Reflection: Ender's Game

I wanted to take the time in my reflection to touch on a few things that we glossed over or didn't discuss in class. Not all of these have to do with alien-human interactions but, as I've begun rereading Xenocide (it's not really a sequel to Speaker for the Dead, it's just this kind of abysmal continuation of a few very bad ideas brought up in Speaker), it colors my whole thought process looking at Ender's Game. In Speaker Ender's in his thirties (I don't think that's a spoiler?) and it makes you so keenly aware of his childhood in Ender's Game that it makes everything else slightly superfluous. And yet, I came to the conclusion during our discussion that Ender has to be a child in this book, or he would not do the things he does. It's a very child-like action to do something outrageous in the hopes that unpleasant things will stop, and that's exactly what Ender does when he attacks the buggers' homeworld. Now, we know that the reason Ender is able to do this is because (in part through the Fantasy Game) he understands these creatures, he loves them, they get inside his head and his dreams. It makes his decision all the more radical because, even though he doesn't know it's real, even though he's being manipulated and deliberately pushed to the breaking point by his superiors, even if it's just a game, it's such a heinous act from his standpoint that he MUST be past his breaking point to do it. I myself can't even play Renegade on Mass Effect.

Ronald Reagan, in a speech to the United Nations General Assembly in 1987, said:

"In our obsession with antagonisms of the moment, we often forget how much unites all the members of humanity. Perhaps we need some outside, universal threat to make us recognize this common bond. I occasionally think how quickly our differences worldwide would vanish if we were facing an alien threat from outside this world. And yet, I ask you, is not an alien force already among us? What could be more alien to the universal aspirations of our peoples than war and the threat of war?"

I did not think about this when reading Ender's Game, in part because I did not, until recently, know that this quote exists. And my immediate reaction to it is that, while it is a nice idea, it is pretty fundamentally that: an idea. The reason I chose this quote to reflect on is because, given the time that this was said, and the time during which Ender's Game was written, the influences of the Cold War are unmistakable. It is one of very few things about the novel that is particularly dated, because reading about Russian imperialism and the Warsaw pact is an immediate source of confusion for those of us born at the tail end of the Cold War. And yet what we have between the Buggers and the Humans is a kind of Cold War in itself, a state of destruction perpetrated by an inability to understand the other's ideology. I was trying to pinpoint, in my earlier post, the kind of patriotism I could see in the childhood games of Val, Peter, and Ender, and I at first likened it to World War II but I really think, in retrospect, that it's slightly later, and it's fascinating to think of Card (biographical fallacy, I know) growing up in this Cold War environment and letting it influence his work.

The last thing I wanted to mention is why Ender has to leave Earth behind. It's interesting but, reading the book, you don't get much of a sense of his attachment to Earth, despite the fact that he is essentially being trained to defend it. Before he goes off to Command School, he learns to develop a connection with the physical world, but there's still no sense of its people. And yet, after he's made a hero, he goes off to settle colony worlds. Why? The answer is simple, according to Val. Because he would be far too much of a tool for Peter, and that in itself is disturbing to me. There's this comment in one of the later books that talks about how Val and Ender simply handle people. Far be it from me to speculate what would have happened had Ender stayed on Earth, but I feel as though, for him, it would have been utterly pointless, because the only person he deeply cared about went with him when he left. As for Peter turning him into a puppet, I'm not sure how well that would have worked. The Buggers tried to get at him, and they, who could literally reach into his mind, found him too strong a persona to use. And while Peter was a figure of terror in Ender's childhood, Ender was later manipulated by other people in some significantly more distressing ways. Ender was selected by Battle School over Peter because he is not merely ruthless, but compassionate, and lacks the element of ambition that made Peter dangerous. In that case, I suspect he would have been more of a threat to Peter than anything else.