Reading Orbit: OCSFC Book Club
Ender’s Game and Speaker for the Dead by Orson Scott Card
Summary: For the 20th anniversary of Card's Hugo and Nebula Award–winning novel, Audio Renaissance brings to life the story of child genius Ender Wiggin, who must save the world from malevolent alien "buggers." In his afterword, Card declares, "The ideal presentation of any book of mine is to have excellent actors perform it in audio-only format," and he gets his wish. Much of the story is internal dialogue, and each narrator reads the sections told from the point of view of a particular character, rather than taking on a part as if it were a play. Card's phenomenal emotional depth comes through in the quiet, carefully paced speech of each performer. No narrator tries overmuch to create separate character voices, though each is clearly discernible, and the understated delivery will draw in listeners. In particular, Rudnicki, with his lulling, sonorous voice, does a fine job articulating Ender's inner struggle between the kind, peaceful boy he wants to be and the savage, violent actions he is frequently forced to take. This is a wonderful way to experience Card's best-known and most celebrated work, both for longtime fans and for newcomers.
About the Author: Orson Scott Card is the author of the novels Ender's Game, Ender's Shadow, and Speaker for the Dead, which are widely read by adults and younger readers, and are increasingly used in schools.
Besides these and other science fiction novels, Card writes contemporary fantasy (Magic Street, Enchantment, Lost Boys), biblical novels (Stone Tables, Rachel and Leah), the American frontier fantasy series The Tales of Alvin Maker (beginning with Seventh Son), poetry (An Open Book), and many plays and scripts.
Card was born in Washington and grew up in California, Arizona, and Utah. He served a mission for the LDS Church in Brazil in the early 1970s. Besides his writing, he teaches occasional classes and workshops and directs plays. He recently began a longterm position as a professor of writing and literature at Southern Virginia University.
Card currently lives in Greensboro, North Carolina, with his wife, Kristine Allen Card, and their youngest child, Zina Margaret.
Analysis: Ender’s Game begins a “process,” a “dynamic,” which is carried over into Speaker for the Dead, that is the origin for what occurs in these two novels. One way to characterize this process is to say that it is the overthrow of, given Card’s title, a “game.” A game is of course a confrontation between two or more parties mediated through a list of rules. Card will keep to this understanding, especially in his first novel. But there is also a more abstract definition of a game at work in the second novel which needs to be mentioned. Here a game is an “entity,” a way of being, which, out of itself, is overcome; that is, this “monad,” out of its own being, is able to “open” itself to what is not itself, the “other.” The monad ceases to be a monad. This impulse, it could be said, is the “engine” which moves Card’s two novels. It could be said to be a “dialectic” in reverse. Instead of opposing forces uniting into a new reality, we have realities “breaking-down” to reveal “other” realities that, finally, reveal the original reality to be inadequate. For Card, this “opening-out” of a game or paradigm is an activity possibly best understood and accomplished by children. But, also, such an overthrow may make victims of children. Note Card’s dedication in the first novel: “For Geoffrey, who makes me remember how young and how old children can be.” But also note the character Dink’s assessment of the training he and his fellow children receive: “I know, you’ve [Ender] been here a year, you think these people are normal. Well, they’re not. We’re not. I look in the library, I call up books on my desk. Old ones, because they won’t let us have anything new, but I’ve got a pretty good idea what children are, and we’re not children. Children can lose sometimes, and nobody cares. Children aren’t in armies, they aren’t commanders, they don’t rule over forty other kids, it’s more than anybody can take and not get crazy.” Perhaps here the game or being “child” is being routed.
In Ender’s Game we are presented with two games and their overturning (in fact, this is the meaning of the protagonist’s nick name, “Ender:” “finisher;” the “ender” of games). The first is the state’s. Here the game is constituted as a type of “training.” The state is seeking a commander which will lead humanity in a victorious, offensive, war against the “Buggers,” an alien race which once almost conquered the Earth. These aliens have retreated to their home-planet after their defeat, seemingly preparing for another attempt at conquest. “But the Buggers are out there. Ten billion, a hundred billion, a million billion of them, for all we know. With as many ships, for all we know. With weapons we can’t understand. And a willingness to use those weapons to wipe us out,” as the situation is described. The thinking of those in power is to attack and defeat the Buggers before they have finished their preparations and before they can return to subdue the Earth. For this the state is searching for a child with certain inherent military and leadership qualities which can be further trained to lead such an assault. A “one;” someone to “save the world.” Such phrases give Ender’s Game a religious aura, which is further developed at the end of the novel on the theme of redemption. For this the state has selected any number of children and adolescents to be educated and prepared in isolation at their “Battle School.” Though, due to genetic experimentation in the specific Wiggin’s family, the government has spared special attention on the family’s youngest child, Andrew ( the protagonist of the first novel and the subject of its title). As one general puts it: “‘We’re going to make him the best military commander in history.’”
The “unmaking” of the state’s game is also the substance of Ender’s training. While those in power challenge Ender through the game, in this case war games between teams of children, their desire is that their training will lead to Ender rejecting the game. That is, the parameters which encase, specify, any game will, finally, be “overcome,” rejected, by Ender. Such, what is called, “thinking outside of the box,” is believed by the trainers, personified by Colonel Hyrum Graff (the headmaster of the battle school) and Mazer Rackham (the commander and war hero who defeated the Buggers in the first war), to be preciously what is needed for a final defeat of the aliens. This strategy turns out to be correct. One example of the affect of the state’s training is when Ender is attempting to orient himself in the battleroom, an environment without gravity: “For a sickening moment he tried his old up-and-down orientation, his body attempting to right itself, searching for the gravity that wasn’t there. Then he forced himself to change his view. He was hurtling toward a wall. That was down. And at once he had control of himself. He wasn’t flying, he was falling. This was a dive. He could choose how he would hit the surface.” This “choice” to “change” one’s “view” is what it means to overthrow games. In thinking about his progress playing an interactive computer game, Ender thinks: “Sometimes they were funny things. Sometimes exciting one, and he had to be quick to stay alive. He had lots of deaths, but that was OK, games were like that, you died a lot until you got the hang of it.” As Mazer later tells Ender: “Your disadvantage is that . . . after each battle your enemy will learn more about you, how to fight you, and those changes will be put into effect instantly.” Thus the need to continually “go-beyond” one’s present “play.”
This rejection of the state’s game is one the state itself participates in. Toward the end of this novel what Ender believed was a practice battle turns out to be the actual attack on the Buggers. “Real. Not a game,” Ender thinks. But there is a certain irony to the state going beyond its own game. Mazar tells Ender after his victory over the Buggers: “Of course we tricked you into it. That’s the whole point . . . 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 . . . 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 could do it even if you knew, you could never have understood the buggers well enough.” In other words, Ender had to “unfold” the game of being a human being in order to enter into and understand the aliens. This in order to defeat them. But this is exactly why Ender cannot defeat them. Thus the need for the state’s trickery.
The second game of Ender’s Game is Ender’s rejection of the state’s game, just as the state has desired; but here the rejection is carried to the degree, in what might be called a “qualitative shift” in thinking, that it constitutes a rejection of the state’s world-view (a perspective which gave rise to the previously noted state’s game; and here we see a foreshadowing of Speaker For the Dead for this is what exactly a “speaker” accomplishes). We have already noted this view: the Buggers are inherently aggressive; and are preparing a further, more technologically advanced, attack of the Earth. Thus there is a need, and here the novel becomes politically relevant to the Bush administration in the United States in a way Card could never have guessed, for a preemptive attack.
The way that Ender comes to refuse the state’s paradigm is through the Bugger’s communication with him through his computer game-playing, dreams, and fantasies. Here Ender learns that the aliens, at first, thought they were overcoming in the first attack of Earth what we would consider animals: lesser beings. After their defeat the Buggers rethought their beliefs (here we also have another overthrowing of a game as perspective). Their intention was never to attack Earth again. They realized that humans, like themselves, are intelligent beings (and here we see a foreshadowing of a theme which will occupy Card in Speaker For the Dead: overthrowing the parameters by which we define what is “human”). As the “queen” of the Buggers tells Ender psychically: “‘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 [A reference to the fact that the Buggers think with one mind. As Ender puts it: “The buggers don’t talk. They think to each other, and it’s instantaneous . . .”].’”
Now begins a quest for attonement on Ender’s part which will result with him becoming the first “speaker for the dead.” As Ender tells his sister, Valentine: “‘I stole their [the Bugger’s] future from them; I can only begin to repay by seeing what I can learn from their past.’” Ender will take the last egg of the aliens, a Queen’s egg, and search the universe for a place where the Bugger’s can begin to live again. Here the game of “death” is “opened-outward” to reveal a new life. This is what it means to be a speaker for the dead: the speaker speaks the subject’s life; a life not known by those who believe they knew the subject in life. Thus a new life for the subject is constituted. A type of “salvation.” (This is what occurs in Speaker For the Dead with Marcos Maria Ribeira. By revealing the truth of him as “father,” the structure of “family” is opened and reconstituted. What was once thought to be Marcos’ family is no longer in a nominal sense; his being as a father is reworked. This means that the hatred his “children” once held for him is replaced by understanding. Even, again, forgiveness. This opens the family to becoming Ender’s family) In this way forgiveness becomes possible, for Ender, the Buggers, and for Ribeira (and, also, for Ender’s brother, Peter, an amoral, power-obssessed, politician). Forgiveness through the revealing of gnosis: the “knowledge” of who Ender, the Buggers, Ribeira, and Peter truely are/were. It is thus easy to understand how Ender’s book, “Speaker For the Dead,” (which later is re-titled, “The Hive-Queen and the Hegemon.” The “hegemon” refering to Peter. Ender speaks for him after his death, which is the substance of the book) becomes the basis for a new religion; a new gnosisticism.
Ender’s Game concludes with Ender and Valentine roaming the universe performing dual roles: Ender speaks for the dead; Valentine, as an “historian errant,” records the stories of those living beings they meet. Both of these functions, I would maintain, serve to extend the definition of “human”: in telling the story, the history, of another I recognize this other as a subject like myself; in speaking for them after their death I tell the unknown truth–something, again, which can only be done about “an-other” subject. A further extension of this is that Ender carries with him the Queen’s egg: “And always Ender carried with him a dry white cocoon, looking for a world where the hive-queen could awaken and thrive in peace. He looked a long time.” Ender will, literally, bring a new life to the Buggers.
With Speaker For the Dead the time of Ender’s looking ceases.
Whereas Ender’s Game might be considered an “enclosed” novel, seeing that the narrative was essentially concerned with one character, with his development and the story’s action occurring, for the most part, in one location, the dynamic of establishment and downfall of a “game” that “fuels” Speaker For the Dead transpires in many stories.
In Ender’s Game there was the “game” or structure of human versus alien, the Buggers. This relationship was characterized by fear, on the human’s part, which led to suspicion and aggression; which further led to intolerance in that the alien was always seen as the “other.” In Speaker For the Dead there is still maintained the paradigm which sees the alien, in this case known as the “Piggies,” as the “other”; but here the divide between human and alien is the result of compassion. Remembering what was done to the Buggers, humanity has decided, in its contact and study of aliens, to create a separation between itself and aliens so as to protect, firstly, their, existence, and then, secondly, their culture. The theme of redemption is, again, evident in this novel. As an Archcardinal Pio puts it: “It is another chance God has given us. We can be redeemed for the destruction of the buggers.”
Card tells us in his Prologue that in 1886 (of a future dating) a colony was established on a planet named by the colonists, “Lusitania.” As these colonists traced their culture back to Portugal, it seemed proper that they should name their colony after their country’s ancestral name. It is on this planet that the Piggies–the porquinhos–are discovered. As Card concludes his Prologue: “But the colony could never spread beyond a limited area or exceed a limited population. And it was bound, above all, by one law: The piggies were not to be disturbed.” But it is Ender who recognizes that any scheme which maintains a variance between oneself and an “other,” no matter what its conscious motives, may bear results that are no different than if they resulted from less positive emotions; and that if this is indeed the case, then perhaps there are unconscious machinations involved. Ender asks: “‘Why are we so anxious to keep them [the Piggies] from any influence from our culture? It isn’t just in the interest of science. It isn’t just good xenological procedure. Remember, please, that our discovery of the ansible [a method of instant communication], of starflight, of partial gravity control, even of the weapon we used to destroy the buggers–all of them came as a direct result of our contact with the buggers . . . We are in space precisely because of the impact of a devastatingly superior culture. And yet in only a few generations, we took their machines, surpassed them, and destroyed them. That’s what our fence means [the fence that separates the human colony from the Piggies]–we’re afraid the piggies will do the same to us.” But even if Ender is wrong as to this unconscious motivation of human culture, for Card the “game” of human versus alien must be overthrown. The notion of “human” must “spread.”
Already at the beginning of Speaker For the Dead we have a questioning of the division between human and alien. The quotation that opens the first chapter is by “Demosthenes,” the pen-name of Ender’s sister, Valentine: “Since we are not yet fully comfortable with the idea that people from the next village are as human as ourselves, it is presumptuous in the extreme to suppose we could ever look at sociable, tool-making creatures who arose from other evolutionary paths and see not beasts but brothers, not rivals but fellow pilgrims journeying to the shrine of intelligence. Yet that is what I see, or yearn to see. 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.” So, phenomenologically, the question of another’s humanity is not in my perception of any “objective” traits they may possess, but in how I intend or constitute this subject. This activity of consciousness, intentionality, recognized by Brentano and Husserl, is, if you will, the “battering-ram” which “breaks through” the “rampart” between myself as a human and the “other” I encounter, as Valentine indicates. It allows for a “dispersal” of definitions. Thus we could say that it is consciousness itself understood as an active entity which is the origin for the overthrowing of “games.” In this way we could argue that both Ender’s Game and Speaker For the Dead are fictional works embracing existential phenomenology. But, of course, it is this same dynamic of consciousness which allows us to also create the barriers between beings that Card demonstrates can be overcome. The words “raman” and “varelse” refer to four categories of “foreignness” in the Nordic language Valentine makes use of in her History of Wutan in Trondheim (Valentin’s various histories are, as I have said, her own way of overthrowing identity as difference. If one can assign history to another, and not just to oneself, one has begun to, intellectually, see the “other” as another self) : 1) “Otherlander” (utlanning)–“the stranger that we recognize as being a human of our world, but of another city or country”; 2) “Framling”–“the stranger that we recognize as human, but of another world”; 3) “Raman”–“the stranger that we recognize as human, but of another species”; 4) “Varelse”–“the true alien . . . which includes all the animals, for with them no conversation is possible.” Here we can see, as with Valentine’s historical writing, even though these are categories of “foreignness,” the breaking-down of the foreigner: definition 1 speaks of the “human” outside of one’s immediate city or country; definitions 2 and 3 speak of the “human” even when the being is from another planet or species. Again, the double ability of consciousness to construct or eliminate absolute difference.
This rejection of the concept of the “foreigner” even extends beyond biology. That is to say, the idea of the “human” must be distributed so as to include machines. In this instance, computers who possess artificial intelligence; what Ender calls a “forth alien species.” Ender speculates that the ansible, with its connection to all of humanity, called the “Hundred Worlds,” and its computers, has given rise to this being he knows as “Jane.” Her/its name, and Ender’s description of her as “a shy, frightened child dwelling in the vast memory of the interstellar computer network,” reveals her as a being, a “person.” Because Ender is the one with both the personality toward and the experience in deconstructing “games,” and that “human beings had long been afraid that someone like her would come to exist,” Jane realizes that he is the one to reveal her existence to: “So she gave them [humans] no sign that she was alive. Until she found the Hive Queen and the Hegemon, as everyone eventually did, and knew that the author of that book was a human to whom she dared reveal herself.” Because Jane is a Self, she is capable of love. This is how Ender describes his relationship with her; and it is what is possible at the beginning of her relationship with Miro Ribeira. Ender introduces her to Miro as: “Raman . . . More human than most humans. We’ve loved each other for a long time, helped each other, depended on each other.” Again, there is the possibility of love; even, perhaps, some kind of sexuality: “Ender’s eyes glistened, and Miro realized that whatever this creature was that lived in the computer, it was no phantom, it was part of this man’s life. And he was passing it down to Miro, like father to son [which Ender has become to Miro by the end of the novel], the right to know this friend. Ender left without another word, and Miro turned to the terminal. There was a holo of a woman there. She was small, sitting on a stool, leaning against a holographic wall. She was not beautiful. Not ugly, either. Her face had character. Her eyes were haunting, innocent, sad. Her mouth delicate, about to smile, about to weep. Her clothing seemed veil-like, insubstantial, and yet instead of being provocative, it revealed a sort of innocence, a girlish, small-breasted body, the hands clasped lightly in her lap, her legs childishly parted with the toes pointing inward. She could have been sitting on a teeter-toter in a playground. Or on the edge of her lover’s bed.”
Allow me to conclude this essay by presenting two of Card’s more interesting examples of the break-down and unfolding of systems.
As we have said, the Lusitania colony culturally traces its origins to Portugal. This means that some notice must be made of the influence of Catholicism on the colony. Indeed, probably the most influential power-center on Lusitania is the Church. Catholicism on Lusitania, under the guidance of Bishop Armao Cebola (Peregrino), initially finds itself antagonistic to Ender as a speaker for the dead. Cebola sees Ender’s practices as both atheistic and as a type of false religion–thus it is in competition with the church, and therefore a source of temptation and eventual damnation for the believer. But this does not prevent Cebola as well as others in the Catholic community from embracing Ender’s plan to “open” both the Piggies and the humans to each other. It is in this way that Catholicism is “undone” and made to spread itself out to the “other.” Perhaps the reason for this is to be found in the Eucharist. Here is how Card describes it: “It was the miracle of the wafer, turned into the flesh of God in his [Cebola’s] hands. How suddenly we find the flesh of God within us after all, when we thought that we were only made of dust.” Before this we are told Cebola’s thoughts about all that has transpired on the Colony, which is the core of the novel. His summation recognizes the motion of “opening-out” of beings: “All things coming clear, all things coming together.” If “all things” come “together,” than the boundaries that circumscribe each individual entity are overcome. This is exactly how the Eucharist works: the distinction between the wafer and God is undone. The wafer becomes God, the body of God; and God becomes the wafer. The “chasm” between them is bridged.” The same is true of the differentiation between my body and God. God enters my body. What was before “dust” is now holy, saved; what was before transcendent is now flesh.
Finally, it is discovered by the xenologists on Lusitania that the Piggies carry with them a disease that has come to be called the Descolada. It is a threat to any other species which would come into contact with the Piggies. The only reason that the humans have not died out in the course of the novel is due to a discovery which allows those in the colony to live with the disease. Here is a description of the disease given by Ivanova Santa Catarina von Hesse (Novinha): “The Descolada doesn’t just split the genetic molecules and prevent them from reforming or duplicating. It also encourages them to bond with completely foreign genetic molecules . . . All the native life on Lusitania thrives in plant-and-animal pairs.” Thus the identity of “plant” and “animal” is yielded. Or, as Amai a Tudomundo Para Que Deus vos Ame Cristao (Dom Cristao) puts it: “. . . one becomes the other.” “Becoming” as the ultimate act of “opening-oneself” to the other.
Henry A. Jimenez
Click here for more information about the Orange County Science Fiction Club.
Explore our site and for more information email info@ocsfc.org or call Greg at (949) 552-4925.