Ender's Game

Ender is a young child (ages 6-12 through the story) who was bred with the expectation that he would save the world from an alien species called the buggers, more properly known as the formics. The formics are an intelligent, insect race. The humans and formics have clashed twice before. Once in hand to hand combat and again when the humans repelled an invading force. Ender struggles terribly as his teachers intentionally turn the other students against him to isolate him. They also push him harder than any other student, testing his limits and ability to command under stress. Meanwhile, his siblings, Peter and Valentine manipulate politics on earth through aliases online. Ender attempts to throw his final exam by making the unethical decision to wipe out the entire race of formics. However, his exam was not a simulation, as he had been told, but actual battles and skirmishes, his commands carried out by real pilots, many of whom died in order to follow his tactics. Ender is haunted by the number of lives he has taken. However, Valentine offers him a chance at redemption by convincing him to govern one of the first human colonies. There, he discovers an unhatched queen and a message left to him by the dead race. He publishes this message under the pen name "Speaker for the Dead" and carries the egg from planet to planet in hopes of hatching her and bringing the formics back from extinction.

This simple plot is the foundation of a complex study of humanity. Ender is the third born in his family, which is an embarrassment to his parents since population is strictly controlled and a third child is a symbol of pettiness and lack of patriotism. However, Ender's birth was ordered by the military. Peter, the eldest, had originally been the hope of the military but is sadistic and sociopath tendencies frightened them. Valentine was also promising but she had too much of what Peter lacked, empathy.

Ender was somewhere in the middle. Peter resents his brother because Ender's very existence is an enormous sign the Peter was inadequate. He often hurts and terrifies his brother. Peter is not the only one. Ender is bullied at school on Earth and during his military training. Ender, fearing that he will be continually bullied, pushes any physical assault to the limit anticipating that his enemy will never want to fight him again. Two of his attackers die as a result of his retaliation. His teachers and manipulators try to keep him ignorant of this but Ender eventually realizes what he has done. Ender sees his empathy as part of his darker side. He knows his enemy inside and out. When he attacks them, he knows them so well that he loves them they way they loves themselves. But it is that knowledge that allows him to beat them, that love that leads him to kill them.

The formics feel the same about humanity. They manipulate one of his games to reach out to Ender and understand him. They enter his dreams, communicating with him and learning about him and his species. When he arrives on one of their colony planets to govern the human pilgrims, he discovers an artificial landscape that had been shaped in his dreams and nightmares. It is there that he finds the queen's egg and learns completely about his enemies.

Ender does not have a chance to enjoy or experience childhood. His life is made of artificial and real challenges. He constantly struggles with the rest of humanity and with himself. His lessons are harsh as are his reactions. He is not able to trust anyone, even Valetine is used to manipulate him.

After Ender leaves, Peter struggles to destroy his own inner demons. He feels that his sadistic tendencies are wrong but he is driven to them and enjoys the suffering he causes. He convinces Valentine to help him channel his energy and help save humanity. Together the orchestrate political strife on Earth which errupts into a short war. At the end of the war, Peter is able to control humanity. While Peter is tempered into a politician, Valentine struggles to retain her identity as she is drawn to power and manipulation. Despite being children, their parents are nearly inconsequential. For all three children, adults cannot be trusted or relied upon. Their difficulties are faced as mature individuals. None of these children are given the possibility of childhood, they become wise and aged before their time.

Children playing war games, saving the world and the human race, it is difficult not to draw comparisons between this book and the very real and very tragic Children's Crusade. Those medieval children believed that in their very innocence lay their success. Since the crusades were wars of religions, the children who marched off to battle believed that their faith and purity would enable God to fully protect them and lead them to victory. Of course, that is not at all what happened. In Ender's Game, the children's innocence and purity are methodically destroyed, their trust violated, their faith in adults used against them. As soon as Ender discovers the motive behind the games, the rules change. His attempts to circumvent his manipulators only play into their hands, making him complicit and guilty even as he is incapable of escaping his fate and unaware of the consequences of his actions.

It is also easy to see this book as a critique of certain education systems, which are goal driven and do not prepare students for life (or peace). Actually, I doubt at all that Card had this in mind but I do. All of the children in the military academies realize that they can let their studies slip because the game is all that matters to their teachers. At the end of the war against the formics, none of those students will have skills relevant to a world without the constant threat of invasion. Ender sardonically notes that, due to his training and excellence in military tactics and murder, no one thinks he is capable of maintaining peace and order.

Most reviewers ignore the fact that the formics were not actually an invading force when Ender kills them. The formics were unaware that the humans were an intelligent species, treating them as one would treat a wild animal that attacked. The so called second invasion was an attempt to colonize Earth without hostile intentions. However, they were attacked and their queen destroyed. The main complication was communication. The fornics communicated telepathically, shared all information and knowledge automatically. They were incapable of speech and ignorant of language. And of course humans are incapable of telepathy. The feared third invasion never was. It was a preemptive strike, which means that the formics were defending themselves, their queen, their species. And yet, they held no hostility to mankind, no hatred to Ender. Like Ender, they learned to love their enemy. A rather Christian sentiment, powerful because it was complete love as humans can never truly feel toward their attackers. Unless you are the Dalai Lama.

The Dispossed: An Ambiguous Utopia

I am going to try this again. I want to talk about revolution. The word itself hints at the problems of a revolution. To revolve is to turn and return. The idea of return plays an important role in Shevek's life and his theories of physics.

My family is from Cuba. My mother was born just days after Castro came down from the hills and declared victory. It was what my grandmother prayed for and she reminds me from time to time to be careful what we pray for because we just might get it. A couple of years later, my grandmother move to Florida with my mother while my grandfather was in jail. If you knew my grandparents, you would be struck by the absurdity. Like me, my grandmother stubbornly says what she thinks out loud, dangerous in any dictatorship. My grandfather is the opposite, he makes do and tries to see the best. Revolution is a dirty word and many of my cousins, I am quite certain, did not vote for Obama because his promises sounded disturbingly familiar. My grandmother also likes to say, "If you aren't a communist when you are 20 then you have no heart; if you are still a communist at 50 then you have no brain."

We look at Cuba with fear and hope, with impotent anxiety, with thin-wearing patience. I have only known Havana's streets in photographs, black and white and yellowing with age but it is the place where my grandparents and older cousins came into the world, were they grew up, were they became. There is a lingering but strong homesickness, an undeniable bond, and a painful recognition of the familiar. So I keep looking at pictures, cooking Cuban food, and, lately, I have been reading a blog by a woman, Yoani Sánchez, trapped on that island.

She has recently written a post about the maintenance of the revolution. To be 'revolutionary' "it is enough to exhibit more conformity than criticism, to choose obedience over rebellion, to support the old before the new." This is the harsh reality Shevek finds on his home planet.

He lives roughly 200 years after the Odonian revolution in a communist paradise. I find my heart sympathetic and smitten with the communal and free spirit of his world, not to mention the equality of sexes and the utter frankness of bodily functions. It offers a type of freedom I will never know and could not survive: freedom from possession. And, while I envy the health care systems of other western, first world countries, I have no intention of going whole hog - not because I am disgusted by the ideal of communism but because I am terrified of the realities.

Shevek discovers that in his academic field, there is corruption where there should be none, barriers against the novel, and that the ideals upon which his society is based can be manipulated into the power structure they oppose. One of his friends is punished by continual assignment to physical labor until he breaks down, forced into an assylum. Shevek's work is stymied by his supposed mentor who denies publication of his work unless credit is shared and blocks Shevek's entry into teaching.

I know that corruption is not a new theme in the utopian genre of science-fiction. What surprised me was the description of how stability can promote corruption, how status quo can purchase power. There are many kinds of freedom: freedom to live, freedom to work, freedom from physical harm, freedom of thought, freedom of mind, freedom to speak and freedom to be heard. Shevek has a very tangible sense of the freedom he desires and is denied. It is freedom to be heard that he seeks, risking all other freedoms for the ability to communicate.

At the risk of sounding prosaic, I offer these quotes, frequently misattributed to Thomas Jefferson:
The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.
Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety. (This is Benjamin Franklin, by the way. You've probably heard a popular paraphrase)

The Dispossed: An Ambiguous Utopia

I have not yet finished this book but it is living up what I have come to expect from Le Guin-a complete world governed by different social structures, deep characters, and the painful feeling that I am missing out on something whenever I am forced to put the book down.

The book is structured both sequentially and simultanouesly according to concepts in phsyics explored by Shevek, the protagonist. This concept is not so difficult to me because it is at the heart of the Jewish calendar, or more correctly the heart of the conflict between the Jewish and the secular calendars. On the face of things, the calendars are only different in that the former is a lunar calendar while the latter is a solar calendar. The both have seven day week cycles, they are marked by (semi)lunar events called months, each annual orbit of the sun begins a new calendar year, and the months are sprinkled with secular and/or religious holidays. However, if you live with both, they begin to take on different meanings. The Jewish calendar becomes one of tradition, of repeating cycles. The Sabbath grounds the week and returns one constantly to peace, to the celebration of life, and to God. The secular calendar marks the forward movement of time through life, the daily grind. The cycle and the progression are part of each other.

Oh travel through the heavens! This is not what I meant to write about but I have wandered into time and physics. I will give it a go.

Shevek tries to explain time like a book. Everything is in the book already but we must move through it from one end to the other. We are only readers of a small portion and we are only able to understand our portion if we move from beinning to end. If you have read Slaughterhouse Five, you will be familiar with this understanding of time as this is how Tralfalmadorians view time, except that they can see the end as easily as the beginning and move fluidly through it. This naturally becomes determinist, lackign free will. Shevek tries (maybe he eventually succeeds) in reconciling his theories of physics and time with free will. I would struggle to put the two together, too, but I am not worried about free will. It doesn't seem worth worrying about since, unless you are Kilgore Trout, you don't get to change whatever the status quo is.

The two worlds, Anarres and Urras, revolve around each other, referring to one another as moons of their earth/world. So, too, do their civilizations and governments pull and repel each other while travelling through their orbits. I haven't developed this thought enough to comment on its relationship to the theories of physics and time that are central to the novel.

Rendezvous with Rama

Against expectations, the aliens do not appear. Rather, Rama is a passing world, briefly coming to life in a shocking display of evolution and animation only to recycle itself as it sling-shots around the sun in disregard for the animal life it has confounded in its brief journey through the solar system. Any and all things understood about Rama must come from human reason and imagination. There is no host population to translate and explain.

Rama, a world in an enormous pill. It is a medicinal dose of discovery. Stories of conquistadors, missions, colonization, etc, that make us all slightly ill with guilt - or at least they make me feel that way. Why? Certainly not because I would conduct negotiations at the end of a gun. I have the privilege of living in 2010 in a fairly egalitarian society (at least politically on paper) and in the great wide world known as the internet*. The exotic has become psychologically domesticated and I have little fear of run ins with the unknown (and even less opportunity to have such run ins). Rendezvous with Rama offers a fairy-tale type of exploration. Hostility is denied, fears are faced, and extraordinary astronauts repress their biological reactions in the name of diplomacy. It is with great sadness and relief that these star sailors flee without having met one of the true Ramans. There is no culture clash, no war culture coming across a peace culture (you can decide for yourself which culture either of the teams would be on).

I did not draw a connection to the Age of Exploration on my own. The spaceship is named the Endeavor after one of Captain Cook's ships. The captain often ponders Cook and compares his successes and failure to Cook, not only as an explorer and captain but also as a human and a husband.

There are indeed some forms of life, the biots, biological robots. They are simple, utilitarian, undeniably organic but not alive as we understand the word. In high school, on the first day of biology, we were asked to define life. What an extraordinary complicated task. What lept to my mind was the inevitability of death, which is no more easy to explain in a satisfying way. I could say the inability to move, permanent lack of consciousness, etc. But these are merely negations of life. So what does alive mean? We agreed that reproduction, conversion of material into energy (metabolism), and growth were necessary. Sufficient? Not quite. A robot-building robot might fit that description. Self-sustaining seemed important, although like many other elements is suggests that certain humans in certain conditions are not truly alive. Cells! now there is an element I can get behind. Some organization of a cell or cells-microscopic bacterium, enormous ostrich egg, and the beautiful gestalt of multi-celled organisms. Dr. Kephart kindly added some of the remaining elements which had been either too uncertain or too unclear in my mind (and probably others'): evolution, the possibility to change from generation to generation; stimulus response, which can be part of growth but also exhibited in movement. So, there you have it, life itself. Solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.

How do the biots rank? Reproduction-check. The biots had available blueprints for their makeup and were either spawned or built as Rama neared Sol. Metabolism- null. Biots lacked a means of ingesting food or a digestive system. I don't think the shifting of electrons through a power chord count as metabolism since the energy is already converted. Growth - null. Self-sufficient - null. Cells-check. Their skeletal system was built in a honeycomb pattern of cells, which reminded me a great deal of that awesome cat with the million-dollar-man style hind legs. But the biot's cells were organic. Evolution-difficult to tell but I would imagine null. Stimulus response, check. I found this an inconclusive and dissatisfying analysis. But at least these biots are only science fiction (at the moment) so the ethical ramifications of their possible life can be delayed, probably through my lifetime and yours.

These biots, while possessing mobility and some intelligence, ignore the astronauts. Since the Ramans fail to appear, the humans have only Rama itself and themselves to explore. While this may seem dull and uneventful, I can feel a lingering tidal tug that will cause me to return again and again to some detail from the story. Each character is well developed and believable. Those in charge have attributes we wish to ascribe to ourselves, even humility. And because I can relate, I find myself questioning what I would think, how I would act, what I would do. Rama is much like the early Myst series computer games. They provided a world to explore without the threat of inhabitants.

In case you are wondering, and like any good human you are always wondering, Rama is one of Vishnu's avatars. He is known as the Lord of Self Control and the Lord of Virtue. His life is a struggle to maintain perfect dharma, by doing what is appropriate and right even in difficult trials.

*Spellcheck insists that the internet must be capitalized but I disagree.

Left Hand of Darkness

This is one of the first feminist science fiction works and my first sci-fi book to consider the nature of gender relations.

The protagonist, a member of the "bisexual" branch of humanity (in that he is male), is an alien among a race who are neuter most of the time, and thus unable to procreate during that time, and for approximately two days can turn either male or female. He is considered to be a perversion of nature since he is constantly sexually available. The period of fertility among the natives is called kemmering. Either member of a pair may assume either sex and all are capable of pregnancy. The protagonist begins by treating them all as males until. However, on a long and dangerous journey, he is confined in close quarters with a karhide undergoing kemmering. It is then that Genly Ai realizes that the karhides are not man or woman, or neither, but always both. The society has no sex/gender roles.

There is a beautiful myth of the first beings. The first born attempts to kill of its siblings but loses one when chasing after another. The youngest waits until the eldest is in kimmering. Then it returned. Each needed the either, could not survive.

The title refers to the inherent duality of karhide life. Light is the left hand of darkness. Each half does not merely oppose the other but requires it and completes it.

Rite of Passage

The epitimous rite of passage is a 30 day stay on a planet with limited supplies at the age of 14. After this trial, the person becomes an adult. The Earth has been destroyed. The protagonist lives in a spaceship whic observes strict reproduction control. The people on ships have all the technological know-how but limited resources which are exchanged with people who live on planets at unfair rates. They each spread false information and slander about one another. The protagonist is supposedly intelligent but lacks social skills.

During Mia's trial, she faces hostility, imprisonment, blah blah blah. Some of her fellow spaceship people are killed. Maybe. In retaliation, the spaceship people blow up the plane. The whole thing. All the people. The ethical dilemma is about as deep and enduring lipstick.

It is a childishly and poorly written book about an unpleasant, immature child who routinely fails at introspection and self-awareness. Many underdeveloped plot elements.

Demographic: tween? Still poorly written no matter who the target audience is.

Dune

This book has set the bar high. I admit it took me a while to adjust to the feudal politics at work but I got over the prejudice fast. The story is rich and deep; I am not sure where to begin. I know, I know. Dune is already famous for being a great and that it is very well known, but I only just read it and did not know what to expect. I must give credit to the MMORPG Kingdom of Loathing for encouraging me to read Dune.

Dune takes place in our universe in the very distant future, some 21,000 years from now, when the human population is spread throughout the universe - an impressively conservative amount of time for our technology to facilitate such travel. Curiously, computers have been outlawed, requiring the training of humans to do complex and speedy computations in their place. The political-economic structure of the worlds are petty feudal systems which are declining in power and stability.

The religious overtones are a curious invention. Dominated by women but yearned for a single man to be the messiah. These women, the Bene Gesserit, so called witches exist selflessly for breeding and to support their husbands but they are the true, though indirect, power behind their husbands and they possess the ability to control by mere speech.

Both sides are extremely sexist however there are two couples, Leto/Jessica and Paul/Chani, which seem to bridge the gaps. But Paul is something else all over again. Within Paul, the female mind within the male body, lies all the power of the universe. It is this duality that gives him all his strength.

The possibility of free will is a strange conflict. Paul at times can see into his future but his choices and their consequences lay a veil over the future. Is it possible that Paul can see only the near-future, what is inevitable from the actions that have already been taken. For example, if I throw a rock over a cliff, it is inevitable that the rock should hit the ground. But I cannot possibly know what will happen to that rock in a hundred years.

I find it curious that the leaders of the religion are called Bene Gesserit, which means something like "he/she does good" which is ironic since I am not convinced that this order only does good or is even actually moving toward good. I will need to read more of the Dune series to decide that.