope beatified Novinha's parents, and so random people keep asking her if she's ever seen any miracles related to her parents, which could justify their sainthood. Her response was evidently a smackdown:

"She said, more or less, that if her parents were actually listening to prayers and had any influence in heaven to get them granted, then why wouldn't they have answered her prayer, for them to return from the grave? That would be a useful miracle, she said, and there are precedents. If Os Venerados actually had the power to grant miracles, then it must mean they did not love her enough to answer her prayer. She preferred to believe that her parents still loved her, and simply did not have the power to act. [....] She told the Bishop that if the Pope declared her parents to be venerable, it would be the same as the Church saying that her parents hated her. The petition for canonization of her parents was proof that Lusitania despised her; if it was granted, it would be proof that the Church itself was despicable."

Not flawless logic, but damn good effort for a ten-year-old, and rather more plausible for its flaws. The petition was sent anyway, of course, "for the good of the community", and everyone is just super awkward about Novinha. I really hope she's going to be a misotheist, because I don't think I could handle Card writing an 'I'm-an-atheist-because-I'm-angry-at-God' character.

Dona Cristã explains that, with Novinha's emotional distance, no one really asks about her for her own sake except Pipo, thus why she's there to speak to him now. Libo protests that Novinha does in fact have one friend, Marçao, because he was once accused of some unidentified misdeed and Novinha testified to who the real perpetrators were--Dona Cristã thinks this had less to do with liking Marçao and more Novinha's desire for justice, but Marçao apparently likes her anyway. Libo, when asked for his opinion, thinks honestly for a moment, which impresses his dad because Pipo knows he isn't just thinking up the answer that he expects they will praise or protest the most, unlike most kids, because other people's kids are losers, I guess? Libo says he "understood that she didn't want to be liked", and then leaves with a smirk of discretion even as Cristã is asking him to leave and be discreet, et cetera et cetera children are more mature than adults.

Novinha has applied to be a xenobiologist--not for training or apprenticeship, but to start immediately, based on the independent study she's apparently been conducting this whole time. They note that at 13 she's not even the youngest ever; two thousand years earlier there was one who passed the test as a pre-teen. And apparently in the whole colony there are zero other xenobiologists, so they're lacking in new plant life to improve their crops and yields. How big is this colony? As pointed out in last week's comments, colonisation was supposedly to help with Baía's overpopulation, but it seems like they only sent a few thousand people at best, and the incredibly important role of 'alien life scientist' has been vacant for several years now after they lost their first two. (The plague killed about 500, which seems to have been a noteworthy chunk but not enough to wipe them out, so... I'm thinking in the 3000 range?) Dona Cristã wants Pipo to supervise the testing:

"But believe me, my dear friend, touching her heart is like bathing in ice."

"I imagine. I imagine it feels like bathing in ice to the person touching her. But how does it feel to her? Cold as she is, it must surely burn like fire."

"Such a poet," said Dona Cristã. There was no irony in her voice; she meant it. "Do the piggies understand what we've sent our very best as our ambassador?"

"I try to tell them, but they're skeptical."

Reasonable. Is this entire cast once again going to be made up entirely of people who are The Best At Everything? Pipo notes that if Novinha fails, she will "have very bad problems" and if she passes he jokes that Libo will want to test for zenador and if his son passes that test then he might as well go home and die, which is apparently some kind of joke, but... this is intriguingly archaic. Three thousand years into the future and scientific disciplines are 'the family business' and you only ever bother having one at a time because I guess there isn't enough demand for science to need two? Like, sure, people need science, but then you just go down the street and pick up a fresh science from the sciencery and they already make enough for everyone to get all the science they need hot out of the oven so any additional science would just go to waste?

The next day, Novinha goes to confront Pipo and she is made of angry and smart. She says she'll jump through all his pointless hoops as long as he lines them up fast enough rather than putting her off, and cites the Starways Code as giving her the right to challenge the test at any time.

Novinha saw the intense look in his eyes. She didn't know Pipo, so she thought it was the look she had seen in so many eyes, the desire to dominate, to rule her, the desire to cut through her determination and break her independence, the desire to make her submit.

Well... it kind of is? Pipo ended the last scene by thinking that he was going to test her for "the unmeasurable qualities of a scientist" that he sees in his son, and intends to stop her from taking the test if he isn't satisfied. So yeah. He's decided that he's in charge here regardless of galactic law. Also, an old man judging the qualitative scientific aptitude of a young girl against his son; does this not set off huge sexism alarm bells? He might not be doing it purely out of ego, but Novinha is otherwise quite right to be suspicious.

She snaps at him that the planet needs a xenobiologist and Pipo is going to make them wait just so he can feel in control longer, and she's startled that he doesn't snap back. He makes it clear that he doesn't believe she's doing this out of altruism.

"Your own words called you a liar. You spoke of how much they, the people of Lusitania, need you. But you live among us. You've lived among us all your life. Ready to sacrifice for us, and yet you don't feel yourself to be part of this community."

I do not remotely follow how that proves that she's not doing it out of altruism, but Pipo is running with it, telling Novinha that she has withdrawn from the colony in every way she can, from the student community, from the church community, et cetera, and then he hits one of my buttons:

"[...] You are so completely detached that as far as possible you don't tough the life of this colony, you don't touch the life of the human race at any point."

And the reason I hate this is that Novinha is human and therefore her experiences are part of the life of 'the human race' even if she never met another human in her whole life. This is the same format of thinking that allows people to marginalise and devalue the identities of any minority: to speak of, for example, 'Christians rejecting queers' itself rejects the existence of queer Christians (generally by asserting that they're not really Christians, as proven by how they're not oppressing themselves enough); to speak of how Canadians are racist towards First Nations people ignores the fact that First Nations are Canadian and legitimises the idea that the only Real Canadians are white people. It simplifies the world, which can be useful and attractive, but it does it the wrong way.

Anyway. Novinha is shocked that Pipo understands her isolation, and so has no defences against it; she continues to protest his stonewalling as he finally gets around to arguing that if she hates everyone, she can't want to be a xenobiologist out of altruism, therefore she must have some other motivation and some other community. It is apparently objectively true that everyone must have a community or die. Novinha snarks that she's obviously insane.

"Not insane. Driven by a sense of purpose that is frightening. If you take this test you'll pass it. But before I let you take it I have to know: Who will you become when you pass? What do you believe in, what are you part of, what do you care about, what do you love?"

Novinha says she loves nothing and no one understands anything, lectures him through tears that he's doing his job the wrong way because anthropology was meant for humans and xenology is doomed to fail without understanding the Little Ones through their genes and evolution. Pipo thinks she needs to be more emotional, because as Ender's Game taught us pain always causes good things, so he prods her about her isolation, and she goes from cold crying to fury:

"You'll never understand them! But I will! [....] You're a good Catholic."

Novinha is a teenager who has read a cool book and therefore understands the truth about the entire world better than everyone else on her whole planet, and suddenly I think that this is the most realistic character Card has ever written in his life. She read The Hive Queen and the Hegemon and imagined what it must have demanded of the anonymous author to understand those aliens, and I just want everyone to keep in mind that as far as the galaxy is concerned, HQ&H is nothing more than an Alternative Character Interpretation fanfic with zero real-world evidence. The fact that it's taken more seriously than Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter is itself a premise that desperately needs justification.

"I don't know about Jesus, I listen to bishop Peregrino and I don't think there's any power in their priesthood to turn wafers into flesh or forgive a milligram of guilt. But the Speaker for the Dead brought the hive queen back to life."

"Then where is she?"

"In here! In me!" [....]

"So you chose not to be part of the bands of children who group together for the sole purpose of excluding others, and people look at you and say, poor girl, she's so isolated, but you know a secret, you know who you really are. You are the one human being who is capable of understanding the alien mind, because you are the alien mind; you know what it is to be unhuman because there's never been any human group that gave you credentials as a bona fide homo sapiens."

This is... like, the worst possible way of saying something that's actually pretty cool. Here, let me try: 'I think you have talents for special kinds of empathy because you won't start from the same conditioning and biases the rest of us do, and your self-knowledge makes you powerful. By the way, kids with circles of friends suck because it's really just about declaring other people not to be your friends, and personal identity is decided by group vote.' Oh, whoops, I made the same mistakes Card did. I guess that's trickier than it looks.

Pipo agrees that she can take the test, and while by law she must never go out to meet the Little Ones, he will give her all his notes and let her study in his lab, in exchange for her also sharing whatever she learns from her genetic research. They immediately start bonding, especially when Pipo reveals he had the test ready for her to start at any moment, as long as he approved of her aspirations. The narrative informs us that Novinha is being "poisonous" when she accuses him of setting himself up as "the judge of dreams", even though that is 100% accurate. Pipo quotes 1 Corinthians 13:13, because why not, and remarks that Novinha has in turn set herself up as judge of love.

"I lost a daughter in the Descolada. Maria. She would have been only a few years older than you."

"And I remind you of her?"

"I was thinking that she would have been nothing at all like you."

Well, that, at least is the best way that exchange can go if it must go anywhere, although Pipo strongly indicates that he hopes they will grow close as family over time. She starts the test.

Next week: SCIENCE! Maybe? Or some kind of horrible incident? Maybe a horrible scientific incident?

I missed last week's post, quite unintentionally. And now this one is late. Holiday season; y'all know how it is. I've also now read ahead a bit, just the next three posts or so. I don't think that enough information came up to affect my analysis of any of this material so far. I just know that it's going to start getting really, really bad soon. I have previewed my horror and I can see the pain incoming again. (I mentioned to my mother that I was reading Speaker for the first time and she tried to talk me out of it, like I had said I was going to hitchhike to Mexico. She does care.)

Let's wrap this first sucker up.

(Content: sexism, murder. Fun content: balloons, the human nervous system.)

Speaker for the Dead: p. 20--30

It takes three days for Novinha to take the test to become the new xenobiologist of Milagre, and because she is 13 years old and a main character in a Card novel, she passes with a score better than most graduate students. Obviously reasonable. She starts spending most of her time in the Zenador's Station, because they have all the cool data, and Libo finds her cold condescension aggravating, especially since they're the same age and presumably both ubergeniuses but she has an adult job and he's still just apprenticing.

He was not prone to taking umbrage openly. But Pipo knew his son and saw him burn. After a while even Novinha, insensitive as she was, began to realize that she was provoking Libo more than any normal young man could possibly endure. But instead of easing up on him, she began to regard it as a challenge. How could she force some response from this unnaturally calm, gentle-spirited, beautiful boy?

*blows noisemaker*

Well done, Card. Managed to make it to page 20 before describing a barely-pubescent boy as 'beautiful' in an explicitly romantic/sexual context. (Of course it's romantic/sexual, and yes of course Libo and Novinha will hook up within the next few years/pages. What kind of book do you think this is?) Novinha snipes at him one day when she learns that Pipo and Libo have never met a female Little One and don't know anything about how the species reproduces. (They described the concepts of male and female, and all of the Little Ones have identified themselves as male.) Libo is quiet for a while before responding at all, and then they have this back and forth of "Obviously you should just do this" and "Well, no, that won't work because X" until finally X is "Because trying to tell them what we want their hair for would risk giving away scientific secrets that could change the course of their society and ruin everything".

Once she realized that they were excellent at their science, and that she knew almost nothing of it, she dropped her aggressive stance and went almost to the opposite extreme. [....] Politeness gradually gave way to familiarity. Pipo and Libo began to converse openly in front of her, airing their speculations about why the pequininos had developed some of their strange behaviours, what meaning lay behind some of their strange statements, why they remained so maddeningly impenetrable.

Libo and Novinha become BFFs, making inside jokes based on their unique scientific information that no one else except Pipo could possibly understand. And it's sort of sweet, but I also wonder why, with the galactic instant internet that's been in place for over 3000 years, none of them have, say, friends on other planets. A hundred worlds with a total human population in the tens or hundreds of billions--shouldn't the galaxy be full of lonely supergenius teenagers looking for someone else smart enough to get them and make complicated xenobiology jokes?

Basically what I'm saying is that Card was very impressive to foresee political blogs but this is the part where he clearly did not see tumblr incoming.

So then there's a misogynistic interlude in which Libo riffs off the Little Ones' habit of naming trees and starts naming their office furniture. Actual quote: "Don't sit on Chair! It's her time of the month again." And Novinha does the same, obviously, she writes "a series of mock reports on an imaginary pequenino woman called Reverend Mother, who was hilariously bitchy and demanding."

Now, maybe, maybe, these arrogant teenagers mocking the primitive aliens' noted reverence for their unseen female population are still going to accurately collect and assess and analyse all of their information, and aren't going to let their superiority affect their objective rational Sciencemastery at all. But maybe--probably--they won't, and if that happens there will be no one to catch them, no one to call them out, because they are utterly isolated from the rest of their community and the only people who are even aware of the mockery going on in the privacy of the Zenador's Station are the three of them who are complicit in it. Where is the oversight? For that matter, where are the experts from the rest of the galaxy making trips to Lusitania to attempt to add insight or oversight to their work? (Travel might be stupidly expensive, but that won't stop Ender from jetting in shortly, and no one thinks it's weird to request a Speaker to come in.)

This here is exactly how science and academia get bigotry in them and become part of the larger system of oppression--it's just a joke, and then it isn't.

But when they do ruin everything one day, it's not because of that, of course. It starts with Rooter, alien teenage supergenius, who demands to know who it is that the humans go to war with, since he knows they only have one city. Pipo reassures him that the humans would never kill the Little Ones, and some time later Rooter remarks--joking, but he's smart enough to know that jokes are always about the implicit truth--that the only reason Pipo is still alive is that "your women are too stupid to know that he is wise".

The weird hybrid of bloodlust and misogyny continues, until Libo finds a safe answer.

"Most women don't know him," he said.

"Then how will they know if he should die?" asked Rooter. Then, suddenly, he went very still and spoke very loudly. "You are cabras!" [....] He pointed at Libo and then at Pipo. "Your women don't choose your honor, you do! Like in battle, but all the time!"

'Cabra' means 'goat', and they seem to be the bison or antelopes of Lusitania. Pipo tries to explain that couples make decisions together, but the Little Ones continue shouting in distress and then haul Rooter away into the forest and forbid the humans to follow. Pipo and Libo book it and try to figure out what happened, starting with Rooter calling human women weak and stupid.

"That's because he's never met Mayor Bosquinha. Or your mother, for that matter." Libo laughed, because his mother, Conceição, ruled the archives as if it were an ancient estação in the wild mato--if you entered her domain, you were utterly subject to her law.

Paraphrasing Card: "Gosh, I sure do have some strong female characters offscreen. Hoo boy, if you could only see them! Now then, back to making sexist jokes about primitive tribal cultures." Also, our characterisation of Conceição now consists of knowing that she doesn't believe children are full people, she doesn't understand her husband's quiet brilliant insights into human nature, and she's iron-fistedly domineering about her library. Top notch, Card.

The forest is loud with drumming that night, and Pipo and Libo wonder if they haven't accidentally introduced the concept of sexual equality to the Little Ones--meaning, of course, not that the revered females might have broken free of wherever they're hidden away, but that the males might have thrown off their shackles and be fighting for liberation. I have literally no idea what these 'shackles' might consist of, but a whole lot of ideas about why the males might be keeping the females locked up and never let them meet the outsiders. Sigh.

In the morning they find a patch of freshly cleared earth, and Rooter's corpse with a tree growing out of his chest. It's gruesomely detailed--every organ and tissue and sinew has been carefully extracted (though not detached) and laid out in a pattern around his body. (I keep picturing this amazing but terrifying image of the human nervous system extracted from the rest of the body.) From the blood spread, they determine that he had to have been alive when they started to eviscerate him. Libo has the understandable reaction that, if the non-interference law means letting this happen to a person, then the law is ignorant and wrong.

Pipo and Libo debate which of them said something to trigger this sudden violence, and Novinha interrupts:

"Do you think their world revolves around you? As you said, the piggies did it, for whatever reason they have. It's plain enough this isn't the first time--they were too deft at the vivisection for this to be the first time."

Pipo took it with black humor. "We're losing our wits, Libo. Novinha isn't supposed to know anything about xenology."

Well done, Sherlock. So they file their report, and the committees agree that since the Little Ones are going to meet human women sooner or later it would have been stupid for Pipo to lie about our genders, so nothing could have been done differently. Life and research go on, although Libo is traumatised and doesn't return to the field for weeks--he grew up hearing about the Little Ones and had known Rooter by proxy for years. I like this; for once someone's empathy for aliens seems realistic, rather than nonexistent or 'Oh my god this fanfic has changed society's entire outlook on our near-extermination'.

Libo and Novinha continue to bond more intensely, treating the Zenador's Station as their only sanctum now that the Little Ones seem just as mysterious and dangerous as other people always have. Pipo and Libo apparently can't get over the feeling that one of them must have ruined everything, so Libo and Novinha are each other's only non-stressful companions. Pipo goes Shakespearian, comparing the station to the island in The Tempest:

...with Pipo a loving but ever remote Prospero. Pipo wondered: Are the pequininos like Ariel, leading the young lovers to happiness, or are they little Calibans, scarcely under control and chafing to do murder?

Or both! I vote for 'both'.

The Little Ones don't talk about Rooter's death, and the humans don't bring it up either, lest they give away more information or trigger more violence, and so the years kind of stumble on. By age 17, Libo and Novinha often talk about what they'll be doing together twenty years from now, and this sort of saddens me. Don't get me wrong, I love the fantasy of people finding each other early in life and first love being truest and forever love, but I am also creeped out by the idea of people attaching to each other out of desperation and never having any consideration of other options, especially when they seem to literally have no other friends or anyone--once in a while even they are going to fight, and who are they going to talk to about those issues? It is good to have your magical one true love to whom you can tell anything, but it is not sufficient.

Also, the romance quotient in the room is reading a solid zero. I'm going to assume that's because I'm not supposed to be emotionally invested in their relationship and rather just take it as future backstory.

Pipo never bothered to ask them about their marriage plans. After all, he thought, they studied biology from morning to night. Eventually it would occur to them to explore stable and socially acceptable reproductive strategies.

Ha ha! Social pressure to conform to traditional religious institutions regardless of whether they're appropriate to your personal goals, relationship, and preferences sure is adorable. (Libo and Novinha apparently hypothesise endlessly on how the Little Ones reproduce, given that they only see self-identified males with no apparent mating equipment. Again, Pipo finds this delightful. Is this supposed to be a parallel to recommended 'courtship' practices in conservative American Christianity, with the constant chaperone?)

And then one day Novinha is examining plant cells and she finds the Descolada agent sitting in them, the same body that swept through the colony as a plague stopped only at the cost of her parents' lives. She starts searching specifically for that and finds Descolada in every kind of cell from every kind of species she's catalogued. She shows Pipo, who starts running the same tests himself and asks her to explain how it functions. I don't know enough about biology to comment:

"...It attacks the genetic molecules, starting at one end and unzipping the two strands of the molecule right down the middle. [....] In humans, the DNA tries to recombine, but random proteins insert themselves so that cell after cell goes crazy. Sometimes they go into mitosis, like cancer, and sometimes they die."

Pipo says unnecessarily vague things about how 'it's the same thing' among the cells, then grabs his coat to run outside, telling Novinha that when Libo arrives he should look at the simulation and see if he can figure it out before Pipo returns, because it's "the big one. The answer to everything." He says he has to go ask the Little Ones if his theory is right, and if he's not back in an hour he must have broken his leg in the forest.

Pipo would not survive in a horror movie, either.

Libo's committee meeting runs long, and then he gets groceries (where does this tiny walled colony get its food), so he doesn't arrive at the station until after dark, and Pipo hasn't returned. They go looking for him, preparing for a long scouring of the forest, but very quickly they find him dead in the snow, eviscerated like Rooter without the tree in his chest.

This is just... I don't even know what to say. Is there anyone who doesn't find it howlingly infuriating when a character figures out a vital secret but then refuses to tell anyone else for no good reason and then walks voluntarily into incredible danger? Like--Pipo, you know this is a subject they kill people over and you know they're super casual about "So, will your women decide to murder the hell out of you soon?" This isn't hard. Write something down and take precautions. (This would work better if he really was trying to take precautions, specifically of the 'Don't let my son come with me into this dangerous situation' variety, but that's not how the situation is sold.)

So let's hypothesise wildly based on the hints dropped. The plague that takes apart your DNA is a vital part of this planet's life. The Little Ones consider themselves all male and no one ever sees a female. The females apparently evaluate the males and decide when the wisest ones should die, and they are specifically killed in a particular ceremonial and surgical manner. Conclusion: death is part of their reproductive cycle, male Little Ones die in order to open up access to their DNA, and only the best are chosen to die in this particular way and contribute to future generations. I'm trying to decide if it's more likely that the trees are simply ceremonial or if female Little Ones actually are trees because the whole ecosystem is interlinked somehow. Anyway, that's why Rooter was so concerned about the humans having another village to go to war with--because war and associated death is ceremonial (or somehow mandatory) as part of their reproductive cycle.

Not sure how long I'm going to have to wait to have my guesses confirmed or rejected (I know it won't be within the next twenty pages) but I'm going to be unimpressed if Pipo worked it out in thirty seconds but his genius proteges don't catch on for decades and need Ender's help to solve the mystery. Seriously, Pipo, write a note or something. Don't just Fermat us. That's a jackass move.

Speaking of jackass moves, come back next week when we catch up with Ender and endure some just really spectacularly bad theological strawmen! And, if you can't wait for that, look for the return of Erika the blogqueen later this week! It is about to be a new year and we are GEARING UP.

Officially back from hiatus! For those of you interested, there is no change or clarity on my health stuff, but my doctor is at least good at helping me fend off my employers who are behaving in ways that are only barely legal. I've started breaking my silence on the issue with my family which has been a somewhat mixed bag, but mostly made up of behaviors that has me looking into firing them. The wedding went incredibly, and I managed to work a Firefly reference into my vows and troll my parents with my musical choices for the ceremony and everything went perfectly.

Now onto what you lovely people get to expect from me in the future! I'm not doing 50 Shades Freed. I know, boo, hiss. I kept trying to read it and I just--I just couldn't. I have precious few spoons and reading it just ate up too many of them. I will read through it and write about it, but that is somewhere in the vague future. I had also initially said I was going to do Eat, Pray, Love when I came back from hiatus. I've changed my mind on that too. I wanted to do a book I knew, a book I actually enjoyed, a book that was problematic, and a book that in its own way meant a lot to me.

I dug through my shelf and plucked a few books that I had loved when I was younger, but afraid to go back to since I came to since I had thrown myself into feminism. I found myself staring down a pile of books almost entirely by Chuck Palahniuk and Nick Hornby. Having stayed away from Palahniuk for longer, I narrowed it down to the three of his that I owned and liked the best when I was younger, and immediately tossed Fight Club off the pile because there is absolutely nothing I can do there that hasn't been done already, and done better. I stared down Survivor and Lullaby. Survivor was tempting, I remembered the themes better in it, and there was a lot to be said for the lone female character even from the fragments I recalled. Still, non-linear story telling does not lend its self well to chapter by chapter deconstruction unless you really know the book and I hadn't touched it in six years.

I eyed Lullaby, its white cover with black text, innocent save for the small neon yellow bird on its back. There was another reason I hadn't read Palahniuk in years, and that was that he and his books were inherently tied to my ex of significance, P, and a very specific time in my life. Like a lot of kids, my friends and I looked for ourselves in fiction around us to feel a little less like freaks. P and a few of our friends looked exclusively in Palahniuk books, and when I joined that circle, I was assigned a character. P had claimed Carl, the narrator of Lullaby (an assessment I never agreed with) and enthusiastically agreed with the Marla of our group that I was Helen, the female lead (also an assessment I never agreed with, or understood). We carry our own baggage into books, and I don't think I can avoid doing it with a deconstruction of one. So there it is, feel free to rifle through, because odds are I'm about to.

Lullaby posts will run on Thursdays so come back on January 9th for the first post.

Ender's Game, chapter nine, part two, in which alternative interpretations abound

50 Shades of live tweeting

Sounds of Silence

Ender's Game, chapter ten, in which Ender rejects redemption and loses his boyfriend

Invisible Illness Awareness Week

Ender's Game, chapter eleven, in which we get down to the WINNING

ANNOUNCEMENTS

Ender's Game, chapter twelve, in which Our Hero gets his second kill

Ender's Game, chapter thirteen, part one, in which Ender tells the truth

Interlude: More of the math of dudes kissing

Ender's Game, chapter thirteen, part two, in which Graff ruins everything again

Ender's Game, chapter fourteen, part one, in which Mazer Rackham doesn't replace Graff soon enough

Ender's Game, chapter fourteen, part two, in which the plan works perfectly

Ender's Game, chapter fifteen, in which the victims blame themselves

Ender's Game, introduction, in which we contemplate empathy

It's that time of year again! The WAR ON CHRISTMAS!

Speaker for the Dead, chapter one, part one, in which nothing ever changes

Speaker for the Dead, chapter one, part two, in which species is decided by vote

Speaker for the Dead, chapter one, part three, in which Pipo makes a lot of bad decisions

RETURN OF THE ERIKA