| Author |
Title |
Publisher: |
Date |
Format |
| Orson Scott Card |
Ender's Game |
Tor, Tom Doherty Associates |
1985 |
Novel |
| Suggested
By: Jennifer Jones |
Added:
7/23/2000 |
| Last Modified:
10/9/2000 |
Comments:
Mini-Review by Jennifer Jones
Ender's Game is Orson Scott Card's novel-length retelling of a short story by the same name that effectively launched his career as a Science Fiction writer in 1977. From the seed of this novel, Card has created an entire series of "Ender" novels including Speaker For the Dead, Xenocide, Children of the Mind, Ender's Shadow, and the forthcoming The Shadow of Hegemon. Ender's Game is commonly understood as a classic work of Science Fiction in the sense that it follows well-trodden generic territory such as taking place in the future and indulging themes such as intergalactic travel and alien invasions of earth. It is, however, extremely interesting to note that this novel was published in 1985, just one year after the ground-breaking publication of William Gibson's Neuromancer, which marks a profound shift in the science-fiction world and has come to define the beginning of a new SF literary movement known as Cyberpunk. One way to understand the divergence of Cyberpunk from SF, according to Bruce Sterling, is through its focus on present-day technologies and their possibilities, on "the lateral futures of today's information technology" rather than on the conventional "linear futures of space adventure."
Although I would not suggest that Ender's Game is directly aligned with the cyberpunk movement (nor would either its author or its critics), I would suggest that it is a worthwhile thought experiment to consider this novel as a type of accidental hybrid between conventional SF and Cyberpunk fiction. With this experiment in mind, aspects of the text jump out that might not otherwise become the subject of analytic focus. For instance, the text takes place in the future, but the specificity of this future is never mentioned, and instead it is a continual unfolding in an unnamed present. This lack of a temporal relation between our extra-textual world and the world of the text gives a haunting impression of its presentness, its refusal to be simply understood as a linear future space adventure.
One of the most interesting aspects of Ender's Game in terms of this experiment is the intersection between communication and the new (information) technologies that undergirds both the story the novel tells and the meta-commentary it offers about the value of writing. It is here that reading Ender's Game in terms of Cyberpunk and its tenet that it exemplifies "the first generation of SF writers to live in an SF world" becomes particularly relevant and exciting, because the novel does clearly participate in the endeavor of imaginatively unfolding what the perhaps near-future could be like through the lens of contemporary technologies.
On one level this intersection is played out via a technology called "the nets," an international network communication system of the future which resembles the Internet and the World Wide Web. In the context of the world unfolding in this novel, the nets are a government-mediated technology in which users are allowed to participate on varying levels depending on their age and status in the world. Students, for instance, can access the various debates taking place on the nets, the focus of which is international politics and the main genre of which is the political essay or news column, but they cannot participate in the debates as writers. Adult citizens can gain access as writers for a fee. Prominent citizens who have gained audiences for their writings on the nets earn the right to write for free, many of them sponsored by official organizations and asked to write on a regular basis. From this system emerge "famous" personalities whose writings are followed by large groups of readers internationally.
Another interesting intersection between communication and technology at work in this text is a human-created device properly called "the Philotic Parallax Instantaneous Communicator." Commonly referred to as "Ancible," a name derived from the novels written by Ursula K. Le Guin in the late twentieth century, this device can transmit messages between galaxies with no lapse of time; it is, in other words, an instantaneous mode of communication, one which hearkens to the draw and desire of technologies such as the ‘real-time' communication in Web-based chat rooms and MUD/MOO environments.
Perhaps the two most crucial, as well as the most interesting, modes of communication in Ender's Game, however, are those native to aliens and humans respectively. It becomes clear through the course of the story that Ancible is a technological device created to simulate for humans the natural communication capacities of the "buggers," the insect-like aliens with which humans are interacting in this novel. As the character Mazer Rackham describes it to Ender,
"The buggers don't talk. They think to each other, and its instantaneous, like the philotic effect. Like the ancible. But most people always thought that meant a controlled communication, like language–I think you a thought and then you answer me. I never believed that. It's too immediate, the way they respond together to things. You've seen the videos. They aren't conversing and deciding among possible courses of action. . . . They aren't having a mental conversation between people with different thought processes. All their thoughts are present, together, at once." (267-68)
The focus of native communication in human beings, on the other hand, is on empathetic understanding. In other words, the separation between one human and another makes communication in the common sense a necessity. However, the notion that one human being can ‘read' another via empathetic recognition is also a mode of communication that the novel nurtures as a particularly human mode of learning how to effectively communicate with and manipulate others. The first episode of empathy-as-communication is one in which empathy is a means of manipulation and control which Valentine, Ender's older sister, recognizes in herself:
"Writing was something Val did better than Peter. They both knew it. Peter had even named it once, when he said that he could always see what other people liked best about themselves, and flatter them. It was a cynical way of putting it, but it was true. Valentine could persuade other people to her point of view–she could convince them that they wanted what she wanted them to want. Peter, on the other hand, could only make them fear what he wanted them to fear. When he first pointed this out to Val, she resented it. She had wanted to believe she was good at persuading people because she was right, not because she was clever. But no matter how much she told herself that she didn't ever want to exploit people the way Peter did, she enjoyed knowing that she could, in her way, control other people. . . . She was ashamed that she took pleasure in this power, and yet she found herself using it sometimes. . . . Sometimes, she was able to persuade even Peter. That was the most frightening thing of all–that she could understand Peter well enough, could empathize with him enough to get inside him that way." (127-28)
Although these latter two modes of communication and information synthesis move away from the structural similarity to Cyberpunk that I have been focusing on, I think that the particular way in which they are juxtaposed with technological communication and its effects is crucial. Writing, as the penultimate communication technology, emerges from this context of the power and effect of what the novel wants to posit as a "native" mode of human communication; however, as a result of this juxtaposition the novel asks us to consider whether we must finally understand these "native" modes as themselves culturally-produced technologies.
With Ender's Game you will be taken away via space travel and intergalactic warfare between humans and aliens; you will be confronted by the ethical conundrum of adult military experts on Earth breeding and training genius children in order to exploit the qualities that make them children as a means of producing a defensive military fleet that can defeat the buggers by imitating in war tactics their Ancible-like immediacy of communication. You will also be provoked to consider the value of writing throughout the text. Is writing best understood and most valuable because it is capable of communicating what is real and actual, a possibility put forward in the text through the writing-based cult that emerges from a mode of storytelling Ender provokes called "Speaker For the Dead"?:
"when . . . a loved one died, a believer would arise beside the grave to be the Speaker For the Dead, and say what the dead one would have said, but with full candor, hiding no faults and pretending no virtues. Those who came to such services sometimes found them painful and disturbing, but there were many who decided that their life was worthwhile enough, despite their errors, that when they died a Speaker should tell the truth for them." (322-323)
Or, conversely, is writing, and at this point artistic expression in general, most valuable because of the ways in which it serves as a metaphor for the fact that human beings do not have immediate or full access to one another, nor the possibility of communicating immediately or fully, represented by the world-changing successes of the net personas Locke and Demosthenes, as well as by the beautiful failures enacted by the fairy castle whose specificities I wouldn't dare give away, and whose presence provokes Ender to ask, "But where was the message and how would he understand it?" (318)
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For more on Science Fiction and Cyberpunk, see "Voice of the Shuttle"
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