Ender's Shadow, chapters twenty-three and twenty-four, in which Bean steps aside

I almost put 'the last Card post ever' under the below 'fun content' tag, but of course then I remembered that, sooner or later, I'm going to have to do one more post on the Ender's Game movie.  So there's that, though I'm not sure when, exactly.

As I have vowed many times, I'm not doing any more Orson Scott Card books on this blog.  I'm quite done; this one is the best and I am not willing to spend any more of my life on his time.  So, enjoy the below, but next week be sure to come back for the very first post on: The Eye of the World, Book One of The Wheel of Time.

I'm going to regret this, I just know it.

But first, we've got to finish up with Card's books at least, so read on, you tenacious followers.  Y'all make this endurable.

(Content: ableism, genocide, child abuse. Fun content: asteroid dodgeball, male novelists, terrifying Space Humans, tons of fanfiction, Adam Savage, and yet more goddamn Bible references.)

Ender's Shadow: p. 352--379

Chapter Twenty-Three: Ender's Game

The opening exchange between Graff and Admiral Placeholder-Designed-To-Make-Others-Look-Better is predictable, as Graff tries to convince him to arrest "the Polemarch and his conspirators", although as I understand this world that means 'all Russians', so... that seems hard.  Admiral Placeholder of course refuses to "fire the first shot", because then he'll be blamed for the ensuing war, etc etc politics cowards whatever.  I hate Graff and I don't know who this guy is, so I can't imagine why I'm supposed to be invested in this subplot.  Anyway, it's xenocide time again and Bean is in prophet mode for Our MurderSaviour:

With Ender there,Bean immediately stepped back into his place among the toon leaders. No one mentioned it to him. He had been the leading commander, he had trained them well, but Ender had always been the natural commander of this group [....] They felt known by the one whose honor they needed. Bean simply did not know how to do that. His encouragement was always more obvious, a bit heavy-handed. [....] Ender was just... himself. Authority came from him like breath.

Card continues to subscribe to the notion that narrative 'showing' is only used for minor matters, like spending several pages detailing the logistics of crawling around inside an air duct, whereas the powerful art of 'telling' is saved for those grand moments when you need to contrast the essential natures of your dual protagonists to drive home your thesis on intelligence distinct from leadership.

Bean also informs us that Ender doesn't call on him nearly as much as he wishes, focusing instead on his besties: Petra, Alai, Dink, and Shen.  The previous book informed us that Ender analysed Bean's skills and found he floundered with large fleets but used small squadrons to devastating effect; here we're told that this was actually Mazer Rackham downplaying Bean's skills so that Bean can always be standing by to hit the button and take over Ender's leadership if Ender freezes or passes out in the middle of battle.

They hear about Mazer Rackham's 'testing' plan, which Bean pegs as suspicious, but the best part is this logical leap, when he sees the globe formation of the enemy ships that Rackham supposedly programmed, surrounding a single decoy queen:

So why would Rackham expect the Buggers to expect humans to strike for a single ship? 

Bean thought back to those vids that Ender had watched over and over in Battle School--all the propaganda film of the Second Invasion. 

They never showed the battle because there wasn't one. Nor did Mazer Rackham command a strike force with a brilliant strategy. Mazer Rackham hit a single ship and the war was over.

Just so we're clear here, I didn't snip out any text.  Bean makes a flying leap from 'Mazer, pretending to be the formics, is decoying with a lone ship, which he thinks the real formics will do, therefore there was no battle whatsoever in the Second Invasion'.  Now, okay, the leap to 'they're faking a queen therefore the queen is their weak point' is a legitimate move, cool, but the additional decision that there was no actual battle around Saturn is pure magical intuition.  Bean has no reason to believe that Mazer didn't kill the queen after a long and devastating battle of brilliant tactics.  If he won with one shot and not military skill, what's supposed to qualify him to program anything else the formics are doing in battle?  Why does one skill (laser tag, or alien empathy) keep translating into total mastery of war?

Bean similarly hears that the testing pattern is going to mimic a campaign, and he instantly concludes that all of his guesses are right, the formics have many worlds and the humans are invading all of them and the formics will learn from battle to battle because they have instant communications etc etc I am literally recapping Card recapping himself.  Also, Bean has apparently given up on his 'I must not believe my own wild theory' plan, continuing his signature move of completely changing his mind between scenes for no given reason.

Ender starts relying most of all on Petra (what happened to Alai running whole fleets himself?), and fails to notice as Bean does that she's a perfectionist and her mistakes are grinding her down.

He was so good with people, and yet he seemed to think she was really tough, instead of realizing that toughness was an act she put on to hide her intense anxiety.

Silly Ender, thinking that a girl is actually tough rather than just having an abrasive veneer covering her deeply vulnerable femininity.  Bean can't be bothered with her right now, of course, he's busy toughly weathering the total lack of recognition he gets (the others don't come to him for tactical support, except for Tom and Han) as he keeps an eye on everything and tries to coordinate behind the scenes as the battles get rougher.  Man Tough.  Man Tough Strong Do My Job Grr Whiskey.

Petra passes out in the middle of battle, Bean has to catch Ender's attention to get him to react, and they pull it together with heavy losses while Petra breaks down sobbing, blaming herself, until she's taken away to, presumably, the infirmary.  She comes back, "but her ebullience was gone", because if ever there was a word to summarise Petra's tactical brilliance, 'cheerful' is definitely it.  Not courage or determination or sharp calculation, but always having a smile on her face.  I'm so done with Card.

Petra's not the only one down this time; Vlad goes catatonic and Fly Molo breaks down laughing in the middle of battle.  As Ender keeps slowing down as well, Bean steps in more to clarify and support his orders, and he starts getting some acknowledgement and back-pats from his friends, and his heart grows three sizes, and then it's the final battle.

Graff comes to beg Bean to come up with some miracle to save the day.  (Bean is finally the only person to point out that Mazer is probably psychologically torn up and taking it out on Ender because all these pilots dying in battle are Mazer's friends from decades ago.  There's an underused concept there.)  Bean's got nothing, especially once he sees the formic homeworld and its ten-thousand-ship fleet in orbit.

I'm going to be a jackass about math one last time.  Let's assume for no good reason that the formic homeworld is about the same size as Earth.  Earth has a surface area of 510 million square kilometres.  Ten thousand ships in flight means each ship needs to cover about 51,000 square klicks  from a human ship reaching the surface.  Half that if they knew what direction the humans would come from and they've only covered that hemisphere of the planet, of course.  So, assuming a hex grid, each formic ship is, what, 120 klicks apart by land?  (I'm not adjusting distance for altitude of flight, but if they're flying above the atmosphere, it's obviously a much greater distance between ships.)  That's not going to give us the kind of incredibly tight swarm Card describes, so do we assume that means the formic homeworld is tiny?  If it isn't, then I'm less convinced that this is as hard a shot to pull off as they imply.  They have eighty ships; the formics need to prevent every single one of them from entering the atmosphere.  If we're looking at the planet from a distance like this but it's minutes away rather than days, all of the ships involved are obviously moving at ridiculous speeds, far beyond anything we 21st century humans have ever achieved, so if our only goal is to reach the planet (and both Bean and the formics see that it must be so), I feel like the formics are at a bigger disadvantage here than we think.  It's exactly the problem Bean described before: if they spread their fleet away from the surface (to keep humans from getting anywhere near firing range) they need exponentially more ships to create a thick enough field to ensure no one slips through.  How quickly can their ships change direction in space?  Can they get from the north pole to the southern hemisphere as quickly as humans can get from hovering out in space to the south pole?  What are our acceleration/deceleration parameters here?

A kindlier blogger would just say that, since Bean sees this as a hopeless fight, obviously the parameters are such that the formic defence swarm is indeed an impassable blockade, but you and I both know I ran out of kindliness long ago.

I'm mostly thinking that this whole fight could be adequately side-stepped if the human fleet contained 79 normal fighters and a single fighter with good cloaking technology to slip down to the south pole and shiv the planet.  Why don't we have that?  Why don't we have ten thousand drones whose sole purpose is to project a small Ecstatic Field and make it look like we have a fleet just as big as theirs, since it's canon that you can't see through shields?  Do they have a moon?  Have we considered busting that and just letting tidal forces obliterate their civilisation?  Have we considered using our sweet stolen gravity technology to give them a moon?  Is no one worried that they might have split off, you know, five hundred of their endless swarm of ships on a mission of vengeance against Earth weeks ago when they found out we had a planet-buster weapon and we were coming for them?

Where we were?

Ender stares in silence at all of this for a full minute before a blinking button lights up on Bean's console, which he knows will put him in command if he touches it.  Bean determines the teachers think that Ender has frozen up, while Bean knows Ender has just reached the same hopeless conclusion Bean has, and because he thinks it's a game, he's going to quit.  Bean agrees, and has nothing in mind except bitter irony when he says "Remember [...] the enemy's gate is down".

I'm fuzzy on why it's necessary that they "dodge here and there through the ever-shifting formations of the enemy swarms" and "every third or fourth move takes us closer and closer to the planet".  It's a straight line, the distances involved make the idea of a 'thick' swarm ridiculous, like flying through an asteroid belt and worrying about collisions.  If you can reach the edge of their swarm and not die, you can probably get to the far side before they can so much as track you.

But the formics don't strike (I'm not even sure if they're shooting), and Bean comes up with a series of hypotheses to explain this: they fear clustering and getting Doctored, they just have too many ships in flight for too few queen minds to effectively coordinate, and they're focused (inexplicably) on blocking the human retreat, because they "have finally, finally learned that we humans value each and every individual human life [....] but they've learned this lesson just in time for it to be hopelessly wrong".  There is much heroic talk about leaping on grenades to save your foxhole comrades, and suicide bombing, collectively and charming summarised as "insane".  Sigh.

Bean concludes that the formics aren't afraid of Dr Device right now because all the human fighters would die with the planet, and wonders whether Ender has somehow learned to empathise with them enough to predict this, but decides it doesn't matter even if it's all luck now, because either way Ender is the one who chose the tactics in this battle and all the others:

It was Ender whose previous victories taught the enemy to think of us as one kind of creature when we are really something quite different. He pretended all this time that humans were rational beings, when we are really the most terrible monsters these poor aliens could ever have conceived of in their nightmares.

For a refreshing break to a realm of more interesting science fiction ideas, allow me to recommend this tumblr compilation of notes on humans from the perspective of aliens.

Anyway, Bean gets around to feeling sorry for the pilots currently on their way to die committing xenocide at Ender's command, and he remembers Sister Carlotta's favourite scripture, Absalom and David, and presses the fleet override button just long enough to speak to all of the pilot simultaneously (and no one else, and apparently no one notices that Bean just took control from Ender for several seconds, and how does he give control back afterwards anyway?)--

...knowing for the first time the kind of anguish that could tear such words from a man's mouth. "My son, my son Absalom. Would God I could die for thee, O Absalom, my son. My sons!"

(Bean is tragically unaware that all of the pilots are women.  Graff's obsession with filling Battle School with more boys than pants wasn't in effect eighty years ago.)

They make their final dive, they all fire (except Petra's squadron, given rear guard duty against the actual swarm), and "the ships that launched too early watched their Dr. Device burn up in the atmosphere before it could go off", because apparently it's a missile in this continuity.  Does the Device not work on gas and vapour for some reason?  But Bean gives the last ship an order to detonate their Doctor onboard, without launching, and somehow that is close enough to hit the planet.

But long before the last ship was swallowed up, all the maneuvering had stopped. They drifted, dead. Like the dead Bugger ships in the vids of the Second Invasion.

BEAN YOU HAVE NEVER SEEN THOSE VIDS OH MY GOD CARD.

Out in the hall, Bean tells the others that, yes, those cool special effects really could happen because they did happen, they just won, and Graff appears to confirm this (I guess after Ender has already passed out or whatever) and inform them that the species is dead.  Petra, of course, immediately breaks down in tears, making her, by the way, the first person to mourn for the formics, so let's keep that in mind the next time anyone talks about how magical the Speaker for the Dead was.  Dink comforts Petra, everyone leaves except Bean and Graff, who are still chatting when gunfire sounds off from the Polemarch's rebellion.  Friendly marines secure the barracks, and Graff takes Bean to the ansible room to hear the news.  The last several lines are actually pretty funny banter and all, but whatever.  People joking around corpses is standard for this book.

Ender's Game is, quite clearly, a massive exercise in putting a child in the position of committing genocide without bearing any actual responsibility for it, because he's kept unaware.  Bean, conversely, is fully aware, totally onboard, and gives the last commands that guarantee victory.  On the other hand, Ender said in Speaker for the Dead that he retrospectively would have been onboard with it if he'd known, and therefore bears equal guilt.

There's nothing much to be said about Bean's lack of thought towards the formics that I haven't said about Ender, except for this: Bean came up with his plan (the Third Invasion) because he thought there was no ansible, so the invasion fleet would hit the formics just when they found out they had lost the Second Invasion.  When he found out there was an ansible, if he'd had the slightest sense in his head, he should have realised that the formics therefore knew they lost the moment it happened, seventy years ago, and thus could have launched their own fleet just as long ago.  We don't know how humanity found the formic homeworlds, so we don't know what kind of scanning and astrometric surveying technology we've all got, but surely we might have noticed if, the first time we Doctored one of their fleets, they decided to launch a full re-invasion fleet toward Earth, or drew their forces back to defend themselves.  Nada.  The formics haven't apparently responded to anything at all.

Bean can catch the hesitation in someone's voice and from it reason his way into understanding the entire secret strategy and technology behind the whole of the Third Invasion, but the marauding monsters (with thousands of times the ships humanity can field) spend seventy years very specifically not attacking Earth again and it doesn't pique his curiosity at all?

Bean has realised that the formics are hive-minds, Bean has thought far enough ahead to realise that the formics might not have realised that humans weren't hive-minds to start with, and all the consequences that spill out of that, and he could have done so in a matter of seconds.  The screen comes up, Ender stares flatly at the impossibility of the final battle, Bean sees the thousands of formic ships that have been built and never sent to kill anyone, and when Ender finally starts giving commands, Bean shouts: Stop.  Because instead of his hopeless "the enemy's gate is down", the lesson he remembers is 'The real enemy isn't the other army; the real enemy is the teacher'.

And that's the real strength of fanfiction that Card doesn't have, here: fanfiction is created by those who adore and immerse themselves in the story, but it is also, most importantly, created by those who didn't feel like the original story was enough.

Let's take Harry Potter here, because while I've been out of fanfic for years, some of the best I still see around the web is in that world.  Harry Potter fanfiction isn't just fun for people who like the idea of wizard school, it's also vitally important for people who want to know that they exist and are good and strong and worthy magicians despite not being cis or straight or (frankly) white, and people who need more than 'all was well' and to talk about the story of recovering and not just winning.  Harry Potter fanfiction is important for people for whom it is not adequate or acceptable that Harry grows up in an abusive environment and no one ever calls Dumbledore on it, or that the youngest survivors of the war are at risk of the same treatment again, or the idea that you can tell who's good and who's bad by the colour of their school uniform.

And Card doesn't have that, here, because he mashed several stories together, he wrote Ender's Game so he'd have his divine white saviour hero for Speaker for the Dead, and it did that job and it can't be done any other way without uprooting his whole original plan, so Bean can't say any of those things, he can't be that smart, despite day after chapter after day of doing exactly that thing, again and again.  Ender's Game, for him, is already good enough.  Ender's Shadow doesn't really exist to comment on that, or to change anything except a handful of details, and then not much--we met Petra, Corn Moon, and Wu, but Bean still says there were only a dozen girls in Battle School (estimated minimum student body of 1000).  The retcons (like everyone knowing about the formic hive-mind) are obviously unintentional.

So, in the end, I have a hard time thinking worse of Bean for going along with xenocide, because even though it could have been completely in his character to understand the situation, his writer couldn't allow him to do that, because the first story was already good enough for him.

Chapter Twenty-Four: Homecoming

Graff informs Carlotta that, before they were defeated, Russia grabbed Achilles out of whatever prison they were keeping him in, being the only Battle School child not currently under I.F. guard.  Dun dun DUNNNN.  Carlotta, of course, is a protagonist and therefore has to be shocked that Graff is up for court-martial, "a scapegoat for victory".  Sigh.

When Eros has been safely reclaimed from Russian rebels, the dream team gather at last to go see Ender, who's been unconscious the whole time.  Bean recognises that Ender has been torturing himself emotionally, grieving for the formics while Bean cares less about their whole species than he does about Poke.

Then it's mostly recapping and Bean narratively informing us how true everything is: "Bean believed him", "Bean felt the truth of that", et cetera.  There's also a line I never paid attention to before,"If the universe had any kindness in it, or even simple justice, Ender would never have to take another life", which I assume is an ironic nod to Speaker for the Dead and the transition of Human to his tree stage.  Meh.

Bean is the only one who already knows that Ender is the only one not going back to Earth, as part of the peace treaty that Locke put together.  Bean thinks of many reasons Ender's own brother would ban him from returning to Earth, but can't decide.  He vows to meet him one day and find out, and destroy Peter if Bean decides this was in fact a betrayal.  Which strikes me as deeply out of character for Bean, who has (until last chapter, when he signed off on the formics' death) never cared about revenge at all.  They're sent home, one by one, and that's the last mention of Ender in this book.

The last page and a half is, in a rare case, one of the best parts of the book.  The Delphiki parents gleefully await the arrival of their son Nikolai (but why now, when Bean started the ball rolling weeks or months ago and it takes so much longer to get back from Eros than Battle School?), and prepare a small feast, and they see the car coming, and it's only when Nikolai gets out with another tiny boy that dad finally tells Elena that Bean survived.  I'll include it here, for completeness, because Card is a terrible person who does terrible things, and it's important to also recognise that a person can be that and write this:

"He's been told that he's coming just for a visit. That legally he is not our child, but rather a ward of the state. We don't have to take him in, if you don't want to, Elena." 

"Hush, you foolish man," she said. 

[....] Her husband spoke. Elena recognized his words at once, from the gospel of St. Luke. But because he had only memorized the passage in Greek, the little on did not understand him. No matter. Nikolai began to translate into Common, the language of the fleet, and almost at once the little one recognized the words, and spoke them correctly, from memory, as Sister Carlotta had once read it to him years before. 

"Let us eat, and be merry: for this my son was dead, and is alive again; he was lost, and is found." Then the little one burst into tears and clung to his mother, and kissed his father's hand. 

"Welcome home, little brother," said Nikolai. "I told you they were nice."

This isn't a book about how hard it is to be the only special person in the room, or how morally justified murder is if we think we're threatened, or how super sad we are about the terrible things we've done for no good reason.  This is a story about what it's like to be this scrawny little genius jackass named Bean, and that is why it's better than Ender's Game.

Next week: hey, my copy of Eye of the World has a back-cover blurb from Card himself, who spoke of Robert Jordan's "powerful vision of good and evil" and "fascinating people moving through a rich and interesting world".  We're so screwed.

Speaker for the Dead, introduction, in which we solve a mystery by studying its genetics

It's been a hell of a ride, hasn't it?  This is the final Speaker for the Dead post, and July is a novel-writing month, so I wouldn't count on a lot of new blog content during that time.  After that, I may return with Ender's Shadow, the retelling of Ender's Game from Bean's perspective, which I still consider to be Card's best novel (I just think that's a lower bar than I used to).  Or maybe I'll move on to something else entirely.  Maybe something good?  Or at least better?  Erika the Blogqueen has contemplated doing a series on Mistborn; I've got like eighteen books partly read lying around my apartment and half of Wheel of Time that I inherited from a former roommate.  We'll keep you posted on our post-July posting plans.

(Content: ableism, partner abuse, racism. Fun content: y'all like point-form lists, right?)

Speaker for the Dead: p. ix--xxii

Introduction

So... Speaker for the Dead, eh?  What was up with that?  It takes some careful planning to create a story where all of the problems exist solely because people would literally rather die than ask a direct question.  As I belaboured back in chapter fourteen, Ender was in a much better position to play an antagonist who proves to be a friend than he was to be the hero, yet he's presented to us as the hero because he's the only one who isn't afraid of the truth.  This needs explaining, and in the spirit of Speaker for the Dead, I'm going to argue that we can figure out what caused this atrocity by tracing back its evolutionary history to a catastrophic plague the 1980s.

Speaker for the Dead is a sequel, but it didn't begin life that way--and you don't have to read it that way, either.  It was my intention all along for Speaker to be able to stand alone, for it to make sense whether you have read Ender's Game or not. Indeed, in my mind this was the "real" book; if I hadn't been trying to write Speaker for the Dead back in 1983, there would never have been a novel version of Ender's Game at all.

Interesting premise.  Let's summarise Speaker for the Dead by chapter:

1. Pipo rescues young Novinha from sadness by taking her in as his daughter (in a weirdly romantic relationship with her pseudo-brother), then is horribly murdered by the mysterious primitive aliens.
2. Ender Wiggin is super-smart and philosophical and a three-thousand-year-old war hero, and people have very strong opinions on the morality of being an alien because his ultra-brilliant sister wrote an essay about fjords a couple of months ago.  He also owes a mysterious debt to someone.
3. Novinha hides all the science that somehow led to Pipo's confrontation and death, and also breaks up with her pseudo-brother to protect him, but also summons Ender Wiggin to cross the galaxy to solve the mystery that she believes must never be solved.
4. Ender Wiggin's girlfriend is the internet and he's super rich and he carries the last survivor of his accidental genocide. 
5. Ender Wiggin breaks up with his newlywed pregnant sister to cross the galaxy in a private star cruiser in hopes of protecting aliens.  His best student figures out the truth and devotes her life to serving his sister's family.
6. Novinha's children are terrible.  Ender arrives and immediately astonishes the mayor with his knowledge and history, learns that Libo died after all, scares children because the Bishop has told them he's the devil, and befriends one of Novinha's kids.
7. Novinha's children are terrible.  Ender enters their home, subdues them by physical force or argument, refuses to leave, and tells them how foolish they are for not understanding their little brother.  Novinha's dead husband used to beat her.
8. Novinha comes home.  Ender tells her he knows everything, she's a terrible mother, and he will redeem her.
9. Ender's literal internet girlfriend Jane reveals that all of Novinha's kids were fathered by Libo.  Libo's kids, Miro and Ouanda, are bad at science.
10. Ender befriends the local monastic sect because he was besties with their founder two thousand years earlier.  Jane distracts Ender, so he switches her off for a bit.
11. Being cut off from Ender for an afternoon utterly devastates Jane and she spends the equivalent of 50,000 years in recovery, then sparks an interstellar police action.
12. Ender is super rich, Novinha is obsessed with him, and her children are fractionally less terrible now that they're obsessed with him as well.
13. The aliens demand to meet with Ender because he is everything.  Ela reveals to Ender that she's secretly been doing real science for years.
14. Miro and Ouanda take Ender to meet the aliens.  Ender tells them that they're terrible scientists, and the aliens then reveal everything to him because he's so important.
15. The government locks down the planetary computers, but they save some vital information because Ender is special.  Ender makes the entire colony sympathise with a dead abuser by explaining that he couldn't have kids and his wife cheated on him.
16. Everyone tells each other everything now that Ender is there.  Miro wants to run away to the forest to marry his sister, but grievously injures himself instead through terrible science.  The colony rebels because Ender is so special that he can completely prevent any consequences to rebellion for the next thirty years.
17. The aliens tell Ender everything else they haven't said.  Ender teaches them how not to be terrible warmongering savages, signs a contract, and ritually murder-metamorphoses an alien volunteer to seal the deal.
18. Miro is permanent disabled and shoved in temporal storage for later.  Ender gets the girl, brings civilisation to the primitive aliens, learns that his sister is uprooting her family to come meet him, and revives the last survivor of his war crime, clearing his conscience.

Now, on the one hand, this synopsis does make it clear that there wouldn't be much of this book left without Ender there.  On the other hand, without Ender's Game as background, Ender literally never earns anything--he's just a brilliant rich straight white male ex-soldier poet-priest whose very presence elicits awe even from people who claim to hate him.  I'm curious if anyone has read Speaker and not Ender's Game, and whether they found Ender remotely sufferable.  I find him aggravating and I've read about all the harsh childhood and suffering and abuse that is supposed to have turned him into who he is in this book.  (I've even read Ender in Exile, y'all.  Never let it be said I'm not dedicated.)

Back to the introduction.  Card explains that the 'speaker for the dead' concept is the result of his dislike for eulogies that erase anything uncomfortable about the dead person and therefore make them less like real people in memory.  He insists that the only story worth telling (despite it being unknowable) is the story of what the person meant to do with their life.  I'm a little unclear on how this is possible--surely, if the true story is unknowable, then the speaker has to take a guess at it, and in doing so they still erase the real person in favour of an explanation that makes sense to them and is therefore "much easier to live with", which is exactly the problem he has with 'normal' eulogies?

This really gets to the heart of the problem, because Card insists that intentions are all that matter to morality, but even he admits that we can never really know what a person's intentions were.  In that case, the logical conclusion seems to be that we can never know how moral a person is, and maybe then we end up at the traditional Christian 'judge not', but Ender's assertion seems instead to be that everyone has good intentions all the time and therefore they are ultimately good even if shallow outsiders think they're 'bad' just because they do stuff like start bar fights and abuse their families.

The next point is interesting:

So when I thought of the idea of an alien species which, in order to reproduce, had to slaughter each other in terrible intertribal wars, it was only natural that I decided the story should be told from the viewpoint of a human scientist studying them.  Only gradually, over several years, did I develop the idea of the piggies and their strange lifecycle, and the intertribal war receded in importance--so much so that I didn't need to make it an issue in Speaker for the Dead at all.

This explains a fair bit--the wars (which play some kind of vital role in Little One society by allowing males to go tree without having to be selected by the females, circumventing their usual honor-related system) seem like they should be a bigger deal, and everything that happened to Pipo and Libo would make more sense if the Little Ones specifically required speedy, violent death, but that wasn't the story Card wanted to tell.  He also couldn't quite bear to get rid of it (and it does allow for that great scene where civilised white Ender teaches primitive little Human about non-aggression treaties and peaceful alliances), so it stayed in some vestigial form, an offshoot that evolution doesn't really need but hasn't had cause to eliminate either.

Originally the role was the Singer of Death, but Card's wife pointed out that all of his acclaimed works had some kind of music thing going on, so he ditched that and attached instead to the only one that didn't: the short story of Ender's Game.

What if Ender Wiggin comes to an alien world as a Speaker of Death, and accidently gets caught up in the mystery of why these piggies are slaughtering each other? It had a delicious symmetry to it--the man who, as a child, destroyed one alien species now has a chance to save another.

On the one hand, I think Card made the smart choice here by having the ultimate threat be 'scared humans with guns' rather than having to understand why the primitive aliens keep slaughtering each other when it's actually harmless.  On the other hand, the story we have got is basically 'humans colonise a planet wrong, so Ender teaches them to colonise it right and the primitive natives are much better off, and this makes other humans angry'.  At no point do we seem to have any hope of 'humans discover the aliens are actually handling their own affairs just fine and if they'd stop trying to force the aliens into human institutions we'd all float on okay'.  One way or another, regardless of whether the endless reproducto-war is centre stage or an afterthought, we're pretty sure that Ender needs to save these people from their ignorance.

Card set up the deal for Speaker of Death in 1983, only to find:

...that the book was unwritable.  In order to make the Ender Wiggin of Speaker make any kind of sense, I had to have this really long, kind of boring opening chapter that brought him from the end of the Bugger War to the beginning of the story of Speaker some three thousand years later!  It was outrageous.  I couldn't write it.

Card then details the short conversation that abruptly led to him having a contract to do a novel of Game before Speaker, but I'm left confused.  That's quite literally what this book does for the first few chapters: show us Ender of three thousand years later, rich and respected and forgotten, and tell us all about his childhood achievements.  What made the original 'outrageous' draft so different?  (Card acknowledges that Ender Wiggin wasn't really a full character until he fleshed out Ender's Game, which is a fair point and presumably made a difference in trying to approach Speaker, but that's not a problem with the story of Speaker, that's a reminder that you have to know your characters before you can write them, or you'll be visibly flailing to figure out their deal on the page.)

With Ender's Game written, he approaches Speaker again, starting with Ender arriving on Lusitania to speak the death of "an old lout named Marcão", but two hundred pages in found it hollow, even after adding Novinha, Pipo, and Libo.  Card was on a trip with a friend and former student, Gregg Keizer, who took some time to read the manuscript of Speaker.

He had many good ideas. Of course, most of them dealt with small fixes for problems in the manuscript as it now stood. One comment he made, however, illuminated everything for me. "I couldn't tell Novinha's kids apart," he said. "I couldn't remember which was which."

This, Card tells us, was the key.  Novinha's kids were "nothing but placeholders", like a younger sister in another novel whom he would forget existed for hundreds of pages at a time until he finally decided to retcon her into dying in infancy, because I guess the death of a baby sister is exactly the same as her never existing?  But he couldn't just cut her kids:

Because I wanted Novinha to be voluntarily isolated, I had to have her be otherwise acceptable to her neighbors. In a Catholic colony like Lusitania, this meant Novinha needed to have a bunch of kids.

Wait, what?  There's an entire sect of teacher-administrators on this planet whose whole deal is that they are married without children.  (I'm not entirely sure what to make of the assertion that Novinha is and had to be voluntarily isolated, given that we're told she was isolated from a young age because no one took the time to understand her and for the rest of her life no one tried to stop Marcos from beating her--Card's insistence that Novinha literally signed up for physical abuse still horrifies me.)

Once you've read Speaker, of course, you'll wonder what the story would be without Novinha's children, and the answer is, It wouldn't be much!

Novinha's children, in order of relevance:

• Miro: informed almost-protagonist, fails to get useful information, gets permanently injured trying to run away to marry his sister, gets put in storage so people don't have to deal with him being all physically disabled at them.
• (Honorable mention because she's not Novinha's kid: Ouanda: like Miro, but female and therefore less important.  Does basically nothing of consequence; exists mostly to assist Ender, be told she's screwing up, and create angst for Miro.)
• Ela: runs the actual household and does the actual science.  Gives Ender vital information a few times and tells everyone that all of their problems are Novinha's fault.
• Olhado: gives Ender vital information several times and likes him first.  Records key incidents with his cyborg eyes because a pocket camera just wouldn't feel sci fi enough.
• Grego: poster child for broken household, violent, needs proper physical discipline from a strong man.
• Quim: religious zealot, shows that even Ender's least-rational fanatical enemies like his work.
• Quara: like Grego, but female and therefore less important.  Quiet, needs signs of affection from a strong man.

Card goes on to complain that genre heroes never seem to have parents and we never see them grow up and become parents either, and he's not wrong about that.  Showing protagonists as part of a larger family makes a big difference and we could do with more.

The romantic hero is unconnected. He belongs to no community; he is wandering from place to place, doing good (as he sees it), but then moving on. This is the life of the adolescent, full of passion, intensity, magic, and infinite possibility; but lacking responsibility, rarely expecting to have to stay and bear the consequences of error. [....] Only when the loneliness becomes unbearable do adolescents root themselves [....] many fail at adulthood and constantly reach backward for the freedom and passion of adolescence. But those who achieve it are the ones who create civilization.

Card decided that, if he couldn't write a parent's perspective, he could at least write the perspective of an adult who feels responsibility to a family, and thus this book was an opportunity to show"the miracle of a family in transformation".  This, at least, explains a little more of why Novinha is such a non-entity in her family.  Card had already decided that the caring adult was Ender, and Novinha was 'voluntarily isolated', so there was no hope of her actually doing anything for her kids.

This undertaking, Card wants us to know, was haaaaard:

Most novels get by with showing the relationships between two or, at the most, three characters. This is because the difficulty of creating a character increases with each new major character that is added to the tale.

Characters A and B just have an A-B relationship, he explains, but add C and you've got A-B, A-C, B-C, and A-B-C.  And we change all the time depending on who we're dealing with, so A might be a very different person with B than with C, and so each one is multiplied and it's so hard.

What happens, then, when you start with a family with a mother, a dead father, and six troubled children, and then add a stranger who intrudes into the family and transforms every one of them?

In this book?  Apparently you reduce half of them to caricatures and ignore the relationships that aren't with Mighty Whitey.  Quick, someone tell me how Ela's relationship to Miro changes as a result of the transformative impact of Ender's presence on both of them over the course of the story.  (I'm pretty sure they talk to each other... once in the whole novel?  Was it once?)

I sat there with Gregg, assigning some immediate and obvious trait to each of the children that would help the reader keep track of them. Oh, yes, Olhado is the one with the metal eyes; Quara is the one who says outrageous things after long silences; Grego is the violent one; Quim is the religious fanatic; Ela is the weary mother-figure; Miro is the eldest son, the hero in the others' eyes. These "hooks" could only serve to introduce the children--I'd have to develop them far beyond that point--but having found those hooks, I had a plan that would let me proceed with confidence.

I'm not sure I have anything left to say about how far these characters have been developed beyond the lines above that I haven't already said over the last six months and three weeks.  Perhaps it will suffice that ppfffbbfbttthaaaaahaaaahahahahaha.

Card notes as well that Jane wasn't in any of the original outlines for Speaker; Ender's computer uplink wasn't sentient (I guess he personally hacked all the things?), but Card started the idea and just enjoye it too much, finding that she brought Ender to life.  This is one of those moments where someone almost has an epiphany and then just barely misses it and runs in the opposite direction: Jane made Ender more interesting because Jane is interesting and Ender's just got a lot of backstory.  Sure, Jane's computer powers are a plot device, but no less than Ender's magical intuition.  Jane could have made a fascinating protagonist, knowing everything and incapable of doing anything without human assistance.

She did apparently get spun off to play a major role in the third book, which came out of nowhere when Card's agent told him she had sold the 'Ender trilogy' to an English publisher.  Card immediately realised that, in the same way that he had turned the Speaker idea into a book by jamming Ender into it, he could turn his concept for another story, 'Philotes', into the third book (Xenocide) by the same process.

Just in case anyone got their hopes up, I'm not reading Xenocide.

Besides--and here you are about to learn something truly vile about me--having a third book would mean that I didn't have to figure out some way to resolve the two loose threads that I knew would be dangling at the end of Speaker: what happens to the hive queen? And what happens to the fleet that Starways Congress sends?

Gotta say, not sure that's more vile than the stuff you happily publish about them disgusting homosexuals, Card.  I mean, sure, self-deprecation can be comedy gold, but it kind of plays better when you're not actually terrible?

There's more rambling that doesn't strike me as vital to our purposes, except that Card loops back to the same thing he said in the last intro, that the story in the book is the result of the reader interpreting and transforming with their mind the materials that the author has put there.  "I hope my tale is true enough and flexible enough that you can make it into a world worth living in."

Flexible, you say?  Flexible.  Okay then.  Let's bend it.

What would Speaker for the Dead become if we cut Ender out of the story and split his part among other people?

• Chapters 2, 4, and 5 get ditched entirely, along with their obsession with sniping at Calvinist theology that matters so little for the rest of the book.
• Chapters 6 through 8 can get enormously condensed, because we don't need any time to fawn over the pageantry surrounding Ender's arrival or his invasion of the Ribeira house.
• Chapter 9: Someone else has to be doing the actual investigation.  I nominate Ela, the only person on the planet who actually does her job (unlike Novinha the UnScientist, or Miro and Ouanda the Missionaries).  The only thing Ela needs to discover in order to set everything off is that she and her siblings were fathered by Libo, not Marcos.  There are a score of ways this could happen, since she's a biologist.  For whatever reason (her insistence on studying Descolada in case it comes back, for example, or her desire to ensure that none of her siblings are going to die from Marcos' disease) she realises that Libo was their father, and this begins unravelling everything she thought she knew about her family history.  Much like Ender, once she knows Novinha didn't hate Libo, she has to figure out why else she would try to cut him out, and steadily comes back to the way Descolada files have been locked away.
• Chapter 10 can get cut.  So can 11, if scientists elsewhere in the galaxy catch Miro and Ouanda's meddling with the aliens without needing Jane's help, because at least one other scientist also does their job.
• The rest of Ender's meddling is substantially reworked.  I'm going to suggest that Ela tries to engage Miro with some of the things she's discovered, but he is too removed from the family and focused on his work to particularly care.  Ela argues that he's just repeating what their mother did, hiding in science because she rejected her family, he says it's not his responsibility to fix her mistakes (he considers his future family with Ouanda to be the only one he needs to care about), and we get into those same issues Card was talking about with adolescent heroes never dealing with consequences or families, and the way adulthood means dealing with the situation you are in rather than running off to somewhere fresh.  Miro considers literally moving into the woods with Ouanda and cutting humanity off, since no one else can come through the fence without their clearance.
• There is still a need for the critical point where Ela confronts people with the truth--the colony knows it will be locked down, and Miro resolves to run away, but Ela drags him and Ouanda and Novinha together (maybe others? Ye Must Love Reapers?) to reveal all that she knows.  Miro and Ouanda have the stark choice to either flee or to try to understand and fix things like responsible adults.
• Miro, who is his mother's repetition, stays with her and tries to hash things out about why she did everything she did (they both broke so many rules of good science for bad reasons) while Ela and Ouanda go into the woods to resolve the science mystery.  (They agree that if Ouanda comes back with answers, they will rebel to defend the Little Ones, but if they get ritually murdered like Pipo and Libo, Miro will go to stand trial without her to protect the colony.)  As in the book, they know the government has left them with all-or-nothing options and so they, like Ender, toss aside their not-even-half-assed attempts at secrecy, but keep to other anthropological good practice like 'Don't remake other societies in your own image'.  They're also damned sure going to tell the Wives that they think they could, with permission, save the lives of the Mothers with a scalpel, some thread, and a mashed yam, rather than let the males keep that fact to themselves.
• I don't particularly care if one of them has to carve Human open to seal the contract or not.
• In a final optional twist, Novinha realises her childhood dream of becoming a Speaker for the Dead to help humanity understand the Little Ones, but not before she (with Bruxinha's permission, if she mentions Libo's infidelity with her) Speaks the death of Marcos herself.

At this point, we've covered the same ground in substantially less time and with fewer asides to talk about how much Calvinists suck and partner abusers are sometimes just misunderstood, which should leave some room to deal with the arrival of the deadly Evacuation Fleet, rather than leaving that for another book.

So now we've got Card's own account of why the hell Ender was in this book: he didn't actually realise he needed to write the other characters until someone read his manuscript and told him to write the other characters.  He was more prepared to write an entire 'prequel' novel about Ender's childhood than he was to figure out what anyone on Lusitania was thinking or doing.  They didn't matter until they were set pieces, the boy with cyborg eyes and the girl who doesn't talk and the young woman trying to be sister and mother and scientist all at once.  He got halfway through the first draft before he acknowledged that they needed some attention.  He already knew which character he identified with: the white guy from another land.

And that, as best I can tell, is what the hell was up with that.  /speakerpulpit

Speaker for the Dead, chapter seventeen, part one, in which Ender is more equal than everyone

Well, that was a nice vacation.  Welcome back to the carnival of nightmares.

(Content: colonialism, ableism, misogyny, racism, dehumanization of non-parents. Fun content: hot tree sex, matriarchy, Rainbow Army.)

Speaker for the Dead: p. 312--331

Chapter Seventeen: The Wives

We start with an email from the chairman of the Xenological Oversight Committee, Gobawa Ekimbo, to the director of the Congressional Security Agency, which begins:

Find out how word got out that the Evacuation Fleet is armed with the Little Doctor. That is HIGHEST PRIORITY. Then find out who this so-called Demosthenes is.

Yup.  The fleet that is supposed to show up at Lusitania in twenty-two years and remove the colony is armed with planet-busters.  This raises a lot of questions, the first batch of which are from the realm of 'hey, remember those three millennia we skipped'?

1. In three thousand years, no one has learned how to defend against Doctor Device?
2. In three thousand years, no one has put legal restrictions in place so that Doctor Device has to be, like, authorised by a unanimous public vote of Starways Congress before it can be pulled out of the dusty vault where it is presumably stored?
3. In three thousand years, no one has thought of a weapon/defence that might be more useful in maintaining a 'peaceful' planetary blockade than the World Eater?  They haven't got satellite networks that could electromagnetically stun any ships that tried to take off, or interdictor fields that prevent Park shifts?  People remember that getting into space is super hard, right?  Preventing someone from getting into space is possibly the easiest task that anyone can perform.*

Because nothing else important has happened for three thousand years, the chairman (whom I guess is also the star-emperor or what have you) makes reference to having "a hundred times the responsibility of Peter the Hegemon and about a tenth of his power", and demands to know why Lusitania would rebel over two scientists.  (He can be forgiven for forgetting how important the xenologers are to the colonists, since the colonists themselves also keep forgetting that vitally important people exist, but it should be howlingly obvious why people would object to getting completely uprooted and/or blasted into component atoms by the evacuation committee.)

Gobawa's a caricature of the pragmatically-heartless politician, so he says "When it comes to war, human is human and alien is alien. All that ramen business goes up in smoke when we're talking about survival."  The Little Ones are, of course, the first real opportunity anyone's had to put Valentine's terminology into practical use, so I guess one point for realism that no one really cares about it; the weird thing continues to be that people are even talking about the Hierarchy of Exclusion while simultaneously taking so little interest in the Little Ones themselves for decades.

Back in the forest, Human leads them through the trees and leaps around drumming on trunks, and there's more dialogue-that-doesn't-actually-communicate-anything about the third life, which has something to do with Pipo and Libo's murders.  To be clear, last chapter they explained that Miro wouldn't 'sprout' if planted, and a couple of chapters before that the Little Ones were given reason to believe that Pipo and Libo had really not wanted to be eviscerated, and still when Ender asks "What is the third life?" he gets a non-answer ("The gift that Pipo kept for himself") that assumes he knows exactly what Mandachuva means ('that thing where we murder you and you turn into a tree') but somehow hasn't caught onto what it's called.

Ouanda is still boggling at the way Ender asks direct questions, because utterly transforming the Little Ones' civilisation with foreign technology is one thing but asking them to define terms (after teaching them two entire human languages and the meanings thereof) is outrageous.  Ela, who currently bears all of my hopes for real science, is wandering among the trees and actually noticing that there are as few plant species as there are animals--one tree, one vine, one kind of undergrowth.

They arrive at a clearing with a single massive tree that they think at first is crawling with worms, but they are corrected: it's the three hundred twenty "little brothers".  (At this point, my confusion of last episode has to be considered resolved, I guess--all 320 new births in the last four years are still in larval form, which means Arrow and Cups are from a previous generation, but they only received their names within the last couple of years.)

And now it's time for the kind of sexism which is practically unavoidable when you deal with societies that have incredibly strict gender roles compounded with actual physical dimorphism, and yet still manages to find new heights of gratuity through the kind of lofty analysis of cross-gender interaction usually associated with TV shows with laugh-tracks.

A wife appears, much bigger than any male they've seen--females don't reveal their names to males, but Human confides that they call her Shouter amongst themselves.  She speaks the Wives' Language so beautifully that it sounds like singing, so obviously this can't be a pile of sexist rubbish.  She agrees to meet with Ender, and to let Ela and Ouanda come with him (being ladies and thus approved), and to allow him any translator he wants as long as it's Human.

Ender sees more female Little Ones watching him from the various houses as he approaches, and asks how many there are, but only when Shouter--fuck it, her name is Star-looker; we won't find that out for a few more chapters but I'm not using a stupid nickname just because Card thinks he's clever.  Star-looker says that among the wives, the males do not speak unless spoken to, and Ender just nods, pivots, and marches away.  Human protests, but Ender states that he will deal as equals or not at all, and it may be an honor to be among the wives but it's also an honor to have a Speaker for the Dead in their presence as well.  So.  Yeah.  Ender, whom careful readers will recall is axiomatically right about everything moral, sees no value in respecting the cultures of other species; he rejects their value system and substitutes his own, which is how we know that he's enlightened.

Human says that he can't relay Ender's words, and Ouanda contributes by realising that he means it's literally impossible to say 'this male demands not to be commanded by females' in Wives' Language, so Ender asks that they conduct their discussions in Males' Language.

Kind of funny that Ender's approach, which he describes as egalitarian, involves everyone doing everything he says and zero concessions on his part.  (This is like a case study of why people who identify as 'equalist' instead of 'feminist' or 'anti-racist' are not to be trusted.)  There's much cacophony among the wives and Ouanda critiques his anthropological practice (the only rule he hasn't broken so far is 'don't kill anyone', ha ha inside-joke foreshadowing spoilers he's going to kill someone later and it'll be the Right Thing to do), but Ender says he's there as an ambassador and thus anthropological rules don't apply.  Tragically, he seems unaware of any diplomatic rules to replace them.  Ender thinks it'll all work out:

"Because I came out of the sky. Because I'm the Speaker for the Dead." 

"Don't start thinking you're a great white god," said Ouanda. "It usually doesn't work out very well."

Here we see more proof that being aware of your clichés will not protect you from playing them perfectly straight and godawful.  Jane pops up with more impossible information, because she's started working out Wives' Language and she describes it as "more archaic--closer to the roots, more old forms", despite not having any information on what Males' Language sounded like past thirty years ago.  Information comes from nowhere in this universe and it's amazing.  (Also, in Wives', female-to-male speech is automatically imperative and male-to female speech is automatically supplicative, and 'brothers' sounds a lot like 'worms'.)

At bloody last, Ender is invited to come back, "as a sister to a brother", and Star-looker speaks in Males' Language in the holy birthing place, which Arrow declares makes this a "very great day", because apparently he has also personally ditched the idea that he will not speak unless spoken to by a wife.  Star-look is still half a metre shorter than Ender, which I'm a little sad about, because I was enjoying imagining her massive, like an eight-foot-tall bear.  There's more back and forth, which is mostly about how awesome Ender is, asking Human to speak as directly as possible and put the blame on him, the "rude framling", and asking not to be described as 'holy'.

There's a bunch of drawn out exposition and "I can't say that in any language" and so I will sum up: they learn that Little One mothers don't grow to adulthood, but give birth while still quite small and their bodies are eaten by their newborns.  The mothertree cracks open so they can see the even-tinier Little Ones inside (in the meantime, Jane works out that the trees 'speak' by reshaping their wood to modulate the echoes of existing soundwaves, which is why the Father Tongue involves drumming on trunks with sticks).  The wives were sterile or never fertilised (which involves carrying them from the mothertree out to crawl around and pick up pollen from the father trees in the forest, like Rooter, which is the real reason the males have their nipply bits--they're for young mothers to cling to during the journey).

Ouanda and Ela immediately begin wondering what could be done to allow the mothers to survive (caesarean sections and the introduction of high-protein foods to the inside of the mothertree) but of course Ender shuts them down--"How dare you!"--saying that in a few centuries if the Little Ones want to do that for themselves they can (I guess points for non-colonialist principles, but revoked for insisting it can only happen in the distant future), and then this hurricane of wrong:

"...We can't begin to guess what it would do to them if suddenly as many females as males came to maturity. To do what? They can't bear more children, can they? They can't compete with the males to become fathers, can they? What are they for?"

This, of course, is the natural conclusion of Card's genetic-continuity fetish: if you can't/don't/won't have kids, you're literally useless and dangerous and we might as well mulch you into baby formula.  He says this, out loud, in the middle of the Wives' village, populated by the most revered of the Little Ones, the leaders of their society: women who didn't give birth.  The cognitive dissonance is amazing, the offence is spectacular (lucky for him Human isn't doing a live translation or the wives would have just have all heard him say that he thinks they're pointless), and come to think of it, it raises a big question which the book will never address: do the wives grow into trees when they die?  If so, it's a bit biologically weird that they aren't able to fertilise mothers themselves in that form; here in the real world, most trees have both 'male' and 'female' components and I'm pretty sure no trees have completely non-fertile forms, so why did the trees of Lusitanian spontaneously develop infertile forms just because they merged with a strictly dimorphic animal?  The kind of Salvador-Dali-inspired evolution that had to lead to plant-animal-life-stage-hybrids was obviously focused on maintaining reproduction above all else, but either the wives' trees have no genetic contribution or the male Little Ones are the only ones who actually merged with the trees and the females are still meat-creatures from start to finish.  (I mean, in a better book, there would be actual parallels drawn to the COTMOCs and the ability of infertile people to tremendously contribute to society, the idea that people have value apart from being a link to future generations, but Ender's just completely shut that whole line of thought down.)

...Ouanda was still upset. She had made the raman transition: She thought of the piggies as us instead of them. She accepted the strange behaviour that she knew about, even the murder of her father, as within the acceptable range of alienness. This meant she was actually more tolerant and accepting of the piggies than Ela could possibly be, yet it also made her more vulnerable to the discovery of cruel, bestial behaviours among her friends.

This is just arbitrary.  She's so accepting and tolerant that she can cope with them brutally murdering her father, but that makes her more vulnerable to finding out that they have violent reproductive cycles?  Why is one 'acceptably alien' and one isn't?  Ender (Card) is just stringing words together however best fits his pet framework.  Ouanda's own dissonance could be explained in a variety of ways (she has precedent for Libo's death, she's had years to convince herself that her work is not all for naught because these are civilised people whose laws they just need to understand and now she's faced with information that drives home how dissimilar they really are and revives the spectre of possibility that her father died for no meaningful reason) but nope, it's all about how she's super-tolerant of aliens and therefore aliens being weird hurts her even more.  The Xenocide has spoken.

It turns out that Human did translate a little of this exchange, but he made sure to keep his propaganda as pro-Ender as possible: he said that Ouanda wanted to make the Little Ones be more like humans and Ender said this could never happen or he'd have to put the fence back up.

If anyone's keeping score at home:

• Introducing new technology that allows them to birth and feed hundreds of new males per generation, completely changes their diet, equips them to hunt, and enables them to prepare for global conquest: the good and right sharing of technology among equals, well done, fifty points to Gryffindor.
• Introducing methods that could allow a few dozen females per generation to grow to adulthood and partake in society instead of being devoured in childbirth: disgusting imperialism, you are wrong and rejected, go to skeleton hell jail.

They begin negotiations with a traditional threat from Star-looker, demanding everything humans have to offer or she'll send the males to murder the colony in their sleep.  Human explains that this is traditional Little One boilerplate for negotiations, but Ender demands that she withdraw the threat or he'll give her nothing.  (Remember, respect the Little Ones and the ways they do things different from you, except when you find it personally offensive.)  Star-looker gets up, rants to the heavens a bit about how rude Ender is, then sits down again:

"She says she'll never kill any human or let any of the brothers or wives kill any of you. She says for you to remember that you're twice as tall as any of us and you know everything and we know nothing. Now has she humiliated herself enough that you'll talk to her?" [....] 

"Yes," said Ender. "Now we can begin."

Now, that's meant to be ironic, fine, but this is exactly the 'egalitarian' problem summed up.  Ender demands that he be spoken to as an equal, but Star-looker is intensely aware that they are not equals.  Humans have better science, more resources, longer recorded history, starflight, hundreds of other worlds, and ships literally on their way to Lusitania right now with death rays that could convert the entire planet to undifferentiated minerals in the space of a couple of seconds.  Trying to pretend that they are 'equals' is completely erasing the context of the situation.  Ender can and has and continues to absolutely dictate the terms of everything that happens, and he's also the one deciding what 'equal' means.  This is a pantomime that satisfies his notions of fair play despite the fact that he's the visiting team and also all of the referees.  Star-looker opens up with the way she speaks to her equals, the wives of other forests, and Ender tells her no, this is insulting, so she sarcastically (but accurately) humiliates herself and he's good to go.

I've studied a half-dozen kinds of martial arts, most of which had some form of sparring.  When you spar, you bow to your opponent, and you keep your eyes on them.  Not because you don't trust them, but because it symbolises your respect, your acknowledgement that if you don't keep your eyes on them, they have the capacity to harm you in a surprise attack, even though they'd never do it.  Ender is the kind of guy who would take offence at this and say he was being accused of being a cheater, and demand that they avert their eyes, despite everyone in the room knowing he's never lost a fight in his entire life and he loves throwing the first punch.**

To close off this week, we leave the forest and return to Miro waking up in bed, with Novinha and other siblings present.  Novinha recaps his paralysis and says that the doctor can help him recover a lot, and they manage some yes/no communication through open mouth/closed mouth sounds.  Novinha tells him that while things may be very bad for a time, he will get better and it's worth trying, but inside her head she despairs to a degree that manages to start at 'realistic' and skip rapidly over the border to 'ableist rubbish'.  Miro's paralysis is worse to her than Olhado losing his eyes, worse than Pipo or Libo or Marcos' deaths.  Yeah.  Worse grief for the paralysed son (who she says will recover) than her husband or 'true love' dying horribly.

Quim and Olhado quickly work out a communication method, using a computer terminal to let Miro pick out letters one at a time to spell messages.  (Their method is unnecessarily slow; they rotate through the entire alphabet one at a time, rather than any kind of organization that would let him skip to later letters without having to go through the first section endlessly.  No eye-tracking either.  Sure, that might be hard for a teenager to program in the middle of the night, but--it's the year five thousand; did the notion of accessible computer interfaces just not come into fashion in this galaxy?)

Miro asks about the Little Ones and gets a recap on the rebellion and Ender going off into the forest, and arduously spells out a message to be taken to Ender immediately.  Novinha squeezes Miro's hand again (he lightly squeezes back, which is only one of many, many ways that he distinguishes himself from being a corpse oh my god Novinha you used to be cool) and leaves, scrambling over the fence after Quim with difficulty.  She remarks, half-amused, that they'll have to install a new gate next to their house, and I'm wondering:

• Why they wouldn't just tear the entire fence down for its various valuable resources
• If she and Quim, who have never been in the forest before, really think that carrying a vital message into alien woods in the middle of the night without a map is the best way to avoid further catastrophes
• Why she climbs the fence right there when Ender and company left the village by a completely different direction

Speaker for the Dead: forcing us to ask the hard questions, like 'what the hell' and 'why would you ever' and 'hang on but you just said oh never mind I give up'.

Next week: Ender forces the primitive savages to give up war, and literally sympathises with an imperial colonialist murderer.  Aren't you so glad I'm back?

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*Although I'm curious now what happens if you Park shift while on a planet instead of floating in the vacuum of space.  Do you get shredded by the atmosphere, or is it a warp field that would take a chunk of your immediate environment with you into space?  If it's not a Star Wars scenario where planetary gravity fields inherently kill warp flight, wouldn't Park-shifted ballistic weapons be a super-cheap way to bombard a planet?  Unlike typical Star Trek warp drives or Star Wars hyperspace, all indications are that near-luminal ships in Card's galaxy really are travelling at relativistic speeds in normal space.  These are questions that I want answered much more than 'how earnestly does Ender feel guilty about the terrible things he's done?'

**Utterly random tangent: at some point in my teenage years, I had a dream in which I reread Ender's Game and there was a short section I had somehow missed in all my previous reads in which Ender and Dragon Army actually lost one of their matches.  It had various minor implications for the storyline that I don't remember now; they only part that stuck in my head was that he was defeated by Rainbow Army.  Make of that absolutely everything that you like.

Speaker for the Dead, chapter sixteen, part two, in which science is useless before the might of the fence

(Content: colonialism, incest, genocide. Fun content: CAN WE FIX IT? No, we can't, because this book was published 28 years ago and the damage is done and it somehow won the Hugo and the Nebula.)

Speaker for the Dead:. p. 289--311

Y'all will recall that we left Miro at the fence, which he can't turn off anymore, hooting for the Little Ones and hoping that narrative fiat is on his side.  It is, obviously, and so a passel of them arrive--"Arrow,Human, Mandachuva, Leaf-eater, Cups"--stomping through the grass instead of moving silently like they do in the forest.  They stay still and absolutely silent, which Miro translates as anxious body language, and he says he can't come to them anymore because he got caught.  He blames Ender, but the Little Ones report that the hive queen said it was the satellites, and suggest what they might have spotted: the hunt, the amaranth crops, the cabra-shearing, orrrrr maybe the three hundred and twenty baby Little Ones born since the first amaranth harvest.

Once again, I'm having some trouble with timelines.  (Bonzooooooo--)  Libo is the one who gave them the amaranth (I don't know if we've had that stated outright yet, but it's why they honored/murdered him), meaning that was four years ago, and we also know that was the first time they shared human technology (spurred by the famine).  All the other tech that Miro and Ouanda have shared with them has to have been in those intervening four years.  Obviously it takes some time to go from conception to adult, but we've already got Arrow and Calendar and Cups running around, meaning none of them can be older than four years.  Supposedly the mass birthing started as soon as possible after Libo's death, but somehow no one has noticed the massive upswing in population, not Miro, not Ouanda, and most questionably not Jane, who literally satellite-scoured the entire planet like four days ago and reported to Ender that "every forest like this one carries just about all the population that a hunter-gatherer culture can sustain" back in chapter six.  Possible conclusions: either the masses of new births actually got delayed a few years, or the Little Ones are actively hiding most of their new generation, or this alien baby boom didn't exist four chapters ago because it wasn't relevant to the plot yet.  Place your bets!

Also, as an aside, I hadn't considered until now that this timeline means that Libo gave the Little Ones new tech, the Little Ones inexplicably eviscerated him for it, and Miro and Ouanda responded by massively ramping up the technology-sharing.  Because that makes sense both from an emotional point of view ("My name is Ouanda Figueira. You killed my father.  Prepare to be taught how to bake and sculpt basic pottery".) and from a survival point of view ("Huh, the boss gave them agriculture and they murdered him; I wonder what they'll do if we give them ranged weapons.").

Where were we?  Right, savage primitives.  Miro demands to know what's with the baby boom and the Little Ones explain that, with their new amazing food source, they can hugely increase their tribe size, conquer all the surrounding tribes, plant mothertrees in their forests, and TAKE OVER THE WORLD.  Miro is a professional, so he doesn't protest their megalomania; he just asks where the new generation is, and Human says they're busy learning with the other brother-houses.  Which is again rubbish, since we were told back in chapter six again that all the males in the forest lived together in one big log house.  (Although, if the satellites can see through the trees well enough to figure that out, why can't they see the Wives' settlement?  And if they can't see the Wives or these other possible brother-houses, how can they be estimating the populations in any of the forests anywhere on the planet?)

Miro gets around to explaining that he's to be taken offworld.  The Little Ones (who have been assuring him that Ender will fix everything) offer to hide him, and he points out the impassable agony fence, they tell him to chew grass.

Finally Mandachuva tore off a blade of capim near the ground, folded it carefully into a thick wad, and put it in his mouth to chew it. He say down after a while. The others began teasing him, poking him with their fingers, pinching him. He showed no sign of noticing. [....] Mandachuva stood up, a bit shaky for a moment. Then he ran at the fence and scrambled to the top, flipped over, and landed on all fours on the same side as Miro.

It turns out the Little Ones have been hopping over the fence at night and strolling around town for years now.  Not going to lie, I cracked up a little at this part.  I mean, it makes no sense or difference--they haven't learned anything in town that impacts the plot, and they've never been spotted because the Starways Panopticon doesn't believe in security cameras--but the level of "Oh, yeah, by the way, your technology is less than useless" is hilarious in its excess.

Miro says the grass is an anesthetic, and they correct him, saying they feel the pain--worse than dying--but "it's happening to your animal self. But your tree self doesn't care. It makes you be your tree self."  Miro recalls Libo's corpse with a mass of grass in its mouth.  Mandachuva says he'll go find Ouanda, since he's been in the village a few dozen times now and knows where everyone lives.  Which of course means that there's no one to pinch Miro and help him test his pain sensitivity as he starts chewing grass.  Well:

He pinched himself. As the piggies said, he felt the pain, but he didn't cared. All he cared about was that this was a way out, a way to stay on Lusitania. To stay, perhaps, with Ouanda.

Yes, dear reader, Our Hero is desperately seeking a way to take his half-sister away into the forest to "raise a family of humans who had completely new values, learned from the piggies".  You may commence retching; I'll still be here when you're done.

He ran at the fence and seized it with both hands. The pain was no less than before, but now he didn't care, he scrambled up to the top. But with each new handhold the pain grew more intense, and he began to care, he began to care very much about the pain, he began to realize that the capim had no anesthetic effect on him at all, but by this time he was already at the top of the fence. [...] Momentum carried him above the top and as he balanced there his head passed through the vertical field of the fence.

Mandachuva returns in time to haul himself up the fence and shove Miro over to the other side.  They argue about planting him immediately before he dies, but Human insists the pain is just an illusion and he'll recover, though he shows no signs.  Mandachuva runs off again to find Ouanda.

We cut back to Ender meeting with all the important people.  Novinha arrives:

He noticed that her hair was down and windblown, and for the first time since he came to Lusitania, Ender saw in her face a clear image of the girl who in her anguish had summoned him less than two weeks, more than twenty years ago.

So... wait, she's finally free and at ease, and so she looks more than ever like the isolated, self-loathing, desperate heretic teenager acting out of self-sabotaging panic?

Ender explains that he's gathered them to decide whether to rebel against the congressional order.  They say they have no choice, but Ender says all of congress' power and threats depends on the ansible.  THE BISHOP says they can't cut off the ansible or they'd lose contact with the Vatican, but Ender (without asking her first, obvs), reveals Jane's power:

"I have a friend whose control over ansible communications among all the Hundred Worlds is complete--and completely unsuspected [....] And she has told me that when I ask her to, she can make it seem to all the framlings that we here on Lusitania have cut off our ansible connection. [....] In sohrt, we will have eyes and they will be blind."

The mayor calls this out as the act of rebellion/war that it would be considered, but Ender can intuit that she likes the idea even as she tries to resist it, which is also creepy as hell--her mouth says no but her eyes say insurrection.  THE BISHOP of course continues to argue, saying that evacuation may suck:

"But a law was broken, and the penalty must be paid." 

"What if the law was based on a misunderstanding, and the penalty is far out of proportion to the sin?"

Lest we lose track, the law here was based on the possibility that introducing human culture and technology to the Little Ones might cause them harm, and about ten pages ago we were informed that the Little Ones currently intend to use their new tech to wage a war of conquest across their entire planet.  That's not a misunderstanding, that's prescient.  The penalty is foolish (as if intervening in twenty years will help), but Ender's counterargument boils down to "I can fix it", which is only going to get you an acquittal if your judge is The Honorable Mr Justice Bob the Builder.

Ender says that if they do what congress says, then they are approving of the law and the punishment*, and they shouldn't do that until they know everything.  There's some more ego-stroking; Ender says they all have to decide together,"the civil and religious and intellectual leadership of Lusitania", or they can't rebel, and the Bishop calls Ender a fourth power, "as dangerous as Satan", yet submitting to them.  Ender says he wants to be one of them.

"As a speaker for the dead?" asked the Bishop. 

"As Andrew Wiggin. I have some other skills that might be useful. Particularly if you rebel. And I have other work to do that can't be done if humans are taken from Lusitania."

First: skills useful for rebellion?  Like, what, tactically?  Ender doesn't have a fleet to destroy the rest of humanity with.  Second: I'm like 150% sure that Ender's work restoring the hive queen would actually be a jillion times easier if he didn't have to worry about humans next door.

Ender recaps for them: he went into the woods, the Little Ones have read HQ&H and the Bible, they want to travel the galaxy and fear human colonisation, humans only advanced so far because we found formic technology and ran with it and now we fear that the Little Ones will do the same if we give them anything.  Libo started meddling because the xenologers have never thought the Little Ones were just savages (Ender says this after literally accusing Miro and Ouanda of thinking of the Little Ones as beastly primitives two chapters ago), and they killed him "exactly the way they put to death their own most honored citizens" (I'm not sure what he's basing that conclusion on).  Then it's time for more theology:

"If you really believed that someone was perfect in heart, bishop, so righteous that to live another day could only cause them to be less perfect, then wouldn't it be a good thing for them if they were killed and taken directly into heaven?"

I would love to dive into this, except that is' one of Fred Clark's best-tread wheelhouses.  Suffice to say that this logic only works if you first assume that the sole point is to go to heaven as assuredly and quickly as possible, and not, for example, to do anything in particular on Earth with your perfection and holiness.  Screw the plebes, you got yours and if they deserved your help they should have offered you paradise first.  (Spoiler: we'll never find out if or how Little Ones die of old age, or what the consequences are for their tree phase.)

Anyway, Ender recaps the tree-splitting ritual, and explains that the Little Ones and the trees are the same species now, despite this being practically impossible.

Novinha interrupts the hubbub to point out that, if congress copied all their files, then they've got her parents' research on Descolada now.  (Apparently no one in the last thirty years has bothered to research any aspect of this ultimate plague, because this is the galaxy of terrible science.)  This means they won't evacuate the planet after all, because while the Descolada is controlled, it's still lying dormant in their bodies.

Bosquinha was appalled. "So anywhere we go--" 

"We can trigger the complete destruction of the biosphere." 

"And you kept this a secret?" asked Dom Cristão. 

"There was no need to tell it. No one had ever left Lusitania, and no one was planning to go."

I can only say 'worst scientists ever' so many times.

But with Ela and Ender's discoveries, Novinha has figured out Pipo's last discovery, that Descolada is part of the reproductive process, and thus she's 'figured out' that every animal on the planet has a plant counterpart.  The river grass hatches watersnakes.  The capim fertilises the cabra.  No, don't ask how she made that leap based on no more evidence than we've been given.  She is senior scientist and her intuition is fact.

The Bishop says this must mean they won't evacuate the colony after all, and Ye Must Love Reapers says they'll be put under quarantine and so they have no reason to submit to the congressional order anyway.  The Bishop finally points out that if Little Ones pose the same threat to the galaxy, and so their dreams of spaceflight must be equally impossible.  Ela thinks they could learn to fully control it one day, but Ender says congress will see this as another formic war, only this time the retroactive tragedy is averted: they'll obliterate Milagre and all of the Little Ones who've had human contact, and keep a compassionate blockade over the planet, no xenocide needed.

"You were there," said the Bishop. "You were there the first time, weren't you. When the buggers were destroyed."

I kind of love the way the Bishop just keeps grabbing historical facts out of intuition in order to make the situation sound more serious.  HEY READERS, REMEMBER HOW IMPORTANT ENDER IS?

Ouanda bursts in, Bosquinha tries to casually arrest her, and she blurts out that Miro's gone over the fence.  They scramble to call Dr Navio, but Ouanda says they can't get through the fence unless they shut it off, and congress has that control now.  Mandachuva strolls in and asks if this means they should eviscerate plant Miro, earning a chorus of horror.  Ender says they need to cut the ansibles immediately, and prods the Bishop with scriptures about leaving the ninety-nine safe sheep to save the lost one.  As they leave:

"Tell me, Speaker [...] if we rebelled against Starways Congress, would all the rules about contact with the piggies be ended?" 

"I hope so," said Ender. [....] 

"Then," said the Bishop, "we'd be able to teach the gospel of Jesus Christ to the Little Ones, wouldn't we? There'd be no rule against it."

First priority: convert the heathens.  I feel like there are a lot of other theological questions to be addressed here first, such as "why" and "are we sure God wants humans to convert aliens" and "have you ever heard of the crusades", but given how we've had the Bishop characterised so far, I suppose his top concern is building his own authority by getting more laypeople under him.  I'm not a fan of proselytising for a variety of reasons, though I do figure it should be allowed (all else equal), but maybe we could spare like five minutes to think about power differentials and coercion and unequal access to information.

When they arrive at the fence, Novinha has already tried to climb it and Ela is holding her back from a second attempt.  Ela recaps the recap, that Miro tried and failed to numb himself with capim.  Ender talks to human, and says he'll bring down the fence and rebel against congress and bring them the hive queen, but only if they let him meet with the Wives to write a treaty first.  He gets a consensus, although Leaf-eater snarks at Human and Novinha is horrified that they're putting everyone in danger of evisceration like Pipo and Libo, and the Bishop's agreement is contigent on getting to preach to the Little Ones.

"Jane," murmured Ender. 

"That's why I love you," said Jane. "You can do anything, as long as I set up the circumstances just right."

Oh my god Jane Ender hasn't done anything.  Everyone reported the facts to each other: Ela's research, Novinha's conclusions, Miro and Ouanda's observation of the tree ritual, Reaper's understanding of how congress would react, the Bishop's desire to convert the Little Ones, all due to the crisis that you personally engineered.  I've played visual novels that were more demanding than Ender's role in this.

Jane 'cuts' the ansible, Ender climbs the fence and hauls Miro back over just as the doctor arrives, and Ouanda follows him over, saying she'll need his help if he's meeting with the Wives.  Ela does the same, and they take off into the woods.

Now, obviously they were going to rebel anyway, but:

1) Literally the only way anyone can think of to cross the agony fence is to declare planetary rebellion?  You till fields!  You mine!  You work steel!  You're supposedly advanced scientists!  Run a tractor through it, dynamite it, swing an axe through its power cables, literally any of the many techniques humanity can bring to bear against fence technology!

2) How the hell does this agony fence work?  It's a physical fence, clambered over like it's chain link, but its agony field not only radiates from the metal but in a vertical field projected upwards?  Does this not result in hundreds of bird corpses piling up on either side year after year as the more reckless of each generation misjudge how high the field is projected, or try to land on it?  Is there no safety suit or lead blanket that could be thrown over the top to make a safe passage?  Does the agony field pierce literally every known form of matter?

3) Why a fence?  Ostensibly it's to keep out the Little Ones, and they must not be allowed to see human technology (remember, Pipo was forbidden to use a ballpoint pen in their sight) but Miro and the Little Ones can see each other and converse through it, and it's structured so that an immune creature (or a robot, perhaps, given the AIs that humanity should be programming) can easily get handholds in the links?  You know what would have been literally a billion times more effective, if you were going to use a huge power-draining fence anyway?  A forcefield, like the ones used in Battle School.  Impassable by any force we're aware of save the Doctor Device, absolutely opaque, absolutely frictionless, and cheap enough to operate that they're used as doors on a space station.  Harder to climb over, but no chance for colossal neural damage in case of an accident!  (Miro's been damaged because he went over the top, but would the same thing not have happened if he tripped and fell face-first against the side of the fence one day?)

Next week: even when women are infertile, they're characterised as loud harridans with full responsibility for raising children.

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*This is one of Card's things, the same principle that inspired him to say he was compelled to try to destroy any government that would dare attempt to enforce anything as society-ruining as same-sex marriage.  As yet, I haven't heard about him getting arrested for plotting his own insurrection, so I have to assume that he's either a hypocrite or he's changed his mind and he fully endorses marriage equality.  NO, CARD, PICK A SIDE OF MY FALSE DICHOTOMY AND LIKE IT.