Monday, January 6, 2014

Speaker for the Dead, chapter two, in which the galaxy revolves around Ender

Hello and welcome to the new year!  This week we finally catch up with Ender again and it is just amazingly bad.  Also, don't miss Erika's return to Thursday posts later this week with the prologue of Lullaby!

Speaker for the Dead: p. 31--40
Chapter Two: Trondheim

The opening letter for this chapter is from Pipo (full name turns out to be João Figueira Alvarez) to some ridiculous straw professor at the University of Sicily who apparently tried to have Pipo censured for failing to provide sufficient information about how the Little Ones reproduce.
When would-be xenologers complain that I am not getting the right sort of data from my observations of the pequeninos, I always urge them to reread the limitations placed upon me by law.  I am permitted to bring no more than one assistant on field visits; I may not ask questions that might reveal human expectations, lest they try to imitate us; I may not volunteer information to elicit a parallel response; I may not stay with them more than four hours at a time; except for my clothing, I may not use any products of technology in their presence, which includes cameras, recorders, computers, or even a manufactured pen to write on manufactured paper; I may not even observe them unawares.
The specification of 'manufactured' is kind of interesting to me, since it seems to imply that if he were able to craft some kind of makeshift pen and paper those would be allowed.  Surely the greater concern is that they not introduce written language if the Little Ones have no such concept?

But my main protest here is tricky, because it's a clash of reality-versus-story, a bit like people complaining that Frodo doesn't just leap on Gwaihir's back and fly all the way to Mordor to throw the Ring into the Cracks from half a league up.  The in-universe reason is that the skies of Mordor aren't safe and they'd lose all hope of stealth, which is worse than a long walk.  The real reason, of course, is that the point of the story is Frodo's quest and the way it scours Middle-Earth with a reckoning against those who would choose power and domination over peace and mercy.  So, if Speaker is about the chaos of surviving cultural contact when the galaxy-roaming humans of the distant future meet some low-tech incomprehensible aliens and try not to interfere, it sort of misses the point to argue that this should be side-stepped.  And yet!

I feel like Card desperately wants to forget that this story is taking place three thousand years in the future.  Not even just three thousand years in our future, but three thousand years from Ender's time--Ender's time in which humanity already had the technology to sculpt gravity, to create fields that shred molecules in a hungry nova, to project harmless forcefields so subtle that they could easily be confused for physical doors inside an army gymnasium in space.  They can make tiny chips they clip to your spine that let them directly pick up every sensory input your body receives and how it reacts.  They can transmit information instantaneously across any distance, and they know this can be done with biological systems, perfect telepathy.

I think maybe it wouldn't have been a huge stretch to build little observational drones that noiselessly hover around with anti-grav engines, maybe wrap them up in cloaking forcefields, and set them to drift through the forest just listening in.  (I'm pretty sure the forcefields in Ender's Game were always completely opaque, not invisibility cloaks, but I'm only asking them for one technological advancement in three thousand years to pull this off.)  Now, zero question that this would be a huge invasion of privacy, and that is not going to be morally okay with everyone.  On the other hand, the option they did go with still involves tremendous risk, gets little information, has lead to two deaths in this chapter, and is guaranteed to cause some degree of the cultural contamination which supposedly everyone is completely terrified of instigating.  So maybe they should rethink which is the lesser of two evils here.

Anyway.  Pipo's explains "I can't tell you how they court and reproduce because, shockingly, they haven't invited us to watch them bang", flips off his antagonist with academic flair, and we draw back out to the galactic scale, where news of his death has just been ansible-broadcast across the Hundred Worlds.
Within hours, scholars, scientists, politicians, and journalists began to strike their poses.  A consensus soon emerged.  One incident, under baffling circumstances, does not prove the failure of Starways Council policy toward the piggies.  On the contrary, the fact that only one man died seems to prove the wisdom of the present policy of near inaction.  We should, therefore, do nothing except continue to observe at a slightly less intense pace.
I know Card means this as an indictment of this idea, if only because he's talking about the herd-agreement of eggheads, tyrants, and muckrakers trying to look good, rather than the reasoned conclusions of a single pure genius in a sealed box who has never met another living being.  That's where you get the good stuff.
Libo is ordered to cut his contact down to an eighth of its previous level and to not ask the Little Ones what happened to Pipo.
There was also much concern about the morale of the people of Lusitania.  They were sent many new entertainment programs by ansible, despite the expense, to help take their minds off the grisly murder.  And then, having doe the little that could be done by framlings, who were, after all, lightyears away from Lusitania, the people of the Hundred Worlds returned to their local concerns.
Some standard issue panem et circenses criticism of the galaxy, boring--the interesting thing here to me is that this implies ansible broadcast is actually incredibly expensive.  Here I've been assuming that everyone had access to the galactic internet all the time at minimal cost.  We've been told, after all, that it's the pervasive influence of the ansible that keeps all of the Hundred Worlds speaking the same languages--Pipo and Libo upload their findings to the galaxy every single day--yet sending them a Netflix update is an expense out of the ordinary?  They have to file a special requisition explaining their dire need for sitcoms?

It's funny that these books and this author are seen as such a giant in the world of science fiction when it seems so often to be actively antagonistic to coherent and consistent science.  I mean, sure, the SFF umbrella absolutely has room for stories with a high-tech aesthetic and all the scientific rigour of Dr Seuss, but it might be worth asking ourselves if these things would fly by without comment if, for example, the author were a woman and not the type of Jesus-and-warfare, no-homo man that Card is.

In case anyone was worried that Ender might have become a mere human in the last twenty years, the very first sentence describing him assures us that he's still the best person ever:
Outside Lusitania, only one man among the half-trillion human beings in the Hundred Worlds felt the death of João Figueira Alvarez, called Pipo, as a great change in the shape of his own life.
Only Ender feels any personal impact from Pipo's death.  No student of xenology who followed his writings with the faith of a disciple and dreamed of making first contact one day, no desperately compassionate person who feels the pain across the millennia of the xenocide of the formics and fearful of interspecies violence, no one anywhere else in the galaxy feels that their life has been changed by the apparent brutal murder of Pipo Alvarez except Ender.  Sigh.

Andrew Wiggin, who tends not to go by 'Ender' anymore, is speaker for the dead on the ice planet Hoth Trondheim in the university city of Reykjavik, built into the side of a fjord, bastion of Nordic culture.  No, come back, I'm serious.  The most Nordicful place in the galaxy isn't on Earth, it's a college built into a fjord on icy fjord world.  It's a beautiful day in Epcot Galaxy.

Andrew/Ender is a temporary professor, overseeing a discussion among history students about whether the destruction of the Formics was necessary before humans could expand across the stars, which he knows always comes down to people hating on Ender the Xenocide, so he tries not to pay too much attention.  Instead, he listens to his stud--which is to say, the ansible bluetooth gizmo "worn like a jewel in his ear"--reporting Pipo's death, and he interrupts his students to ask them about the Little Ones.
"They are our only hope of redemption," said one, who took Calvin rather more seriously than Luther.
Card just doesn't care that three thousand years have passed, apparently.  The theologies of Calvin and Luther are still a huge deal to these university students, rather than any other authors who might have made some contributions to concepts of theodicy and salvation.  They aren't even Nordic theologists!  (I suppose John Calvin did flee to Switzerland before publishing his big stuff [edit: I have been reminded that Switzerland is also not a Nordic country, my bad], but that doesn't change the fact that Card appears to mostly have wanted to set this book last week, a few blocks from his house.  I wouldn't even know what the hell these people are talking about if I hadn't been reading Fred Clark for the last six years.  Shorthand: they disagreed a bit on the degree to which salvation from hell was flexible or predetermined.)

The students start disagreeing about alienness and empathy, leading Andrew/Ender to call on Plikt, the only person in the class who has read Demosthenes' latest publication, in which she defines the the 'orders of foreignness': utlannings of another city, framlings of another world, ramen of another species, and "the true alien, the varelse, which includes all the animals, for with them no conversation is possible."  The other students are irritated with Plikt, and Andrew calls them out for just being ashamed that they haven't read Demosthenes' new history yet and so feeling stupid because she has.  Card/Ender seem to have forgotten since last book that the smart kid who gets picked out by the teacher as Best Student just makes the resentment even worse.

I'm going to quote heavily a bit, because this is intensely bad stuff.

Plikt goes on to defend the Third Invasion:
"...Ender was not a true xenocide, for when he destroyed the buggers, we knew them only as varelse; it was not until years later, when the original Speaker for the Dead wrote the Hive Queen and the Hegemon, that humankind first understood that the buggers were not varelse at all, but ramen."
Another student contradicts her, declaring that 'dead is dead'.
Andrew sighed at Styrka's unforgiving attitude; it was the fashion among Calvinists at Reykjavik to deny any weight to human motive in judging the good or evil of an act. [...] Because Speakers for the Dead held as their only doctrine that good or evil exist entirely in human motive, and not at all in the act, it made students like Styrka quite hostile to Andrew.  Fortunately, Andrew did not resent it--he understood the motive behind it.
I imagine that all y'all have read Kinsey Hope's essay on Magical Intent.  But in this case, it's not even Ender's philosophy that bothers me so much--it's far from the first time Ender would be howlingly wrong--but that the opposition is such a hilarious straw philosophy:
"This talk of varelse and raman is nonsense.  If the piggies murder, then they are evil, as the buggers were evil.  If the act is evil, then the actor is evil." 
Andrew nodded.  "There is our dilemma.  There is the problem.  Was the act evil, or was it, somehow, to the piggies' understanding at least, good?  Are the piggies raman or varelse?  For the moment, Styrka, hold your tongue.  I know all the arguments of your Calvinism, but even John Calvin would call your doctrine stupid." 
"How do you know what Calvin would--" 
"Because he's dead," roared Andrew, "and so I'm entitled to speak for him!"
Oh my god.  Ender has grown up from being the isolated resentful smart kid's validation fantasy and become the smart kid's fantasy of what it would be like to be a teacher.  At last he has the authority to shout down the stupid students.  (He reflects that Styrka is smart enough that he will drop his philosophy before he graduates, which I suppose is a form of twisted praise.)

These are the two positions we are given: either good and evil exist only in our heads and so no action of itself contains any moral weight (in which case, near as I can tell, the most 'moral' life is led by someone who never learns that other people are capable of feeling pain), or good and evil are absolutes that infect us through our actions--if you do a bad thing then you are a bad person, you should be punished, end of story, no mitigating factors, world without end amen.

It seems to me like the main purpose of both of these systems is to level judgment: to definitively declare that a person was Good or Bad.  Sometime in the last decade, I lost all interest in trying to lay a final judgment on people; I tend to think more in terms of 'situation is good', 'situation can be fixed', and 'situation needs to be escaped'.  Actions can be good or bad--we can see that from their harmful results--and intentions can be good or bad--we can see that by whether people care about their results.  If someone causes harm with good intentions, that doesn't make their action good; it makes it salvageable.  If a person wants to do good and fails, then they should be enthusiastic about understanding how they screwed up and how to not screw up in future.  If a person causes harm intentionally, then the first challenge is getting them to agree that they shouldn't have done it.  Both of these cases are in the 'situation can be fixed' category.  If a person causes harm and doesn't care (or did so maliciously) and they can't be talked out of it, then we end up in the 'situation needs to be escaped' category.

Intentions, in this framework, don't impart their morality to actions.  They tell us what to do next.  Judgment doesn't, of itself, make anything better.  I'm mostly in favour of making things better.  Judgment is a distraction.  Judgment is boring, it's static, like the dead that Ender demands the right to speak for.  Am I good, am I bad?  Fucking yawn.  I am still alive and I will use my time trying to be better.

Andrew leaves his students and starts thinking of himself as Ender again, recalling his past, giving us solid timelines at last.  It is the year 1948 Starways Code, and he destroyed the formics in 1180 BSC, so 3128 years precisely since the xenocide.  He's about thirty-five now, having spent the last ten years of his life skipping from world to world constantly--the math tells us he's been skipping an average of 50 years every two months, although we don't know what the average length of an interplanetary voyage is among human colonies (his first voyage was 50 years, anyway).

Hey, remember when Graff mentioned that travel from Earth to Battle School cost more money than a highly-qualified professional would make in their entire career?  Apparently it's still so common than Ender never lands on a planet and finds that they're just not intending to send a ship out for the next year or so.  Also, let's note that Ender has zero trouble communicating with anyone there on Trondheim, despite three thousand years of supposed linguistic evolution.  It's not just that the ansible keeps a common language among the worlds; it literally keeps language static for three thousand years.  But it's also super expensive to use and so transmitting new sitcoms to Lusitania is a big deal.

I hate to be a hypocrite, and I really am about improvement more than judgment, so, pro tip to aspiring novelists: don't do these things, because they suck and you can do better.  You can handwave.  Ender's apparently got the internet in his brain; use those three thousand years of advanced technology to say that someone invented neural interfaces that rapidly update language centres of the brain in order to help address these exact sorts of time-dilation issues.  (Hell, the ownership of that kind of software practically begs to be the centre of its own sci fi story--they who control the evolution of language control the fate of humanity.)

Plikt follows Ender after class; she keeps up with the news and she has realised that Ender had to have got the report of Pipo's death in the middle of class, which means he's got ansible priority, which is a big deal.  She's also tried to investigate him and found that "Everything's classified.  Classified so deep that I can't even find out what the access level is.  God himself couldn't look up your life story."  Subtle, Ender.  Maybe just make up a fake name and say you're from South Carolina?  That seems easier.

Plikt wants to be a Speaker too, and aspires to one day speak for Ender, which means understanding his story first, but Ender's having none of it, and as he escapes her she shouts that she knows he's going to Lusitania, although there hasn't been any request for him to go yet.  There's some standard-issue 'I don't care about anyone or owe anyone anything', with the exception of the last hive queen, though she's not named.  Normal foreshadowy stuff, so angst, much ominous.

Next week: Novinha derails her life's work and vital science in a fit of passion over her boyfriend.

(And again, do not miss the blogqueen's triumphant return with Lullaby this Thursday!)

63 comments:

  1. They aren't even Nordic theologists! (I suppose John Calvin did flee to Switzerland before publishing his big stuff

    I
    feel compelled to point out that Switzerland isn't a Nordic country. It's south of Germany.
    It's a pet peeve of mine when Switzerland is treated as if it was the
    same as Sweden. :(

    Anyway (being a Swede) I feel seriously weird about Card's use of my native language. Not only did he use Swedish words for the levels of foreignness (utlänning = "foreigner", främling = "stranger" and varelse = "creature"); I mean, these make sense. But he named the characters Plikt (= "Duty") and Styrka (= "Strength").

    I assume there's supposed to be a deeper meaning to this, and it feels pretty ham-handed, especially since these two characters seem to be essentially strawmen for the merits of intentions (duty) vs results (strength).

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  2. Ah, my mistake, I apologise. I am somewhat rubbish at European geography and I should have read up on the matter more carefully first.


    It really should have occurred to me to check out the characters' names, too. After the nonsensical choices that made up much of Battle School (Commander Wrong!) this is something to keep a closer eye upon. Duty and strength, you say.

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  3. Hey, remember when Graff mentioned that travel from Earth to Battle
    School cost more money than a highly-qualified professional would make
    in their entire career? Apparently it's still so common than Ender
    never lands on a planet and finds that they're just not intending to
    send a ship out for the next year or so.


    C. J. Cherryh covers the existence of interstellar trade by creating a whole culture of people who live on ships - you don't lose your family when you travel because your entire family is travelling with you, you don't lose your friends because your friends are either your family or the shipdwellers who are on similiar trading-circles to you and you meet them in stations when you're both in dock at the same time. That seems like a reasonable working hypothesis to me, given interstellar flight exists at all, but if Orson Scott Card had written his spaceflight that way, there would be a whole interstellar culture of people who might - perish the thought! - be pretty indifferent to Ender and to the gospels of the Hive Queen and the Hegemon: who might - perish the thought - include people as old or older than Andrew Wiggin: who might - perish the thought! - have insights into how humans from other worlds are becoming different kinds of people that upset Orson Scott Card's vision of Epcot Galaxy.

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  4. Will, the hardest thing about reading your posts is figuring out which pieces I wanna quote to say THIS at, ha. I didn't know if I'd be able to get into Speaker as I'd not read it (and not spent years quietly irked at it for being The Best Thing Evah), but I have discovered that I would read you analyzing a PHONE BOOK, lol. I especially love the science fictiony stuff, which I would never think of on my own, interwoven with all the wonderful social justice stuff because HOW OFTEN DO WE GET THAT. <3

    Ahem. I shall stop fangirling now, lol.

    rather than the reasoned conclusions of a single pure genius in a sealed box who has never met another living being. That's where you get the good stuff.

    LOLSOB.

    Because Speakers for the Dead held as their only doctrine that good or evil exist entirely in human motive, and not at all in the act, it made students like Styrka quite hostile to Andrew.



    OH MY GOD. Ya'll told us back in Ender's Game that this "Intent Is Magic" was IN-TEXT CANON for the series, but I didn't expect it to be so baldly written out on the page like that. I just... buh.



    [CN: Nazis] So, I know that Ender is supposed to be Innocent Hitler (at least depending on who you listen to on this), but what would OSC think about actual Hitler? If it could be somehow proved that a genocidal monster had RILLY-RILLY pure intentions, do we give them a pass? [/end CN] With Ender, Card bent over backward to try to insist that Ender didn't know what he was doing, and therefore was ignorant, and therefore his intentions didn't matter because he didn't really HAVE intentions.



    That seems like a contradiction of the entire Speaker philosophy, if it wasn't ENOUGH for Ender to have good intentions (like, "Protect my sister") but he INSTEAD had to be so completely ignorant (supposedly; I've pointed out my problems with this, but set that aside) that his intentions can't even be factored because he was an unknowing pawn of others. Indeed, if a better writer were writing this, I would assume that the Speaker philosophy is meant to be less of a Objective Truth and more of a rationalization by Ender to help him live with the pain of being him. But this is Card, so no.



    Moving on from philosophy, I feel like any oppressive state government worth its salt wouldn't be too keen on letting super-classified people live 3000 years by planet hoping. I has a disappoint with Peter's totalitarian government or whatever he created.



    Briefly touching on Calvin and Luther: I grew up in a conservative evangelical community that was OBSESSED with stuff like this and even we didn't talk like OSC has his characters (including Ender) talk. He has this weird opinion that people who follow Calvin's teachings talk about him like they worship him or something; it reminds me of how anti-catholicism writers have everyone talking about The Pope, like wearing "what would The Pope do" bracelets or something. OSC was raised Mormon, I think? It's really tricky, I know, to write religious communities you're not immersed in. Having said that, I don't really feel like he's trying, since all his non-Speaker characters are wrongity wrong wrong.

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  5. Oh dear. This is a millennially ancient nest of snakes you are brushing off here as having an obvious answer. It doesn't.


    I legitimately don't know who the "you" here is. Are you addressing me? Card? Someone else entirely? You raise a lot of questions which don't appear to be quite addressing what anyone has said (such as the morality of nonhuman predator animals), and making generalizations about neurotypical and neuroatypical people that I'm not wholly comfortable with. The whole subject of good and evil is an intriguing one, so I'm happy to discuss, but I don't quite get where you're coming from or where you're going.

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  6. OSC was raised Mormon, I think?
    Indeed, Brigham Young was his great-great-grandfather.

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  7. "Because he's dead," roared Andrew, "and so I'm entitled to speak for him!"
    Hm. So the opinion of anyone who's dead is whatever Ender wants it to be? I think I'll try that out myself
    William Shakespeare says OSC is a singularly lousy writer. He's dead, so I'm entitled to speak for him.
    Aristotle, Socrates, and Nietzsche all say OSC's ideas and philosophy are rubbish. They're dead, so I'm entitled to speak for them.
    Arthur C Clarke and Isaac Asimov say OSC can't do science fiction or worldbuild for beans. They're dead, so I'm entitled to speak for them.
    Well, I do see the appeal.

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  8. But are you really a Speaker for the Dead? Do you hold that all good and evil exist only in the mind and not in the action? Because if you did, then I think you would realise that OSC only intended to create magnificent works of heartbreaking truth and empathy, and so all of his actions in creating rubbish power fantasies seasoned with a rainbow of bigot flavours are irrelevant. Those sound like the words of some kind of Calvinist radical accusing poor OSC of being inevitably predestined to write slapdash SFF!

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  9. I mean, sure, the SFF umbrella absolutely has room for stories with a high-tech aesthetic and all the scientific rigour of Dr Seuss, but it might be worth asking ourselves if these things would fly by without comment if, for example, the author were a woman and not the type of Jesus-and-warfare, no-homo man that Card is.


    You don't have to wonder, that's how it goes. If you look at YA literature, you'd see people praising John Green as the saviour of YA, while the rest of the authors, who are predominately female, get snubbed. (Sorry, I have a bit of a rep for criticizing the guy. In all fairness to him, he seems like a really nice person. But on artistic merit, he doesn't write much differently than the rest of his peers.)

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  10. Indeed, if a better writer were writing this, I would assume that the Speaker philosophy is meant to be less of a Objective Truth and more of a rationalization by Ender to help him live with the pain of being him. But this is Card, so no.

    I think even at this point Ender isn't supposed to have quite come to terms with having enabled the xenocide, or else he wouldn't be quite so devoted to finding a place where the formic queen can hatch and start her civilisation over again. The Speaker philosophy is less about defending his own actions (thus allowing him to remain angsty) and more about defending the formics.

    Though, if millennia have gone by and the entire galaxy now thinks the formics could have been their bestest buddies ever, I'm not sure why Ender's quest is so dangerous and secret--shouldn't he be able to say "Surprise, I'm still alive and so are the formics and they just want a nice planet to settle, so can we give them some room?" and have everyone trip over themselves to help? Very confused.

    Moving on from philosophy, I feel like any oppressive state government worth its salt wouldn't be too keen on letting super-classified people live 3000 years by planet hoping. I has a disappoint with Peter's totalitarian government or whatever he created.

    I don't think the government is supposed to be totalitarian--just the usual muddled bureaucracy that it's easy for Card to take shots at and get everyone nodding along. (Naturally, the Shadow series shows Peter constructing an extremely liberated federation, the Free Peoples of Earth, but that's in retcon land. No idea what Card imagined Peter's hegemony was like when he wrote Speaker.) Now you have got me wondering who's protecting Ender's ultra-classified files, though, and how much Ender has to bribe them to keep them quiet.

    It's really tricky, I know, to write religious communities you're not immersed in. Having said that, I don't really feel like he's trying, since all his non-Speaker characters are wrongity wrong wrong.



    Just wait until we get to Shadow and hear how he writes people in queer communities!

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  11. Wait, he's still carrying this egg around? WTF? Does customs not check for foreign fruits and vegetables in the future?


    OK, clearly I need to go read Chapter 2. BE RIGHT BACK, LOL.

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  12. *reads further* WAIT, when Rooter died, Pipo whipped out a camera and took pictures. They were past the perimeter--it was against the rules for Novinha to follow them.

    So he takes a camera with him, but he's not allowed to use pens????

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  13. Though, if millennia have gone by and the entire galaxy now thinks the formics could have been their bestest buddies ever, I'm not sure why Ender's quest is so dangerous and secret--shouldn't he be able to say "Surprise, I'm still alive and so are the formics and they just want a nice planet to settle, so can we give them some room?" and have everyone trip over themselves to help? Very confused.

    I think he's set it up that way to keep Ender the pure misunderstood hero, the one who carries a burden nobody else can even imagine, let alone share. It gets old after a while.

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  14. I imagine him shoving it into the overhead baggage compartment. I forget how big the thing is supposed to be, but it certainly adds a new terror to having someone take your luggage by mistake.

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  15. Basically what I take from this bit is that Andrew is a horrible teacher. What a jerk he is. But then this is normal in Cardland: the hero is right. He just is. You have to believe that. And if you think he isn't right, then you're just wrong.
    Will, if you ever do the "Homecoming" series by Card (which I recommend strongly against. Seriously, I recommend against anybody reading these books. Their only possible use is to prop up shaky tables. I do not know why I have these books, but surmise it has to do with the SF Book Club opt-out system), I will make much popcorn. These posts on "Speaker" are deeply entertaining.

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  16. the true alien, the varelse, which includes all the animals, for with them no conversation is possible."

    This is not a category that makes sense to me. It appears to be conflating "true alienness" (whatever that's supposed to mean) with non-sapience, which seems both convenient (if we don't want to bother understanding a group, we'll just decide they're non-sapient animals, end of story) and rather unimaginative.

    And I know this: Ender was not a true xenocide, for when he destroyed the buggers, we knew them only as varelse is supposed to be wrong (I think - I know the character is), but it does support the idea that the very concept of varelse is convenient. Nope, not murder, they're too different. How is that even an argument? WTF?

    If the piggies murder, then they are evil, as the buggers were evil.

    And as humans are evil? I mean, the character does know that humans do or at least have (maybe 3000 years in the future humanities given it up) murdered, right? Right?

    Except Andrew seems to agree with at least part of that, or is one of those confusing people who always nod when people are talking to them, but since he goes on: There is our dilemma. It seems he agrees. So.... no one 3000 years in the future knows that humans have committed murder. What about, oh, the genocide they were talking about five seconds ago!?

    "Was the act evil, or was it, somehow, to the piggies' understanding at least, good?"

    Why does no one consider that maybe there's a Little One Jack the Ripper running around loose? Why is the standard suddenly that all the acts of all members of a species must be good for the species to be good? (The very concept of a good or evil species makes my head hurt, by the way. Hell, even most D&D groups throw that out these days.)

    "Are the piggies raman or varelse?"



    Dude, that ship has sailed. People are already communicating with them, therefor they are raman, by definition.


    Ugh, the people in Card's books just make me *headdesk*

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  17. If I remember right he wraps it up completely in the jacket he was wearing at the end of Game. So it's smaller than a, what, 13 year old's torso?

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  18. For that part I think Card actually got it right. Feeling all lovelorn over a deceased species is a lot easier than dealing with an actual giant-bug species walking around your hometown. Humanity has a celebrity crush on a created memory of someone they've never met. They'll probably be less lovey towards their object of love in freaky scary person.
    Though may be right that it was more for the misunderstood hero thing.

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  19. "Why does no one consider that maybe there's a Little One Jack the Ripper running around loose?"

    I suppose it's because of human biological and cultural experience; in other words, because human prejudice gets in the way. When Pipo is murdered (and when Libo is murdered later on) the "programming" of the (human) observers tells them that they are looking at a sacrificial act (they're wrong about that, but not for the reasons we're expected to expect) in which the whole pequenino society is involved (which turns out to be true). What they don't think is that they're looking at the work of a lone maniac.* And it's not, but you're right, the possibility should at least be brought up and then convincingly dismissed.

    "'Are the piggies raman or varelse?'

    Dude, that ship has sailed. People are already communicating with them, therefor they are raman, by definition.
    "

    Or: people think they are communicating with them, but, should they (the pequeninos) turn out to be varelse after all, that idea ("we, the humans, are communicating with them, the pequeninos") will be disproved as an assumption and the "communication" in which the humans and pequeninos have been involved will be exposed as a delusion.



    *I think the reader's mind is supposed to be directed toward Aztec Mexico and not London in the 1800's.

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  20. For that matter, who says that communication with animals isn't possible? That...I just...CITATION NEEDED.


    It may not be as sophistication communication as discussing shitty sci fi books, but there are plenty of animals who are able to communicate things like Hungry, Sleepy, Don't Touch Me, and various other basic needs and wants. And we are able to communicate things like Food Is Over Here, C'mon Up For Snuggles, and Fetch Me That Stick Please.


    All of this Ender / Valentine stuff is so very I AM A GENIUS ANGST TEENAGER WHO HAS ALL THE ANSWERS -- the sort of thing that often has to be trained out of a lot of us in proper philosophy classes. Once you start actually defining what we mean by "communication" it becomes a lot trickier to pin down.


    Like those monkeys who do sign language, there's the underlying question of whether we can ever really TELL if they're just doing trained mimicry (this sign gets me a banana) or if they actually understand that the sign MEANS banana. Because what, really, is the fundamental difference between understanding and perfect mimicry? For that matter, what's to say that humans aren't doing mimicry but at a sophisticated enough level to allow for some adaptation. WHAT PRECISELY IS LANGUAGE, etc.


    These are complex questions, and can't be boiled down to "doesn't speak English, isn't a real creature" like that. Or even "is an animal, can't be communicated with, toss it in the ramen noodle bucket". Or whatever.

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  21. I want to add: The fact that the chapter implies that Libo isn't allowed to ask the Little Ones about Pipo's death is FUCKED UP. I mean, okay, you don't want to interfere with their civilization, but if you don't TELL THEM that you DON'T LIKE BEING MURDERED, isn't there a risk that the Little Ones will take it as read that the humans don't mind being murdered and do it again?


    I mean, they're already culturally exchanging stuff like acrobats (albeit accidentally, but INTENT IS NOT MAGIC hey lookit that), so would it really be THAT BAD to say "by the way, please don't do that thing you did to Pipo to any other humans".

    This is RIDONKULUS that the official response is apparently to humor the Little Ones in the name of cultural tolerance, and it smacks of Straw Liberals if you ask me. *side-eyes Card*

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  22. This brings up a point, though. Which is: HOW do the Speakers KNOW what the intent was?


    Part of the reason why intent is not magic is because harm was still done. But another, not-trivial part? Is that we can't really know intent. Ultimately, intent discussions come down to arguments over what the harmful person "meant" and no one can solve that. Even the harm-causing person could be lying, mis-remembering, unsure, etc.


    I'm sure OSC / Ender will explain this to us later and I'M SURE IT WILL BE AWESOME. (sobsobsob)

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  23. Of course if we gain absolute power and can impose human values on the fabric of reality itself, we'll prevent real animals from dying or feeling pain! It's like you haven't thought about being a god at all.

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  24. Those seem messed up. I benefited from having no exposure at all to the ex-gay movement when I read them. So I saw that part as a contrived, science-fictiony scenario used to illustrate the character's basic humanity for the slow people in the audience.

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  25. I believe that's Ender's assumption as well. "Alas, the poor, misunderstood Formics. If only we could undo the damage. Oh, wait, we can? Shit ..."

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  26. I seem to recall that at least one group of primates that was taught sign language proceeded to teach said sign language to new members of the group. And also possibly something about inventing new signs. Both (or either) would suggest at least some level of understanding.


    And, of course, the very fact that we _have_ domesticated animals requires some level of human-animal communication. So I guess Card is unfamiliar with everything from pets and farm animals to circuses to primate studies to human history. (Actually, that sounds about right. I'm not at all certain he's familiar with humans who are not him.)

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  27. I think the reader's mind is supposed to be directed toward Aztec Mexico and not London in the 1800's.



    Oh, I'm quite sure of it. It still strikes me as bizarre that there's no consideration at all that it's anything but a cultural practice. (Especially when it's being called murder, and in such a way that it's suggested humans never commit murder.)


    Miscommunication is one thing, but unless the entire thing will turn out to be a dream, communication is certainly being attempted on both sides. How successful that communication is is another question entirely. And we're kind of back to the whole question of what is communication anyway? Which, once again, makes the idea of dividing non-humans into raman and varelse really suspect as a practice.

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  28. Given what we see later about what speakers actually do, now that it's an official profession, I'm going to guess that Andrew/Ender is just being playful, and his students know he's being playful.


    Don't worry. He'll have plenty of opportunities to show for real how much more geniusy he is than everybody else.

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  29. Intentions, in this framework, don't impart their morality to actions. They tell us what to do next.


    This is one of the better answers I've seen to the intentions vs. actions debate.

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  30. Mm, great. Ender is one of those assholes who walks up to the circulation desk and just stares at the clerk, isn't he. And then gets all pissy when you ask how you can help him, because how dare his telepathy not be good enough.

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  31. I may not ask questions that might reveal human expectations, lest they try to imitate us

    ...yeah, in no way do we assume their whole universe to revolve around us, whatever made you think that?

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  32. I do not have a 13-year-old here at the moment, but after taking a gander at my largish 11-year-old I feel confident in stating that his torso would fit the normal requirements for carry-on luggage.

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  33. Genuine question: Is Speaking supposed to be analogous in this world to the Mormon religion? I ask because for all that HQ&H is fanfic (as Will so aptly put it), that's pretty much how a lot of Christians view the Book of Mormon.



    And it would explain why the main antagonists to Speaking so far are not secular authorities (which is the usual go-to for sci fi) but rather Lazy Catholics (who believe the old ways without question) and Hostile Protestants (who have "correctly" rejected Catholicism but are too far up their own asses to see that Speaking is the right way to go).


    Side-note: The whole "girl ambushes Ender after class and wants to Speak for him and KNOW HIM and SEE HIS SOUL" seriously disturbed me. Ender is her teacher and that read way too close to a student having a crush on said teacher. It's good that Ender is leaving, but I don't feel like he handled that situation well at all. (Yelling I'M NOT DEAD YET YOU DON'T KNOW ME and running down the halls while windmilling your arms is rarely a good way to deal with things.) (That's how I chose to remember the scene, anyway.)

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  34. Yeah, if multi-generational retention (and teaching) and adaptation of language don't imply understanding, then our definition of "communication" has become very restricted, perhaps untenably.


    The weird thing is, Valentine wants to have it both ways. Like, the "recognition" that aliens/animals can be communicated with is supposed to say something deep about US, so that would imply that the definitions for Ramen Noodles or not actually is NOT clear-cut and well-defined.


    Except then she goes and defines it in a way that, while not entirely binary (because animals), definitely DOES include the Little Ones (as you pointed out: the communication ship has sailed).

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  35. (Yelling I'M NOT DEAD YET YOU DON'T KNOW ME and running down the halls while windmilling your arms is rarely a good way to deal with things.) (That's how I chose to remember the scene, anyway.)


    I'm pretty sure that's canon, yeah. Or possibly muppet-flailing, but I'm not going to go back and check.


    It fits pretty neatly into a few important boxes: Ender has magnetic charisma that draws people to him even/because they know nothing about the truth of his soul, inappropriate advances are completely harmless coming from girls, and Ender would never do anything like use a student-teacher relationship for personal benefit because he is too pure. (I'm trying to imagine the scene if it had been, say, Styrka and Valentine, and my guess is that Valentine would have suppressed him by making it clear how much smarter she was than him, but I don't think she could have just walked away tension-free.)

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  36. Also, it only just occurred to me that the history Plikt has read, for which all of these orders of foreignness were drawn, was written by Valentine, authored under the name 'Demosthenes', and specifically about Trondheim. So apparently she's been continuing to write histories/biographies over the last decade, keeping her pen name the whole time. It's one thing if a person named Andrew Wiggin keeps popping up and doing eulogies, those are one-time things, but if Demosthenes has been writing a new history book in the same style every 50-100 years, wouldn't someone eventually suspect that they were all the same Demosthenes and do a little research into the planets of publication and travel between them?


    Spaceflights are apparently common (or Ender and Valentine wouldn't be able to skip about so easily) which means there must be a fair number of people who were born centuries ago--I mean, is a pilot only going to pilot one trip in their whole career? The notion of people living much longer than even those occasional pilots must have at least occurred to someone, and you'd think if nothing else there would be a Weird Facts blog on the ansible network with things like "The 'oldest' known person in the Hundred Worlds was born in 1254 SC". And there's Demosthenes leaving a trail of publications across the stars, begging to be analyzed.

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  37. You know, grief counsellors might have been more useful than soap operas at helping this community. Maybe even more useful than former child geniuses telling passive aggressive truths. And when there was a death at my high school, that's what they brought in. But we've already established that future people respond to grief entirely differently than present day people, so maybe Ender and Netflix was the way to go? Or maybe future governments are just so out of touch that they don't realize that therapists exist?

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  38. I think I find the whole thing particularly weird not just because it compares unfavorably to the way, say, Star Trek looks at human-alien contact (hell, it compares unfavorably to the way Star Wars looks at human-alien contact!), but because it appears that humanity has actually gotten worse and I'm not sure if Card intends that or not (what with Andrew seeming to agree with the assessment and all).


    The Formics were seen as a hostile force, but they were seen - as far as I could tell - as people. (That is to say - as a sapient species.) Evil, incomprehensible people, but people nonetheless. Yet, 3000 years later, it's somehow debatable that the Little Ones are people (despite the fact that humans are chatting with them and observing that they have a culture and other pretty obvious markers of sapience). Now, maybe this whole varelse thing isn't supposed to be implying non-sapience, but it keeps being used by characters as if it does. (Both with the comparison to animals, who aren't typically considered sapient, and with the whole "well, Ender thought they were varelse, so it wasn't genocide" thing.)

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  39. From things he’s written elsewhere (e.g. Lost Boys), I gather Card has a very low opinion of psychiatrists; possibly he includes counselors as well.

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  40. Believe me, it doesn't take more than one airplane trip with my sons before you start thinking about their potential as baggage as opposed to their reality as fellow passengers.

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  41. That might actually make for a good plot too, but again I question whether it would occur to Card to write such a thing.

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  42. "That Rooter intuited the meaning of acrobat was wage related is an example of authorial knowledge; that Pipo didn't fix it with the above explanation is further examples of his uselessness."

    This is an oversight on a level with the one which has Pipo pointing a camera at the RooterTree when the rules say he isn't allowed to take notes with a pen. The pequeninos are bright but culturally they haven't even got to the point where they can smelt metal. They haven't learned how to herd animals or weave cloth* yet, though they start doing things like that later on in the book, but when they do it's because humans decide to show them how. There's no way they could "naturally" be carrying the concepts of regular jobs and paid occupations and guilds and "professions" around in their heads. Maybe this is supposed to be an indication of how smart Rooter is but as it stands it looks like carelessness on the part of the author.

    *I think they learn how to weave cloth.

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  43. I'm getting a strange sense of disconnect, reading these deconstructions. On the one hand, I agree with a majority of the points you raise. On the other hand, back when I was in my twenties and I read Speaker for the first time, I loved it. Most of these points didn't occur to me, and the ones that did, I shrugged off. (Slightly less true of Ender's Game, whose flaws were more obvious to me.) I feel hypocritical for so thoroughly enjoying your beatdowns.

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  44. Eh, I pretty much loved Ender's Game the first time I read it (with a few exceptions where things rang false to me, but I was completely onboard with the general story) and I suspect that at the same age I'd have felt pretty good about Speaker, at least those parts I've read so far. All else equal, there's nothing wrong with taking enjoyment in fiction, and to paraphrase JM Keynes, I'd rather be persuaded to change my mind than remain blissfully wrong. May I recommend that, rather than feel hypocritical, you feel triumphant for having managed to both enjoy a story and not be captured by its pitfalls?

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  45. Because Speakers for the Dead held as their only doctrine that good
    or evil exist entirely in human motive, and not at all in the act,


    But according to Ender, "It isn't like a religion - you don't have to memorize any catechism." Because apparently that's how religions work, and according to the context for that quote you can't learn a catechism from a computer.


    Now I'm thinking of Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality for at least two reasons. The Interdict of Merlin in that fic magically prevents anyone learning the really dangerous spells from a book or even a ghost - you can only get them from another living mind. (Though a basilisk would count.) The dread knowledge of Catholicism must be among those secrets.

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  46. No, it's how dare YOUR telepathy not be good enough.

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  47. Oh, the temptation to just put my fingers to my temples, squinch up my face and say: "I sense that you are... returning that? No? Checking out? No? You want a library card? A fish sandwich? To retake kindergarten and learn to use words?"

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  48. I find it hard to believe that OSC could come up with a future that has blogs and Bluetooth headsets but hasn't managed to miniaturize cameras and hide them as things like buttons,glasses and pins.

    On the pen thing, if he's not allowed to show the technology of pens, he could use charcoal. Anyone living on a planet with an oxygen atmosphere and carbon based plant matter could have access to charcoal after a forest fire started by lightening. If you don't want to give away the technology of paper, there are always large leaves and smooth barks. If you don't want to give away the tech of writing he could sketch, although that gives away the tech of representational art.
    I would think sketching is less of a big deal than if he's wearing clothes and shoes. Weaving and leather-working and metallurgy are major technology breakthroughs with a lot of implications.. Also, he must be wearing clothing without designs, patterns, pockets, labels, tags, buttons, zippers, Velcro, seams, etc. because that's all technology.
    I just checked out my outfit for today. Just my jeans have weaving, fiber dying, seams, cuffs, metal buttons and a zipper, along with an abstract art design on the back pockets. My shoes are made of leather, metal and PLASTIC. My shirt has plastic button, cuffs, pleats and a collar.
    Even if Pipo and Libo are wearing very plain coveralls with no designs, undyed, no metal or plastic fasteners, they are still going to get asked why they are wearing the coveralls, who made them and how, what they are made of, how the pieces are attached, how the material is cut, etc. ad infinitum.

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  49. About the only rationalization I can think of is that Pipo took the pictures when no living pequenino was in sight. That isn’t very good (how could he be sure he was alone and unobserved?) but it’s all I got.

    But I wouldn’t waste too much thought on the problems with the law-of-cultural-embargo stuff. There is something later in the book which actually makes sense of what is going on, but discussing it now would be a spoiler (the same one which I rot-13ed last week).

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  50. I also feel like that guy who wrote in asking that Pipo be censured for being useless had a point. I can see why a question like "How do ya'll reproduce" might not be ANSWERED, especially if Pipo refuses to answer about human anatomy and customs, but I in no way see how asking the question reveals human "expectations". Pretty much all living things reproduce, after all.

    And if the issue is cultural contamination, I'm not sure how bare bones scientific information about penises and vaginas should be verboten to share. It's not like the Little Ones could somehow imitate that reproduction if their biology is different. Sex != Written language, after all.

    There's this weird... almost Puritanical insistence on the part of Pipo that human mating rituals EQUAL human mating mechanics and, uh, they don't. And it's particularly weird that the Galactic Counsel is all "oh, well, they would have found out about gender equality anyway whatcanyoudo", but they wouldn't have someday found out that we have primary sexual characteristics and we use those things to reproduce? BUHWHUT.

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  51. For that matter, how did they even teach the word "women" to Rooter and the Little Ones without talking about human reproduction? (I'm assuming that OSC-and-therefore-Pipo equates sexual organs with gender.)

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  52. I have been puzzling that myself for some time. We're told it came up just in the course of teaching them Stark and Portuguese, but the only way I can think of that they might have defined sexes without getting into reproduction is by relying on especially exhausting and backwards stereotypes, like by associating 'male' with warfare and 'female' with nurturing, or something like that. (Which might account for the Little Ones declaring themselves all male, since war/death/reproduction is all apparently tied up together for them.)

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  53. Ooooh, that would actually be great foreshadowing maybe, if we'd been told that. I has a disappoint now.

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  54. Given how long it takes to move someone from one world to another, sending a grief counselor in person would be less than effective. Even if it only takes 5 years, most people would have an "ehh" reaction to grief counseling. Group grief counseling over the ansible might have been a better idea than Netflix or at least the mountains of research on and trainings for grief counseling so someone in the colony could learn how to help the others at least a little.
    A trauma specialist coming in person, on the other hand, seems like an excellent idea. While millions of humans frequently don't go more than a few miles from their towns, most people find being confined (i.e. you are not allowed to leave this small, walled village, EVER) traumatic. Losing so many people to a horrible disease is also traumatic. Knowing that there are aliens near your home but you have no idea what they are capable of could also be traumatic (particularly after they seem to have horrible murdered one of the only two people allowed contact with them. The effect of trauma can be severe and last for decades. Again, at the very least, sending the mountains of data we have on dealing with trauma seems like a good idea.

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  55. The thing about not being able to communicate with aliens also struck me as only making sense if OSC either never had any contact with domesticated animals or defines communication as "spoken language". My two cats and I communicate quite well. It's not in English but for example they know exactly what the sound of "no" in a particular tone of voice means. They also know what "treat" means and are quite capable of letting me know that I am supposed to be feeding them right now. That meets my definition of communication.

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  56. While a totalitarian government might not like super-classified people planet-hopping, on the other hand, it's a great way to make it someone else's problem. "Oh, Ender's off doing whatever it is Ender does, whatever; wait two months and we won't have to worry about him for another fifty years." On the other hand, whoever tries to get him to settle down and quit traveling has to put up with whatever happens when supergenius guy... I don't know, starts killing again because it's the best way to intimidate people into leaving him alone?

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  57. And by the latter definition, the Formics really were varelse; they had no spoken language, and had trouble even comprehending the concept.

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  58. Perhaps the great expense of ansible sitcoms means that the entertainment execs felt compelled to create entirely new shows for the express purposes of beaming them to Lusitania, so the great cost was in hiring the writers, actors, directors, and such to produce new shows.

    However, I refuse to believe that in the three-thousand years plus between the Formic War and Speaker, plus whatever time between our now and Ender's Game, that we'd still be talking about John Calvin as some sort of philosophical authority. Practically speaking, it would require that some entity preserve his writings, but then argue for their relevance over time, as the world developed into something that looks an awful lot like the epitome of free will. And then he'd have to survive the unenviable fact that information is lost every day, due to not being converted, or the destruction of their archives, whether due to war, commercialization, or the ravages of time.

    Since on our modern world, we're producing, what, petabytes, of information daily, I would assume that by Speaker time, they're up to googols or googolplexes of bytes produced daily, the likelihood of a pre-ansible philosopher surviving is...slim.

    Not to mention that I would have thought Peter-as-Locke and Valentine-as-Demosthenes would have supplanted just about anyone else in the philosophical arena,gicen how effective they are in Ender's Game.

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  59. The writings might exist, depending on how much society decided to archive of historical writings. It would seem to make sense to keep a couple copies of all written records from Earth history around somewhere on various archival servers, if only so the really specialty scholars can go digging in them for research. But they'd be a dusty relic of the past that probably a handful of academics even know or talk about, not a common discussion topic.

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  60. Yes. It's a weird sort of science fiction that seems to ask, "what if we had all this amazing technology tomorrow but nothing else ever changed?"
    Only today's culture continues to matter, only today's writers continue to be relevant (or yesterday's writer who are considered relevant now). Nothing new will happen to people, only to tech.
    It baffles the mind.

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  61. This was a point in Xenocide with Valentine. She'd read her brother's romantiziced description of them, but was actually terrified to see the bugs in person. I wish Card had done more with that idea.

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  62. So, Card's expressed morality (by mouth of one who agrees with Ender and therefore is Right) compares unfavourably to Nethack, where a scroll of genocide is called scroll of genocide whether you use it on a humanoid species or, say, ants.

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  63. The other students are irritated with Plikt, and Andrew calls them out for just being ashamed that they haven't read Demosthenes' new history yet and so feeling stupid because she has.

    Why does anyone give a damn about Demosthenes' new history? She was born 3000 years ago and has been conscious for about 1% of that of time. She knows less about galactic history and society than the average ten year old. I mean, imagine if Einstein hibernated for a century at a time, woke up, fumbled around for a couple of weeks and then wrote a paper and went back to sleep. How long do you think he'd stay relevant to other physicists?

    "How do you know what Calvin would--"

    "Because he's dead," roared Andrew, "and so I'm entitled to speak for him!"

    This is an amazingly terrible response. First, it's almost perfectly designed to make sure that no clever, rebellious teen within earshot ever trusts or respects a Speaker again. Second, it's not consistent with the Speaker philosophy--they're historians/detectives who spend decades researching individual deceased subjects, right? They're not entitled to speak for any random dead celebrity that comes up in conversation.

    Third, it rings totally false coming from Ender, who of all people should be least likely to view the Speakers as magical authority figures. They're just a fan club that grew up around a book he wrote. Sure, I'll believe that Ender feels entitled to rhetorically bully any kid who dares disagree with him, but that's because he's Ender, not because he's a Speaker. He should be crushing Styrka with uniquely Enderish insights and logic, not trying to pull rank in a hierarchy that neither he nor Sytrka values.

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