EN 2215 S/F I Orson Scott Card Lecture

Lecture Summary - Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game, 1985, rev. edn. 1991.

· The SF elements: (1) An unstable but unified world-order, (2) An alien invader race, (3) Instant communication (the “ansible” 249), (4) Total, instantaneous empathetic communication among all the members of a species (253, 267-68).

· Xenophobia: The novel dramatizes the human anxiety about the Other as an alien species that might annihilate the human race.

· Eugenics/Selective Breeding: The novel works out a scenario where specially gifted children might be selected and trained for specific societal purposes.

· The prioritization of the group over the individual: The novel represents a society in which the individual is to be shaped into tool for use in the service of what people in authority perceive as the larger good of the community.

· Games Theory: The novel shows how skills developed in simulated environments such as that involving competitive games can be transposed into the world outside a game.

· Nostalgia and innocence: The novel shows the loss of childhood and innocence is entailed in the manipulation of the individual for a social need or function.

· Guilt and Redemption: the novel suggests that the human fear of extinction makes humanity predisposed to the assumption that the Other is always hostile and to be destroyed. If this assumption turns out to be wrong, the race will have to seek expiation for its guilt.

· The speculative element: that a sentient race of insect-like creatures could be the occasion to teach humanity to evolve from an attack-under-threat syndrome into an ethics of trust and faith in contact with the Other.

1 The SF elements: (1) A world-order, (2)An alien invader race, (2) Instant communication (the “ansible” 249), (3) Total, instantaneous empathetic communication among all the members of a species (253, 267-68)

Ø … an American Jew, as President, was Hegemon of the alliance, an Israeli Jew was Strategos in overall command of I.F. defense, and a Russian Jew was Polemarch of the fleet… (100)

Ø “They don’t have a language at all…. And maybe they’ve been trying to think to us, and they can’t understand why we don’t respond.”

“So the whole war is because we can’t talk to each other.”

“If the other fellow can’t tell you his story, you can never be sure he isn’t trying to kill you.” (253)

2 Xenophobia: The novel dramatizes the human anxiety about the Other as an alien species that might annihilate the human race.

Ø …history is shaped by the use of power. (xiii)

Ø … the future of the human race depends on how well you learn, how well you fight. (24)

Ø The buggers may seem like a game to you now, Ender, but they damn near wiped us out last time. (25)

Ø It isn’t the world at stake, Ender. Just us. Just humankind. As far as the rest of the biosphere is concerned, we could be wiped out and it would adjust … but humanity doesn’t want to die. As a species we have evolved to survive. And the way we do it is by straining and straining and, at last, every few generations, giving birth to a genius. The one who invents the wheel. And light. And flight. The one builds a city, a nation, an empire…. Human beings are free except when humanity needs them…. We might do despicable things, Ender, but if humankind survives, then we were good tools. (35)

Ø The bugger menace. Save the world. Listen, Ender, if the buggers were coming back to get us, they’d be here. They aren’t invading again. (110)

Ø “Why are we fighting the buggers?”

“I’ve heard all kinds of reasons,” said Graff. “Because they have an overcrowded system and they’ve got to colonize. Because they can’t stand the thought of other intelligent life in the universe. Because they don’t think we are intelligent life. Because they have some weird religion. Because they watched our old video broadcasts and decided we were hopelessly violent. All kinds of reasons.” (252-53)

3 Eugenics/Selective Breeding: The novel works out a scenario where specially gifted children might be selected and trained for specific societal purposes.

Ø Ender’s Game is a story about gifted children. It is also a story about soldiers. (xxv)

Ø They had such fantastic children that the government told them to have three. (15)

Ø … girls. They don’t often pass the tests to get in. Too many centuries of evolution are working against them. (24)

Ø We need a Julius Caesar except that he made himself dictator, and died for it. My job is to produce such a creature, and all the men and women he’ll need to help him. (34)

Ø We’re going to make him the best military commander in history. (36)

4 The prioritization of the group over the individual: The novel represents a society in which the individual is to be shaped into tool for use in the service of what people in authority perceive as the larger good of the community.

Ø He can have friends. It’s parents he can’t have. (38)

Ø Humanity does not ask us to be happy. It merely asks us to be brilliant on its behalf. Survival first, then happiness as we can manage it. (277)

5 Games Theory: The novel shows how skills developed in simulated environments (such as those involving aggression trained through competitive games) can be transposed into the world outside a game for the purposes of war.

Ø How would you train soldiers for combat in the future? …. The essence of training is to allow error without consequence. (xiv)

Ø Better to play the war games, and have a better chance of surviving when the buggers come again. (11)

Ø Battle School is for training future starship captains and commodores of flotillas and admirals of the fleet. (20)

Ø Status, identity, purpose, name; all that makes these children who they are comes out of the game. (98)

Ø The game was trivial, compared to the whole world. (112)

Ø … as the battleroom was to Battle School, so the simulator was to Command School. (259)

6 Nostalgia and innocence: The novel shows how the loss of childhood and innocence are entailed in the manipulation of the individual for a social need or function.

Ø Perhaps … I can go to one of the villages and become one of the little boys working and playing there, with nothing to kill and nothing to kill me, just living there. (74)

Ø I’ve got a pretty good idea what children are, and we’re not children. (108)

Ø Perhaps … I can go to one of the villages and become one of the little boys working and playing there, with nothing to kill and nothing to kill me, just living there. (74)

Ø I’m the bloody bastard you wanted when you had me spawned. (118-19)

Ø You’ve been isolating the boy. Maybe he’s wishing for the end of the world he grew up with as a little boy, his home, coming here. Or maybe it’s his way of coping with having broken up so many other kids here. (121)

Ø 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. (252)

7 Guilt and Redemption: the novel suggests that the human fear of extinction makes humanity predisposed to the assumption that the Other is always hostile and to be destroyed. If this assumption turns out to be wrong, the race will have to seek expiation for its guilt.

Ø “Salaam” … she had put her hands on his head … and prayed over him. Ender … had kept it as a memory of holiness … a gift so sacred that even Ender could not be allowed to understand what it meant. (70)

8 The speculative element: that a sentient race of insect-like creatures could be the occasion to teach humanity to evolve from an attack-under-threat syndrome into an ethics of trust and faith in contact with the Other.

Ø … Asimov’s Idea of a group of human beings who, not through genetic change, but through learned skills, are able to understand and heal the minds of others…. Human beings may be miserable specimens, in the main, but we can learn, and through learning, become decent people. (xii)

Ø I thought of Ender’s Game, the novel, existing only to set up the much more powerful (I thought) story of Speaker of the Dead. (xviii)

Ø What Peter had detected was a fundamental shift in the world order. (126)

Ø … there are times when the world is in flux and the right voice in the right place can move the world…. I see myself as knowing how to insert ideas into the public mind. (128)

Ø That night Demosthenes published a scathing denunciation of the population limitation laws. People should be allowed to have as many children as they like, and the surplus population should be sent to other worlds, to spread mankind so far across the galaxy that no disaster, no invasion could ever threaten the human race with annihilation. (153)