Ender’s Saga, sans the Forth

I found myself writing something soft and sappy about Ender’s Game after reading it, never finished, and then I read the next two novels, Speaker for the Dead and Xenocide, and the illusion was well broken. There’s a forth, Children of the Mind, but despite it being the second half cleaved from Xenocide, after Xenocide I find myself hard pressed to read #4. So we are going to pretend it doesn’t exist except for the brief synopsis on Wikipedia.

Ender’s Game is one of those classic novels you may have read in school. It was released in 1985 by Orson Scott Card, who would have been about 34 at the time, but he had been publishing since the 70s. Ender’s story would continue on for decades. Even today Card still writes and publishes for Ender, but Ender’s Game was the first and, out of the three I have read, the best.

Ender’s Game is simplistic, following just Ender and then his two Earthbound siblings as a secondary plotline. Three main characters with spatterings of child soldiers flittering in and out of Ender’s life. The climax is unexpected and shocking (in a good way), though the ending after that is divisive. Going from a 10 year old boy to a 20 year old man running a colony on an alien planet in the course of a few sentences will certainly do that. But before that, Ender’s game is easy to swallow, it’s themes uncomplicated and plot one-track-minded. It’s not so subtle in it’s criticism of the military, child soldiers/lost childhoods, and war.

Then, you pick up the second book, Speaker for the Dead. From #1 to #2 Card makes a great leap that is incredibly jarring, but it pushes us forward into an expanded universe. Once comfortable with that, the book is solid. More complex than the 1st (as sequels usually are) and a large swath of new characters on a new planet. But Valentine falls by the wayside, only a distant memory for Ender throughout SFTD. There is mystery, there is conflict, there is tragedy and new belonging. It ends just as abruptly as the 1st ended, with a single sentence marrying Ender to Novinha, who he had never expressed previous romantic affection for except for when he first saw her teenage face. But otherwise it ends well; an interspecies treaty is formed and the Hive Queen emerges again. This one tries to tell us peace is hard work but worth it, unfortunately that is layered under Card’s love of colonialism and his thoughts on religion.

You want to know what happens next with the Hive Queen and so pick up the third book, Xenocide. With a name like that you might dread the future for the buggers and pequeninos. But #3 is wildly different than #2, a seemingly endless train of thought. I describe this book as Card talking to himself. There is still remnants of his writing there, mainly through the new planet of Path, but the majority of this book is a hodgepodge of philosophical essays on God that he put quotation marks around and credited to his fictional characters. Characters we grew to know from SFTD have been watered down into clones of Ender or Valentine. Except if they are a woman, because then they get a dash of hysterics. It ends with most of the plot unresolved, because the book was so long that the publisher forced Card to cut it in half. Thus, where Xenocide leaves us unfulfilled, we are expected to continue with Children of the Mind to find out the conclusion to the main story of Ender. But I had such a hard time with large pieces of Xenocide that I cannot image forcing myself to do so again with the forth book. In Xenocide, he hits you over the head with the same arguments about peace being worth it but this time it feels more like he’s beating you with a bat. This book really didn’t tell you anything new, only amplified previous messages by 10, coupled with the occasional messy 90s sci-fi that was so endearing in Star Trek.

Card, as a sci-fi author born in the 50s, has his issues. And where you might be able to ignore those issues through Ender’s Game due to its simplicity, his opinions only become louder and more obstructive the deeper into the series you get. It’s easy to miss opinionated content in Ender’s Game when it is so subdued and you cannot see a pattern in it. But continued reading reveals the patterns, and indeed makes those patterns scream at you until you can’t help but cringe.

There are three women in Ender’s Game, and all three are not great. One, a religious mother who forgets her son exists once he’s gone. Two, a sister deemed “too empathetic” and “mild” to be of use, whose great deeds are underscored by her brothers’. Three, an emotional child-solider who is the first to have a mental break during combat. “Two” is Valentine, of course, Ender’s older sister who he reveres like a goddess and has an uncomfortably loving and close relationship with that boarders on something not familial. 

But SFTD and Xenocide push the limits of caricature with Card’s women characters. Calm, rational women are the outlier for Card. Where it is unusual in Card’s universe for a man to be violent and unintelligent it is also unusual in Card’s universe for a woman to be unemotional and uninvolved. Ela is the main outlier, here. You can argue Valentine is as well, but by Xenocide she has turned into Ender and I hardly view her as her own character anymore. Long gone is empathetic Valentine, for when she meets disabled Miro the first things out of her mouth are vile insults to his character and personality, based solely on his being disabled. She says everything just short of “don’t be so sensitive just because you’re a c-slur.” By Xenocide, Valentine is not the calm-and-rational outlier woman Card so rarely writes, she has lost all her empathy which had made her Valentine, but has kept which traits that make her reflect Ender’s own. Not even Valentine can be her own woman. If a woman is to be rational in Card’s universe then she is to be a copy of Ender, who himself is frequently hailed as Card’s self insert. Perhaps Ender and Valentine’s relationship, so deeply close that even their own spouses are jealous, is more a reflection of Card wanting to fuck himself more than the other, grosser explanation, which is an obsession with pseudo-incest.

But gender dynamics are very surface level for Card. Beyond that, by SFTD, the main theme is that “colonization and religious indoctrination is a good thing.” The enemy is non-interference, the enemy is letting culture develop on its own timeline. In Card’s universe, it is wrong to let the pequeninos be as they are. In Card’s universe, it is “good” and “noble” to convert non-industrial colonies of pequeninos to Christianity, specifically to Catholicism. In Xenocide, a priest which converts the pequeninos (one of Ender’s stepsons) is a martyr when he dies and he is celebrated for introducing aliens to an Earth religion that is unnatural to them. And this is despite half of the pequeninos planning to take Catholicism and use it to commit genocide against humans, who would die of the virus that they carry, because they believed the virus to be God’s way of purging the unworthy. But Card’s rational is that such pequeninos were “just reading the Bible wrong,” and that “they would regret it,” not that giving tribal aliens the very Earthen, very human, Bible was maybe, just maybe, a bad idea. This could have been a warning to the dangers of interference but, knowing Card and his opinions, that isn’t so. He genuinely sees this all as a “good” and “noble” thing.

Card’s adoration of colonialism is made even more clear in his inability to write space colonies as anything but segregated. By SOTD we are 3,000+ years into the future, 3,000+ years since spaceflight, but humans apparently cannot conceive of interethnic colonies. A colony is either all Nordic, or all Portuguese, or all Chinese, carrying with it the same architectural, religious, and cultural identities that they held 3,000 years ago. If a colony must be Chinese then by God, Card believes that the colony must still uphold kowtowing and the social standards of ancient China and show no sign of cultural drift, save for the addition of computers in each room. If a colony must be Portegese then by God, Card believes the colony must all be blatantly Catholic and built of brick, as if incapable of cultural exchange. Card writes Xenocide in long self-important philosophical dialogues that make you wonder if he thinks the sun shines out of his own ass, but he simply cannot image a human being whom is not a caricature of their society as it was thousands of years ago. He should have put his money where his mouth was and made Ender and his family the picture of White American Mormanism stereotypes, too. But of course he’d never, because he’s Ender, and Card would not want to be stereotyped. I am certain that yes, there are people like his characters which exist in the world. But the inability to show any human as complex cultural peoples who can change, instead having each one represent the accumulation of generalized Wikipedia articles, shows a lack of extended understanding and what I might even call romanticization.

Much of SFTD and Xenocide’s story and themes get lost in Card’s loud, screaming opinion on religion and morality. There was a paragraph in Xenocide about how Ender believed that nobody important ever had pre-marital sex, and how immature one must be to have pre-marital sex. And this, of course, was in response to thoughts about Miro and Ouanda, Miro’s half-sister. Not about how glad Ender was that the siblings didn’t have sex before they knew they were siblings, but about how glad he was that they never had sex because it would have been pre-marital. And on incest- I have barely even touched on it yet. Because incest is a major theme across all three of these books, and if the synopsis for Children of the Mind is right, such theme continues into book four. It would take a while to comb through every incestuous thing in these books, instead I’ve made a chart for you, which took considerably less time to draw than writing about it would.

... But I’ll write it out, anyways, because I hate myself.

- Ender and Valentine have a loving relationship that makes both of their spouses jealous. They are compared to a celibate couple. Card has Ender comment on the perceived strange relationship between them by having Ender imply anyone who thinks they’re incestuous has a “sick mind,” so clearly Card knows about this long-lived interpretation and isn’t happy about it.

- Pipo (father figure to Nova), real father of Libo. Libo, (brother figure to Nova), secret lover to Nova. Nova has 6 children with her brother figure. They aren’t technically siblings, neither by law nor blood, but she grew up with him as if adopted.

- Nova has Miro with Libo, then Libo has Ouanda with his actual wife. Miro and Ouando make out and kiss in great detail. They are half siblings. They stop once it’s known they’re siblings but Miro more than once wallows over how sad he is that they had to stop. He wished they never found out.

- Ender first sees Jane as his lover in book 2. Then later in book 3 sees her as a child. Val, a genetic clone of Valentine in a teenage girl’s body, is taken over by Jane. Thus, Jane, once-lover to Ender, now mind-and-body-sibling to Ender, marries Miro, Ender’s stepson. So, Miro is married to his step sibling and his step father’s ex-lover who is in the body of his step-aunt Valentine.

... And this doesn’t even cover the child-adult and grooming relationships, but I put them on the chart. Multiple relationships start with a teenage girl and an adult man, often with the adult man “waiting” for the child to come of age. Jane is also likened to a child frequently, including in her chosen virtual appearance.

These three books have some good things in them. And once, in 1985, when only Ender’s Game had the great name Ender, it was something special. But as Speaker for the Dead and Xenocide (and Children of the Mind, which I will still not read) released throughout the next decade... the child solider Ender and his remorseful tragedy faded away like fog, replaced by the unavoidable opinions expressed by Card. We all know he holds homophobic views. But his books hold, somehow, even worse views. As much as I loved the conflict between the pequeninos and the humans in Speaker of the Dead, as much as I loved the dysfunctional Ribeira family, it was overshadowed by Card constantly trying to justify colonization and forced religion. As much as I loved the story of Path, the almost sexual mind-merging to the Hive Queen in her presence, it was overshadowed by stuffy chapter-length-rants about God and an insane amount of hatred for the disabled.

Across the 3 books I read there must be well over 300k words, so even though this analysis (review? book report?) is long, if I meant to do a real analysis I don’t think it would fit on Tumblr. And honestly... I don’t want to make an analysis that long, anyway. I had enough thinking to do after Xenocide and a million reviews have been made for Card since the 70s. Everything has been said by everyone else, anyway, and the things I didn’t touch on (or only touched briefly) are written everywhere else, if you want to read them.

For now... I am tired. Ender’s Game will remain one of my favorite old sci-fi novels. But as for the rest of Ender’s story goes... it could have been great, had Card not been the author, or maybe if he’d just stopped kissing his own damned reflection as if he thought himself better than his reader.