Ender's Shadow, chapters twenty-one and twenty-two, in which Bean is not the smartest person

(Content: misogyny, emotional manipulation. Fun content: Petra Arkanian and Ace McShane are the best crossover ship.)

Ender's Shadow: pp. 319--351

Chapter Twenty-One: Guesswork

Unnamed Important Military figures (I'm guessing Anderson and... I'm going to pretend Levi as well) open by discussing the logistics of getting Ender's dream-team through all their pre-war training before they're ready for xenocide.  It really drives home just how amazingly inefficient all of their spread-out Secret Schools are:

"ISL is two months away from you,and by the time they're done with Tactical, the voyage from there to FleetCom will be four months. That gives them only three months in Tactical before we have to bring them to Command School. Three months in which to compress three years of training."

The whole 'you have eleven seconds to master this secret technique that most people have to reincarnate to spend a second lifetime to learn' is standard enough child hero fare, but our first question is why again all these various schools need to be so incredibly far apart.  I mean, Eros is only around the orbit of Mars, so we're apparently not using the Park Shift engine for cheap fast easy relativistic flight for some reason, but why are they moving around at all?  This fleet is operating on the basis that there's no difference between having your general aboard the flagship versus sitting at a desk seventy light-years away, but you need to waste half your remaining training time shipping your miracle students on a whirlwind tour of the solar system rather than just using your instant communications tech to access whatever software or skype tutoring they need in one place.  (Sure, they would need to lie properly to cover up the instant communications being used, but as we're about to see, they're already doing that, and not well.)

Also:

"I'm not faulting Colonel Graff, you understand, he had no way of knowing." 

"Knowing what?" 

"That Achilles is a serial killer." 

"That should make Graff happy. Ender's count is up to two."

They talk about how amazing it is that Ender, the team-builder, got cornered and went for a solo fight, while Bean the Lonely Loner brought together a squad for a nonviolent solution, and how that's so far against their predilections, apparently forgetting that Ender's establishing moment is killing a bully in a one-on-one fight and Bean's first moment is transforming a street gang into a sort of microfeudalistic patronage.  Also, remember how I talked about the general who picked Ender's friends for his campaign team feeling foolish once Ender decides to go the Distant Unapproachable Genius route for his leading role?  I was clearly wrong, because they didn't actually put that much thought into it.

"So send ten." 

"Which ten?" 

"How the hell should I know?  Well... Bean, him for sure. And the nine others that you think would work best with either Bean or Ender in command, whichever one it turns out to be."

So from three dozen our dream team roster has been retconned down to 'whichever ten you like, plus Carn Carby since we've already got him here'.  The world-saving world-ending assault force command group has been assembled with all the careful consideration and approval processes of a company softball team.

Bean gets his transfer orders, has a final chat with the Rabbit toon leaders about how they lost all five of their games and that's okay because they were learning improvisation and teamwork from each other, which are more important now than the ability to follow one smart guy's completely battle plan, ending with "losing is a much more powerful teacher than winning", which I feel raises some serious questions about Ender's endless winning streak in this narrative.

He then goes to have a last chat with Nikolai, who has been promoted yet again to be the new Rabbit Commander (that's just a fun phrase), and they speculate on whether it's End of the World time.  Bean says the signals are mixed; the teachers are acting like it's the final countdown, but nothing seems to be happening in the solar system to suggest they're bunkering down for an incoming invasion.  Bean says if they were going to launch their own invasion fleet, the time to do that was right after the Second Invasion.  Nikolai points out that humanity might not know where the formic homeworld is (Bean didn't think of that, especially if they don't communicate via light the way we do; Bean insists light is "still faster than anything else."

"Anything else that we know about," said Nikolai. 

Bean just looked at him. 

"Oh, I know, that's stupid. The laws of physics and all that. I just--you know, I keep thinking, that's all. I don't like to rule things out just because they're impossible."

Once again, a thing I actually really like in this book: Nikolai might not be a miracle child, but he's thoughtful and open-minded, and sometimes that means he's smarter than Bean.

Also, Nikolai was one of those who went to trap Achilles, of course, and Bean is very grateful.

"Someday," said Bean, "you're going to need me the way I needed you. And I'll be there."

Flat-out untrue; Nikolai disappears a few chapters into the next book and we will never speak of him again.  Sigh.

So they get loaded onto a destroyer for the four-month journey, and we get a full roster at last: Dink, Petra, Alai, Shen, Vlad, "Dumper", Tom, Fly Molo, Han Tzu, and Bean (Bustopher Kobayashi is of course already there, with Carn Carby).  Bean remains suspicious of Petra's reliability, obvs, but rather than resolve that sidequest just yet, he spends four months in the library reading recent Earth history, learning about how Russia threatens to conquer the world at any moment so easily.  No, for reals.

Where the Chinese simply took it for granted that they were and should be the center of the universe, the Russians, led by a series of ambitious demagogues and authoritarian generals, felt that history had cheated them out of their rightful place, century after century, and it was time for that to end. [....] Everything was in place for a vast power play the moment the Buggers were defeated--or before, if they thought it was to their advantage. Oddly, the Russians were rather open about their intentions--they always had been. They had no talent for subtlety, but they made up for it with amazing stubbornness. [....] Along with their national vigor, the Russians had also nurtured their astonishing talent for misgovernment, that sense of personal entitlement that made corruption a way of life.

It just goes on like this, vast heaving tracts of telling-not-showing about the nature of Earth back home, making up bad future Russians so Card can tell us how they extrapolate from our own contemporary Russians, generalising the millions of inhabitants of a country with "effective borders back to the peak of Soviet power--and beyond" according to some vague traits found among the ruling class of the 20th century.  I mean to say: why is this here?

(Lest we think Card is just an anti-Russian zealot, he also criticises Chinese national narcissism ("To the Chinese, once something was known in China, it was known everywhere that mattered") and the apathy of "the Euro-American nations", which is a phrase almost as hilarious as 'Judeo-Christian' is in glossing and blurring of radically different histories and traditions and mindsets into a vague 'obviously we all get along in our community of whiteness' melange.)

The actual reason it's here is so Bean can bring up Locke and Demosthenes, consider whether they might really be the same person, decide they think and write too differently despite their similar factual premises, and so write an anonymous essay to mail to both of them.  Bean, with his total lack of access to reconnaissance data, accurately draws up the Russian threat, their Obvious Strategy, and how to pre-empt it.  He is also the one to call for the Battle/Tactical/Command School kids to be sent home immediately after victory, so they won't be captured by the Russians "or kept in ineffectual isolation by the I.F."  Within days, Demosthenes and Locke both demand the kids come home (which, of course, is meant to set up the Shadow sequels, but kind of undercuts the point in Ender's Game that Locke and Demosthenes were never supposed to both throw their support behind something until it was the Big Score, saving the world from itself after Ender wins the war).

Three days later, they ship out with Carn.  We'll find out next chapter that this is because the Battle School kids are already being shipped home, but, despite Bean specifically listing, Battle, Tactical, and Command in his essay, apparently everyone back on Earth has rapidly forgotten that Tactical and Command exist.  Slapdash, which is especially weird given that this is Bean collaborating with the Wiggins, all of whom are supposed to be perfect.

Chapter Twenty-Two: Reunion

Graff and Admiral Whomeverthefuck continue to discuss the arrangements for the students at Command School, and top of Graff's mind is the insistence that "Ender can't do his job unless he knows about the ansible" whereas if Bean finds out "he'll leap straight to the core situation", and I know I complained about this last time, but once again, why does Ender need to know about the ansible in order to play his campaign?  Anything.  I will accept literally any practical reason that Ender's video game proficiency would be reduced if he didn't know about our instant communications technology.  I can't find one.  But this, we are told, is basically the whole reason that Ender and his friends never get to spend any time together apart from their voicechat during games.

"But if this is so, then Bean, is not capable of being Ender's backup, because then he would have to be told about the ansible." 

"It won't matter then." 

"But you yourself were the author of the proposition that only a child--" 

"Sir, none of that applies to Bean." 

Okay, wow, this is now also the first canonical indication that Graff is actually the one who came up with the idea that a twelve-year-old is the ideal commander for their xenocidal campaign.  Now, that's not surprising, since Graff's favourite kind of soldier is one whom he can easily manipulate into anything at a whim, but it re-re-re-emphasises the question from the dawn of time: who the fuck is Hyrum Graff?  How did he, a colonel/schoolteacher, convince the whole Fleet Command and Triumvirate to put their entire desperate suicide-mission plan on the shoulders of a child?

Of course, we know Mazer Rackham said the same thing, and Rackham's existence is secret, so maybe Graff is just the 'public' author of Rackham's plan, except this guy knows the whole plan so he must also know Rackham is still alive, so we're back to Graff being inexplicably influential even though everyone hates him and his ridiculous theories.  Graff and Rackham desperately needed to be the same character.

Now it's time for Bean to resolve the Petra plot thread, when people start for the first time talking about their pre-Battle-School lives.  Bean isn't bashful about spewing his whole street kid deal, including Poke, Achilles, and her eventual murder, which of course moves Petra to tears and she flees the room--Bean follows.  He makes an extended plea for her to tell him what she was doing when she baited Ender, how they need to trust each other, how he has "opened his soul" to them (such a natural line, innit), and Petra neatly shuts him down.

"You told me about your feelings. [...] So good, it's a relief to know you have them, or at least to know that you think it's worth pretending to have them, nobody's quite sure about that. But what you don't ever tell us is what the hell is actually going on here. [....] The teachers told you things back in Battle School that none of the rest of us knew."

Petra's wrath makes me all warm and fuzzy sometimes.

Bean is of course shocked to realise that other people are actually paying attention, and he admits that he hacked the student records and the teachers asked him to assemble Dragon Army, which similarly shocks Petra immensely, though, again, the public facts about Dragon Army (rejects and newbies) are still true, so I don't know why everyone thinks this is such a big deal.

Anyway, Petra admits that she did bait Ender in the hallway That One Time, and elaborates her plan: get into a brawl (with herself protecting Ender, and Dragons and other armies sure to join in), Ender gets punched a little but everything cools off, and all of the bullies (who hated Bonzo only a bit less than they did Ender) get bored and Bonzo loses his power to rabble-rouse.  She adds that she thinks the only reason Ender didn't go along with her plan was that Bean was in the middle of it and guaranteed to get mangled like a soft-centred truffle in a snowblower, and thus it's Bean's indirect fault that Ender had his deathmatch in the showers.  Which--I mean, Petra's not wrong about a lot of this.

(I am left wondering where Petra was the next day, when she looked around the commanders' mess that apparently only had a couple dozen kids in it and noticed that neither Ender nor Bonzo were present.  Was she just forbidden to enter the boys' showers?  There's been no mention of gendered facilities and everyone is naked all the time anyway.  Petra wouldn't have been held back like Dink was; Petra would have been this guy:

Bean admits his plan kinda sucked too, even if he doesn't like hers, and responds to mockery by telling Petra he's the best friend she's got there.  (He's apparently not paying attention to the amount of time Petra spends with Dink Meeker, Professional Decent Supportive Person.)  His evidence goes thusly:

"Because I'm the only one of these boys who ever chose to have a girl as his commander."

Bean, you colossal jackass.  You chose Poke as your 'commander' because you thought she was foolishly compassionate, and spent every moment with her meditating on how much smarter you were than her, based on no evidence except your own self-satisfaction.  No one else in your class has ever had the chance to pick their commander anyway.  What kind of self-aggrandising entitlement is this now?

Because he's such a supportive friend, Bean goes on to explain that "you're not really one of the guys" and of the estimated dozen (?!) girls in Battle School, Petra was the only really good soldier.  Bean explains that the only reason none of them have ever asked her why she 'betrayed' Ender is that they don't have enough respect for her to believe she didn't just screw up.  Because what good friends do is tell you all your other friends don't like you as much as you think they do and that you can only trust them, because they once did a Thing that objectively proves they respect women.  Oh my god.  This is, like, their first major interaction that will seed all their future trust and friendship and eventual coupling, and it reads like he's grooming her for abuse.  GET IT OFF OF ME.

They arrive at Eros, which Bean quickly realises was originally carved into a base by the formics, and thus was the goldmine of new technology like the gravity manipulators.  He concludes instantly that the I.F. never announced this because it would have scared people to learn how technologically advanced the formics were.  I think that's a really bad conclusion, because 1) a single formic ship killed a hundred million people in the First Invasion and 2) humanity has now survived two full invasions in spite of advanced technology.  We're used to overcoming enemies with advanced technology, we've been used to that forever, since long before Ace McShane beat a dalek down with a baseball bat.  I'm not sure how finding out their gravity-controlling powers were inadequate to resist the might of the human spirit would scare people more.

Because Card has reached his comfort level with gender equality, Petra gets separate quarters and the dozen boys share two rooms.  The environment creeps Bean out, but when he wakes up from nightmares, he instead realises something else is bothering him: he was talking to a technician today, someone fixing a simulator game, and commented that the thing was completely accurate except there was no time-delay for lightspeed communications, and the technician took a minute to even realise what he meant before brushing it off.  The only possible conclusion: humanity got the ansible from the formics as well.  The only possible consequent: they will wage the war from here, never knowing when it stops being simulator games and starts being an invasion campaign.

Now, within the confines that this book has given us, I do think this is at least relatively clever writing: a tiny slip-up by a technician that Bean extrapolates into all of its possible consequences, seeing how it fits with the other oddities (like how they get trained on older-model ships instead of the newest).  It's not easy to write characters who are supposed to be incredibly smart, and this kind of logical leap makes some sense.  Of course, he still hasn't resolved the question of how we found the formic homeworld (and all of their other bases, which, what?), but that doesn't come up in Bean's self counter-argument, as he tries to convince himself that this can't possibly be true because he doesn't want to get distracted thinking about people dying in space while he's leading them.

They start training with the voice command interface, and everyone takes turns being leader, but Bean declares it's obvious that they're getting set up to play under Ender, and he gets dragged before Graff to explain where he's getting all his secret knowledge.  Their real concern, of course, is that Bean has figured out The Terrible Truth, but Bean insists that if he knows anything, it's obviously not affecting his performance.  Graff laughs, turns off the recorder, and tells Bean about the Battle School kids going home, who Locke and Demosthenes are, and that they found Bean's biological family and he's Julian Delphiki, brother of Nikolai.  He grapples with this unprovoked infodump and decides he's being manipulated with sweet, sweet lies, thinks that he won't give up the name Poke gave him so easily as that, and this is reinforced when they are reunited with Ender, who quickly identifies his besties over the headset: Alai, and Bean.  It's not bad.

Next week: the finale grande, in which Bean is a willing accessory to xenocide.

Speaker for the Dead, chapter five, in which loving siblings trying to destroy each other

I was researching the relativistic physics from last week's footnote further, and in doing so, noticed that the time dilation effects of travelling at relativistic speeds are all crammed up at the fast end.  What this means is that if we assume humanity can get up to any speed short of lightspeed, Ender's average of 133 years per spaceflight could be on trips that take (from his perspective) a year or two weeks and the speed is still going to be roughly the same (0.99999~ c).  So my conclusion that Card had actually done meaningful math is unfounded, because he could have justified Ender aging ten years or one or fifty with just about exactly the same calculations.  My apologies, folks.  I didn't mean to mislead you about how much science Card actually put in his science fiction.

(Content: dysfunctional family, victim-blaming, emotional abuse.  Fun content: super awkward RPF.)

Speaker for the Dead: p. 71--83

Chapter Five: Valentine

I don't keep an actual list, but I think Pipo's notes have to be in my top five worst info-dumps ever.  Not because they're so clunky (Card does a reasonable job of making them sound natural, and at least he found a justification for Pipo to tell the reader directly about the aliens) but because he gives us bits of information with no linkages.  I can't imagine what kinds of conversations they could be having that would let him draw these conclusions and no others.  For example, he let it slip one day that he was Libo's father, and the Little Ones were astonished and impressed:

The conclusion is inescapable.  The pequeninos that we've known so far are not a whole community, or even typical males.  They are either juveniles or old bachelors.  Not a one of them has ever sired any children.  Not a one has even mated, as nearly as we can figure.

HOW?!  How can that possibly be the only conclusion?  How can he possibly have gained inconclusive evidence as to whether any of them have ever mated?  He doesn't even know what mating means for their species!  This is like an investigative RPG with a really inept GM who knows what information they want to feed their players but no idea how to hide it, so everything just comes in the form of rumours ex nihilo.

Pipo concludes (because it's true for all primate societies he knows of) that these Little Ones are powerless outcasts, which explains why they flipflop between speaking of females with worship and total contempt, never defying their wishes but still insulting their intelligence.  (Personally, I think he should have realised that when all the Little Ones showed up wearing fedoras, but I'm not a xenologer.)  He thus discards his theory that the females are nonsentient animals, and concludes that the males he knows are just bitter, which... well, to paraphrase Farnsworth, that theory is less stupid, although he came to it in a profoundly stupid way.

He doesn't quite believe it, though, because he's sure the Little Ones he knows are too smart to just be the least-desirable mates.  And for whatnapple, he says he can't report any of this because it would mean admitting he accidentally revealed information.  Even though he has admitted to revealing information at later times, like, say, chapter one.  So instead he just hides these findings "in Libo's locked personal files, where even my dear wife wouldn't think to look for them", because apparently on Lusitania spouses break each other's trust and privacy six times before breakfast.

Back to Trondheim, to Valentine, eight months pregnant and frustrated that she can't help load the boat for her history class to go on a "söndring", which Google tells me means "difference".  I dunno.  She met Jakt on her first söndring.  They had come to Trondheim like it was any other planet, where Ender would Speak someone's death and she would take a few months to write a history... oh god:

It was a game they played, pretending to be itinerant professors of this and that, while in actually they created or transformed the world's identity, for Demosthenes' essay was always seen as definitive.

I just can't with these people anymore.

Card does finally address the whole 'all of these essays are written by Demosthenes' thing by saying that people believe Demosthenes to be a name taken up by a series of individuals, in the same way that there are many Speakers for the Dead.  There are theories that some secret council of wise historians reviews sufficiently brilliant writings that are submitted to them and judge if they are worthy of the Demosthenes pseudonym.  Apparently no one, despite relativistic travel occurring on a near-daily basis, believes that maybe one author could be skipping around space writing things periodically, and no one is correlating the trail of publications with the travels of the Wiggin siblings.  I mean, Ender the Xenocide is supposedly the name everyone knows and hates, but no one has tried to investigate where he actually ended up in life?  Did he fake his death a few millennia ago?

Everyone in this galaxy is a colossal twit.

At least Val notes that each world changes her as well, and none more than Trondheim.  To get away from all those goddamn Lutherans and Calvinists, she decided to start taking groups of students on camping trips, to live off the land and have intellectual debates in the woods.

Her idea was to break the patterns of intellectual rot that were inevitable at every university. [....]  When their daily food depended on their own exertion, their attitudes about what mattered and did not matter in history were bound to change.

This is... weirdly Maoist for Card, but okay.  First principles, away from the taint of books, not completely out of the ordinary.  She hired a boat from Jakt, who fully expected to have to rescue the lot of them within a week, but they did well, built a little village, and produced a mess of brilliant publications on their return.  Valentine keeps taking more students camping, and gets to know Jakt: not much education, but he's very Close To The Earth and knows the sea and ice and the skrika, which are apparently seal-like, given the way they're described flopping onto the beaches.  (Y'all will recall that Ender just bought a starship full of skrika, of which Jane said some would be eaten and some would be worn.  I assumed it was, like, a plant, and now I'm assuming she meant they'd be divided into meat and fur, but I'm enjoying the idea that they chew the fur and wear the meat.)

So Jakt and Valentine were married (by a "Lutheran minister--not a Calvinist" because Card has some serious anti-Calvin grudge apparently) and she rapidly got impregnated and she's due very soon, so they must have been there for almost a year, if not two.  (I went back and Ender did indeed say he hadn't spent more than six months on any world except Trondheim.)  She has rooted, and she's grateful that Ender understands their wandering is over, so clearly nothing can possibly go wrong and they will all be happy forever.

Ender arrives, and she sees his bag and thinks he's intending to come camping with them, which she notes will kind of defeat the purpose, because Ender's incredible brilliance will infect the other students and the revelations they come to will be the ones he hints at, not their own.  I'll give Card this--he's so dedicated to first principles that he's even stopped approving of Ender teaching other people.  (Sometimes.  Teaching his own classes is still okay.  And telling everyone what the lives of dead people really meant.  Look, I don't know anymore.)

They greet each other, and joke about whether it'll be okay if Valentine has her kid while camping (yes, because her father will Nordic at her and wrap her in furs), and then out of nowhere Valentine intuits that Ender is leaving Trondheim.

"I can have this baby on söndring, but not on another world." 

As she guessed, Ender hadn't meant her to come.  "The baby's going to be shockingly blond," said Ender.  "She'd look hopelessly out of place on Lusitania.  Mostly black Brazilians there."

Oh god.  I mean, okay, well done on keeping human diversity in the future, Card, but what this means is that lily-white Ender is leaving behind the peaceful world of blonds to go to an all-black planet and teach them how to empathise with the humanoid beings they think are actually just mindless savages.  Given that we've already established that the Portuguese flavouring here was inspired by Card's missionary work... this just got so much more uncomfortable.  I know it's a science fiction standard to have people basically interchangeable according to their planet, but that is the opposite of a good reason to make everyone black on Bad Colonialist Science World.

They argue a bit over whether things could have been any different, once Valentine met Jakt, given that wife and husband are (assuming all goes well) inevitably going to be emotionally closer than siblings.  Plus Card needed to get his reproduction fetish in there somewhere:

"The Wiggin genes were crying out for continuation.  I hope you have a dozen more." 

"It's considered impolite to have more than four, greedy to go past five, and barbaric to have more than six."

Somehow, Valentine saw Ender with his bag on his back and intuited that he was leaving the planet, but she's still shocked that he's leaving today, which I feel just highlights how much the magic intuition of these characters isn't 'extrapolation from small details to a comprehensive whole' but 'direct line to the author'.  They might as well have all their brilliance come to them in dream sequences.  Anyway, when he reveals that he wants one of Jakt's boats to the spaceport so he can leave in the morning, Valentine quickly turns furious.

"Why are you in such a hurry?  The voyage takes decades--" 

"Twenty-two years." 

"Twenty-two years!  What difference would a couple of days make?  Couldn't you wait a month to see my baby born?" 

"In a month, Val, I might not have the courage to leave you."

In other words, "This is going to be really hard on one of us, so I've decided it should be you".  Ender is a magnificent example of what it looks like one someone has enough empathy to understand other people's emotions but not enough to actually care.  Valentine says Ender's done enough by redeeming the formics' memory and should just relax and stay and marry (Ender notes that he'd have to put up with obnoxious Calvinist proselytising), and reminds him of what it was like after their first trip, when they talked to 70-year-old Peter back home.

"It was an improvement, as I recall."  Ender was trying to make things lighter. 

But Valentine took his words perversely.  "Do you think I'll improve, too, in twenty years?" 

"I think I'll grieve for you more than if you had died." 

"No, Ender, it will be exactly as if I died, and you'll know that you're the one who killed me."

These are supposed to be incredibly closely-bonded deeply-empathetic siblings and they talk like dysfunctional co-dependents with a blood feud.  It's realistic dialogue for completely different, intentionally awful characters, but these two are supposed to be the most enlightened beings in the galaxy.

Valentine, whom y'all will recall was rejected from Battle School for being too gentle, informs Ender that she won't even write to him for the twenty years he's in space, won't tell him about her daughter growing up, won't speak to him until she's old and she writes her memoir and dedicates it to him.

"To Andrew, my beloved brother.  I followed you gladly to two dozen worlds, but you wouldn't stay even two weeks when I asked you." 

They rant at each other further.  Valentine says she's only being cruel because Ender is sneaking away like a burglar in the night, so it's his fault and he can't turn it around on her.  Which... I can't even decide who's doing more victim-blaming here, but I'm pretty sure they're both neck-deep in it.  It is a fantastic idea for them to get the hell away from each other.

Ender admits that he's rushing because he thought it would hurt less, and says it hurts him to see Valentine growing closer to Jakt and further from him even though he knows that's the way things should be (love is zero-sum, I guess, so growing closer to Jakt while staying close to Ender is nonsense), and eventually he tumbles to a halt and they just hug and weep and he leaves.  Valentine goes on the söndring and fails to fully hide her sorrow from her students, and the students wonder if there's some untold story there, so the girl named Duty Plikt starts to investigate.

Her research somehow takes four years, even though we have no indication that it's more complicated than getting access to a series of passenger manifests.  Valentine's daughter Syfte is four and her son Ren is two when Plikt confronts her with a short story she's published, about the oldest people in the universe, a brother and sister and how they finally parted.  Plikt has written Real Person Fic about Valentine and Ender.  She's apparently missed some details, but on the plus side she hasn't decided there was some kind of terrifying Lannister-esque sex going on.

...She knew enough of their story to write the tale of their good-bye when she decided to stay with her husband, and he to go on,  The scene was much tenderer and more affecting than it really had been; Plikt had written what should have happened, if Ender and Valentine had had more sense of theatre.

Note that Card himself developed his writing skills as a playwright and editor, so I wonder if he's making sort of an in-joke here, saying that he knows what he's written doesn't look like polished stories normally do because he's made something more realistic.  I'm not asserting that's what he did, but writers talking about writing are worth keeping an eye on.

Valentine tries to step lightly around the issues, but then Plikt reveals that she knows Andrew Wiggin is Ender the Xenocide.  Val freaks, but Plikt assures her that if she meant to reveal it, she would have already.  She's endlessly delighted that, once the Speaker for the Dead revealed Ender's crime, Ender took up the mantle of Speaker himself and travelled the worlds as penance.  (Not to beat a dead civilisation, but the fact that everyone thinks HQ&H is absolute fact based on no evidence continues to baffle me.)

"Plikt, mybrother didn't imitate the original Speaker for the Dead.  He wrote the Hive Queen and the Hegemon." 

When Plikt realized that Valentine was telling the truth, it overwhelmed her.  For all these years she had regarded Andrew Wiggin as her subject matter, and the original Speaker for the Dead as her inspiration.  To find that they were the same person struck her dumb for half an hour.

Does Card not get tired of telling us how casually Ender and Valentine transform and revolutionise everything they touch?  I'm bored.  How is Card not bored?  Ender could make a fricking BLT and no one could ever eat a sandwich again without writing a ballad and ending a war and reuniting with an estranged relative.  Valentine invites Plikt to be her co-writer and tutor to her children.

It became the family legend, and as soon as the children were old enough to be discreet, they were told the marvelous stories of their long-lost Uncle Ender, who was thought in every world to be a monster, but in reality was something of a savior, or a prophet, or at least a martyr.

Okay then.  Savior, prophet, and martyr.  Card has declared Ender is Jesus.  That's just canon now.  Good to be on the same page.  Plikt doesn't quite convert Valentine to Lutheranism, but teaches her to appreciate the stability of family life and her five children (so, an "impolite" number but not yet "greedy" according to her earlier assessment), and to understand Ender's destiny in religious terms, as "apostle to the ramen".  The stories of Ender of course have mythic power to the kids, and Syfte grows up to aspire to join him on Lusitania and help him.

"What makes you think he'll need help?  Your help, anyway?"  Plikt was always a skeptic until her student had earned her belief.

Conventional teaching and parenting might say that children need the support and belief of their adult guardians in order to have the courage to chase their dreams, but I'm guessing Plikt also read How I Totally Saved The World Through Consistent Child Abuse by Col. H. Graff.

"He didn't do it alone the first time, either, did he?"

Oh my god.  Syfte actually noticed that Ender's successes have always been incredibly dependent on the other people supporting him--Valentine, yes, but she'd be right if she meant Alai and Petra and Bean and Dink and Bustopher--and she fully expects him to need help again, and to save worlds with him, even if it'll take her twenty-two years to catch up.

Syfte is my new favourite.

She's still worshipful, but she would be, given the stories she was raised on.  For Ender, it's only a week or two later, and the pain of losing Valentine is fresh, but the chapter ends with him thinking of Novinha, wondering what she'll be like when he arrives, "for he loved her, as you can only love someone who is an echo of yourself at the time of your deepest sorrow."  I'll be looking forward to seeing if that 'wives and husbands are always closer than anyone else' holds true for Ender and Novinha, 'cause I'm guessing not so much.

Ender's Game, chapter thirteen, part one, in which Ender tells the truth

(Content: emotional abuse, violence. Fun content: I am tired this week so it is just a post, enjoy.)

This would be a really good scene if it were set in a different book.

Ender's Game: p. 227--242

Chapter Thirteen: Valentine

No clue who's handling the Faceless Featureless Plane of Dialogue duties this week, except that one of them's spoken with Graff.  The I.F. has apparently learned how to track IP addresses through more than one link and finally discovered that Valentine and Peter are Demosthenes and Locke.  They're freaking out because:

"The Wiggin is a third.  They are one and two." 

"Oh, excellent.  The Russians will never believe--" 

"That Demosthenes and Locke aren't as much under our control as the Wiggin."

They are for-reals referring to Ender as The Wiggin.  That's apparently how he's known in the highest ranks of the International Fleet.  Amazing.  Also, as much as the International Fleet is supposed to be International, I'm not really seeing how they aren't just Americans.  Apparently the Hegemon is American, all the Battle School teachers are American, and they refer to "the Russians" as a completely separate group.  I find all of these machinations a lot less interesting if this really is just a flat repetition of the Cold War, with the USSR reborn as the bad guys to the I.F.'s NATO.  The idea of the I.F. as the neutral global party trying to keep its constituent parts from fighting is much more fun.  There's a bit later that talks about how "the Second Warsaw Pact was not abiding by the terms of the League" but since the League is apparently as mighty as the U.N., it's still just regular nationalism.  (I'm not even sure what this is for, unless it becomes relevant in the later Ender books somehow?  It doesn't mirror the human/formic war in any illuminating way.)

More to the point, the I.F. folks are GOBSMACKED that Valentine could be writing Demosthenes and Peter writing Locke, given that Val is all that is good and light "and the boy has the soul of a jackal".  (About five pages ago we watched Ender fight Bonzo to the death, but as long as he was sad about it, apparently that's cool.)  The fact that they can work out that Locke and Demosthenes are siblings working together and yet still be baffled that they're writing against type is also some pretty convincing evidence further towards the conclusion that at this point in humanity's future, we're all goddamn stupid.  No wonder being pretty good at laser tag is enough to get military high command turning your name into a title with the definite article.  (The Wiggin: worst timelord ever?)

The I.F. are, for the moment, just going to confirm that Locke and Demosthenes don't have any secret connections or agendas, but they're aware that if they wait too many more years to expose them, there'll be no shock value left and they'll be taken seriously even if everyone knows who they are--which, they think, also might not be a bad thing if the Russians really are planning war.  Of course, if the Russians are 'planning war' then they've apparently been massing troops on the borders for two years and yet the I.F. hasn't been able to confirm it despite having satellites scattered across the entire planet.  (They also think that Demosthenes might be useful to have around if the Russians are planning war, because apparently xenophobia is awesome for making good decisions?)

Valentine is still having fun with it, though--her columns are read across the country, she nudges politics a little here and there with donations to candidates and causes, and she gets diplomatic/furious/interrogatory letters from heads of state to read with her brother.  Normal bonding stuff.  They still fight sometimes, because Demosthenes is more popular than Locke--'he' gets invited to serve on some useless blue ribbon panel, and Peter is jealous that dignified statesman Locke isn't getting the same attention.

Graff arrives to pick up Valentine from school and take her to see Ender--the dialogue isn't bad, particularly for Valentine, but it's patter.  The point is that Ender doesn't want to see anyone, doesn't want to do much of anything, but they've cajoled him into meeting with Valentine.  Val is skeptical about what he's asking her to do, but Graff lets drop that he is one of the six people in the world who know Demosthenes' real identity.  So: blackmail, cool.  Is there anything about Graff that isn't supervillainous?  I'm honestly trying.

Ender in this chapter is almost animalistic, like he's spent the last years on a deserted island punching leopards and never having any human contact, rather than playing laser tag in space.  It's an interesting characterisation, the idea that he's been boiled down to this utilitarian instrument and doesn't know how to navigate humanity anymore, but I really don't think it's justified by what we've seen over the last few chapters.  He's had friends and enemies and triumph and sorrow and pain, and I don't think any of it adds up to forgetting how to people.  So while I like bits like this, I wish they were justified:

Ender didn't wave when she walked down the hill toward him, didn't smile when she stepped onto the floating boat slip.  But she knew that he was glad to see her, knew it because of the way his eyes never left her face.

It's not that this is bad writing, but that it's unjustified writing.  Unearned things are hollow, which I might say is the four-word explanation of what's wrong with most stories that have super-perfect protagonists.

They talk awkwardly and finally manage to reconnect over how terrible Peter is--Ender has built a raft, which he connects to the wooden block buildings he and Valentine would build as infants, ones that would stand up even with their obvious supports removed, and Peter would in turn remove the important ones and leave the obvious ones to turn them fragile even though they looked fine.  I hope the metaphor is intentional, because it could be great--Ender and Valentine made things that stayed strong even when they looked broken, and Peter made things that looked good but fell apart at a touch.  One side substance, one side style.  The problem, of course, is that Ender and Peter are basically the same, both care very much about their appearance (Peter wants to be the respected leader, Ender wants to be the perfect commander and won't ever apologise or ignore a game for any reason) and both have plenty of substance (they both want to befriend or kill everyone).

They swim a bit, then sunbathe.  There's a wasp, which Valentine notices but decides to ignore: Let it walk on this raft, let it bake in the sun as I'm doing.  Ender crushes it instantly, saying that this breed attacks unprovoked and he's been studying pre-emptive strategies.

Which: again, no.  Ender does not do pre-emptive strategies.  He didn't try to find a way to stop Bonzo's plotting or resolve it before it became a deathmatch.  He didn't try to integrate with his fellow students in a way that might give him mutual friends or allies the way he already saw work with Alai and Bernard.  He didn't try to force Graff's hand by bringing the teachers into it in advance.  Ender doesn't do pre-emptive.  Ender waits to be provoked before he kills.  Ender does justification.  Pre-emptive strikes have to be justified, but justification does not make pre-emptive.

Valentine tells Ender about Peter's plan and how they might take over the world.  She says they can all be Alexander the Great, which possibly misses the central concept behind 'unilateral dictatorship'.

It's hard to do a meaningful recap/analysis of this chapter, because it is a recap/analysis of itself.  Ender talks about the games, the way they change the rules whenever they feel like it and he tries to escape but they drag him back.  Valentine acknowledges that she's there to do the dragging.  Ender says he honestly doesn't care about anything anymore, and mentions that they won't let him see the secrets of Mazer Rackham's victory, which matters to him because he needs to understand them.  EMPATHY EXPOSITION TIME.

"Being here alone with nothing to do, I've been thinking about myself, too.  Trying to understand why I hate myself so badly." 

"No, Ender."

"Don't tell me 'No, Ender.'  It took me a long time to realize that I did, but believe me, I did.  Do.  And it came down to this: In the moment when I truly understand my enemy, understand him well enough to defeat him, then in that very moment I also love him."

What was I saying about unearned characterisation earlier?  He murdered Stilson because he didn't understand the difference between bullying and gladiatorial arenas.  He made Bonzo's hatred of him worse and worse over the years because he didn't know or care to know what mattered to Bonzo.  And he was able to kill him in the end, not because he understood everything that mattered to Bonzo, but because he knew how to goad Bonzo into a disadvantage.  That took a bit of taunting about honor, nothing more.

Let's have at this a little deeper: if Ender truly understands someone, everything that matters to them, then why is he never able to offer them another way out?  If he really got what made Bonzo tick, why was there a deathmatch instead of a speech saying 'I know what you really need, and here's how we can do this with neither of us dead'.  The simple answer for the Bonzo case is that what Bonzo really and truly wanted was Ender's death, so there wasn't anything else that he could offer.  That is the only way to justify Ender's self-defence kill.  But that flows backwards as well, because it means that if Ender destroys someone and he really understands them, he had no choice except to destroy them.  That's the inescapable conclusion: Ender destroys people by understanding them, and he only destroys them because he has no other choice, otherwise he wouldn't have done it, obviously, because he loves them.

Ender's empathy assures us that everyone he kills must die.

"I think it's impossible to really understand somebody, what they want, what they believe, and not love them the way they love themselves.  And then, in that very moment when I love them--" 

"You beat them." [....] 

"No, you don't understand.  I destroy them.  I make it impossible for them to ever hurt me again.  I grind them and grind them until they don't exist."

After all this time, I can't but read this as a meta-admission that this whole book is a geek fantasy about revenge against bullies.

It occurs to Valentine that, much as Peter has found a way to channel his energy 'constructively' and now plays politics instead of torturing bystanders, Ender has changed too, and really might be the more dangerous one now.  Well.  I say 'now', I mean 'hey remember when he murdered a kid at the start of this book?'  They acknowledge this, as Valentine semi-defends Peter and comes to the conclusion that the three kids aren't really as different from each other as the Battle School testers claimed.

"We aren't just ordinary children, are we.  None of us." 

"Don't you sometimes wish we were?" 

She tried to imagine herself being like the other girls at school.  Tried to imagine life if she didn't feel responsible for the future of the world.  "It would be so dull."

On the one hand, children are our future.  The ones who truly do their best to change things for the better deserve to be celebrated.   On the other, I'm willing to bet that there are a lot more who think of themselves as wearily bearing the fate of humanity on their shoulders because the idea that other people are also competent and important is weird and foreign to them.

Valentine decides that, no matter how unmotivated Ender thinks he is, he still has too much ambition to really have stopped--he wants her to get him moving.  Of course, when simple 'don't you want to be the famous hero' fails to work, she moves on to emotional blackmail:

"When you were little and Peter tortured you, it's a good thing I didn't lie back and wait for Mom and Dad to save you.  They never understood how dangerous Peter was.  I knew you had the monitor, but I didn't wait for them, either.  Do you know what Peter used to do to me because I stopped him from hurting you?"

I realise that there are many times when implying is more effective than detailing, but it's just really hard to be sold on how awful Peter is when we only see him do it once and have every reason to believe that incident was exceptional.  But that aside: this is brutal, and I wish we got more of Valentine's story, because her life is a parade of terrifying and courageous decisions made to try to save other people (Ender, then Peter, now the world) and I would like to know her better.  Yes, she fits the usual female stereotype of being the nurturer and passive/reactive and servant to men, and we need many more characters who aren't that because sweet jebus, but all the same: I wish I knew more about Valentine.

Valentine decides at last that what weighs on Ender is Peter, undefeated--no matter what enemies he faces, the memory of Peter having power over him is inescapable.  Ender corrects her:

"You don't understand. [....]  I don't want to beat Peter." 

"Then what do you want?" 

"I want him to love me." 

She had no answer.  As far as she knew, Peter didn't love anybody.

It does seem plausible.  Then again, all the way back in chapter two, we had Peter coming to Ender's bedside to weep and beg forgiveness and swear that he loved him, and I wonder what this story looks like from his perspective, too, and whether they aren't all rubbish at empathising.  The fact that everyone apparently knows Peter was monstrously broken as a kid but no one has tried to help him kind of contributes further to the idea that all of these monsters we supposedly meet (Peter, Bonzo, and Ender whether they admit it or not) are the direct result of Graff's meddling and negligence.  By taking up his heroic blogging crusade, Peter has done more to heal himself than anyone else ever did.

They drift back to shore and Valentine swears to Ender that she loves him more than ever, no matter what he decides, and she leaves and doesn't expect to be forgiven again, because she knows she has convinced him to go back to his studies.  Being the motivational object is a terrible job.

Next week: more Graff than anyone should ever have to listen to.

Ender's Game, chapter nine, part one, in which blogs are taken seriously

(Content: animal cruelty, threats, discussion of mental illness. Fun content: Greek and Russian history, Tenacious D, Fred Clark.)

I've been looking forward to this one for months.  Required reading: Randall Munroe on Locke & Demosthenes.  After that, how much is there left to say?  I don't know!  Let's find out.

Ender's Game: p. 120--138

Chapter 9: Locke and Demosthenes

In today's 15 minutes of Ender Time, Graff is demanding that Major Imbu find out which sothothic horror programmed the video game that keeps psychoanalysing Ender better than anyone else does.  (Although given the apparent level of inductive reasoning among the I.F. brass--hmm, this six-year-old murderer might have violent tendencies--that is not hard.)  Last week, of course, it showed Ender his brother's face in a mirror instead of his own, because symbolism.

"I don't like having the computer screw around with Ender's mind that way."

I'll wait for everyone to stop laughing before we continue.  The zone name 'The End of the World' is distressing Graff.  Imbu hypothesises:

"You've been isolating the boy.  Maybe he's wishing for the end of this world, the Battle School.  Or maybe it's about the end of the world he grew up with as a little boy, his home, coming here.  Or maybe it's his way of coping with having broken up so many other kids here.  Ender's a sensitive kid, you know, and he's done some pretty bad things to people's bodies, he might be wishing for the end of that world."

Major Imbu is way better at this than Graff.  Maybe he should start a blog.

Graff is especially confounded by the photo of Peter because it's so new, more recent than anything in Battle School or any other I.F. computer.  The game AI apparently had to go and actually steal a picture from the Guilford County school computers.  As this chapter illustrates maybe more clearly than any other, Card successfully predicted a whole lot of technological advances of the modern day, tablets and blogging and internet communities, but he did not see facebook coming.

"His brother is dangerous, his brother was rejected for this program because he's one of the most ruthless and unreliable human beings we've laid hands on.  Why is he so important to Ender?"

"One of" isn't good enough; Battle School only takes the most ruthless and unreliable human beings.  (I'm repeating myself, but I'm still struggling to grasp how Ender murdering a schoolyard bully for pushing him around can make him appear more reliable and... ruthful.)

"Honestly, sir, I don't know.  And the mind game program is designed so that it can't tell us.  It may not know itself, actually."

Who the hell thought it was a good idea to program a video game to think for itself, intentionally place kids in psychologically destabilising scenarios, freely requisition whatever information it decides it wants from any computer system on Earth, and be completely unaccountable to everyone?  They might as well just let the Joker be the guidance counselor and have HAL run the battleroom.  The fact that Earth isn't a smouldering clod of ash is obviously proof that the aliens aren't actually trying to invade, because it's sure as hell not the brilliant military scaring them off.

Back to Earth!  It's Ender's eighth birthday and Valentine is commemorating it with a small fire in their backyard at the new house in North Carolina.  (This chapter is a huge timeskip.  You may recall that Ender's seventh birthday was during his few weeks in Salamander Army, and we'll get to his ninth before the chapter ends.*)  She thinks about how often they used to write him letters, but they slowed and stopped when he didn't respond, and finally moved to a new city.  She is sure their parents did it for Peter:

...so that living among trees and small animals, so that nature, in as raw a form as Mother and Father could conceive of it, might have a softening influence on their strange and frightening son.  and, in a way, it had.  Peter took to it right away.

I'll spare us all the details of what Valentine has found in the woods, but suffice to say that she knows Peter has been going off on cheerful nature hikes with his desk and a sandwich, and then catching, torturing, and killing squirrels.

At first she was horrified, and nearly threw up at dinner, watching how Peter ate so vigorously, talked so cheerfully.  But later she thought about it and realized that perhaps, for Peter, it was a kind of magic, like her little fires; a sacrifice that somehow stilled the dark gods that hunted for his soul.  Better to torture squirrels than other children.

Valentine might be a genius but she is apparently not familiar with the link between animal cruelty and serial killers.  People occasionally bring this idea up, that if you 'vent' your dangerous/harmful impulses by giving into them in some lesser way, you will somehow make yourself healthier than if you held them in.  As if the whole of the planet isn't proof that emotions can be practiced, that we teach ourselves how to react and how to feel.  Stereotypes. Bigotry.  Abuse, whether mental or physical.  There's a pretty solid link between animal abuse and a history of being abused.  Everything gets easier after the first time.  I really hope we're supposed to think this is the stupidest thing Valentine has ever thought.

I don't know whether to detail the rest of Valentine's terrible psychological assessment or not--it manages to be ablist while trying not to be, as she muses on how Peter "was not insane" because he has impulse control.  That's not a good definition of insanity.  (Strictly and literally speaking, nothing is a good definition of insanity other than 'mental unhealthiness', and I think it's pretty clear Peter does have that.  But sure, let's just tell the twelve-year-old with a militarily-screwed-up home life and a completely inadequate school system that his problems are all his own fault because he's just a bad person.)

She doesn't fear Peter's idle death threats anymore, either:

He would only do it if the advantages outweighed the risks.  And they did not.  In a way, she actually preferred Peter to other people because of this.  He always, always acted out of intelligent self-interest.

Really?  What advantage does he get from torturing animals in a way that can clearly be linked back to him if anyone went looking (say, if Valentine decided to show their parents, which she does not because she thinks they're too stupid to see through Peter's 'whole new boy' façade**)?

Peter moves on from death threats to world politics, and Russian troop movements:

"You know Russia?  Big Empire?  The Second Warsaw Pact?  Rulers of Eurasia from the Netherlands to Pakistan?" 

"They don't publish their troop movements, Peter." 

"Of course not.  But they do publish their passenger and freight train schedules.  I've had my desk analyzing those schedules and figuring out when the secret troop trains are moving over the same tracks.  Done it backward over the past three years.  In the last six months, they've stepped up, they're getting ready for war.  Land war."

Card wrote this during the early 1980s, when the Cold War was still a thing.  Given how many writers back then now look silly for assuming the USSR would hold together indefinitely, I have to give Card some credit for writing world politics such that he could make the USSR the bad guys of the future even if the current situation changed.  (If nothing else, he could say the place fell apart during the first alien invasion.)

Peter and Valentine apparently talk about world politics regularly, and are such geniuses that they see the truth that everyone else misses:

They had become quite deft at sifting accurate information out of the stories of the hopelessly ignorant, gullible new writers.  The news herd, as Peter called them.

Card's predictions about the type of people who would become avid bloggers are scarily accurate.  I bet in the Enderverse Peter Wiggin invented the term 'sheeple'.  Anyway, Peter and Valentine, super-geniuses with apparent access to incredibly comprehensive information on international rail transit, have managed to come to the same conclusion that Dink Meeker did in a cave with a box of scraps sitting in a tin can in space and thinking about human nature.  But sure, the only reasons they didn't go to Battle School were that Peter was too violent and Valentine too empathetic.

We are reminded again about how empathetic Valentine is as she thinks about how good she is at manipulating people by seeing what they like about themselves and flattering them.  (Peter is said to see what they hate about themselves, for use in bullying, but apparently that doesn't count as empathy because Card doesn't know what a sociopath is.)  She can manipulate people at school, and her parents, and even Peter which scares her, because apparently even Valentine is distressed by the idea that people who do terrible things aren't indecipherably inhuman.  First mental illness is scary because it doesn't make sense, and then because it does.  You can't win.

Peter goes on about how he and Valentine may be children but they don't act like them or write like them, and how in times of crisis the right words can change everything.  He cites many people, including Demosthenes, and flatters Valentine by asking:

"Haven't you ever thought of a phrase, Val, a clever thing to say, and said it, and then two weeks or a month later you hear some adult saying it to another adult, both of them strangers?  Or you see it on a video or pick it up on a net?" 

"I always figured I heard it before and only thought I was making it up." 

"You were wrong.  There are maybe two or three thousand people in the world as smart as us, little sister.  Most of them are making a living somewhere.  Teaching, the poor bastards, or doing research.  Precious few of them are actually in positions of power."

I read these things and try to remember if I ever identified with them; if I thought of myself in my teens as one of the few smart people with the potential to think freely and speak meaningfully.  I honestly don't remember.  It sounds like me, and yet on my first read-through I was still totally on Ender's side regarding Peter Wiggin, The Adversary Who Is Called The Devil, so maybe I was too busy being disgusted by his evil.  (This chapter, with the animal torture, is the height of Peter's evil and hereafter will largely be ignored and, I would argue, retconned out of existence by the time of Shadow of the Hegemon, four-ish years later.)

Peter's plan to blog his way to power depends first on getting an adult's internet access--apparently they can use whatever fake names they want on the web but they can't avoid being designated as children on their own accounts.  He wants Valentine to make they case to their father, by telling him how worried she is that Peter is getting unstable and backsliding to his sadistic ways because he can't talk to his real intellectual peers and get the respect he deserves.  If this is supposed to parallel kids who act out in school because the lessons are too easy for them, it's a really creepy parallel.

Valentine brushes Peter off, reminding him that he was making death threats a few minutes ago, and he starts a spiel about how he's wanted to ask her to do this for a long time but he's been afraid--afraid that she wouldn't believe in him, or that she would stop him because she saw him as a nascent evil overlord.

"I was a vicious, nasty brother.  I was cruel to you and crueler to Ender before they took him.  But I didn't hate you.  I loved you both, I just had to be--had to have control, do you understand that?  It's the most important thing to me, it's my greatest gift, I can see where the weak points are, I can see how to get in and use them, I just see those things without even trying. [....] I'm going to rule, Val, I'm going to have control of something.  But I want it to be something worth ruling."

Is this 'I have a gift for seeing the weak points and where to strike' common in other people's experience?  Because I have seen a remarkable number of people describe themselves like that (including myself) and I'm not sure whether it's a thing smart people do or a thing that everyone does but only 'smart' people think it makes them special.

Peter's entitlement here is perfect: the conviction that he will change everything if only he doesn't miss opportunities because he's too young and people don't appreciate that if he is the only one who understands how the world needs to be run.  He is every teenager, especially the (legitimately) intelligent ones who feel that they are staggering geniuses tragically unappreciated by those around them.  There is a foreword to this book, which I have been struggling since the beginning not to quote, because I want to save it for the end, but--this is one of the parts to remember, when we get there.

Also, both siblings Godwin Peter, independently (Valentine in her thoughts, Peter out loud).  Peter goes on, and Valentine believes he is both sincere and manipulative (manipulating her by being sincere for once when he normally lies) by saying that he is also afraid that he's going to become a tyrant, but he believes that with Valentine's constant presence and partnership he can be good.  Valentine thinks that she wants to believe this too, because it means that she can be good while still satisfying the power-hunger that she tries to pretend she doesn't have too.

I do not believe for one instant that Peter or Valentine couldn't do Ender's job.  They are the same person thrice over: 'I'm so smart that I am compelled to dominate no matter what, so I had better angst about whether I am morally pure'.  God, that was like crack and Fruitopia to teenage me.  Not because I believed it was true, but because I loved the fantasy that it could be.

So they get online and basically start trolling:

They needed respect, and that they could earn.  With false names, on the right nets, they could be anybody.  Old men, middle-aged women, anybody, as long as they were careful about the way they wrote. [....] Of course they were not invited to take part in the great national and international political forums [....] in the lesser conferences, where common people commented about the great debates, they began to insert their comments.  At first Peter insisted that they be deliberately inflammatory.  "We can't learn how our style of writing is working unless we get responses--and if we're bland, no one will answer."

Based on my web experience, if they want people to react, their best bets are to be funny or to promote one side of the status quo that a large part of the population already agrees with.  Still, they get responses, and hate mail.  The weird thing is that the hate mail is apparently constructive criticism?  I mean, sure, you can see what people take easy shots at, but I'm less clear on how hate mail is a good way of figuring out what parts of your writing are seen as "childish and immature".

Then they get serious, with Peter taking the west coast and the screenname Locke, and Valentine taking the south under the name Demosthenes.  They go everywhere together, plotting and writing and using sockpuppets to throw in further ideas to the conversation.  Peter is super-intense about keeping their writing styles dissimilar so that (when people start trying to figure out who they are, because of course they will) they won't think there's any chance the two are collaborating.

They began composing debates for their characters.  Valentine would prepare and opening statement, and Peter would invent a throwaway name to answer her.  His answer would be intelligent, and the debate would be lively, lots of clever invective and good political rhetoric.  Valentine had a knack for alliteration that made her phrases memorable.

Alliteration always aggregates into an avalanche of actual attention.  Or maybe it sounds stupidly twee and childish.  But sure.  This is, of course, the GIRAT Conundrum, that when a character is the Best Writer Ever in a written story we eventually need some evidence and it's hard to fake The Best Writing Ever.  (The solution, of course, is the Tenacious D Stratagem: write essays that other people are writing about Locke and Demosthenes and their ideas.  Card will do this later; he does make some good decisions.)

Then they would enter the debate into the network, separated by a reasonable amount of time, as if they were actually making them up on the spot.  Sometimes a few other netters would interpose comments, but Peter and Val would usually ignore them [....] Peter took careful note of all their most memorable phrases and then did searches from time to time to find those phrases cropping up in other places.

Card accurately predicted people googling themselves.  This is pretty comprehensive.

After seven months, Demonsthenes gets an offer for a weekly column in a major California newsnet.  She takes it, of course, and gloats a bit about being more popular than Locke, but a large part of the reason seems to be that Demonsthenes is a paranoid xenophobe who rants about how the Russian Empire needs to be dissolved, and (as throughout time immemorial) bigotry has a huge automatic audience.  Peter's plan is for his own persona, Locke, to be the one who is ultimately given actual power once he's seen as the voice of reason, the Martin Luther King to Demosthenes' Malcolm X.

Their father starts reading from Demosthenes at the dinner table, talking about how once the Formic War is over they can't leave half the world as serfs to 'hegemonist Russians', which I hope is supposed to be hilarious, when we've been told that the literal global Hegemony is run out of North America.  Valentine is sad, because she thought "only fools" would listen to Demosthenes.  Valentine is only now catching on to what we realised back in chapter two, which is that her parents are twits.  (Or faking it, according to the later books.  But I'm pretty sure that's not what Card had in mind at this moment.)

Locke gets picked up by a New England newsnet specifically to counterpoint their super-popular Demosthenes column.

"Not bad for two kids who've only got about eight pubic hairs between them," Peter said. [Excuse me, I have to go throw up forever.]

"It's a long way between writing a newsnet column and ruling the world," Valentine reminded him.  "It's such a long way that no one has ever done it." 

"They have, though.  Or the moral equivalent."

Not that Peter explains who he thinks is a good example of this.  We'll cut off there for this week, but first a tally: Card successfully predicted big-name bloggers, sockpuppets, the end of the USSR, and the continued popularity of vitriolic jingoism.  He completed failed to predict facebook, lolcats, upvotes, or blog deconstructions.  I think we all know which have had a bigger impact on the social role of the internet in the world.

Come back next week to see Ender develop and be cured of depression because clearly Card is a master of how psychology works.

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*On the one hand, I understand the relevance of timeskips in fiction, but on the other, they almost always frustrate the hell out of me because they are so badly conveyed.  For an example of the worst: The Walking Dead TV series did an eight-month timeskip between seasons two and three, during which no one died, no one new joined the group, no interpersonal relationships changed, and everyone travelled in circles.  It was just an excuse to skip over a pregnancy.  The one good example I can think of is Battlestar Galactica, where the one-year timeskip covered multiple marriages and births, new friendships forming and dissolving, political shifts, personality changes, and it took half a season before we fully understood everything that had happened.  My point is this: if you're telling a story where huge changes occur every few hours, and you skip ahead two years and tell the audience "Uh, yeah, coincidentally everything slowed way down while you weren't looking", I am unimpressed.

**Blogger and/or Chrome wants me to spell 'façade' as 'facade', because apparently fuck French.  Sigh.