Reflection: Speaker for the Dead

I know we didn't get a chance to discuss this book this week, and that makes writing an additional reflection on Speaker a little difficult. Also, having read the other two books (I don't rate anything after Children of the Mind as canon, and I barely count that) it's difficult for me to piece together what my ideas were about this book and what it was trying to say before I read the other ones. Still, I think the character that most distinctly fascinates me (as a feature of alien-human contact) is Jane.

We have a tendency to forget, reading this book (and Ender tends to forget as well) that Jane is not human. She looks human and acts human, within the context of her computer existence, as a means of facilitating communication with Ender. Her nature, and the way others treat her, reminds me greatly of what we were discussing while reading Concept of the Political--her power and abilities are so far above the realm of human experience, and so comprehensive, that there is no choice in the human-Jane relationship but to consider her a friend, because to consider her an enemy would be preposterous. She is the ansible, she dwells inside the philotic web, and as such everything that humankind is completely dependent on is dependent on her.

And yet when Ender switches off his comm, it hurts her. Deeply, on an emotional level. He does it as though chastening a naughty child, but as she has devoted so much of her attention and her understanding to Ender-as-father-figure, it's like losing contact with a parent. Losing part of herself. And though she recovers, eventually, time for her passes much differently than for humans, and by the time he switches it back on she has undergone the equivalent of a million years of suffering and recovery. Because Jane puts on this facade of humanity, Ender doesn't recognize, as he does with the Hive Queen, that she is alien or different, and that is a problem. If we perceive Jane as a person, and not merely as a computer program (and she is a person) then we must treat her as ramen or varelse because her thoughts and experiences are too different from ours to treat her as a framling.