nder's Game is one of the best known and best loved sci fi books of all time. This is not a review of it, though I do discuss it in the process of writing this review of the 4th book in the Ender series, Children of the Mind. This review was written for the January 30, 2003 blog, before I introduced the categorized scoring system I use now. I've been post dating in such a rating for numerous things in this Reviews Section, but I don't remember this book well enough to do so. The whole series, after Ender's Game and Speaker of the Dead, blur together for me, and while they're good books on their own, none of them are nearly an equal to the first two.

So read the following, use it as an introduction to the fantastic Ender/Speaker novels, and go forth into the series from there, if you so desire. 

January 30, 2003

The novel is Children of the Mind, by Orson Scott Card.  It's the fourth and concluding novel in the series that began with Ender's Game, which would probably win the Internet fan balloting for best sci-fi novel ever.  If there were such an award. I would hope that many of you have read Ender's Game, and if not I can't recommend it strongly enough.  You don't have to like sci-fi at all to love it.  I'm not a big sci-fi fan, but I can't help but recognize the brilliance of the story.

While the first book is the most famous and popular, the other 3 in the series are very good also, though very different. 

A not-so quick recap. 

Ender's Game is mostly an action story. It is set 100 or so years in the future, and about 40 years after the human race was attacked by emotionless insect aliens. They destroyed every human society everywhere, working their way towards earth, and only by one brilliant military commander was their vast fleet defeated. In the years since then, all humanity has been united in a military federation, working with all the earth's resources to train the most brilliant minds to become commanders for what everyone assumes will be the third invasion by the evil "buggers".

Most of the book is about Ender, a young boy who goes to the orbiting battle school and becomes the greatest commander ever, eventually leading earth's forces in the third invasion, which is not the buggers coming here, but earth's forces going after them.

All of that is enormously enjoyable to read, since it's a lot of winning fiction archetypes.  The child prodigy.  The hero against impossible odds.  The outsider conquering entrenched forces.  Plus the characters in the story are very interesting, and it's far more than just Ender leading his child army. You can read the original short story that he developed the novel from on the official Orson Scott Card website.  The actual novel is a lot more detailed, and a lot better, but it's interesting to see the story after you've read it, to see how much he expanded on and improved things.

A major subplot involves Ender's older brother and sister back on earth, as they turn their brilliance towards politics, or at least public opinion. In an interesting foresight to blogs on the Internet, his siblings begin writing opinion pieces on the net, which are picked up by various local news services, and then as they grow in fame and influence, they go national, and then international.  Eventually their secret online personas are among the most powerful and influential individuals on earth, just as Ender is the most powerful soldier.  All three are still young children, I might point out.

The real twists come in at the end, where Ender becomes one of the first colonists to head off into outer space, heading towards one of the bugger's now-vacant worlds.  The near light speed travel they engage in takes just weeks or months to move from one world to another, while that same time is years, decades of real time.  So you age a month on your journey, and when you arrive it's been 30 years for the rest of the universe.  Your children are now older than you are, and if you flew back to them, they'd be dead by the time you arrived, two months after you left, in your time.

On the world Ender finds something incredible.  Impossible. There is a whole city-sized area that is a representation of a world he used to explore in a private game he played back in battle school. Through methods that seem impossible at the time, but are explained in great detail in the three following novels in the series, the bugger queens were in a sort of telepathic communication with Ender, and saw that he would be their doom.  So they snatched his private nightmare world out of the game and built a version of it for him to discover, since he alone of all humans would recognize it for what it was.  Hidden in a special place he finds a cocoon, the one fertilized remaining queen egg of the entire bugger species, and he can engage in a sort of telepathic communication with the unhatched queen within.

He alone of all humans, Ender the destroyer, understands them and how they think, which is how he was able to command the ships that defeated their entire space armada. Ender now sees the buggers as a species that deserves to live, and realizes that their invasion was an error and a misunderstanding, and that they forgive the humans for their genocidal revenge. Ender writes a book relating the buggers' side of the story, telling of all their faults and strengths, and then writes another about his brother, who has been the president of all the earth for the last 50 years.  His books, signed The Speaker for the Dead, become a sort of new religion, and are eventually read by nearly the entire human race.  From this seed of understanding a new perception of the buggers and Ender begins, and over time he comes to be seen as an evil Xenocidist, and the buggers as tragically-exterminated aliens

The book ends with Ender taking the cocoon and beginning to travel the universe, carrying it with him always, looking for a world upon which he might allow the queen to hatch and raise her species again.

The second book, Speaker for the Dead, is entirely different.  It takes place 3000 years later, with Ender on a new planet, one where an intelligent life form has been found, just the third ever known (humans being the first, and the supposedly-extinct buggers the second).  There are complications with the primitive creatures, some humans have died, and things only get more complicated once Ender arrives. The book has almost no action, at least nothing along the lines of the space battles that filled most of Ender's Game, and is entirely dialogue and character interaction.

This has gone much longer than anticipated, proving once again that I have no future in any field of writing, such as the blurbs on the back of paperbacks, where brevity is essential.  Most fans of Ender's Game tend to find Speaker for the Dead very slow going, and indeed when I first read it, probably a dozen years ago, I didn't much care for it. I wanted more brilliant tactics in battles, and there is nothing at all like that in this book, or the rest of the series.

The third and fourth books in the series are much the same, in terms of more plot and dialogue than action.  What makes them worth reading is how much detail and thought Card puts into the philosophy and religion and other weighty topics that are the primary motivators.  The different species all have very different perspectives on things, and life on dozens of human worlds is discussed, with the different philosophies everyone has.  There is extreme religious diversity, and cultures that exist on earth today are reflected in great detail in the future societies described in these books.

I just finished the fourth and final one in the series tonight, and after reading it I was in a very philosophical mood.  Some of Card's ideas are quite brilliant in terms of scientific breakthroughs, as well as the characters and philosophies that power them, and there is a lot of really intelligent meditation on the meaning of life, and what makes a life.  Aliens, even computer programs, become major characters, and I always find the balance that Card brings to the competing religions to be quite interesting.  He is a devout Mormon in real life, so I keep expecting some version of Christianity to be the leading and dominant religious ideal in the stories.  But it never is.  In book four Japanese culture and religion is probably the major factor in how things are the way they are, and there's even a major section on a sort of space Samoa, where their philosophies are dominant.

Card's view of the future is an interesting one, where far from the godless world/universe that I envision, where science will be dominant and the age of religions a footnote in humanity's primitive past, he seems an amazing profusion of religions and cultures, and humans retaining their cultural differences even thousands of years into the future, on different worlds.  Humans staying as they are now, and adapting their new environments to suit their pre-existing beliefs, rather than adapting to the new worlds, and creating new mythologies to explain things that they need explained. What makes it worth reading, in my opinion, is how he does a good job balancing everything.  As I said, I keep expecting some version of Mormonism to be revealed as the true belief, but there's never really any version of Christianity that gets much play, aside from the Roman Catholicism that's dominant on the world that most of the second novel in the series takes place on.

I suspect this makes Card some sort of heretic to his own faith, but it makes the books a lot more interesting. I also find it confounding, since I can never understand how anyone with a wide array of knowledge, especially about astronomy, and other cultures and their myths/religions, can continue to believe in any one particular religion.  I don't see how an informed person wouldn't see that all religions are man's creations to bring order and hope to a chaotic and random world, and therefore cease believing in any of the supernatural aspects of a religion.  But I don't really know what Card believes, though I assume he's still into the "Jesus is the resurrected lord" stuff, if he still calls himself a Mormon.  And I can't see how he could continue to believe that, knowing as much as he does about how Christianity first came about and how the mythos of it evolved over time, built largely on pre-existing myths and legends of other cultures.

Anyway, as for the books, I would very strongly recommend Ender's War, and I while I think Speaker for the Dead is the best book in the series, I can see why some people wouldn't really appreciate it.  Especially action fans who aren't eager to do so much thinking about culture and religion and how the book's events might reflect on their own personal beliefs.  Books 3 and 4 can be skipped, though they are interesting, you have to really want to follow the cultural aspect of Card's future world, and not mind an almost total lack of action, until near the very end of book 4.

March 6, 2004

After blogging about an exceptionally-stupid anti-gay marriage editorial by Orson Scott Card, I segued into a discussion of his work in general.

What I'm left wondering after this, and other examples of Card's Neanderthal social conscience, is what to make of his writing.  He is sporadically a hack, but Ender's War is still the best scifi I've ever read, and I think the rest of the series is brilliant as well.  The really weird dichotomy of his writing, as I see it, is how lucid and balanced and intelligent he is when it comes to religion and philosophy and cultural interactions.

He's obviously a student of history, and especially military history, but personally he's very primitive along the "man naturally dominates woman" theory of marriage and society.  Yet he often has intelligent, strong female characters in his novels, and while he's a very conservative Mormon in his own faith, he presents very balanced and nuanced looks at religions interacting, often non-human races and their religions and faiths as they deal with future versions of various human religions.  And he's not at all of the "Christianity will conquer all" theory; he's got future planets based entirely on weird forms of Shintoism, Buddhism, and other things you wouldn't really think of.  Plus they're presented fairly and equally; it's not like the good Christians are doing everything with the silly primitive other religions sitting on the sidelines.  And his main characters are often not religious at all, though they're usually at least somewhat spiritual.

So he's clearly able to write interesting scifi worlds without ruining his work by proselytizing, and he's very good at presenting differing views of God or even atheism.  I don't think we can expect to see any gay characters presented positively in his upcoming work, or gay marriage as other than an evil delusion, but he's certainly fair (as far as I've seen, from reading just a small percentage of his novels) when it comes to religion and philosophy.  Odd that he can step outside his narrow world view in that area, but he's so utterly unable to do so when it comes to homosexuality.

My point here is that knowing how he feels about gays and gay marriage, how does that affect my and your enjoyment of his writing? I've never seen Mel Gibson-like tendencies in him, to call anything gay disgusting, or to use "fag" as an insult, or to make any gay characters scum, so I think Card is probably being honest in his editorial.  He doesn't feel too much personal animosity towards gays, and he doesn't want to kill them or anything, he just doesn't accept their state of being, and wants to (continue to) deny them access to things that heterosexuals take for granted.  Like being able to marry someone you love and want to share your life with.  I'll feel weird when I read his work from now on, knowing what he's like personally, and I imagine that any gay readers have to feel very conflicted at this point.

It has to be weird, to find out that an artist whose work you enjoy would hate or disapprove of you personally, for some deep seated reason you can't change.  What if your favorite musician came out in an interview and talked about how much they hated men, or women, or blacks, or whites, or whatever you are?  Can you still enjoy their work and get past their opinions about you and people like you?

This is probably a good illustration of why most artists should just keep their mouths shut when it comes to political or cultural issues.  A lesson I'm unlikely to ever take to heart.

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