Tuesday, December 31, 2013

Speaker for the Dead, chapter one, part three, in which Pipo makes a lot of bad decisions

I missed last week's post, quite unintentionally.  And now this one is late.  Holiday season; y'all know how it is.  I've also now read ahead a bit, just the next three posts or so.  I don't think that enough information came up to affect my analysis of any of this material so far.  I just know that it's going to start getting really, really bad soon.  I have previewed my horror and I can see the pain incoming again.  (I mentioned to my mother that I was reading Speaker for the first time and she tried to talk me out of it, like I had said I was going to hitchhike to Mexico.  She does care.)

Let's wrap this first sucker up.

(Content: sexism, murder.  Fun content: balloons, the human nervous system.)

Speaker for the Dead: p. 20--30

It takes three days for Novinha to take the test to become the new xenobiologist of Milagre, and because she is 13 years old and a main character in a Card novel, she passes with a score better than most graduate students.  Obviously reasonable.  She starts spending most of her time in the Zenador's Station, because they have all the cool data, and Libo finds her cold condescension aggravating, especially since they're the same age and presumably both ubergeniuses but she has an adult job and he's still just apprenticing.
He was not prone to taking umbrage openly.  But Pipo knew his son and saw him burn.  After a while even Novinha, insensitive as she was, began to realize that she was provoking Libo more than any normal young man could possibly endure.  But instead of easing up on him, she began to regard it as a challenge.  How could she force some response from this unnaturally calm, gentle-spirited, beautiful boy?
*blows noisemaker*

Well done, Card.  Managed to make it to page 20 before describing a barely-pubescent boy as 'beautiful' in an explicitly romantic/sexual context.  (Of course it's romantic/sexual, and yes of course Libo and Novinha will hook up within the next few years/pages.  What kind of book do you think this is?)  Novinha snipes at him one day when she learns that Pipo and Libo have never met a female Little One and don't know anything about how the species reproduces.  (They described the concepts of male and female, and all of the Little Ones have identified themselves as male.)  Libo is quiet for a while before responding at all, and then they have this back and forth of "Obviously you should just do this" and "Well, no, that won't work because X" until finally X is "Because trying to tell them what we want their hair for would risk giving away scientific secrets that could change the course of their society and ruin everything".
Once she realized that they were excellent at their science, and that she knew almost nothing of it, she dropped her aggressive stance and went almost to the opposite extreme. [....] Politeness gradually gave way to familiarity.  Pipo and Libo began to converse openly in front of her, airing their speculations about why the pequininos had developed some of their strange behaviours, what meaning lay behind some of their strange statements, why they remained so maddeningly impenetrable.
Libo and Novinha become BFFs, making inside jokes based on their unique scientific information that no one else except Pipo could possibly understand.  And it's sort of sweet, but I also wonder why, with the galactic instant internet that's been in place for over 3000 years, none of them have, say, friends on other planets.  A hundred worlds with a total human population in the tens or hundreds of billions--shouldn't the galaxy be full of lonely supergenius teenagers looking for someone else smart enough to get them and make complicated xenobiology jokes?

Basically what I'm saying is that Card was very impressive to foresee political blogs but this is the part where he clearly did not see tumblr incoming.

So then there's a misogynistic interlude in which Libo riffs off the Little Ones' habit of naming trees and starts naming their office furniture.  Actual quote: "Don't sit on Chair!  It's her time of the month again."  And Novinha does the same, obviously, she writes "a series of mock reports on an imaginary pequenino woman called Reverend Mother, who was hilariously bitchy and demanding."

Now, maybe, maybe, these arrogant teenagers mocking the primitive aliens' noted reverence for their unseen female population are still going to accurately collect and assess and analyse all of their information, and aren't going to let their superiority affect their objective rational Sciencemastery at all.  But maybe--probably--they won't, and if that happens there will be no one to catch them, no one to call them out, because they are utterly isolated from the rest of their community and the only people who are even aware of the mockery going on in the privacy of the Zenador's Station are the three of them who are complicit in it.  Where is the oversight?  For that matter, where are the experts from the rest of the galaxy making trips to Lusitania to attempt to add insight or oversight to their work?  (Travel might be stupidly expensive, but that won't stop Ender from jetting in shortly, and no one thinks it's weird to request a Speaker to come in.)

This here is exactly how science and academia get bigotry in them and become part of the larger system of oppression--it's just a joke, and then it isn't.

But when they do ruin everything one day, it's not because of that, of course.  It starts with Rooter, alien teenage supergenius, who demands to know who it is that the humans go to war with, since he knows they only have one city.  Pipo reassures him that the humans would never kill the Little Ones, and some time later Rooter remarks--joking, but he's smart enough to know that jokes are always about the implicit truth--that the only reason Pipo is still alive is that "your women are too stupid to know that he is wise".

The weird hybrid of bloodlust and misogyny continues, until Libo finds a safe answer.
"Most women don't know him," he said. 
"Then how will they know if he should die?" asked Rooter.  Then, suddenly, he went very still and spoke very loudly.  "You are cabras!" [....] He pointed at Libo and then at Pipo.  "Your women don't choose your honor, you do!  Like in battle, but all the time!"
'Cabra' means 'goat', and they seem to be the bison or antelopes of Lusitania.  Pipo tries to explain that couples make decisions together, but the Little Ones continue shouting in distress and then haul Rooter away into the forest and forbid the humans to follow.  Pipo and Libo book it and try to figure out what happened, starting with Rooter calling human women weak and stupid.
"That's because he's never met Mayor Bosquinha.  Or your mother, for that matter."  Libo laughed, because his mother, Conceição, ruled the archives as if it were an ancient estação in the wild mato--if you entered her domain, you were utterly subject to her law.
Paraphrasing Card: "Gosh, I sure do have some strong female characters offscreen.   Hoo boy, if you could only see them!  Now then, back to making sexist jokes about primitive tribal cultures."  Also, our characterisation of Conceição now consists of knowing that she doesn't believe children are full people, she doesn't understand her husband's quiet brilliant insights into human nature, and she's iron-fistedly domineering about her library.  Top notch, Card.

The forest is loud with drumming that night, and Pipo and Libo wonder if they haven't accidentally introduced the concept of sexual equality to the Little Ones--meaning, of course, not that the revered females might have broken free of wherever they're hidden away, but that the males might have thrown off their shackles and be fighting for liberation.  I have literally no idea what these 'shackles' might consist of, but a whole lot of ideas about why the males might be keeping the females locked up and never let them meet the outsiders.  Sigh.

In the morning they find a patch of freshly cleared earth, and Rooter's corpse with a tree growing out of his chest.  It's gruesomely detailed--every organ and tissue and sinew has been carefully extracted (though not detached) and laid out in a pattern around his body.  (I keep picturing this amazing but terrifying image of the human nervous system extracted from the rest of the body.)  From the blood spread, they determine that he had to have been alive when they started to eviscerate him.  Libo has the understandable reaction that, if the non-interference law means letting this happen to a person, then the law is ignorant and wrong.

Pipo and Libo debate which of them said something to trigger this sudden violence, and Novinha interrupts:
"Do you think their world revolves around you?  As you said, the piggies did it, for whatever reason they have.  It's plain enough this isn't the first time--they were too deft at the vivisection for this to be the first time." 
Pipo took it with black humor.  "We're losing our wits, Libo.  Novinha isn't supposed to know anything about xenology."
Well done, Sherlock.  So they file their report, and the committees agree that since the Little Ones are going to meet human women sooner or later it would have been stupid for Pipo to lie about our genders, so nothing could have been done differently.  Life and research go on, although Libo is traumatised and doesn't return to the field for weeks--he grew up hearing about the Little Ones and had known Rooter by proxy for years.  I like this; for once someone's empathy for aliens seems realistic, rather than nonexistent or 'Oh my god this fanfic has changed society's entire outlook on our near-extermination'.

Libo and Novinha continue to bond more intensely, treating the Zenador's Station as their only sanctum now that the Little Ones seem just as mysterious and dangerous as other people always have.  Pipo and Libo apparently can't get over the feeling that one of them must have ruined everything, so Libo and Novinha are each other's only non-stressful companions.  Pipo goes Shakespearian, comparing the station to the island in The Tempest:
...with Pipo a loving but ever remote Prospero.  Pipo wondered: Are the pequininos like Ariel, leading the young lovers to happiness, or are they little Calibans, scarcely under control and chafing to do murder?
Or both!  I vote for 'both'.

The Little Ones don't talk about Rooter's death, and the humans don't bring it up either, lest they give away more information or trigger more violence, and so the years kind of stumble on.  By age 17, Libo and Novinha often talk about what they'll be doing together twenty years from now, and this sort of saddens me.  Don't get me wrong, I love the fantasy of people finding each other early in life and first love being truest and forever love, but I am also creeped out by the idea of people attaching to each other out of desperation and never having any consideration of other options, especially when they seem to literally have no other friends or anyone--once in a while even they are going to fight, and who are they going to talk to about those issues?  It is good to have your magical one true love to whom you can tell anything, but it is not sufficient.

Also, the romance quotient in the room is reading a solid zero.  I'm going to assume that's because I'm not supposed to be emotionally invested in their relationship and rather just take it as future backstory.
Pipo never bothered to ask them about their marriage plans.  After all, he thought, they studied biology from morning to night.  Eventually it would occur to them to explore stable and socially acceptable reproductive strategies.
Ha ha!  Social pressure to conform to traditional religious institutions regardless of whether they're appropriate to your personal goals, relationship, and preferences sure is adorable.  (Libo and Novinha apparently hypothesise endlessly on how the Little Ones reproduce, given that they only see self-identified males with no apparent mating equipment.  Again, Pipo finds this delightful.  Is this supposed to be a parallel to recommended 'courtship' practices in conservative American Christianity, with the constant chaperone?)

And then one day Novinha is examining plant cells and she finds the Descolada agent sitting in them, the same body that swept through the colony as a plague stopped only at the cost of her parents' lives.  She starts searching specifically for that and finds Descolada in every kind of cell from every kind of species she's catalogued.  She shows Pipo, who starts running the same tests himself and asks her to explain how it functions.  I don't know enough about biology to comment:
"...It attacks the genetic molecules, starting at one end and unzipping the two strands of the molecule right down the middle. [....] In humans, the DNA tries to recombine, but random proteins insert themselves so that cell after cell goes crazy.  Sometimes they go into mitosis, like cancer, and sometimes they die."
Pipo says unnecessarily vague things about how 'it's the same thing' among the cells, then grabs his coat to run outside, telling Novinha that when Libo arrives he should look at the simulation and see if he can figure it out before Pipo returns, because it's "the big one.  The answer to everything."  He says he has to go ask the Little Ones if his theory is right, and if he's not back in an hour he must have broken his leg in the forest.

Pipo would not survive in a horror movie, either.

Libo's committee meeting runs long, and then he gets groceries (where does this tiny walled colony get its food), so he doesn't arrive at the station until after dark, and Pipo hasn't returned.  They go looking for him, preparing for a long scouring of the forest, but very quickly they find him dead in the snow, eviscerated like Rooter without the tree in his chest.

This is just... I don't even know what to say.  Is there anyone who doesn't find it howlingly infuriating when a character figures out a vital secret but then refuses to tell anyone else for no good reason and then walks voluntarily into incredible danger?  Like--Pipo, you know this is a subject they kill people over and you know they're super casual about "So, will your women decide to murder the hell out of you soon?"  This isn't hard.  Write something down and take precautions.  (This would work better if he really was trying to take precautions, specifically of the 'Don't let my son come with me into this dangerous situation' variety, but that's not how the situation is sold.)

So let's hypothesise wildly based on the hints dropped.  The plague that takes apart your DNA is a vital part of this planet's life.  The Little Ones consider themselves all male and no one ever sees a female.  The females apparently evaluate the males and decide when the wisest ones should die, and they are specifically killed in a particular ceremonial and surgical manner.  Conclusion: death is part of their reproductive cycle, male Little Ones die in order to open up access to their DNA, and only the best are chosen to die in this particular way and contribute to future generations.  I'm trying to decide if it's more likely that the trees are simply ceremonial or if female Little Ones actually are trees because the whole ecosystem is interlinked somehow.  Anyway, that's why Rooter was so concerned about the humans having another village to go to war with--because war and associated death is ceremonial (or somehow mandatory) as part of their reproductive cycle.

Not sure how long I'm going to have to wait to have my guesses confirmed or rejected (I know it won't be within the next twenty pages) but I'm going to be unimpressed if Pipo worked it out in thirty seconds but his genius proteges don't catch on for decades and need Ender's help to solve the mystery.  Seriously, Pipo, write a note or something.  Don't just Fermat us.  That's a jackass move.

Speaking of jackass moves, come back next week when we catch up with Ender and endure some just really spectacularly bad theological strawmen!  And, if you can't wait for that, look for the return of Erika the blogqueen later this week!  It is about to be a new year and we are GEARING UP.

40 comments:

  1. Is there anyone who doesn't find it howlingly infuriating when a
    character figures out a vital secret but then refuses to tell anyone
    else for no good reason and then walks voluntarily into incredible
    danger?


    Orson Scott Card, obviously.

    but I'm going to be unimpressed if Pipo worked it out in thirty seconds
    but his genius proteges don't catch on for decades and need Ender's help
    to solve the mystery.


    LOL. See, guys, this is WHY you spend more than one weekend studying science before they let you do original research.

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  2. So there's "Descolada" is every single non-imported cell on the planet? And it's also the infectious agent that killed so many people, which you'd think they'd look for under that whole "how are we getting infected?" question. And they're just realizing that NOW? How stupid were the colony's original xenobiologist(s) that they didn't realize that? How stupid are these supposed geniuses that they only found it after however many years it's been?

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  3. Pipo's actions remind me of the informers in poorly written mysteries. You,know, the ones who offer a big tip but refuse to explain over the phone, so the detective has to drive over to their apartment, which gives the murderer plenty of time to kill the informer, ransack the place for the clue, watch a movie, and still be long gone when the detective gets there.

    But the problem isn't the cliche. It's that I've never encountered an instance of it that wasn't #1 mind-blowingly stupid, #2 absurdly contrived, #3 painfully obvious (what's the chance the informer will be alive when the detective gets there and give him the tip? -386%), and #4 completely unnecessary.

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  4. Yeah, exactly how is that supposed to work? Was it somehow invisible until now? Did no one ever look at the cells of native life before? These are not questions we should be asking.

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  5. "By age 17, Libo and Novinha often talk about what they'll be doing
    together twenty years from now, and this sort of saddens me. Don't get
    me wrong, I love the fantasy of people finding each other early in life
    and first love being truest and forever love, but I am also creeped out
    by the idea of people attaching to each other out of desperation and
    never having any consideration of other options, especially when they
    seem to literally have no other friends or anyone--once in a while even
    they are going to fight, and who are they going to talk to about those
    issues? It is good to have your magical one true love to whom you can
    tell anything, but it is not sufficient.
    "

    See: Twilight.

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  6. The logic of it is, that there were only ever two xenobiologists in the colony, married to each other. They both died in the plague leaving a five-year-old daughter. Presumably their students also died in the plague. Apparently, the only person in the entire colony who then started studying xenobiology in order to understand the native life of the world they are attempting to colonise was a five-year-old girl.

    Since the headteacher of the colony's only school did not know Novinha was teaching herself xenobiology to graduate level, it appears that it occurred to no one that it would be jolly useful to know about the native life in the world and that any student with any kind of aptitude for learning biological science ought immediately to have that aptitude fostered and encouraged and set to study the working notes of the previous xenobiologists. Indeed, given that there is apparently a thriving school with multiple teachers in the colony, plus a bishop and priests, it would seem logical that the science teachers of the school - while obviously needing to continue their work of educating the next generation - should have been studying this, too.

    And however interested anthropologists are in studying the Little Ones, given a disaster that wipes out the colony's only qualified xenobiologists and given ansible communication, why wouldn't biologists on other worlds have been interested to study a problem like the Descolada?

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  7. Novinha (and apparently several other women in the colony) fit the definition of the tsundere to a tee - aggressive, poking, child, then suddenly polite and sweet on the person that has apparently penetrated her armor. Which I'm sure will them be put into the service of making it impossible for Novinha to solve the mystery, because emotional females are just no good at that science thing. Blech.

    Also, ansible communication should prevent any sort of Roanoke Island scenario, as the survivors or last members in the plague would be transmitting their data elsewhere, either as a problem to solve or a warning to stay away. The discoveries being made here by preteen geniuses should already have been done repeatedly. Their absence suggests conspiracy. Or really bad writing. But mostly conspiracy.

    Similarly, Pipo might have made the jump to the supreme conclusion, but if he's any sort of scientist, the others should be able to pick up his research notes and follow him to the point of insight. Grah. This is not science...

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  8. I also have to wonder: how did this planet get cleared as habitable/safe for settlement in the first place, if it hosts such a dangerous pathogen? This is why you send in science teams first, to study the environment and find out what is around that can kill you, BEFORE you send in the colony ships. Apparently in the Enderverse they just... don't do that. Because if they had, either the previous scientists would have noticed something that ubiquitous, and probably would have been killed by the Descolada themselves. Which might have prompted the authorities to go "woah, hold up, this planet is really dangerous, maybe we should not settle here. At least not until we figure out how to keep people from having their DNA shredded."

    I'm also not sure why no one outside Lusitania is studying the Descolada. Again, if we're assuming instant universal Internet, I imagine there would be a LOT of scientists very curious to study this thing and (more importantly) why it works the way it does. Which Pipo and Libo seemingly never bothered to consider, even though that kind of thing doesn't just develop without a reason or function behind it.

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  9. This here is exactly how science and academia get bigotry in them and
    become part of the larger system of oppression--it's just a joke, and
    then it isn't.


    I feel genuinely unsure how to read this scene. It seems like Card must mean us to see it as wrong, since it seems kind of stupid if we accept the ending. And he probably has another attack on materialistic thinking underway, this time directed at anti-missionary attitudes. That, or I'm wasting my time trying to find meaning in something as empty of all sense and intention as cloud patterns or Left Behind.

    Not sure how long I'm going to have to wait to have my guesses confirmed
    or rejected (I know it won't be within the next twenty pages) but I'm
    going to be unimpressed if Pipo worked it out in thirty seconds but his
    genius proteges don't catch on for decades and need Ender's help to
    solve the mystery.



    Probably not real spoilers:


    MWAHAHAHAHA! Actually, I don't know what Novinha figures out. She has her own problems. Which lead to the disappointment I mentioned earlier, when I wondered if the actual Speaking might be easy to fix. (Levels of screaming and/or crying frustration may vary.)

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  10. "Most women don't know him," he said.



    Does Pipo and/or Rooter talk in the third person? I has confused.



    Moving on, I still continue to be gobsmacked by how contradictory this whole premise is. The whole "whoops, we might have introduced the concept of sexual equality" just... doesn't... ANY COMMUNICATION WITH PEOPLE IS GOING TO INTRODUCE FOREIGN IDEAS. It's literally not possible for them to *not* communicate ideas to the Little Ones, because that's what communication does: it's an interchange of ideas. Null ideas (i.e., seeing the things Pipo and Libo don't consider), too.


    If they don't want to interfere with the Little Ones' evolution, they CANNOT INTERACT WITH THEM. AT ALL. They shouldn't even be on the planet. Does OSC agree with this? Does he want us to think everyone involved in this is a colonialist garbage nightmare? I can't tell.

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  11. (Spoilers, if you care) No, OSC doesn't agree with any of the Prime Directive stuff, it's the Straw Bureaucrats and Straw Scientists off-planet who are advocating that policy (because they're Evil Liberals or something; I don't think he ever gave much of a reason for it. Ostensibly, the book claims it's because they're 'afraid of causing another xenocide' or something but that makes no sense as a rationale for that policy). Once Ender shows up he convinces everyone that the Strawpeople are wrong and that they must teach and be charitable to the Little Ones; IIRC, it's presented very much as 'dispassionate scientific study is wrong, let's be humane'.


    I have no idea what the message of that was supposed to be.

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  12. I have no idea what the message of that was supposed to be.

    It sounds like a statement about missionaries to me. But "they must teach and be charitable to the Little Ones" is what triggered that thought - the condescension of "Little Ones" and that humans know better and have more wisdom.

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  13. I have read and reread and reread this section, but I can't figure out what "your women are too stupid to know that he is wise" means.

    The whole thing seems to be caught up in some kind of weird, perverted what-Card-thinks-a-matriarchal-society is (I'm blanking on what the counterpoint of misogyny is. brain wants "androgyny" but ahhaha that's not it at all). But I've no plans to read the book - not now that I'm seeing it laid bare here - so I'm not familiar with the other context that might explain that line. Help?

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  14. Rooter is coming from a culture that apparently thinks killing wise men is a normal thing (see my theory that it's part of their reproductive process) and women decide who dies, so if Pipo is wise and still alive it must be because his wisdom is unrecognised by those women. Apparently. (The counterpart to misogyny is misandry, but I don't think that's what's supposed to be happening here.)

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  15. Sorry if I quoted unclearly; the line there is Libo, describing Pipo to Rooter. Pipo is apparently mostly unknown by women. Aside from Dona Cristã and his wife, I guess.

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  16. ARGH EVERYTHING ABOUT THAT IS TERRIBLE.


    (Thank you.)

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  17. Ah-ha! No, I don't think that was you; I'm clearly getting confused by there being so many "he's" in the room.


    Hopefully when Ender arrives, he'll always be referred to by his appropriate title Jesus McHolySpecial or whatever.

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  18. Incidentally, I have a whole theory about how the word "little" is almost always used in a way to indicate diminutive status/value and not just height/size. Orson Scott Card is being filed into this theory as we speak.

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  19. Yes, though keep in mind that was my paraphrase and not Card's actual words (for instance, I suspect the book used 'piggies'; I substituted 'Little Ones' because it's what they call themselves).


    There was definitely a missionary aspect, though some of it was also 'let's share our technology with them', which I was more or less okay with... even though there's definitely lots of patronising awfulness involved.

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  20. So I broke down today and bought the book so that I can follow along better, with my beloved context.

    A) I am still GOBSMACKED at the opening and the acrobat bit and the WHOOPS I SHARED KNOWLEDGE because fffffffffff.

    B) Gotta love that the 13 year old boy is better at not sharing knowledge than his dad. OSC, TROLLOLOLOLOL.

    C) Husband, who has listened to this book on video tape, when I told him I was going to read this book: "I'm so sorry for you." Apparently it did not make a good impression, ha!

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  21. OMG I FINALLY CAUGHT UP AND OMG OMG OMG. THIS IS SO AWFUL. BUT HERE IS A THING I WANNA TALK ABOUT.

    Pipo and Libo speculated that perhaps the human
    example of sexual equality had somehow given the male pequeninos some
    hope of liberation. [...] It was a sobering thought—that doing their job faithfully might lead Starways Congress to forbid them to do their job at all.

    I love -- and by "love" I mean I want to throw this book into a supernova -- how fucking self-centric this is. Pipo and Lido have potentially completely upset an entire society, there may be violent social upheaval on the horizon, people are almost guaranteed to die (because that's what social upheaval usually does), and an entire society may be irrevocably changed overnight. Possibly not for the better. Possibly not in ways which will ever allow them to be peaceful again.

    And Pipo and Lido are worried about THEIR JOBS. Because of course they fucking are. And not even a kind of worry that allows them to also be concerned about the Little Ones who may die over this--they're 100% thinking about themselves. These guys shouldn't be allowed to study PLANKTON.

    Also? That "doing their job faithfully" cracks me the fuck up. BECAUSE IT IS A LIE. Pipo broke the rules because he felt like breaking the rules would be better than saying "I'm sorry, I don't understand, possibly we have a language barrier problem?" when faced with a question that HE DIDN'T UNDERSTAND BECAUSE OF A LANGUAGE BARRIER PROBLEM. The book straight-up says he broke the rules:

    In this case, Pipo could see no point but to
    tell the truth; it was, after all, a relatively obvious and trivial bit
    of information about human society. It was against the rules that the
    Starways Congress had established for him, but failing to answer would
    be even more damaging, and so Pipo went ahead.

    That's not faithfully doing your job. That's deciding that the rules don't apply to you because you think the rules are wrong. You might be right that the rules are wrong, but you don't get to act all wounded about how you did your job by the book and now you aren't allowed to at all waa waa waambulance.

    Also, AGAIN, if they aren't allowed to do their jobs, it's because despite everyone's (supposed) best efforts, HUMANITY HAS FUCKED UP ANOTHER RACE. Humanity would be 2 for 2 on fucking up alien races. That, to me, is just a touch more important to mourn than waa waaa waa we followed the rules but we're being punished anyway. You're not being punished, you selfish garbage monsters, your job just because impossible because the alien race you're supposed to be studying has now been irrevocably altered by your intervention.

    WHICH IS A THING YOU KNEW ABOUT YOUR JOB GOING IN, FFS.

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  22. I fully agree, but I also figured this was part of the hamhanded one-two punch this chapter is supposed to deliver, the sudden shift when Libo thinks 'Oh, I wonder if we've shaken up their society, we might get in trouble'--when he then sees that made concrete, finding Rooter's corpse, he immediately goes to 'Oh my god we ruined everything what have I done'. So I think the initial reaction is meant to be self-centred, because Libo is a child lacking real perspective. Pipo has no excuse, but as noted, Pipo is a useless person who makes terrible decisions.

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  23. That may be. A big problem is that I am having a hard time with Orson Scott Card because our values dissonance is SO HUGE that I'm never clear how much he realizes that his characters are self-centered garbage monsters. So subtlety in writing it shading over into a sort of Poe's Law area, if that makes any sense at all.

    Like, Ender was super self-centered at times, and was all "waa I might not get to fight the buggers" at least one time that I distinctly remember (though admittedly not all the time, but that's another thing) even though he wasn't really MOTIVATED to fight the buggers, but he'd accepted it was raison d'etre and (mostly) didn't want it taken from him.

    So I'm not sure if this Pipo/Lido thing is more of the same or if OSC actually realizes how intensely selfish they are. Even Novinha's "their world doesn't revolve around you" is kind of a weird extreme in the other direction, to me. I feel like the text is avoiding holding Pipo and Lido accountable for their horrible, horrible actions. :/



    I'm also gobsmacked at the whole "we have no way to get their DNA" thing because apparently they don't have picnic blankets to set down and then fold up and take back in with them. But of course we all know that the existence of picnic blankets and acrobats would change society, while language and gender equality are just trivial little things. BLUH.

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  24. Incidentally, I have a whole theory about how the word "little" is
    almost always used in a way to indicate diminutive status/value and not
    just height/size.



    I agree; at least for me, something like "Short Ones" doesn't have the same overtones at all.

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  25. Yeah. The most common phrases I hear "little" in are:

    1. pretty little things
    2. worry your little head
    3. [foolish / silly] little girl

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  26. GeniusLemur, I believe you have left out that the murderer must also pretend to have been attacked(fake hit on the head or fake strangulation preferred), or else leave a false clue in the form of something monogrammed in a way that incriminates at least two of the other suspects (handkerchiefs are popular here). There is the option of the fake final message written in blood by the murderer. Extra points if there is a cryptic statement by the informer that is phrased in a way that nobody would ever naturally phrase such a statement, and that therefore is misleadingly taken to refer to absolutely anyone but the actual murderer.
    I have read much Christie and much John Dickson Carr. I swear, pretty much every Christie murder mystery had That Victim who died because they could not spit out the murderer's name.

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  27. Speaker for the Dead has now changed within my head into a Pink Pantheresque farce of Pipo and Libo trying to get Rooter's DNA. I am hoping that at some point this will involve gorilla costumes and a monkey, and possibly a nudist camp.

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  28. "That's not faithfully doing your job. That's deciding that the rules don't apply to you because you think the rules are wrong. You might be right that the rules are wrong, but you don't get to act all wounded about how you did your job by the book and now you aren't allowed to at all waa waa waambulance."

    OSC is kind of notorious for thinking that there are Good People and that the Good People have Good Ideas and do Good Things, just 'cuz. (For the Bad People, of course, life works the opposite way.) There seems to be some kind of law/grace polarity involved, which ensures that since Good People live by grace and not by law, they're independent of the rules. Instruction booklets are for grubs: those who have been rapt up in the mantle of the divine have hatched out of the cocoon and float free of all such obstructions (etc., etc.). I may be overstating the case but I don't think I'm mis-stating it.

    See: C. S. Lewis.

    (Of course the protagonists of OSC books are Good; otherwise, why write about them?)

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  29. Well said.


    Also, I know that there is nothing really original in literature, but how sad is that this book earned a ton of awards, while other ones, which handle the narrative a hundred times better, do not? Ursula K. LeGuin's Hainish Cycle comes to mind, since (in the books I've read, anyway) the stories always seem to come back to the principle of interacting with alien races that haven't reached your level of evolution.


    I haven't read Speaker for the Dead, but I have a feeling Card isn't going to bemoan the fact that humanity has played God to another race (again,) and turn it into another story of failure.

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  30. Actually, he did give a reason. ROT-13 for spoilers:

    Jr yrnea yngre ba gung Fgnejnlf Pbaterff jnf nsenvq bs jung zvtug unccra vs gur crdhravabf bognvarq bhe grpuabybtl, naq va cnegvphyne vagrefgryyne syvtug. Gurl jrer irel njner gung ng gur fgneg bs uhznavgl’f vagrenpgvbaf jvgu gur Ohttref, jr unq bayl n fvatyr jbeyq naq gurl unq obgu fhcrevbe grpuabybtl naq na vagrefgryyne pvivyvmngvba – ohg ol gur raq, jr unq qrfgeblrq gurz hfvat grpuabybtl juvpu jr unq erirefr-ratvarrerq sebz gurve fgnefuvcf. Gur ohernhpengf jrer nsenvq gur crdhravabf zvtug qb gur fnzr gb hf. Gurve uvtu-zvaqrq vqrny bs cebgrpgvat gur crdhravab phygher sebz bhef jnf bayl n (cbffvoyl hapbafpvbhf) pybnx sbe gurve erny nvzf: gb cerirag gur nyvraf sebz trggvat bhe grpuabybtl juvyr fgvyy xrrcvat na rlr ba gurz.

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  31. Oh, that's right. I wonder why I'd forgotten about that - that's actually a pretty reasonable argument, all things considered. (juvpu rkcynvaf jul Pneq qbrfa'g ernyyl ratntr jvgu vg ng nyy, naq qvfzvffrf vg ol univat gur crdhravabf qrpyner, rffragvnyyl, "jr cebzvfr gb or avpr, abj funer lbhe grpuabybtl jvgu hf").

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  32. "So I think the initial reaction is meant to be self-centred, because Libo is a child lacking real perspective."

    Sounds like it would be a good idea not to leave these decisions to a couple barely-adolescent kids, then.

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  33. As an aside, the galactic instant internet is strongly implied to be very expensive to use (which makes some sense, I suppose: bandwidth is not unlimited). This is all contradicted by the arrival of an AI that uses said instant internet the way we use neural pathways, but perhaps that AI is using all the bandwidth and Starways Congress has really incompetent network monitors...

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  34. Also, Will asked about its biological plausibility. Obviously, it's not plausible, but that's not really a strike against a McGuffin in SF.


    [major spoilers for a series McGuffin below]


    While it is a neat idea, basically there is *nothing* plausible that can combine phenotypes from evolutionarily remote kingdoms into a single being like the descolada does, so introducing some halfway-plausible-sounding techspeak is a reasonable get-out if you want to do that: its mechanism of action is gibberish but it's gibberish that uses the right words in the right order.


    If you want to retain a mind in life stages that don't already have one, the whole thing becomes even less likely, particularly if you also want to make sure those minds have a way to communicate with each other. At least Card does mention that this can't be done very often: the descolada exterminated almost every species on the planet -- yet somehow the resulting ecology worked, even with only a few species in it, yeah right. Oh also nothing at all managed to evolve resistance, like that would ever happen; even *I* can think of a few terrestrial species that could resist the descolada as described with no effort at all (Deinococcus radiodurans, for instance, and probably most extremophiles and organisms that can survive dessication).


    I wonder if he was trying to suggest parallels with the oxygen catastrophe, another example of endosymbiosis and a massive extinction pulse proceeding in parallel (though one was the cure for the other, not its cause).


    I note that Egan does something similar with the organisms in his _Orthogonal_ trilogy, and Asimov does something similar with the organisms in part 2 of _The Gods Themselves_, but in both cases those organisms evolved that way, and in both cases the reproductive stage took the biologically plausible and nicely morally icky approach of resorbing the brain during metamorphosis/reproduction, just as happens when insects metamorphose. Now if Card had done *that* he'd *really* have had a moral dilemma: the pequeninos' brains are digested / disintegrate during this process, but if you stop it they all die out. As it is, he reached for a cheap get-out. Oh look, they're all really still alive and the same people they used to be, even though this happens to no other species on the planet, unless you believe the *grass* is sentient. Sigh.

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  35. No indeed: this is perhaps an SFization of religious afterlives. (Totally unsurprising spoiler, not even worth rot13ing really: Ebbgre vfa'g qrnq.)

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  36. Fun fact--the first viral helicase was discovered the same year Speaker for the dead was published.
    The first helicase in general was discovered ten years sooner.

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  37. Ur'f...ur'f, nu...cebonoyl cvavat sbe gur swbeqf.

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  38. The thing that gets me is the way that learning that an alien species is socially and/or biologically similar to a known species native to one's homeworld is treated like it should be a shocking world-changing event that alters how one views oneself and one's own society (and apparently requires one to be killed to keep this a secret) when it happens to the pequininos when humans in the book have repeatedly been in the same situation and the humans' response appears to have been "Let's give the alien species an insulting nickname that references the homeworld species."

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  39. Well done, Card. Managed to make it to page 20 before describing a barely-pubescent boy as 'beautiful' in an explicitly romantic/sexual context.


    Even when I first read Card's books, I noticed that he frequently sexualizes children and sometimes writes in incestuous subtext. However, I didn't start to seriously wonder about it until I learned that Card was a massive homophobe. Maybe he hates gays because he projects his own pedophilic desires on them.

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