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Thank you to all of my friends who have put up with me while I read the enders game series. Here's Jane / Val

i think Ender's Game would slap harder if Ender was a trans girl or nb (under the umbrella)

Ok but what if I really want to hear your Orson Scott Card rant?

...You asked for this.

This is definitely harder to deliver in text format than verbally, but I'll do my best.

Ender's Game is a seminal science fiction novel from the mid 80's about a space war between Earth and an insectoid alien species referred to as "buggers" (they have an actual name I think but I don't remember it). The war has been raging for years, Earth has effectively united to fight it, and particularly intelligent children are taken by the military to train at an orbital boot camp to be the next generation of soldiers. Our protagonist Ender Wiggin, a genius to end all geniuses, is taken to this space station to begin this training. (Ender is a usually-illegal third child who the government gave his parents special permission to produce, since their first two children were both unaccountably brilliant but too violent (Peter) or too gentle (Valentine) to be good child soldiers, which is uhhhh pretty eugenicist BUT THAT'S NOT THE SUBJECT OF THIS PARTICULAR TED TALK-)

The main body of the book covers Ender's time at battle school and is pretty solidly entertaining, with some genuinely interesting thought experiments on zero-g battles and psychological management and manipulation of a young fighting force (though it's, yanno, undercut by the full-page out of nowhere antisemitic raving. I'm not fucking kidding, there's slurs and everything, it's. Fucking wild.) but the really important stuff comes at the end of the book, when Ender and his trusted group of friends are put through a grueling series of simulations designed as a graduation test. Through this series of simulations, Ender, gifted and cursed with an incredible depth of empathy, begins to understand the buggers in a way that no one has before, and by understanding them, knows how to end them. To quote directly:

"In the moment when I truly understand my enemy, understand him well enough to defeat him, then in that very moment I also love him. I think it's impossible to really understand somebody, what they want, what they believe, and not love them the way they love themselves."

Through this understanding, he realizes that the buggers are a hive mind, and that by destroying the center of that hive mind, he can win. So he does, and the simulation ends. And then they tell him he just won the war. He has given real orders to real soldiers, and he has exterminated the buggers. He has loved his enemy, and he has destroyed them.

Compassion is the key theme of Ender's Game. It is what makes Ender and what breaks him when it is exploited. Empathy and understanding for someone deeply, incomprehensibly different from you.

So then we come to Orson Scott Card, great-great-grandson of Brigham Young, a virulent homophobe, a racist (called Obama "a black man who talks like a white man" as an explanation of his success in politics) and antisemite (looking at that FUCKING page again). He wrote this entire book that hinges on empathy, but either refuses or abjectly fails to apply that notion to his own life. It is genuinely remarkable to me that someone can craft a narrative so explicitly about the one trait they seem to lack entirely and not allow it to open some window of understanding into their own shortcomings.

But we're not quite done yet. Let's talk about Xenocide.

Xenocide is the first of 3 sequels to Ender's Game, set some hundreds/thousands (can't remember, it's a long fuckin time) of years after the events of the first book. Humanity has spread across the universe and settled other planets. The book tells the story of a small human community on a planet predominantly inhabited by the pequeninos, a race of piglike sentients with whom human contact is limited to two specific researchers. The researchers' interactions with the pequeninos are going well -- until one day the body of one of the humans is found vivisected by the pequeninos. Later in the book, it happens to the other researcher as well. All this, very understandably, threatens to spark a war.

Then the discovery is made -- the late life cycle stage of a pequenino is to transition from one of the piglike creatures into a tree, which is the form that is actually capable of reproduction. This transition, bestowed upon members of the species who have done something significant or remarkable, is done by vivisection, after which the body sprouts. The pequeninos believed they were bestowing an honor upon the researchers they killed, and were confused when they did not proceed into the next stage of life. When they learn that they in fact killed them, they mourn.

I am so genuinely fascinated by this story as a work of science fiction. I read this book pretty young, but this is all from memory, it stuck with me that vividly. When two species so utterly alien to each other begin to interact, a simple assumption of similarity can end in tragedy, even during acts of respect or good will. It's juicy! It's thought-provoking! The pequeninos are convincingly alien and the scenario makes sense. And the key thing is that they are people, they cared, they wanted to show their respect for the humans they admired. Empathy, speaking with them and understanding their view of the situation, was the only way to move forward in a constructive way, to avoid war and prevent further tragedy.

Another fascinating thing in this book: the concept of a Speaker for the Dead. Through the time-distorting effects of intergalactic travel, Ender is in his mid-30's in Xenocide, having spent the intervening centuries as a Speaker for the Dead, a position named after the role he assumed in writing his own book about the buggers as a species, laying out their story postmortem. The job of a Speaker is to tell the story of a life as the person viewed themselves -- returning once again to empathy, this time as an almost ritualized practice, as a Speaker arrives to a place where they have been requested and has to piece together the life of the deceased in order to tell the tale. (A friend of mine once promised to be my Speaker if I died first, if I'd promise the same. I think that promise still holds, though I somehow doubt both our capabilities toward the task as writ.)

Orson Scott Card loves empathy. It's one of his main themes. He keeps coming back to it, keeps emphasizing it in new and varied ways. And then he turns around and is a fucking asshole in real life. And you can't help but wonder - does he think he's succeeded? Does he think that he's managed to interact with the world in a kind and empathetic way? Does he somehow believe that he truly understands all these groups he seems to actively disdain, to campaign against, to view as alien? Does he think he loves them the way they love themselves?

After 71 spiteful little years on this planet, I somehow don't think change is in the cards for this man before he shuffles off the mortal coil. And yet I can't help thinking... he could stand to read his own books sometime. He might learn something.

i am so far gone in the ender's game brainrot. that like. i can't think anymore.

i guess i've always loved the series but now it's just hitting me. especially speaker for the dead. ender, who felt unworthy, dirty, and unlovable found people who adored him (miro and olhado specifically). this really scratches that found family itch. as someone who's on the aro/ace spectrum and hcs ender to also be on the aro/ace spectrum (i hc him as demiromantic sex positive asexual) for him to find that kind of love and appreciation? and understanding when for so long the only other person who understood him in the whole hundred worlds was valentine? idk. amazing. wonderful. i haven't heard much about novhinia on here and i think she's also such an interesting character. she is so deeply scarred by the fates of the people who loved her before that she has a hard time letting ender love her. and eventually, she lets him in. i just love this book and these characters so so so much. they've become such a big part of my life.

Fav song:

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.

Okay I kinda get being dissapointed at how they rushed the Sov sibling reconcilliation with just one conversation after drawing it out for months but y'all...this really isn't the end-all-be-all of Crow's character arc, nor is it necessarily out of line for him. His biggest weakness is that he's a bleeding heart who lets people walk all over him- remember how he decided not to get revenge on Spider despite Spider very literally keeping him as a slave? Or how he killed a psion because he was too empathetic to a hive guardian? As much as I love him, and as much as his love is a terrifying force when weilded correctly, he's soft and weak. He always has been. He was bound to forgive Mara eventually, esp. since they have a psychic twin bond going on.

I think y'all are also forgetting the fact that Mara has had quite a bit of character development over the past year or so and has very notably been more open about her emotions and better about keeping herself out of Crow's life- because she got bitchslapped by the reality of what she'd done to him in Season of the Lost and then got shaken to the core by her confrontation with the Witness in Witch Queen. She hasn't been 'defanged', she realized that the way she was acting qualified her to be a Disciple (aka the worst of the worst, the enemy she'd been hellbent on fighting this whole time) and that in tandem with Crow's rejection upset her deeply enough for her to change her behavior, which hasn't been as apparent until now. Idk how y'all can forgive how Uldren Sov slaughtered hundreds of Awoken citizens and wreaked havoc on the Reef but is changed as Crow without also acknowledging the fact that Mara herself changed as well. It's not as dramatic of a difference because it happened more gradually and without intervention from a Taken Ahamkara and the Traveller, but its still there and is the most apparent its ever been right now. It wouldn't surprise me if the reason why Crow is forgiving her now- apart from the fact that he's a softie and discounting potential Riven bullshit- is because she's proven she's changed by both keeping her distance and being more emotionally open with him, as well as open about how she knows she fucked up. That's the second thing Uldren wanted other than her approval, after all.

Also, it's been like, 2 years of Crow being pissed at Mara and avoiding her, so them starting to make up now is kinda necessary even if it feels a bit rushed. I personally would have loved to see more snark and nettling from Crow's end, bc I love conflict and sibling angst, but it really isn't out of character nor is it throwing away Crow's character arc. It would have if Mara hadn't changed, but she has. And while I myself love storylines where victims don't need to forgive their abusers and can exert their wrath upon them as they wish, the fact of the matter is that how such a situation needs to be dealt with varies immensely on a person-to-person basis, which the writing team has already proven they're capable of understanding. Just look at Calus's and Caiatl's relationship! That ended with no reconcilliation because Calus simply refused to change, while Mara has spent the past year trying to get Crow to feel comfortable with her as an equal in conversations and open up to him more and trying to break her habit of watching him like a hawk- aka, acting like an actual sister rather than the pseudo-mother figure she'd picked up from Osanna. Ofc Crow the softie is going to respond to that, esp. since he's got a psychic connection to her via Awoken Twin Magic and seems to have been walking Uldren's memories as of late. He just genuinely is really fucking bad at holding a grudge.

(And while its easy to go 'oh the writing is lazy and rushed', I also think its kinda sus that Riven specifically talks about the human wish to reconnect with family right after the Sov sibling talk happens. It wouldn't surprise me if she picked up on Mara's desire to reconnect with her brother and pushed Crow towards forgiving her. It seems like she's been trying to pull Uldren's memories to the forefront everytime she talks with him and that could be a big factor as to why he's been reflecting on them a lot recently)

I don’t know if it’s true, since I found it on TV Tropes (the 40k Nightmare Fuel page), but apparently the Rangdan Xenocide was so horrifying that the Emperor had to release the Void Dragon from Mars to try and stop them.

We know he opened the Noctis Labyrinth during the Xenocides in order to push for victory. We know that's where a large or ascendant shard of the Void Dragon is kept bound. We know from the Mechanicum novel that the Emperor is the one who bound it there, and is the only one who could have bound it there. One can assume because the Imperium couldn't even fathom the technology that goes into making a Tesseract Vault, so he did... Emperor Things... to make "chains" for it. It's fairly reasonable to assume that, given it's the most significant big known thing in the Labyrinth, that it's what he pulled out. Also lines up with the whole "large amounts of the incident being purged" thing. It's bad for PR to know your empire was so fucked that its omniscient ruler had to trot out an eldritch god fragment to save it.

Do I like that the Emperor is able to chain up a C'tan because "He's Da Emprur"? No, but that's a whole other thing.

i've succumbed.

grabbed a copy of ender's game from ebay.

saw the paintings by the guy who wanted to get topped by a witch so bad and got An Idea

very much wanted to keep his traditional subject material, and led to a few “huge lady surrounded by vague, possibly armored figures” images

corrupted depictions of the Lycian Primarch, perhaps? the images distorted by whatever process ripped her from memory like a picture from a book?

I just saw your tags about your cyberpunk protagonist and I am so far beyond intrigued that words fail to capture the true extent of my intriguedness. Is this something which has been put into the world, that we may enrich our lives with its presence?

Alas, nothing yet. I should... probably actually do something practical with her. Her repeatedly backed-up, cloned and instantiated nature means she's done Noble Sacrifice For The Good Of All several times and then just keeps coming back from the dead with increasing levels of detachment from basic human function.

imagine if miku showed up on your computer unprompted and told you that you were mentally ill

Wow

"are you gonna kick me"

"sometimes not being kicked hurts more"

Ok so here's an idea the rangdan well actually the grey aliens who came to terror and abducted people back in the days of ancient Earth. Over they were an independent alien race and they came over to humanity and abducted them because they were thinking about colonizing terror or they were a Dynasty of necrons that didn't go to sleep and were able to regain their flesh and blood forms but were mutated in the process and to becoming grey aliens

Xenocide by Orson Scott Card

With the FULL disclaimer that the author has said some unacceptable and heinous things, I’m still going to write about the book (from my phone before I forget to write it at all).

This novel was not my favorite of the series so far. It dragged in some places where it got bogged down with technical jargon to the point where I had to listen to the audiobook while doing something else. But the ideas presented in the book were also too intriguing for me to put the book down and not finish it. At the same time, you could tell it was a setup for the next book with the large amount of exposition within it.

I loved the conversations between the hive queen and the father tree (I can’t actively remember if it was Router or Human) at the beginning of each chapter. It gave us a different point of view from the conversations the humans had with each species. It also brought to light the strengths and weaknesses of the species during these discussions. One of my favorites was when the Hive Queen discussed how humans think so many things in so many different ways and perhaps that makes us brilliant even if only 1 out of every 1000 ideas is good because that’s still more ideas than they can come up with for any given problem. Even though THEIR idea is the correct one all along (which seems to not be true, their memory just changes as information changes). I also liked the perspectives of the species towards each other. Like how the Hive Queen said the pequenino mind is more simple than that of a human.

The introduction of the new planet Path was an interesting choice (again probably more setup for the next book) but also was pivotal in the discoveries made about faster than light travel across the universe and the descolada. It’s a shame that Qing-jao did not have a redemption arc like I thought she was going to. She simply wanted her parents and the Gods love so badly she refused to stray from her ways even after everyone else did.

I feel like everyone else has done justice to the Peter and Young Valentine introductions. There really isn’t much to say that hasn’t been said. Although I’m interested to see what Ender is like in the next book without those parts of his aiúa in him or if they ever go back into him.

Rating: 7/10 It wasn’t bad. It just wasn’t as good as the other books in the series that I’ve read so far.