The Eye of the World, chapters five, six, and seven, in which the plot begins

I started reading The Fault in our Stars this weekend, and while I don't think I could or would want to do a full series on it (most of all because I've never been directly impacted by someone's terminal disease before), I might toss a bonus post or two up about it sometime soon, because when it's good it's pretty dang good, and when it's bad it's all OH JOHN GREEN NO.  We'll see how the rest of the book goes first.

The Eye of the World: p. 62--103

Chapter Five: Winternight

Starting us off on a light but confusing note, the first page, describing the al'Thor house, looks like it's supposed to be full of double entendres:

Tam and Rang were considered out of the ordinary as much for being two men living alone as for farming in the Westwood.

'Alone' except for all the other bachelor merchants and farmboys who stop by to keep them company, of course.  Quite out of the ordinary, yes, quite strange, quite, quite queer.

The house was still in a tidy state of repair, the thatch tightly mended and the doors and shutters well-hung and snug-fitting.

Well, I mean, who doesn't like well-hung shutters snugly fitting into their tight thatch?

Apologies; I'm twelve.  Moving on.

They scope out the unspooked animals and the untainted well and decide the Black Rider wasn't here, set about doing various chores, keeping their bow and spear close at hand, making Traditional Fantasy Stew for dinner, et cetera, et cetera, pages of this.  When they finally head inside, it is extremely cozy and all the wars and magic feel very far away.  Dad al'Thor nevertheless locks the doors, for the first time in Rand's memory, because no one ever locks their doors, which causes me to wonder why they have locks at all.  Dad also busts out the secret family sword, which, by its slight curve (stop snickering), single sharp side, and heron designs, I'm guessing is a katana or wakizashi.  Robert Jordan is giving his Quaint English Whitebread farmboy hero a katana.

How exactly did all of these tropes get associated with fanfiction when best-selling authors with endless heaps of praise to their name have been doing it for years?  (Gatekeeping and sexism, the answers are gatekeeping and sexism.)

Dad al'Thor bought it a long time ago, although Mom disapproved, and he comments grimly about how impractical it is to a farmer's life and he should have given it away.  Obviously that means he's never practised all these years and so won't know what he's doing, right?  Nope.  A minotaur bursts through the locked door, Rand throws the kettle at it, and Dad kills it in a single thrust, and then the next one that comes in after it, instant-death blows that in the real world are generally reserved for decapitation.  Dad shouts for Rand to run and hide in the cold dark woods full of monsters.  Dad has made a series of bad decisions today and this might be a winner.  Rand scrambles out a window as monsters burst in the back door, there is much scurrying and echoes of steel hitting steel (so much for that beautiful unmangled sword), and Dad busts out the front window (inexplicably immune to glass shards) and leads the monsters off on a chase as Rand stumbles fearfully through the woods.  They reunite and Dad explains that the minotaurish things are Trollocs, our signature Always Chaotic Evil race.  (I have an asexual friend who remains delighted that this forms the acronym ACE.)

Dad's weak and bleeding, so Rand takes the sword and goes back to the farmhouse (sheep all slaughtered, house all wrecked) to get geared up.  One Trolloc turns out to have faked its death to lie in wait, and haltingly tells Rand to wait and talk to the Myrdraal that's coming, which is also called a Fade, so now we have two new Capitalised Names for one being without the slightest clue what it is.  (It is apparently a very tall monster.)  It then helps Rand perform the Traditional First Farmboy Hero Kill by leaping at him, and he gets his sword up just in time for it to impale itself as it tackles him to the floor.  He loots what he can from the ruin of their home, chops up a broken cart axle with the sword (even Rand realises this is improbable) and runs with it all back to Dad al'Thor, who is feverish and having nightmares and must be taken to Rivendell Emond's Field as soon as possible.

So, quaint rural homeland, Black Rider, slightly magic sword received from father figure, Morgul wound, orcs speaking the Black Tongue, need for a druid healer to cure a cursed wound... I mean, wow.  I honest to Eru Iluvatar did not expect Wheel of Time to be this severe a knockoff of Lord of the Rings.

Chapter Six: The Westwood

Rand binds his dad's wounds, al'Guyvers a stretcher out of the axles and blankets, and starts dragging him through the woods, with much narrative emphasis on how scary this is and he's only alive by luck and his sword-and-sorcery-adventure daydreams never involved anything this grim.  How old is Rand?  Sixteen?  I like him more the younger I picture him, because this all becomes more impressive and I have less desire to tell him to just shut up and do the job already.  He drags his dad through the woods (with constant yelps of pain when they go over rocks and roots).  From Dad al'Thor's epic babbling, he's either reciting legends or he had a much more heroic unmarried life than we were led to believe.  The Black Rider shows up on the road, leading the trollocs, but they go unnoticed.  Is the town screwed?  I think the town is screwed.  Especially once Rand starts extended descriptions of what the party will be like when everything settles down and they can finally take their new yacht for a spin after that police detective finishes his last day on the job.

Dad al'Thor is muttering more 'nonsense' about cuttings from the Tree of Life, Avendesora, which Rand al'Expositions to us belongs to the Green Man, who is also just legend (like trollocs, Rand admits).  He then fever-talks his way through a story of finding a baby in the snow after a battle and how he knew Kari wanted children and Rand is a good name, and Rand is genre-savvy enough to realise on the spot that this means he was adopted, which is on the one hand implausible and on the other hand oh thank god we're not having that drawn out too much.  I mean, if you must be that blatant, let the hero clue in as soon as the reader.

Chapter Seven: Out of the Woods

Is that a pun, because they're literally and figuratively out of the woods, or ironic, because things aren't going to get any better?  I appreciate good wordplay.  Good wordplay.

As day breaks and Rand is a hungry aching golem trudging through the woods, he finally reaches Emond's Field, which is indeed half burnt-down.  However, there are plenty of survivors picking through the wreckage, and Egwene leads them to Nynaeve, who takes a look at Dad al'Thor and reports that he's beyond any help she can give.  Tough luck, Tam.  At best you were going to be Obi-Wan, but it looks like you're Uncle Owen.  (Still a better role than Mother Organa.)  There is much milling and description and encounters with sympathetic villagers.  The mayor explains that the mysterious visitors are indeed and Aes Sedai and a Warder, and they saved what's left of the village via lightning magic and deadly swordplay, and finally someone remembers that Aes Sedai have healing magic as well.  But, despite the way Everyone Knows that women are the only ones who can safely use magic, Everyone Also Knows that you never want to get mixed up with their help, either, and Rand's first instinct is intense repulsion at the thought.  Even in a world where women are the preferred mages and they charge into battle to protect random villages from monsters, the menfolk might rather watch their father die from a Not-Morgul Blade wound than ask one for help.

Light, is there a story with an Aes Sedai where she isn't a villain?

I ask you.  If literally every story about Aes Sedai casts them as villains, they should be many times more terrifying than trollocs in the common consciousness, and yet still people talk about them fighting the evil False Dragons and such.  Moiraine just saved everyone's lives, so thinking she might help makes sense, but their response to her rescue wasn't 'Holy wonderballs, there's an Aes Sedai and she's helping us, oh my god, oh my god, what is this life', it was to get back to sifting the wreckage and leave her to burn the trolloc corpses with her buddy Lan.  They should be acting like Darth Vader showed up to save them all.  And then they start talking about how she's got healing magic, which--if Aes Sedai are in the habit of healing people in extreme circumstances, how do they have such a bad rep?  Are they all satanically going around demanding people's first-born children in exchange for curing a severe case of Legs Chopped Off?  Who invented this prejudice?

Rand finds them (Lan is busy with the trolloc bodies, having found sigils from seven separate clans now) and manages to ask for help from Moiraine, regardless of the cost.  She is of course happy to help (everyone else keeps refusing her), although she moves slowly, tired from all that magicking.  Lan remarks that "Even with an angreal, what she did last night was like running around the village with a sack of stones on her back", and for those of you who spend your time doing productive things unlike myself, I'll note that 'sangreal' is an old term for the Holy Grail, so we're still flush with random Arthurian references.

This is a bit of a short post, but that tends to be how it goes when chapters are 90% descriptions of settings and the way people are running around in them.  One of the explanations I heard for WOT's length, long ago, was that Robert Jordan only planned for it to be four books, but when they started selling so well he was asked to extend the series, and did so with gusto.  But we're more than a hundred pages in now and we're at the point I would probably have called the end of chapter two if I were writing this book, so I'm skeptical of this claim.  A lot of the material isn't bad, it's just filler, and not especially brilliant filler either.  There's some poetry, there's some realism, but it's also just very forgettable text.  I feel like this is the cheese sandwich of fantasy: popular, tasty enough, but just not that much going on except that afterwards you have food inside you.  The problem so far is that the worldbuilding doesn't really make sense yet and I don't care much about what happens to the sandwich, let alone whether the sandwich's father lives or dies.

Ender's Shadow, chapters fifteen, sixteen, and seventeen, in which Bean is a street preacher

(Content: suicide discussion, homophobia, death. Fun content: Squirrel Prophet, Bean doesn't understand algebra.)

Ender's Shadow: p. 218--275

Chapter Fifteen: Courage

The pre-chapter Warm-Up Show With Carlotta And Graff is mostly a bunch of Ender's Game name-dropping, referencing how Demosthenes is riling up the nations of Earth to demand their supergenius commander-children back after the war.  Now, at this point, we've established that the sole reasons for so much Fleet secrecy (the location of Eros, the imaginary war fleet massed in the asteroid belt, technology like forcefields and gravity control) are to keep Earth nations from tearing apart the planet before we can kill all of the formics, because the last thing we want is to go down alone.  The reason for all of the Fleet's secrecy isn't to protect Earth from the formics, but to limit the damage from the inevitable Earth-based wars when the supergeniuses go home and get religion patriotism.  But for some reason, when Valentine or Locke or Carlotta say "You should send these kids home and damn the consequences", no one says "That is literally the last thing in the entire world that we want to have happen".

"You and I can't do anything about the fact that world war will certainly come. But we can do our best to make sure these children don't become pawns in that game. [....] Give them their chance to play." 

Well done, Carlotta, that is exactly what Jesus would say in your place.  There is a huge war coming and the best you can think of is 'let's make sure the free-for-all is properly filled with children with the talent to destroy whole worlds, who have explicitly been selected for training if they were malleable enough to be pushed into doing so by adults who don't answer their questions'.  Sigh.

It's time for Dragon Army's first battle and Beantron coolly calculates that everyone else is nervous.  He eventually acknowledges his own nerves, expressed in silent watchfulness, but goes to shower and mull how he'll one day be taller than anyone, mightier, the most beloved son of humanity regardless of his genes, "greater than Wiggin", which is super left-field to me.  They're children who haven't done anything yet and he's already thinking of Ender as a rival ("Lee and Grant [....] Bismarck and Disraeli. Napoleon and Wellington"), convinced that Ender feels the same and so keeps him down to avoid building up his own competition.  (Bean already decided Ender isn't like that, back when he analysed Ender's free-time practices and their methodology, but why would Bean remember that?  What?  Perfect memory?  Naaaah.)

Ender shows up in the showers as well because Bean is late--a scene not in Ender's Game, which would have rather changed the tone of that first battle chapter, I feel.  Ender and Bean snark at each other and Ender leaves with Bean's towel so he'll have to walk through the corridors naked [drink!], and Bean is still attacking himself for freezing up in fear (now, in the showers, and in Rotterdam, when Achilles had Poke, and before that when Poke had Achilles bleeding on the sidewalk).  This is one of the better aspects of Bean's characterisation, I think, if only because it's a real flaw, it's emotional, and it's presented as something that he's always had and always just brushed off before now.

Nikolai appears, having successfully outwitted the greatest genius in the world through the clever ruse of saying Bean had Secret Diarrhea and didn't want to tell Ender for fear he'd have to sit out the battle.  He also has Bean's towel, and they bond more about how scared they are before rejoining the team.  The battle proceeds from Bean's limited point of view as a member of Tom's C Toon, somehow stealthily circling around Rabbit Army to attack from behind despite essentially no cover.  There are some fun SFy zero-G tactics that try very hard to sell us on the idea that Ender's orientation (enemy's gate = down) is so counterintuitive that Rabbits continually fail to expect attacks from the south/below.  Bean then goes rogue, leaping off without orders and taking out the last of the Rabbit strike force solo before they freeze him, making Bean the anonymous sole casualty mentioned in their first game.

At breakfast, Bean is on an adrenaline high and can't stop talking about how awesome Ender is, because apparently his hunger to be 'greater than Wiggin' forty minutes ago has already been subsumed once again into his role as prophet of the one true god.

"And that's because Wiggin isn't just thinking about Battle School and standing and merda like that. [....] He's thinking about how to beat the Buggers. [....] He wants to come out of this with him and the toon leaders and the seconds and if he can do it every single one of his soldiers ready to command a fleet against the Buggers if we have to."

And then, the next day when they get word of their second battle so soon, Bean decides/realises that the timeline is super short and the only thing the teachers care about is testing and graduating Ender as fast as possible.

So it's already too late for me. Wiggin's the one they've chosen to rest their hopes on. Whether I'm toon leader or not will never matter. All that matters is: Will Wiggin be ready?

Bean's ambitions are all the hell over the map this chapter, eh?  But Bean decides that there will probably be plenty of war post-Third-Invasion for him to make his name in, and so he needs to build up Ender, despite their continued animosity.  I mean, I sort of like that he's got ambition, but it's also weird that all of his ambition is military for no apparent reason.  He's got no interest in solving any of Earth's other problems, putting his attention anywhere other than xenocide, despite his total despair that he's ever going to get recognition in Battle School or join the campaign.  (Actually talking to Ender again is not on his prophet checklist, so resolving their problem like that is out of the question--he actually considered it, "then common sense prevailed".  What?)

He wanders to the arcade, briefly accidentally plays the Giant's Drink, runs off when the computer (still with its difficulty setting jammed to Fuck With Your Head And Damn The Consequences) gives the giant Achilles' face, and gets cornered by Bonzo.  Bean, of course, pulls the same there-is-no-honor-in-beating-up-a-little-boy approach that Ender will use, and so doesn't get too roughed up at first, although after flinging some insults he does get choked a bit.  Bonzo calls Ender a "catamite", which is an interestingly specific choice on Card's part--Bonzo's a villain and always wrong, so we could take this as indicating that homophobia is bad, but there's still enough room to just assume that, objectively, that's a bad thing to be and therefore an appropriate insult for any occasion.

In the aftermath, Bean inexplicably refuses to tell Nikolai who choked him, but reports the incident to Dimak, who of course brushes it off, given that he's under orders from Graff and he's probably already taken odds from his bookie.

Chapter Sixteen: Companion

Oh my god this is the worst random musing in this whole book--Carlotta and Anton discussing suicide:

"We get used to everything. We find hope in anything. [....]  In my view, suicide is not really the wish for life to end. [....] It is the only way a powerless person can find to make everybody else look away from his shame. The wish is not to die, but to hide." 

"As Adam and Eve hid from the Lord. [....] If only such sad people could remember: Everyone is naked. Everyone wants to hide. But life is still sweet. Let it go on."

Where do I even begin?  Okay, first: here is an international breakdown of suicide help lines, here is a major Canadian network, and here is a major American network.  In case any of those are relevant to anyone, ever.

Second, of all of the topics for a random throwaway conversation to promote the author's pet theories and then never address again, suicide has to be the worst possible option, and at the very least Card's editing staff should have stopped him.  At least he gave genocide a whole second book to discuss--but seriously, a random toss-off exchange between two character who already agree with each other and just want to indulge each other's brilliant theological references?  Pull up your pants, man, there are children present.

Third, is it just me, or is this a very well-off-white-man theory to have?  Just last chapter we had Bean telling us that fear takes on a totally different form once you're secure enough in life that you fear shame more than personal deprivation, and now we have Card telling us that shame is the real reason people kill themselves?  Maybe it's the only reason he can ever imagine, but as we've noticed before, Card has serious trouble accepting that most people don't have the same thoughts and experiences he does, and zero grasp of clinical depression.

And let's not ignore the elevated rates of suicide among queer youth, which are already known to be associated with bullying and institutionalised discrimination.  I can't decide if Card is saying that a kid (who gets bullied all day at school and comes home to homophobic or transphobic parents and gets online and gets harassed by other gamers or bloggers or whomever) who finally ends up killing themselves is just succumbing to their own shame at how twisted and broken they are, or if he's saying that all that bullying wouldn't bother them so much if they just imagined Jesus hugging them more.  Either way, what a colossal jackass.

Moving on to Battle School again--Dragon Army gets worn down, winning game after game, until the fateful match with Salamander, their second battle of the day, with an open room and Salamander already deployed around Dragon's gate.  They do their makeshift-armorsuit trick, devastate Salamander, and Ender loudly has Bean, the Littlest Space Marine, explain how Bonzo could have won by keeping up constant movement.  Bean of course thinks this is needless provocation of Bonzo, which finally gives us something interesting:

Did he do it deliberately? Wiggin was always in control of himself, always carrying out a plan. But Bean couldn't think fo any plan that required yelling at Major Anderson and shaming Bonzo Madrid in front of his whole army. 

Why would Wiggin do such a stupid thing?

This is interesting to me simply because, if Bean is right and Ender is smart (things we can generally rely upon, in-universe) this suggests that Ender really is trying to provoke Bonzo, and if that's true, then he's either trying to make Battle School so dangerous for himself that they pull him out, or he's already trying to goad Bonzo into a deathmatch.  Chalk up another point of evidence for Team Premeditation!

Bean's started getting less-than-perfect math scores because he's too busy thinking up tactics, both for laser tag and space war, and one day decides to snark his way out of a math test by writing:

2 + 2 = π(sqrt(2 + n)) 

When you know the value of n, I'll finish this test.

Which, I mean, not to try to out-jackass Bean, but n = ((4/π)^2) - 2.  Pi is irrational, so we can't actually write it out in numeral form, but that doesn't make it somehow not a number.  Maybe this is just a notation error and n wasn't supposed to be included in the square root?  I'm not sure.

The last scene for this chapter is also kind of fun, because it's a scene that was from Bean's perspective in Ender's Game, and here it still is, but with substantially more complicated internal dialogue.  When asked to assess himself, Bean doesn't mention any of his new retconned achievements like being a source of constant new ideas and analyses to Tom, because "that would be brag and borderline insubordination", although if Tom hasn't mentioned any of that to Ender, Tom's also kind of a jerk.  Bean instead only report on his "public record", his accuracy and survival stats.  When Ender prods him into talking about the bigger picture of the war, Bean's choice to sit on the floor and not meet his eyes is now justified by Bean's fears that in the panopticon they are awlays watching his face and he mustn't give away how much he's guessed about the coming invasion.  Ender assigns Bean his special Ridiculous Ops toon, asks him to come up with stupid ideas, and as they settle into bed, Bean mulls much longer and adds two more assignments for himself--support Ender's prep for space war, and find some way to strip Bonzo's support, "so that, in the crunch, he would have to take on Ender Wiggin alone or not at all."  Ah, Bean, so redundant.

Chapter Seventeen: Deadline

Entertaining but irrelevant dialogue about whether to bring Achilles up to Battle School.  They have every reason not to, but by sufficient willful misinterpretation of psych data, Graff can justify it and try to bump the kill count a little higher before he's shipped away.

The first part of this chapter, as Bean assembles Ridiculous Ops, is actually pretty good, because it's character stuff with people leaning up against their flaws (Bean's emotional hunger, Tom's anger problems) and doing better at overcoming them, because they've learned to trust each other more, and no one says or does anything morally reprehensible for multiple pages.  It's a good run.

One of the recruits is called Shovel, but he's white, so he protests his stupid nickname, and Bean takes him seriously.

Bean thought back. Shovel's real name was Ducheval. "You prefer 'Two Horses'? Sounds kind of like a Sioux warrior."

Which: first, no it doesn't; second, 'two horses' would be 'deux chevaux', 'du cheval' means 'of horses' and Bean should know that because he speaks French; third, why is that Bean's go-to reference when he speaks like a dozen languages and has apparently already absorbed the history of the Western Hemisphere for the last thousand years?  The only reason we would think 'Two Horses' sounds like a funny name is because when people call me William they've forgotten or they never knew that it means 'Iron Helm' (or, as I prefer to translate it, 'Metalhead').

Graff, Dimak, and Dap are all arguing (both of them protesting Graff's plans to set Ender and Bean into deathmatches with their archnemeses), and Graff is not interested in this because "Self-doubt was the one thing that neither candidate could afford to have. [....] The boys had to face their worst fears, knowing that no one would intervene to help."  Dimak points out that this theory is "completely unproven and unprovable except in the blood of some child", which I guess is the first canonical confirmation we've had that Graff really did invent his educational practices out of nowhere, rather than being taught this kind of thing as standard practice.  Graff is the embodiment of author fiat.

Bean arrives and tells us all things we know--time is short, the rules are changing, you need Ender tested fully, you're testing our resourcefulness so give us some resources--and ultimately wears Graff down into letting him browse the school inventory once.  Thus Bean acquires the deadline, used to tie things together in space, thin and strong and impossible to cut except with a blowtorch.

"This is what I want." 

"Just one?" asked Dap, rather sarcastically. 

"And a blowtorch," said Bean.

Now that would have been a game of laser tag worth seeing.  'The enemy's gate is wherever the hell I decide it is'.  They have their practice, and when they leave the battleroom, the halls are full of Salamanders.  It's time for Petra's next big moment/failure, asking to talk to Ender in the halls while bullies prepare to ambush him.

Either she was a perfect actress or she was oblivious, Bean realized. She only seemed aware of the other Dragon uniforms, never as much as glancing at anybody else. She isn't in on it after all, thought Bean. She's just an idiot.

Which is about what we were left thinking in Ender's Game, although in a few chapters she'll assure us otherwise.  Bean's solution, instead, is to rush for the Rabbit Army barracks and tell them Ender is in danger, to fill the hallway with witnesses in case something happens (though of course it doesn't), and thereafter Bean sets up a rotation of constant watch on Ender--mostly.  Apparently no one is willing to skip lunch--they already missed breakfast, but given that apparently everyone we like is obsessive about not eating, you'd think someone would sit it out.  Ender, of course, just promises not to leave his quarters and everyone goes along with it because the narrative demands it.

Bean goes because he needs to make a speech on the lunch tables like a YA slice-of-life protagonist.  He hits all the classic points, like shutting down a bully with bad grades--"Your scores are pretty much in the bottom ten percent in the school, so I thought you might need a little extra help"--and starting a slow clap--"how many here think that Ender Wiggin is the one commander we would all want to follow into battle?  Come on, how many of you!" [....] Pretty soon, the whole room was clapping. Even the food servers.--and of course, that high school classic, latent homophobia--"Anybody who raises a hand against Ender Wiggin is a Bugger-lover!"

As we all know, and as Bean apparently completely failed to notice, neither Bonzo nor anyone else who really wants to murder Ender is actually in the lunchroom, and by the time Bean pieces everything together, Bonzo is dead and Dink is helping Ender back to his quarters.  Bean takes a moment to remind Dimak that he can't legally use a 'just following orders' excuse if Graff commanded him to allow the deathmatch to happen, and then goes to flop in his bunk and think about useless he is:

I'm just a street kid whose only skill was staying alive. Somehow. The only time I was in real danger, I ran like a squirrel and took refuge with Sister Carlotta. Ender went alone into battle. I go alone into my hidey-hole. I'm the guy who makes big brace speeches standing on tables in the mess hall. Ender's the guy who meets the enemy naked [drink!] and overpowers him against all odds. 

Whatever genes they altered to make me, they weren't the ones that mattered.

We come again to the sort of central conundrum of this story, which is that they're all super-wrong.  The xenocide isn't necessary, the Third Invasion isn't necessary, which means nothing that anyone achieves in this book was actually necessary and it would have been better for everyone overall if someone else had been in charge.  So if the thesis of this book is that the most important elements of a leader aren't the brilliant intellect and infinite knowledge and memory types of things, but magical charisma and unflinching willingness to kill in an instant, are we still supposed to believe that Ender is ideal?  Or do we consider that someone else being in charge might have actually dodged the tragedy and Ender might not be the objectively perfect person they assume he is?  Do we believe Bean when he says his genius isn't so important?  I suspect we're still supposed to, but as ever, I don't see why.

Next week: Bean properly demonstrates why he's better than Ender.

Ender's Shadow, chapters twelve, thirteen, and fourteen, in which Bean is distressed that no one understands how awesome he is

(Content: racism, bullying. Fun content: more of Card's own fanfiction.)

Ender's Shadow: p. 175--217

Chapter Twelve: Roster

Pressure to get Ender to Command School because war soon et cetera.  Graff has started holding all of his secure meetings in the battleroom control centre, because it has a separate air system Bean can't creep through.  That seems like a totally reasonable solution, as opposed to, like, assigning any of your spectacularly advanced monitoring technology to follow him, or perhaps a literal person.  But yeah, reorganise your office space completely around this kid.  (Dimak says Bean has grown too big anyway, and stopped doing the weird exercises that were meant to help him crawl through ducts.)

Bean has written and anonymously published a paper, "Problems in Campaigning Between Solar Systems Separated by Lightyears", which all the staff have quickly read and pondered--somehow Graff knows Bean wrote it, even though none of the other teachers do.  (Note from the next scene: Bean literally just wrote it and left it in his directory for them to find.  How does every teacher not know who wrote it?)  It's fascinating to me, noticing how much Card gets away with people having or not having certain information in a way that the reader is meant to ignore.  Dimak likes the idea of just setting Bean loose as a theorist and forgetting military training, but Graff has already put on his xenocide boots and he's not taking them off now.  (Side note: between all his other work, Bean has now taught himself French and German so he can read treatises in their original language.  I kind of like this, on its own, the idea that he's just that absurdly talented with languages, but piling it on top of everything else still gets an eyeroll.)

Here's a bit I've never understood:

"But he believes his false theory only because he doesn't know about the ansible. Do you understand? Because that's the main thing we'd have to tell him about, isn't it?"

This is not the first or last time Graff has insisted that Ender needs to know about the ansible in order to lead the final campaign, but that has never been justified to me.  Ender always thinks he's playing games, and he doesn't need to know about the ansible to do that; it only increases the likelihood that he'll realise the games aren't games.  They even tell Ender the things Bean has guessed--that Earth already launched its fleet, that the Third Invasion is a human attack on the formics--so the only reason Ender apparently doesn't figure it out is that he's just not that bright.  That's as close as we ever get to explicit that they didn't want Ender to be the smartest person ever for their plan, but just smart enough to push the button and take the attention.

They finally try to justify the existence of Bonzo Madrid by saying Bean was partially right in his criticism of officer criteria, because they test for qualities in highly-regarded Second Invasion veterans and the war was too short to "weed out the deadwood".  Graff puts all the blame on "our tests" giving Bonzo command despite his ineptitude, and never discusses the option of, say, teacher evaluations pointing out that he's useless and shouldn't be in space.  (Remember early in Ender's Game when Bonzo was actually moderately competent because he relied on discipline?  Those were the days.)  Of course, we also theorised that Graff wants Bonzo there as Ender's antagonist, so he would talk like his hands are tied by 'the tests', wouldn't he?

Since Bean's got his own ideas about what qualities the tests are missing, Graff decides to finally make him and Ender touch: Bean is assigned to create a full army roster out of launchies and any of the soldiers currently on transfer lists.  When Dimak tells Bean this, of course, Bean rapidly figures out it's a new army for Ender (so they can accelerate him to graduation) and that they'll use the Dragon Army name because of the supposed 'curse'.  Bean is dismissed, but takes the time to talk back to Dimak further about how bad the student evaluation criteria are anyway before he leaves, and then, with no sense of irony, decides that Dimak won't fiddle with the roster as a show of power, because he's a better person than that.  Bean: calculating people's virtues so he can insult them to their face without fear of repercussions.  Charmer.

Bean's so grim writing up his roster (trying to make sure that he won't get passed over for toon leader himself, then actually having a moment of self-awareness about his narcissism) that Nikolai stops by to check on him, jokes about letters from home.  Nikolai knows Bean grew up on the street; Bean knows Nikolai was an only child and immensely spoiled because his parents had to use so much surgical intervention and embryo manipulation just to have him (foreshadow foreshadow).  They banter, Bean goes back to work with three more slots to fill in the roster.  He finally adds Crazy Tom, despite the risk of him hulking out if he disagrees with Ender, and Wu:

...which of course had become Woo and even Woo-hoo. Brilliant at her studies, absolutely a killer in the arcade games, but she refused to be a toon leader and as soon as her commanders asked her, she put in for a transfer and refused to fight until they gave it to her. Weird.

Here we have another case of a girl in Battle School who has never been mentioned before and won't be again, whose character is defined by a combination of skill and refusal to be important.  It's almost artful, to have distilled the Faux Action Girl into such a condensed form, even leaving enough room to make it clear that her comrades-in-arms "of course" found a way to combine a dose of racism with a dash of sexual harassment.  (Seriously, it sucks to have a Chinese name in these books.  Wu?  Woo-hoo.  Han Tzu?  Hot Soup.  Andrew?  ENDER.  Granted, other white people also get stupid nicknames on occasion, like Ducheval being Shovel, but that one actually gets called out and ended, while Hot Soup goes on.)

At last, after some hemming and hawing, Bean puts Nikolai in the final slot, on the basis that he won't drag the team down and Bean wants his bro to be part of the imminent sensation that will be Dragon Army, to be able to tell stories of the days when he was the legendary Ender Wiggin's school buddy.

Dragon Army assembles for the first time in their barracks, and we get the first of the truly parallel scenes--the same dialogue as Ender's Game, but from Bean's perspective and thoughts.  Ender lets them all settle in for three minutes, then calls them to practice.  Bean isn't the one who shouts "But I'm naked!" [drink!] but he is also naked, because they had to cut down a flash suit to fit his tiny monkey frame and he can't figure out some of the makeshift fasteners.  (Buttons: much harder than German conjugation.)  But Bean silently knows he's only really angry at himself, because he should have known they would go straight to practice, so he doesn't complain as he runs naked down the hall with his suit in his arms.

Chapter Thirteen: Dragon Army

In what is presumably a typo, the first two lines of faceless featureless dialogue actually end with "said Sister Carlotta" and "said Graff".  Carlotta wants Bean's genetic info to do a test (she doesn't believe he's Volescu's kid, and hopes that means it's all a lie and he'll live) but Graff confirms that Fleet scientists have already determined Anton's Key probably works exactly the way we were told.  Then they congratulate each other on how awesome their favourite students are.

This chapter is mostly Ender's Game chapter ten, with Bean's snark and narcissism instead of Ender's anxiety and narcissism.  This is the first time we've seen Bean in the battleroom, and of course he's already figured out the same thing Petra did, that the zero-G effects have to be artificial rather than a trick of non-rotation like the school claims.  Bean makes it explicit that gravity-bending machines are utterly unknown in the rest of humanity--again, why is the Fleet allowed to do this,when everyone knows there are no formic spies?  (Anti-grav never comes up in the later Shadow books on Earth, suggesting that the Fleet doesn't let that tech out after the war, either.)

Ender sends them all out in waves, and finally tells Bean that he can use a side handhold, as we know, and Bean's upfront ire ("Go suck on it") is now justified as frustration that Ender made him run naked through the halls because his suit was tricky, but takes pity for his size.  Bean just does his anti-nausea trick as he muppetflails through the room and ricochets off a side wall to join the formation.  Ender does his whole angry-drill-sergeant rant, Bean is bored, Ender teaches them "the enemy's gate is down", off they go on another leap, and Ender starts picking on Bean again to answer his various strategic questions.  We've seen this.

Bean is at first mildly scandalised that Ender doesn't know who he is already, and thinks Ender is making a fool out of himself:

"Excellent. At least I have one soldier who can figure things out." 

Bean was disgusted. This was the commander who was supposed to turn Dragon into a legendary army? Wiggin was supposed to be the alpha and omega of the Battle School, and he's playing the game of singling me out to be the goat.

It goes on, and on, like we saw before, but around the 'string bean' joke, Bean realises that Ender is successfully tapping into everyone else's resentment of him--unifying most of the army in their frustration at how the toddler keeps out-geniusing the rest of them.  Bean, of course, also thinks this is a terrible mistake because Ender is undermining his best soldier, because Bean is awesome and Bean knows it and so should everyone else.  In Ender's Game, this would have been serious; here I'm 80% sure it's supposed to be as ironic as I read it, because Bean is a jerk.

After practice, Bean and Ender have their showdown, and Bean's I-can-be-your-best-or-your-worst remarks are spun in his head as 'I will only be effective with your trust and respect, useless if you mock me', which is a hell of a retcon, but a mechanically fascinating thing to see, as a writer.  Card makes the sensible choice to not literally retcon any of the dialogue, but does his damnedest to create alternate interpretations of lines he wrote fifteen years earlier to mean something completely different.  He does occasionally add Bean's thoughts directly, almost like new dialogue, but doesn't pretend Ender picks up on it:

"So I don't even get a chance to learn before I'm being judged." That's not how you bring along talent.

Maybe the best thing about this whole thing, thematically, is that Ender's Game and Ender's Shadow, when they overlap like this, are like a study in how the same events can look very different depending on your preconceptions and biases, which is supposedly the over-arching theme of Game and Speaker.  It's not great writing, but the ideas are neat, and I'd like to see a less-terrible author try the same thing in a book that actually was about that, instead of books that claim to be about that but are actually about how incredibly awesome Ender Wiggin is.

Post-argument, Bean is shaken up, and realises that he's reached the point where he can feel sick with fear even when he's not at risk of dying in a cold gutter anymore--he's counting on Ender seeing his potential and giving him an awesome future, like he did with Poke.

Chapter Fourteen: Brothers

There's not actually a whole lot to analyse here that I can see (commenters are encouraged to disagree if y'all have your own copies and thoughts), but I'll at least recap.

Graff reports to Carlotta that Volescu really isn't Bean's genetic father, though he's a close relative, and so Carlotta goes off to find Volescu's secret half-brother.  In the meantime, we're also warned that Achilles has been removed from his ground school, on Graff's decision that he's super-smart and belongs in Battle School.  Carlotta tells him that if they're both in Battle School, one will definitely die, and accuses Graff of being "determined to let them find out which is fittest in the best Darwinian fashion", because Carlotta is the best character.

In the barracks, Bean and Fly Molo (leader of A Toon and apparently therefore second-in-command for Dragon Army) get into a fight over strategy when Fly criticises Ender's fragmentation and delegation.  When Bean's snark gets too sharp, Fly rushes him, and Nikolai comes to his aid, tragically not screaming DEATH FROM ABOVE.  Han Tzu finally breaks it up, they all agree they were insubordinate, and Nikolai explains to Bean that he's tense because he's sure he's the worst soldier in Dragon.  Bean does a bad job reassuring him, because his spectacular analysis and empathy skills have been turned off this scene to show that he has flaws.

Carlotta sherlocks her way through bureaucracy and secret files to find Bean's genetic parents, discovers that they had twenty-three frozen embryos stored years ago for impregnation (the twenty-fourth was already born, Nikolai), and they collectively discover that the remaining twenty-three were stolen.  Carlotta shares as much about Volescu as she's legally allowed, and discovers that if they had another boy, they were going to name him Julian, for his father.  Dad correctly guesses that one of the twenty-three stolen embryos wasn't destroyed and has since grown up a bit, and Carlotta confirms it and promises that if she can make it happen, they'll meet one day.

Back on Battle School, Major Anderson has a chat with Nikolai, basically saying "You are literally the only person Bean likes, please keep being his friend", and Nikolai has some realistic dialogue about dissociation (thinking of himself in his baby pictures as a different person, and seeing that person in Bean), but ultimately insists that Anderson has nothing to worry about, because they're not friends, they're brothers, and it's all very heartwarming and mildly out-of-place in this book, as the only scene not from Bean or Carlotta's perspective.  I suppose it helps, in that it gives Nikolai some psychological justification for his weird attachment to Bean the jackass ultragenius, but it also just feels like a lot of self-indulgent irony, with the 'chosen brothers' secretly being genetic brothers as well, because genetics are the best everything.

Next week: Bean's secret and completely ineffectual war to proselytise for Ender and stop Bonzo.

Ender's Shadow, chapters four, five, and six, in which Bean just barely doesn't sprint into the fourth wall

Y'know, this book really isn't as bad as Ender's Game for a very simple reason: Ender's Game is about what a burden it is to be an amazing person whom everyone else torments even though you're destined to save the entire world someday, and Ender's Shadow is about what it's like to be Bean.  Where Game couldn't go a chapter without telling us how wonderful Ender is or making proclamations on absolute human nature, Shadow is more of a straight underdog story interspliced with a bit of Science Mystery and Finding Your Family in both literal and figurative terms.  I'm finding, as I read ahead, that it's no worse than most books I intentionally keep on my shelves.  And I didn't make this blog to give maximum publicity to Orson Scott Card, so rather than detail every chapter of the book regardless of content, I'm going to start skimming to hit the interesting points.

(Content: starvation, child death, hostile teachers. Fun content: OSC writes his own fanfiction.)

Ender's Shadow: p. 54--101

Chapter Four: Memories

Graff and Carlotta, discussing Achilles and Bean, are basically a standup routine.

"He gives the right answers, but they aren't true." 

"And what test did you use to determine this?" 

"He committed murder." 

"Well, that is a drawback."

Is it, Graff?  Is it really?  But Graff tells her to forget Achilles, then, and focus on Bean.  Bean starts getting Battle School cram school, and when he's not studying, he gets to draw, or play games, or tell Carlotta about his past.  He remembers flawlessly, back to when he was only a few months old, learning to crawl, climbing out of his crib in "the clean place" (some kind of laboratory full of babies) because he had picked up from the adults that there was something bad coming.  So he hid, and a janitor found him but wasn't allowed to keep him (they're in the International Territory and he's not allowed to adopt, despite not having any kids of his own?), so Bean ran away and starved for three years until he found Poke.

Carlotta tells him that this is all impossible ("I guess that means I'm dead") unless God was watching over him, and Bean interrogates the idea that God kept Bean alive because he loved him but he let all those other kids starve   This is again a substantial improvement for Card, I think, as Bean takes a plausible atheistic stance when Carlotta says God kept him alive for a purpose:

It was like, she wanted to give God credit for every good thing, but when it was bad, then she either didn't mention God or had some reason why it was a good thing after all. As far as Bean could see, though, the dead kids would rather have been alive, just with more food. [....] Because if there was somebody in charge, then he ought to be fair, and if he wasn't fair, then why should Sister Carlotta be so happy that he was in charge?

Looking ahead to the later Shadow books, Bean never quite converts; I believe at one point after losing Carlotta he makes an off-hand reference to whatever God thinks and, when asked if he believes, responds 'More and more, and less and less', which I could take to mean that he sees more and more evidence that someone is scripting the universe, but less and less reason to believe that they're any kind of brilliant/benevolent God-figure like Carlotta believes in.  We never really get into the question of millions of starving children again either way.

The rest of the chapter is just investigation, as Bean realises that Carlotta is trying to figure out what kind of lab Bean came from, so he learns how maps work and runs away to track down the janitor with his perfect memory.  When he does, Carlotta arrives with the cops and reveals that she followed him:

"I didn't want to interfere until you found him. Just in case you think you were really smart, young man, we intercepted four street thugs and two known sex offenders who were after you." 

Bean rolled his eyes. "You think I've forgotten how to deal with them?" 

Sister Carlotta shrugged. "I didn't want this to be the first time you ever made a mistake in your life."

Sister Carlotta is probably my favourite of all Card's creations, but lest we forget she's one of Card's creations, we have the next scene.

They interrogate the janitor, Pablo de Noches, and work out that since the company who owned the space Bean came from has no existing records, it was obviously an organ farm, buying babies from poor immigrant families and harvesting them for parts to save rich peoples' babies with defects.  The inspector is the Designated Stupid Character for the scene, and so brushes all of this off as irrelevant even as he explains it to scornful Carlotta.  Carlotta insists that Bean's parents must be remarkably smart and thus prominent, and the Designated Stupid Character continues to be insightful:

"Maybe.  Maybe not," said the inspector. "I mean, some of these refugees, they might be brilliant, but they're caught up in desperate times. To save the other children, maybe they sell a baby. That's even a smart thing to do. It doesn't rule out refugees as the parents of this brilliant boy you have."

Carlotta agrees that this is possible (spoilers: no, Bean's parents aren't broke refugees) and leaves with the conclusion that Bean is a miracle, so it's time to ship him to space.

Chapter Five: Ready or Not

Graff is still snarky about Carlotta sending Bean to Battle School, despite telling her to do literally exactly what she's done, but here we get the reveal that Bean even beat Ender's test scores, to make sure that whomever Card is writing is still the smartest person in the room.

Bean explains away his initial crying in front of Carlotta as a mistake of openness that he learned not to repeat once he realised she kept secrets from him, too, and so he's distanced himself by the time she sends him to the shuttle.  He does methodically calculate that, when she hugs him, she wants to believe he will miss her, and therefore he hugs her back, playing along, in payment for the safety and food and opportunities she's given him.  He may or may not slip a 'beep boop' in there to reassure himself that he does not feel human emotions, but he also justifies it as "the kind of thing Poke would do", helping someone else when it costs him nothing.

We get the Shuttle Scene Redux, and it gives me a strange joy how thoroughly Card is writing fanfic of his own book.  He at first stares at all the other kids on the shuttle, so healthy and well-nourished, and thinks about how easily Sergeant could destroy any one of them, and he feels a brief stab of anger in his emotion chip as he wishes they knew what it was like to starve: "...the dizziness, the swelling of your joints, the distension of your barely, the thinning of your muscles until you barely have strength to stand. These children had never looked death in the face and then chosen to live anyway."  Of course, he then immediately fears that he can never catch up with anyone who's got such a head start on him, and he's torn between wanting to climb to the top of their social hierarchy or disdaining the whole thing as beneath him.

I am oddly charmed by Bean's insistence that he's a cold computer when he's actually this complete emotional mess of repressed fear and hunger and ambition and FEELS.  (He's going to fit in so well among Manly Men.)  If he stayed like this, of course, he'd be insufferable, but his whole arc is about grappling with the existence of emotions and learning to act out of compassion and reason instead of fear and mistrust.

But then we get into the actual replay of the original shuttle scene, where a teacher (Dimak) shows up and tells everyone to keep their egos in check because everyone here is at best on equal footing, if not outclassed, and some boy says that this is obviously not true because someone has to have the highest scores.  So Dimak shuts him down sarcastically:

"You, however, understand the profound truth that you must reveal your stupidity openly. To hold your stupidity inside you is to embrace it, to cling to it, to protect it. But when you expose your stupidity, you give yourself the chance to have it caught, corrected, and replaced with wisdom."

Not really a spoiler: Dimak is president of the Hyrum Graff fan club and intentionally trying to mimic his techniques with Ender.  So, while Bean's Spider-Sense warns him that he had the best scores and so he's going to end up the real target of this scene, the teacher goes on to tell the students how stupid they are, and that even if he had been wrong, it would be a waste of time to point it out.

I would like to believe that this is supposed to be commentary on the American school system, since Dimak also adds that 'teachers are powerful, students are not; don't provoke when you can't defend'.  Bean agrees with this, but silently adds that you have to notice when the teachers are wrong, you just shouldn't point it out because that gives everyone else your advantage.

I'm rarely on-board with stories where the protagonist is meant to be unlikable, but Bean is an exception and I have to conclude that it's because I do actually relate to him, once he's off the streets.  His deep social awkwardness and attempts to calculate appropriate social responses to stimuli, his 'excuse me, I didn't request to be supplied with feelings' ways.  A jackass, but one with the potential to do better, unlike Ender, who's already 'perfect' and just needs the plebes to stay out of his way.

Dimak says that this one loud student was less wrong than normal, because someone aced almost all of the tests, all of the psychology and command-relevant questions, but had terrible physical scores.  Card doubles-down for the paraquel: instead of Graff telling the group that Ender is the only one who matters, Dimak asks Bean to guess who this was, makes Bean say it, then congratulates him on his accurate self-assessment, concluding that the only thing that matters is winning the war, so worship the smart ones and hope they rain undeserved mercy on you.  Bean just thinks about how stupid his tactical advice is, recommending that no one commit to a fight unless they're sure of their advantage, and they blast off into space while Dimak replays Graff's zero-G headstand tricks.

Chapter Six: Ender's Shadow

Graff boggles to learn that Dimak apparently pulls these stunts with every launch group he brings up, because he likes the way it causes an immediate sorting-out of children into differing statuses, because Dimak is a goddamn awful teacher.  His flight summary apparently includes seven pages about how awesome Bean is ("He's cold, sir. And yet--" "And yet hot. yes, I read your report.") which I'm sure isn't meant to be a self-deprecating dig at how this series lavishes adoration on its heroes, but for one lone time I empathise deeply with Graff.

Bean concludes that, since obviously no one will help him, everyone in Battle School is either irrelevant, a rival, or an enemy, "so it was the street again".  That's an interesting frame of reference for schools--personally, all the schools I went to were either in nice enough neighbourhoods or I was out of the loop enough that I can't always relate to the things my friends remember about those days.  We get an SFFy reintroduction to Battle School life, nothing y'all don't remember, but this bit irks the fuck out of me, when older students walk past them in the halls and shout catcalls like 'fresh meat' and 'they even smell stupid':

Some of the launchies ahead of Bean in line were resentful and called back some vague, pathetic insults, which only caused more hooting and derision from the older kids. Bean had seen older, bigger kids who hated younger ones because they were competition for food, and drove them away, not caring if they caused the little ones to die. He had felt real blows, meant to hurt. He had seen cruelty, exploitation, molestation, murder. These other kids didn't know love when they saw it.

So here's a thing about humanity: we're extremely relative.  Happiness is a complicated thing, but it's getting studied, and the results are only shocking to people who think, like Bean, that feelings are calculated decisions. We compare our happiness to our environment and adjust accordingly, which is why billionaires aren't billions of times happier than people on welfare.  As someone currently dragging himself out of a kind of abrupt depressive episode like I haven't felt in years, I'm particularly aware that mental health isn't solely determined by your environment or what seems reasonable.

My point being that Bean is foolish to assume that passing insults are a sign of affection just because he's seen children kill each other, and to think that the other children are all wrong and just don't understand and appreciate the love being poured onto them.  And if those other launchies feel attacked because they are being catcalled, that's not invalid, because any hypothetical intentions don't just neutralise the distress they create.  The normalisation of 'I do this thing, even though you say you hate it, because I want to show affection' needs to be pulled out of our culture by the root.  Anything that resembles 'tough love' can fuck off.  Parents abusing children to 'toughen them up', men catcalling women on the street, children picking on other children on the playground because they don't know what to do with a crush: these things are not equivalent, but they come from a common poisoned well, and it's this nonsense.

Bean in particular gets catcalled for being so small, and thus compared to Ender.  He spends the chapter piecing together Battle School culture: older students form officially-recognised crews (armies), but while they have the potential to be bullies, they only matter because the teachers have turned them against him, so the teachers are the real enemy.  He realises Ender is some kind of celebrity, so being compared to him boosts his ego, but reduces his ability to blend.

There's more food-rejection nonsense; like Ender before him, Bean thinks they served him too much, so he shoves the excess onto other kids' plates.  On the one hand, "letting his hunger be his guide" is excellent advice; on the other, everyone we're supposed to like in this series only ever eats less than they're told.  Sigh.

The rest of his scene is wandering Battle School after lunch, figuring out how to get around, where things are, who the armies are.  He gets caught up in a class-change and catcalled more (two years later, Dink Meeker gets called out for using the exact same line about walking between his legs without touching his balls that he used on Ender, THIS IS FANFICTION) and then grabbed by Petra Arkanian, who solves problems.  She's rational enough that Bean is willing to talk to her, but he brushes her off as "a take-charge person and didn't have anybody to take charge of until he came along", so I guess we're not at the part where we're supposed to go back to liking Petra yet.  (She does, however, make the useful point that it's impossible to do anything without revealing your character to the teachers, such as how Bean's sneaking around will show his insistence on solitude and exploration.)

There's more repeating, this time without the charm, such as Bean showing up in the game room, reaching exactly the same conclusions as Ender about how badly the other kids play the game, asking for a turn, and getting laughed at (though this time they leave rather than actually following through on the offer).  There's an extended sequence about him fitting himself into an air duct just to see if he can, and figuring out that he's just fulfilling his need to always have an escape route, before he finds his barracks again (perfect memory) and settles in for naptime.

There's one more scene in this chapter, but since we've ramped up the pace, I'll leave it until next week.  What do y'all think of moving at this rate?  Anyone who's read Shadow yourselves, did I miss anything that you would have liked to see examined more?

Also, make sure to come back on Thursday for a new post from the blogqueen, especially if you know Judge Dredd.