tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2946534773407276339.post2329382990248148655..comments2023-11-05T04:09:53.857-05:00Comments on Something Short and Snappy: Speaker for the Dead, chapter one, part two, in which species is decided by voteErika The Over Queenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03649072707709302370noreply@blogger.comBlogger27125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2946534773407276339.post-90660423664531420352013-12-30T18:40:42.648-05:002013-12-30T18:40:42.648-05:00"I imagine. I imagine it feels like bathing ..."I imagine. I imagine it feels like bathing in ice to the person <br />touching her. But how does it feel to her? Cold as she is, it must <br />surely burn like fire." <br /><br /><br /><br />I'm also calling totally Twilight on this belief that people stand around EARNESTLY trying to UNDERSTAND other people like this. I feel like I've lived a pretty usual human life, and I've never, ever, not even once, had this conversation with someone about another person. <br /><br /><br /><br />"I'll bet it BURNS LIKE FIRE when someone touches her COLD SOUL." <br /><br /><br /><br />"Whatever. Did you hear the cafeteria is still out of pizza? We should have brought more tomato seeds, this is fucking ridiculous."Ana Mardollhttp://www.anamardoll.comnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2946534773407276339.post-26414884079641200262013-12-30T18:00:18.899-05:002013-12-30T18:00:18.899-05:00Card does try to write young adults later in Speak...Card does try to write young adults later in Speaker and in Xenocide.EdinburghEyenoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2946534773407276339.post-34795481424524734792013-12-30T17:59:21.043-05:002013-12-30T17:59:21.043-05:00It's difficult to believe with Ender, but at l...It's difficult to believe with Ender, but at least he's presented as having all of the educational facilities of a school that's supposedly meant to help child geniuses learn all they need to know about military strategy, tactics, etc: and that he has been picked as <i>the</i> supergenius child who will have every opportunity opened up to him. (And teachers who have been told a kid is bright are more likely to foster that child's abilities; there have been a couple of very dubiously-ethical experiments that proved you can advance a kid's IQ by telling their teachers that this kid has a very high IQ.)<br /><br /><br />But Novinha is supposed to have done all of this entirely on her own without support from the local school and teachers - by the age of 13. <br /><br /><br />Also, "not too old" by the time Ender finally arrives is entirely dependent on the relativistic time separating Trondheim and Milagre - and that distance-in-years is entirely up to Orson Scott Card himself.EdinburghEyenoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2946534773407276339.post-45211950112729413772013-12-30T17:50:31.098-05:002013-12-30T17:50:31.098-05:00ARGH. That is so much fail! Does OSC say how they ...ARGH. That is so much fail! Does OSC say how they are eating and sustaining themselves and getting power and whatnot? That just does not compute to me. <br /><br /><br />Like, the more I hear about this, it feels like a fantasy version of the English settlements in the Americas, but with pretending that the English didn't need SUBSTANTIAL help from the native peoples. (Because they totes did need help, and with good reason.)Ana Mardollhttp://www.anamardoll.comnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2946534773407276339.post-5983413554710865082013-12-30T17:46:37.700-05:002013-12-30T17:46:37.700-05:00The human town (Milagre) is apparently walled off ...The human town (Milagre) is apparently walled off completely at ground level and has sufficient security (or Little Ones are sufficiently agreeable) to keep any of them from ever looking inside, so all they can learn about humanity is what the xenologers tell them. No idea how the colony is supposed to feed itself or access sufficient resources (what do they use for power) given that they have to keep everything inside their walled compound, but this is again a case of leaving things vague and hoping no one cares/notices.Will Wildmanhttp://somethingshortandsnappy.blogspot.com/noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2946534773407276339.post-27430003627997462752013-12-30T17:43:24.425-05:002013-12-30T17:43:24.425-05:00I... oh.
See, here I was thinking that the Litt...I... oh. <br /><br /><br />See, here I was thinking that the Little People could help her not die from poison in the first 20 minutes of her job, but I'm not a Famous Author. <br /><br /><br />And (as you already pointed out) I really do not understand how "don't interact with the Little People" is supposed to work when you've COLONIZED THEIR PLANET WHUT.Ana Mardollhttp://www.anamardoll.comnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2946534773407276339.post-90479999063322426702013-12-30T17:15:19.013-05:002013-12-30T17:15:19.013-05:00Novinha's allowed alien plants, bugs, animals,...Novinha's allowed alien plants, bugs, animals, et cetera, she's just not allowed to interact with the Little Ones at all. So she does have a substantial range of biology available to her. How a 13-year-old is supposed to master every kind of plant and animal biology on an entirely new world--this is left as an exercise for the reader.Will Wildmanhttp://somethingshortandsnappy.blogspot.com/noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2946534773407276339.post-40449461005133905642013-12-30T17:11:25.420-05:002013-12-30T17:11:25.420-05:00I also do not understand why the Hot Angry Nun giv...I also do not understand why the Hot Angry Nun giving the colony orders is a Young Woman. Surely the Hot Angry Nun giving orders should be Captain Janeway or the like.Ana Mardollhttp://www.anamardoll.comnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2946534773407276339.post-81505204704567866362013-12-29T13:14:49.791-05:002013-12-29T13:14:49.791-05:00Maybe Card didn't feel comfortable writing you...Maybe Card didn't feel comfortable writing young adults. His children don't sound at all like children, but maybe he thought he was doing a better job of writing superintelligent children than he could have done with adolescents.<br /><br />But your point is a good one. It's not a matter of raw intelligence, it's a matter of how long it would take even a super-genius to absorb all the information Novinha supposedly absorbed by the time she was 13.Noranoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2946534773407276339.post-28913643392747331312013-12-27T23:04:14.730-05:002013-12-27T23:04:14.730-05:00I assume Libo and Novinha start so young for two r...I assume Libo and Novinha start so young for two reasons--first, to make sure they're not too old when Ender finally arrives, and second, to maintain the theme of child supergeniuses from Ender's Game. The entire Ender cast, of course, is supposed to be a clutch of comprehensively-educated military geniuses by age 13, and there are various asides about Ender entering a class with older students, being dismissed as ridiculous, and then within a month or two having already surpassed the class and been removed for other placement again. Which raises much the same questions, such as 'how did he supposedly learn the entire curriculum by seeing two months' worth of it?'Will Wildmanhttp://somethingshortandsnappy.blogspot.com/noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2946534773407276339.post-77063206725996244822013-12-27T21:35:06.140-05:002013-12-27T21:35:06.140-05:00Re-reading Speaker it occurred to me for the first...Re-reading <i>Speaker</i> it occurred to me for the first time how absolutely <i>unlikely</i> Novinha and Libo's extreme youth is.<br /><br /><br />They're both thirteen. Libo has officially left school and will be studying with his father as an apprentice: Novinha wants to leave school and take the exams to become the colony's xenobiologist. According to Card, Novinha doesn't just <i>pass</i> the exams: she passes them "with a score a good deal higher than many a graduate student".<br /><br /><br />In Scotland, because of the way the exam system was structured and the age at which kids start primary school, it was (and is, for all I know: I haven't checked recently) more than possible for a fifteen-year-old high school student to be able to enter university. It's not lawful in the UK to leave full-time education before your 16th birthday, but <i>technically</i> if you're at uni you're in full-time education.... <br /><br /><br />Every single university in Scotland has rules that say you <i>have</i> to have passed your 16th birthday before they'll admit you as a student. The exam system had a further extension that made it possible for a high school student to effectively do their first year at uni while they were still at high school. (Scottish universities do a four-year Honours degree.) No matter how bright a teenager that age is, universities don't want them as students: there may be exceptions, but in most cases, they'll do a lot better at university if they enter when they're more-or-less adult than when they're still very much children. <br /><br /><br />In a town that's small enough that students - especially prestigious students like the only daughter of Os Venerados, the town's saints - are able to move ahead at their own pace, I can believe that Novinha is already reading university-level xenobiology at 13, and that Libo would want to be part of his father's work and his father would register him apprentice to be allowed through the fence with Pipo. But Libo would still be in school: there'd be no reason for him <i>not</i> to be still taking classes. Still. It sort of works.<br /><br /><br />But, that Novinha is already <i>better</i> than a graduate student - that at thirteen, independently, she's <i>already</i> gone through all the work she would have done in three or four years at college: that's just unbelievable. She's supposed to have done it without a mentor, without any help from the school (Dona Crista says that Novinha "claims" to have been studying xenobiology "since she was a little child", meaning that Crista doesn't <i>know</i>). <br /><br /><br />Really. Unbelievable, Novinha just wouldn't have <i>time</i>. At what point is she supposed to have started reading xenobiology: six? This isn't like Mozart being an infant prodigy of music, it's not like being a chessmaster or a mathematical genius, understanding scientific concepts and learning not merely the whats but the whys takes <i>time</i>. <br /><br /><br />If both Libo and Novinha were 17 when the story on Lusitania begins (and if Novinha were to pass, but not zoom through) that would still make Novinha scarily intelligent, having accomplished the equivalent of a college degree working on her own: and it would be believable that Libo would have left school and be working on <i>his</i> equivalent of a college degree with Pipo as his mentor. And it would make no real difference to the basic plot: given time dilation caused by spaceflight, what's four years? <br /><br /><br />Why was Orson Scott Card so determined Novinha <i>had</i> to be a child when this happened - not a young adult, but a child?EdinburghEyenoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2946534773407276339.post-81902069831481431222013-12-18T16:26:33.849-05:002013-12-18T16:26:33.849-05:00"...and the more I think about how humanity&#..."<i>...and the more I think about how humanity's expansion was pretty much given a huge boost with the destruction of the Formics, the less likely it seems to me that people later would be filled with such guilt and remorse, such a sense that what Ender did was a terrible thing...</i>"<br /><br />If I thought OSC had an ironical bone in his body I would think he was doing a riff off <a href="http://www.jabberwocky.com/carroll/walrus.html" rel="nofollow">this poem</a>, but since I think he's pretty much irony-free, I'm stuck for an explanation.<br /><br /><br /><br />The notion that a book dedicated to self-exculpation* which is written by a suffering teenager can (and indeed will!! and indeed must!!) shake the known universe and become its single standard of value fits in with the perspective of a 15-year-old whose world has just been rocked by <i>The Fountainhead</i>. But it doesn't fit in with the perspective of a grown man and again I'm left at a loss.<br /><br /><br />However, it does seem to mesh with the small-towny feel of the Lusitania colony, where so many of the colonists are Just The Bestest. ("All the children are above average.") I can testify to the fact that in small towns as in all small communities, it's easier for a person to be The Bestest at something <i>within the parameters of that community</i> than it would be if the same individual were part of a larger group. That's because there's less of a standard of comparison (as the proverb says, it's easier to be a big fish in a small pond). What Card does (IMO) is take that kind of comparative, small-scale facility and turn it into objective, gamechanging brilliance. The one thing is substituted for the other. And then there's the dream many people share of belonging to an exclusive and really superior society, which has provided the juice for pulp fiction galore and probably helped fuel the writing of <i>The Book of Mormon</i>. Galt's Gulchers and seasteaders and extropians and Mormons all seem to have that fantasy in common.bekabotnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2946534773407276339.post-24168033323489478292013-12-17T13:06:15.329-05:002013-12-17T13:06:15.329-05:00According to this, Milagre had 15,000 people at th...According to <a href="http://ansible.wikia.com/wiki/Milagre" rel="nofollow">this</a>, Milagre had 15,000 people at the time of <i>Xenocide</i>, which takes place several decades after <i>Speaker</i>. Of course, the population might have increased in that interval, especially if Lusitania is a colony of strict Catholics who use no contraception. But that raises another problem: if they had such large families, how did they avoid a disastrous population boom, when they were confined to a single location?Steve Morrisonnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2946534773407276339.post-75335442516328975922013-12-17T12:48:21.529-05:002013-12-17T12:48:21.529-05:00And if she's been rattling around loose, despi...And if she's been rattling around loose, despite the staggering unlikelihoods we've already discussed, it seems to me she's got a legitimate beef with the colony. Yet here she is, applying her genius to becoming a sorely needed xenobiologist and plugging a dangerous gap in the colony. Maybe she learned the Ender Wiggins rebellion technique from his book. You know, "Rebel and show you hate them by doing exactly what they want."GeniusLemurnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2946534773407276339.post-57567576852752326332013-12-17T10:14:16.111-05:002013-12-17T10:14:16.111-05:00I think that the book as THE religious text is mor...I think that the book as THE religious text is more of Card kissing the ass of Ender Wiggins, Greatest Wonder Boy in the History of the Universe. After being stupendously brilliant in every other way, he writes the greatest religious text in the universe, too! And he does it all without any training!GeniusLemurnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2946534773407276339.post-70252666127243912712013-12-17T09:20:13.950-05:002013-12-17T09:20:13.950-05:00Ender's Game would seem to have lied to us, ha...<i>Ender's Game</i> would seem to have lied to us, having claimed that HQ&H is 'the only scripture that matters' and the only religion in space, whereas Pipo has now informed us that it's on the index of books Catholics are forbidden to read and Catholicism is still alive and well, as are presumably thousands of other religions.Will Wildmanhttp://somethingshortandsnappy.blogspot.com/noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2946534773407276339.post-70674708052297157622013-12-17T09:07:07.102-05:002013-12-17T09:07:07.102-05:00Yeah, the idea that this book would be THE univers...Yeah, the idea that this book would be THE universal religious text for humans never felt right to me, and the more I think about how humanity's expansion was pretty much given a huge boost with the destruction of the Formics, the less likely it seems to me that people later would be filled with such guilt and remorse, such a sense that what Ender did was a terrible thing. There would always have been alternate views of the "Bugger Wars" and the destruction of the Hive Queen's planet, and I don't see any real reason why this one particular vision would have won the war of ideas. <br /><br /><br /><br />I'm jumping ahead a little, because I have read this book in its entirety, but I'm thinking the whole notion that everybody now believes in the goodness of the Formics and the horribleness of Ender is part and parcel of Card's ongoing efforts to make Ender into the lone, unappreciated genius who has to suffer to save the universe.Noranoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2946534773407276339.post-52072065872548471192013-12-17T00:46:44.354-05:002013-12-17T00:46:44.354-05:00She read The Hive Queen and the Hegemon and imagin...<i> She read The Hive Queen and the Hegemon and imagined what it must have demanded of the anonymous author to understand those aliens, and I just want everyone to keep in mind that as far as the galaxy is concerned,HQ&H is nothing more than an Alternative Character Interpretation fanfic with zero real-world evidence. The fact that it's taken more seriously than Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter is itself a premise that desperately needs justification.</i><br /><br /><br />It's far more plausible than Ender, in the previous novel, convincing his publisher to publish that book under the equivalent of a Creative Commons license. "It'll be fine, just give it a really nice cover or something and they'll buy it from you instead of anyone else." Uh huh. It's also more plausible that nobody ever leaks who the anonymous author is the second sales for <i>The Hive Queen</i> start to flag.<br /><br /><br />That said ... I can see <i>The Hive Queen and the Hegemon</i> striking a chord for people like Novinha -- any alienated teenager, really. They'd embrace it for its emotional truth. On the other hand, I don't see humanity coming together as one and going, "Yep, this is who the Bug-- uh, the Formics really were, and this is what really, literally happened, and Ender sucks now."cinderkeysnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2946534773407276339.post-27912109461828257682013-12-16T19:30:18.421-05:002013-12-16T19:30:18.421-05:00It makes even less sense because there are so few ...It makes even less sense because there are so few human beings on Lusitania — you would think that children would still be valuable commodities if only in terms of their usefulness when it comes to doing odd jobs. Card spends book after book pounding away at how important large families are in an environment like this but here he has a kid rattling around loose for years because nobody's willing to take her in. <br /><br />Hunh?bekabotnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2946534773407276339.post-40179685963947081662013-12-16T13:22:58.756-05:002013-12-16T13:22:58.756-05:00That's the impression I got when I read it, to...That's the impression I got when I read it, too, only it doesn't make sense. It takes decades of realtime to get a ship there -- you don't start out by sending a small colony and then send a huge one unless you *already suspect* that something is wrong that might kill off the first lot of inhabitants.<br /><br /><br />Did Starways Congress know about the descolada? :)<br /><br /><br />(Well, OK, I guess you might have been testing for something wrong, but it seems more effective to send a small survey mission, then the full colony five or ten years behind. If the survey fails you can always turn the full colony around. Only this *is* the full colony, this *postdates* the briefly-mentioned survey, so that doesn't work either.)Nixnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2946534773407276339.post-24543536307434544532013-12-16T10:07:20.658-05:002013-12-16T10:07:20.658-05:00If her parents were so admired to the point of bei...If her parents were so admired to the point of being literally canonized, I would think her well-being would be a major priority of the colony, and the line of potential foster parents would go around the block at least once.GeniusLemurnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2946534773407276339.post-90814004523292513232013-12-16T09:04:49.391-05:002013-12-16T09:04:49.391-05:00No SF has colony fleets of a hundred million at a ...No SF has colony fleets of a hundred million at a time... though that would explain Single-Culture Planets -- the entire population of bankrupt states like Portugal, or annoying breakaway regions like the Basque region or Texas or whatever just got loaded onto a huge ship and sent off to some planet en masse... but no, this series has nothing like that.)<br /><br />Plenty of 'em do. The thing about the city-sized spaceships that inevitably show up is that they can carry a city's worth of people and infrastructure, or more. And if you aren't particularly concerned about comfort - either because you have fast ships, some sort of stasis system, or you just don't care, you can get crazy densities. At 'modern airplane' densities, a 1000 by 300 by 300 meter ship can carry 150 million people. At 'slave ship' densities, it can carry *billions*. <br /><br />3000-person colonies are, of course, completely implausible as a way to reduce population.<br />Not to mention they're too small to be genetically stable...BaseDeltaZeronoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2946534773407276339.post-24839362945225435572013-12-15T22:26:09.066-05:002013-12-15T22:26:09.066-05:00Presumably, Starways Congress originally planned a...Presumably, Starways Congress originally planned a much larger colony – but it had to be limited to a single town after the discovery of intelligent inhabitants. (I don’t believe we ever get a population figure, but three thousand sounds like the right ballpark.)Steve Morrisonnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2946534773407276339.post-58689925295606877172013-12-15T21:10:13.078-05:002013-12-15T21:10:13.078-05:00Has anyone else noticed how all the characters in ...Has anyone else noticed how all the characters in the first two books talk the same way? All the children have the same way of talking to adults, all the adults have the same way of talking to each other and to children. He really seems incapable of imagining people with different personalities beyond the two or three types he uses over and over; the idea that different people would have different ways of expressing themselves seems to be completely beyond him.Noranoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2946534773407276339.post-436328146865798552013-12-15T19:31:31.486-05:002013-12-15T19:31:31.486-05:00"Three thousand years into the future and sci..."Three thousand years into the future and scientific disciplines are 'the family business' and you only ever bother having one at a time because I guess there isn't enough demand for science to need two?"<br /><br /><br /><br />If the colony is implausibly tiny -- and all evidence points to 3000-odd people, indeed -- then it is thoroughly unsurprising that they are so short of specialists that if someone decides to do what Daddy did he'll be the *only* specialist in that area in the colony.<br /><br /><br />Which is, on planet Earth, an excellent way to lose all your technology really quite fast (look what happened to, IIRC, the Tasmanians: went from canoes to *nothing*, even losing fire). But maybe their galactic Internet helps? (It would have to. Charlie Stross has estimated that on the order of a hundred million people would be needed to maintain present levels of technology. No SF has colony fleets of a hundred million at a time... though that would explain Single-Culture Planets -- the entire population of bankrupt states like Portugal, or annoying breakaway regions like the Basque region or Texas or whatever just got loaded onto a huge ship and sent off to some planet en masse... but no, this series has nothing like that.)<br /><br /><br />3000-person colonies are, of course, completely implausible as a way to reduce population. Let's ship a ship out with 3000 people on board! Before a quarter of an hour has passed, long before everyone has even boarded let alone before the ship has broken orbit, the population growth curve has made up the loss again... but Card needed a small colony for the story to work, so a small colony we get.Nixnoreply@blogger.com