Orson Scott Card
1951–

(Has also written under the pseudonyms Brian Green, Byron Walley, Frederick Bliss, P. Q. Gump, and Dinah Kirkham) American novelist, playwright, editor, essayist, nonfiction writer, comic book writer, and author of young adult novels and short stories.

The following entry presents an overview of Card's career through 2005.

INTRODUCTION

Card is the award-winning author of over sixty books of young adult science fiction, fantasy, history, and horror. With the creation of Andrew "Ender" Wiggin, the young genius protagonist of Ender's Game (1985), Card launched his widely acclaimed career as a science fiction and fantasy writer. Since his debut in the field in 1977, when his short story "Ender's Game" appeared in Analog magazine, Card has gone on to become the first writer to win the science fiction genre's top awards, the Nebula and the Hugo, for consecutive novels in a continuing series. Card's stories often evince an epic methodology that examines the implications of future trends to logical, yet disturbing paths. His heroes are typically conflicted individuals, seeking the right course within a myriad of possibilities that lack definitive black-and-white answers. Beyond the "Ender" series, Card's other projects include creating the American fantasy series "Tales of Alvin Maker"; a sci-fi retelling of ancient scripture in the "Homecoming" series; contemporary novels with occult and ghost themes such as Lost Boys (1992), Treasure Box (1996), and Homebody (1998); and a series of biblical historical fiction, "Women of Genesis," begun with the novels Sarah (2000) and Rebekah (2001).

BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION

A descendent of the legendary Mormon figure Brigham Young, Card was born on August 24, 1951, in Richland, Washington, though he was later raised in California, Arizona, and Utah. The son of Willard Richards Card, a schoolteacher and college professor, and Peggy Jane Card, a school administrator, Card displayed an early affinity for literature, particularly works of science fiction. At age sixteen, he enrolled at Brigham Young University where he became an active participant in the school's theater department, eventually penning his first play Tell Me That You Love Me, Junie Moon in 1969. Continuing with his interest in playwriting, he authored and adapted more plays in the early 1970s, including several with overt religious themes, among them The Apostate (1970) and Stone Tables (1973)—which he later adapted into a 1997 novel of the same name. As a young Mormon, Card fulfilled his requisite missionary service at the LDS Church in Brazil and later returned to Provo, Utah, to start his own theater company. After the company failed, Card found a job as a copy editor at the Brigham Young University Press, eventually becoming an assistant editor at Ensign, the official publication of the Church of Latter Day Saints. Through his contacts at Ensign, Card was hired to write novelizations of church materials, such as passages from the Book of Mormon, for the publishing house Living Scriptures. Also during this period, Card began writing original works of science fiction, submitting the short story "The Tinker" to Analog magazine. At the time, Analog's editor was the respected science fiction author Ben Bova, who rejected Card's story, though encouraged him to submit again. In 1977 Analog published Card's next story, "Ender's Game," which won him the 1977 John W. Campbell Award for "Best New Science Fiction Writer." That same year, Card married Kristine Allen, a church historian, with whom he had five children. Card published his first collection of short fiction, Capitol, in 1978, followed soon after by several young adult science fiction novels. Around the same time, Card earned his M.A. from the University of Utah and enrolled briefly in the Ph.D. program at Notre Dame. However, Card's international literary career began in earnest when he decided to expand his short story "Ender's Game" into a full-length novel in 1985. Ender's Game remains Card's most celebrated novel to date, though his sequel Speaker for the Dead (1986) also received both the Hugo and Nebula Awards. Since the publication of Ender's Game, Card has emerged as one of the most prolific contemporary authors of young adult science fiction and fantasy. Having over sixty books in print, he has also written stage plays, screenplays, video games, essays, instructional works of nonfiction, and comic books, taking over Marvel Comics' "Ultimate Iron Man" series in 2005. Additionally, Card has edited several anthologies of short science fiction, including Dragons of Light (1980) and Future on Fire (1990). A long-time resident of Greensboro, North Carolina, Card assumed a permanent position at Southern Virginia University as a creative writing professor in 2005 and continues to write a weekly column for the Greensboro Rhinoceros Times.

MAJOR WORKS

Card is perhaps best known for his series fiction, particularly the young adult novels that comprise his "Ender," "Tales of Alvin Maker," and "Homecoming" series. The "Ender" series, beginning with Ender's Game, relates the story of Andrew "Ender" Wiggin, a six-year-old genius who is sent to the militaristic "Battle School" where he is regarded as the possible savior of the human race in their ongoing war with an insectoid alien species known as the "Buggers." Later in the novel, leading what he believes to be only simulated space battles, Ender unknowingly commands a fleet of spaceships that surround and completely destroy the Buggers' home planet. In the sequel, Speaker for the Dead, Ender Wiggin has left the Battle School and now travels the universe, acting as an interpreter—or "speaker"—for the recently deceased and serving as a medium between the dead and their families and loved ones. Concurrently, Ender searches for a home planet for the eggs of the lone surviving Bugger "hive queen" in hopes that he can restore the species he exterminated as a child. The novel ends with Ender settling on the planet Lusitania, and in the series' third chapter, Xenocide (1991), Ender works feverishly with his adopted Lusitanian family to neutralize a deadly virus. In 1996 Card published Children of the Mind, the final volume of the "Ender" series. In this novel, Ender plays a relatively minor part in the hectic attempt to halt the destruction of the planet Lusitania by the Starways Congress. The series characters who take a more active role in this episode are Peter and Young Valentine, both copies of Ender's brother and sister and products of Ender's mind. Also instrumental in Ender's bid to save his adopted planet is Jane, an irascible Artificial Intelligence who has an uncanny knack for transcending the light-speed barrier. Together, the protagonists must roam the galaxy to find a new home for the citizens of Lusitania.

While Children of the Mind has been billed as the last work of the "Ender" series—aside from the short fiction collection First Meetings: In the Enderverse (2003)—Card created a new line of novels, known as the "Hegemon" series, that exists in a parallel time-frame to the "Ender" books. The first "Hegemon" novel, Ender's Shadow (1999), retells the events of Ender's Game from the perspective of Bean, one of Ender's classmates at the Battle School. While no great prodigy like Ender, Bean wins his admission to Battle School through his understanding of personal motivation—a skill that kept him alive on the streets of Rotterdam as a starving child. The "Hegemon" series continued with Shadow of the Hegemon (2001) and Shadow Puppets (2002). With the wars over and Ender off to colonize a new world, the children of the Battle School become increasingly important to Earth's warring nations, and Peter Wiggin—Ender's brother—rises to the position of "hegemon," the ruler of Earth's government. As Shadow of the Hegemon opens, Bean is second best of the Battle School children and aide to Wiggin; he is wooed for his powers by Wiggin's nemesis, Achilles, an unbalanced genius who wishes to conquer Earth. In Shadow Puppets, Bean is forced to confront his mortality—his body grows too quickly, dooming him to an early death—and with his young wife Petra pregnant, he seeks an antidote against a similar fate for his unborn children. As Bean's genetic disorder worsens in Shadow of the Giant (2005), the Battle School alumni race to finally establish peace on Earth, while Bean searches for embryos that were stolen from his wife and implanted in various women across the planet.

Card's "Tales of Alvin Maker," which consists of six books and several short stories, foregoes the outer space environments of the "Ender" novels and instead chronicles an alternate version of American history. Set in a pioneer America where the British Restoration never happened, where the Crown colonies exist alongside the states of Appalachia and New Sweden, and where folk magic is readily believed and practiced, the first novel in the series, Seventh Son (1987), follows the childhood of Alvin Miller, who has enormous magical potential because he is the seventh son of a seventh son. The novels recount Alvin's struggles with frontier prejudices—such as anti-witchcraft laws and slavery—and his attempts to create the near-mythic "Crystal City," a peaceful utopian paradise. Based loosely upon the real-life events of Mormon founder Joseph Smith, Jr., the "Alvin Maker" books continue Card's religious allegories about the nature of will and moral choice. An unusual amalgam of science fiction and fantasy, the stories explore issues of racism, nation-building, and the nature of good and evil as depicted in the battles between the "Makers" and the "Unmakers." In 1993 Card debuted his "Homecoming" series with The Memory of Earth, a novelistic mixture of philosophy, futuristic technology, and biblical lore. The book opens on the planet Harmony, where, for forty million years, humans have been controlled by Oversoul, a powerful, global computer programmed to prevent humanity from destroying itself through needless wars. With obvious parallels to the Book of Genesis, the "Homecoming" novels consider the origins of religion—the Oversoul is regarded as a goddess—as well the benefits of free will versus benevolent control. Like the "Ender" series, "Homecoming" continues Card's child-savior theme in the form of fourteen-year-old Nafai, who is charged with leading a company on a mission for the Oversoul, who guides them to complete her ultimate plan for Harmony. Card concluded the series with the novels Earthfall (1995) and Earthborn (1995), in which the humans return from Harmony to Earth when it appears that Harmony is about to self-destruct. The long-absent humans meet two new species who have evolved in their absence and must make peace with them.

Though firmly established as a science fiction author, Card has not limited himself to that genre, publishing throughout his career numerous works of nonfiction, drama, and, most notably, historical fiction. In A Woman of Destiny (1983), for example, he returned to the subject of the life of Joseph Smith, first touched upon in Seventh Son. A Woman of Destiny offers an account of the lives of Smith, the founder of Mormonism, and Dinah Kirkham, a fictional English woman who is converted to Mormonism and becomes Smith's polygamous wife. When Smith is murdered in 1844, Kirkham escapes with a group of fellow Mormons to Utah, where she becomes a staunch leader as well as one of the wives of Brigham Young, Smith's successor as president of the Mormon Church. Card's Treasure Box is billed as a mainstream novel, yet it contains elements of the supernatural. Quentin Fears loses his beloved older sister Lizzy as a young boy. However, he continues to confide in her following her death. A millionaire, following the sale of his computer firm, Quentin meets his true love, Madeleine, at a party and marries her. But there are gaps in her background, and when he finally meets his in-laws at a spooky mansion in upstate New York, events unravel following Madeleine's insistence that Quentin open a box supposedly containing her inheritance. Homebody is another mainstream supernatural fantasy, combining elements of spirituality, the occult, and psychological insight in a haunted house tale. Homebody tells the story of Don Lark who, grieving the death of his two-year-old daughter, sets out to renovate the Bellamy House, a grand old Victorian mansion in a terrible state of disrepair. His three elderly neighbors warn him about the house's dark powers, but he goes forward with his project and becomes attached to a squatter who lives there. Lark eventually discovers that the woman is the occult key to the house's violent history as a brothel and speakeasy. In Card's burgeoning "Women of Genesis" series, the author constructs historical narratives surrounding the lives of notable female biblical figures. Card inaugurated the series with Sarah, the story of a woman who studies to become a priestess of Asherah until she meets a man named Abram, a mystic and desert wanderer. Sarah realizes that she shares a destiny with Abram and waits eight years for his return, only to suffer through several more years of a childless marriage to test her belief in Abram's God.

CRITICAL RECEPTION

Although his young adult novels have been warmly received by both readers and reviewers, Card has attracted an unusual amount of critical debate, largely due to his outspoken political views and his fervent belief in the Mormon religion. For example, as an essayist, Card has stated his opposition to aspects of gay rights; under the doctrines of the Mormon faith, homosexuality is a mortal sin. This has raised concerns among some readers about his portrayals of homosexuality in his novels. While his supporters maintain that his character's opinions are not necessarily indicative of Card's own beliefs, noting that many of his homosexual characters are heroic figures, his detractors have identified certain troubling negative implications surrounding some of his gay characters. The figure of "Zdorab" from Card's "Homecoming" series is key to this argument—a gay male who eventually falls in love with a woman and abandons his homosexuality. Nevertheless, Card has been an active proponent for the open discussion of sociopolitical issues in his novels and has regularly spoken out against the undertones of racism still evident in American culture. To that end, critics have praised his ability to insert potentially controversial thematic material into his novels without becoming didactic. Suzanne Elizabeth Reid has stated that the "Ender" series is "controversial precisely because it is such a powerful stimulus for critical thinking about the nature of humanity and about our cultural responses to those instincts." Michael R. Collings has agreed with this assessment, suggesting that "Ender's Game and Speaker for the Dead succeed equally as straightforward SF adventure and as allegorical, analogical disquisitions on humanity, morality, salvation, and redemption." Card's more contemporary works have continued his exploration of sensitive issues under the gauze of his unique brand of revelatory, allegorical science fiction. In his review of Ender's Shadow, John Lawson has asserted that Card's narrative strength lies in his "complex three-dimensional characters, a strong story line, and vivid writing (which) all combine to make this an exceptional work. Card revisits the themes of man's inhumanity to man, child exploitation, and the ends justifying the means." One of the more unusual criticisms of Card's work—and one of the few that Card has responded to personally—is critic Elaine Radford's assertion that Ender's Game functions as a potential rationale for and endorsement of the actions of Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler. While Radford's opinion has been in the extreme minority, it nonetheless created a brief critical firestorm.

PRINCIPAL WORKS

Young Adult Science Fiction and Fantasy Works

Capitol (short stories) 1978
Hot Sleep: The Worthing Chronicle (young adult novel) 1978
A Planet Called Treason (young adult novel) 1978; published as Treason, 1988
Dragons of Light [editor] (young adult short stories) 1980
Songmaster (young adult novel) 1980
Unaccompanied Sonata and Other Stories (young adult short stories) 1980
Dragons of Darkness [editor] (young adult short stories) 1981
Hart's Hope (young adult novel) 1983
The Worthing Chronicle (young adult novel) 1983
Hatrack River: The Tales of Alvin Maker (young adult novella) 1987
Wyrms (young adult novel) 1987
The Folk of the Fringe (young adult short stories) 1989
Eye for Eye (young adult novella) 1990
Future on Fire [editor] (young adult short stories) 1990
Maps in a Mirror: The Short Fiction of Orson Scott Card (young adult short stories) 1990
The Worthing Saga (young adult novels and short stories) 1990
The Changed Man (young adult novel) 1992
Cruel Miracles (young adult novel) 1992
Flux (young adult novel) 1992
Monkey Sonatas (young adult novel) 1993
Lovelock [with Kathryn H. Kidd] (young adult novel) 1994
Future on Ice [editor] (young adult short stories) 1998
Magic Mirror [illustrations by Nathan Pinnock] (picture book) 1999
Masterpieces: The Best Science Fiction of the Century [editor] (young adult short stories) 2001
Empire of Dreams and Miracles: The Phobos Science Fiction Anthology [editor; with Keith Olexa] (young adult short stories) 2002
Hitting the Skids in Pixeltown: The Phobos Science Fiction Anthology [editor; with Keith Olexa] (young adult short stories) 2003
Robota: Reign of Machines [with Doug Chiang] (young adult novella) 2003
Magic Street (young adult novel) 2005
Ultimate Iron Man, Volume One [illustrations by Andy Kubert; originally published in Ultimate Iron Man, issues 1-5 in 2005] (comic book) 2006

"Ender" Series

Ender's Game (young adult novel) 1985
Speaker for the Dead (young adult novel) 1986
Xenocide (young adult novel) 1991
Children of the Mind (young adult novel) 1996
∗First Meetings: In the Enderverse (young adult short stories) 2003

"Hegemon" Series

Ender's Shadow (young adult novel) 1999
Shadow of the Hegemon (young adult novel) 2001
Shadow Puppets (young adult novel) 2002
Shadow of the Giant (young adult novel) 2005

"Tales of Alvin Maker" Series

Seventh Son (young adult novel) 1987
Red Prophet (young adult novel) 1988
Prentice Alvin (young adult novel) 1989
Alvin Journeyman (young adult novel) 1995
Heartfire (young adult novel) 1998
The Crystal City (young adult novel) 2003

"Homecoming" Series

The Memory of Earth (young adult novel) 1993
The Call of Earth (young adult novel) 1993
The Ships of Earth (young adult novel) 1993
Earthfall (young adult novel) 1995
Earthborn (young adult novel) 1995

Plays

Tell Me That You Love Me, Junie Moon [adaptor; from the novel by Marjorie Kellogg] (play) 1969
The Apostate (play) 1970
In Flight (play) 1970
Liberty Jail (play) 1975
Elders and Sisters [adaptor; from the novel by Gladys Farmer] (play) 1979

Other Works

"Listen, Mom and Dad": Young Adults Look Back on Their Upbringing (nonfiction) 1978
Saintspeak: The Mormon Dictionary [illustrations by Calvin Grondahl] (nonfiction) 1982
A Woman of Destiny (novel) 1983; republished as Saints, 1988
Character and Viewpoint (nonfiction) 1988
How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy (nonfiction) 1990
Lost Boys (novel) 1992
A Storyteller in Zion: Essays and Speeches (essays and speeches) 1993
Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus (novel) 1996
Treasure Box (novel) 1996
Stone Tables (novel) 1997
Homebody (novel) 1998
Enchantment (novel) 1999
†Sarah (novel) 2000
†Rebekah (novel) 2001
†Rachel and Leah (novel) 2004

∗Includes the short stories "Ender's Game," "The Polish Boy," and "Teacher's Pest."

†Part of the "Women of Genesis" series.

GENERAL COMMENTARY

Bernie Heidkamp (essay date November 1996)

SOURCE: Heidkamp, Bernie. "Responses to the Alien Mother in Post-Maternal Cultures: C. J. Cherryh and Orson Scott Card." Science-Fiction Studies 23, no. 3 (November 1996): 339-54.

[In the following essay, Heidkamp explores the relationship between child protagonists and proxy alien mother figures in two works of young adult science fiction—C. J. Cherryh's Serpent's Reach and Orson Scott Card's "Ender" series.]

Throughout the history of science fiction, alien cultures periodically have appeared in the form of hives. In C. J. Cherryh's Serpent's Reach and Orson Scott Card's Ender trilogy, both of which were conceived in the late 1970s, the authors center these hive cultures around the figure of a Queen or Mother. This Queen dominates the hive, controlling all its members as if they were mere extensions of her body. The adolescent human protagonists in each of these novels—both of whom have been separated from their families at an early age—develop affinities for this figure of the Queen. In Serpent's Reach, however, Cherryh leads a female protagonist into an affectionate relationship with the Queen, while, in Ender, Card creates a male protagonist who must destroy the Queen and her culture before he can recognize his love for her.

The hive Queen in these cases, I will suggest, is a literary manifestation of the pre-Oedipal Mother—at least, an infant's image of the pre-Oedipal Mother. The protagonists in these stories, moreover, react as infants to this Mother. Their reactions, however, are gendered. In order to understand this peculiar alien Mother and the distinct male and female reactions to it, I will employ feminist psychoanalytic theories of mothering which came into vogue in the United States in the mid to late 1970s Oust before Cherryh and Card conceived of their stories)—specifically, the theories which Nancy Chodorow originally outlined in Reproduction of Mothering and which Dorothy Dinnerstein outlined in The Mermaid and the Minotaur: Sexual Arrangements and Human Malaise. Both of these authors ultimately argue for an end to the traditional Western heterosexual familial arrangement in which the women are the sole caretakers for the children. Only at that point, they argue, will Western culture begin to accord "selfhood" to mothers. This feminist psychoanalytic framework helps to reveal the forces which motivate the unique relationships in these novels between the protagonists and their alien mothers and between the authors and the alien mothers which they create.

Both Chodorow's and Dinnerstein's theories—and the object-relations school of psychoanalysis on which those theories are based—have been widely discussed over the past twenty years. In the last few years, they have been experiencing a sort of renaissance. Recently, Chodorow herself has revised her theories in her collection of essays entitled Feminism and Psychoanalytic Theory, which I rely on significantly in this essay. Other prominent feminist critics such as Jacqueline Rose in her Why War?—Psychoanalysis, Politics, and the Return to Melanie Klein and Barbara Ann Schapiro in Literature and the Relational Sex also have emphasized the continuing value of Chodorow's original approach. Admittedly, Chodorow has been criticized for being Euro-centric and deterministic. Nevertheless, those criticisms (which Chodorow addresses extensively in her later essays) do not affect my analysis here. Although Chodorow might have been imagining a particularly Western nuclear family in her original analysis (and therefore her theory might not be universally applicable), both of the American authors I am analyzing—and most of science fiction in general, unfortunately—comes out of that tradition. Moreover, although Chodorow might be giving her concept of the mother too much weight in a child's development, the alien mothers in the texts I am looking at are, in fact, exaggerated and overdetermined figures themselves.

Besides placing my use of this particular type of feminist psychoanalysis in perspective, I also want to contextualize my discussion of hive cultures in science fiction.¹ As early as H. G. Wells's First Men in the Moon, science-fiction authors have conceived of intelligent communities—both human and non-human—which possess the same type of rigid organizational principles as ants or bees. Contemporary examples include the aliens in the original Aliens and the Borg on Star Trek. A 3-D video game entitled "Hive," in fact, just came out this past March. (The advertisements invite gameplayers to "Infiltrate, Annihilate, Exterminate"). This game brings to mind the genre of cyberpunk literature which—beginning with William Gibson's Neuromancer—has always had an interesting relationship with hive cultures.

I am particularly interested in the proliferation of hive cultures at particular points in the history of American science fiction—for example, in the 1950s. In Robert Heinlein's Starship Troopers and the classic film Them!, the negative views of hive cultures reflect fears associated with the dangers of the burgeoning atomic age and the perceived threat of communism. In both these cases, a male-dominated military force successfully defeats the alien hive culture.

Despite these various appearances of hive cultures throughout the history of sf, however, I would claim that Cherryh and Card's use of hive cultures are unique in many respects. In some ways, in fact, we can read their use of hive cultures as a reaction against and a critique of earlier uses. (Card's Ender's Game, for example, can be considered a revision of Heinlein's Starship Troopers.) The hive cultures in Card and Cherryh's fictions—while by no means utopian—have something positive to offer the human cultures which they encounter. They are intelligent and caring beings—motivated not simply by instinct. This intelligence and compassion, moreover, is centered on the figure of the Queen. Card and Cherryh—unlike most authors who portray hive cultures—spend a great deal of time detailing the physical and emotional complexity of the hive and the Queen. For other authors, the human protagonist's culture is fore grounded and the hive culture is a dark and evil contrast to it. The hive and the Queen are, at most, vaguely defined.

The uniqueness of Cherryh's and Card's portrayals of the hive cultures, I will claim, can be seen most clearly in the human protagonists' reactions to them, which, as I stated earlier, are gendered. The rest of this paper will, as a result, concern itself with a close feminist psychoanalysis of their texts.

Although sf criticism is now addressing issues of gender more frequently, it still rarely discusses the construction of gender roles—even though it often actively assesses the quality of an author's "world-building." The application of feminist psychoanalytic theories to science fiction is one way to spark that discussion.² The growing volume of criticism so far on the Ender trilogy deals almost exclusively with issues of militarism.³ And the majority of the criticism on Cherryh's novels ignores their gender politics.⁴ Both Serpent's Reach and the Ender trilogy, however, foreground gender issues and, specifically, the construction of gender through their emphasis on reproduction and mothering. Both of the cultures in these novels are militaristic, capitalistic, and, to coin a phrase, post-maternal. As harbingers of the future or even as only bleaker alternative realities, these cultures directly challenge several traditional Western ideals. In particular, the presence of such an archetypal alien Mother within these cultures challenges the Western image of family.

In the Reach, the quarantined collection of planets which forms the setting for Serpent's Reach, mothering as we know it has disappeared. The only truly human presence in the Reach are the Kontrin, and, from the beginning, the reader learns that their population "was originally augmented by importation of human ova" (5). And, now, a Kontrin can only be born if another Kontrin dies. The governing Council of the Kontrin "makes ultimate decisions about population levels, and how many of us can be born, and where" (49). The Kontrin have also produced sprawling populations of two types of genetically-engineered lower classes—the "beta" and the "azi." Every Kontrin child receives an azi nurse who takes care of all the mothering functions. The most traditional mothers in the Reach are, in fact, the Queens of the Majat, the Mothers of the hive cultures which also live on these planets. By page 17, the female protagonist, a Kontrin named Raen, is already escaping, running for her life, toward the safety of this supposedly alien Mother.

Ender's Game begins in the near-future United States. The government by this time allows families only two children. Ender, the male protagonist, is an exception. He is a Third, an extra child whom the government has commissioned because the genes of his mother and father are promising. The label of a Third is a stigma for the child and the child's family, because the public (most probably influenced by government propaganda) thinks that having more than two children—for whatever reason—is irresponsible (23). Since the government—the military, to be more exact—commissioned the birth of Ender, an army colonel explains, "He has been ours from then, if he qualified" (20). The military claims Ender at the beginning of the novel when he is six years old and sends him to an orbiting battle school. The army colonel tells Ender (truthfully, in fact): "You won't miss your mother and father, not much, not for long. And they won't miss you long, either" (22). The still male-dominated military becomes the parenting force for the rest of the novel. Ender's first drill sergeant explicitly states: "I'm your mom for the next few months" (42). Even though Ender does not meet the alien Mother, the feared Queen of the enemy hive culture, until late in the trilogy, she is, essentially, all he could ever have dreamed of.

In these post-maternal cultures, the traditional mother is, literally, the Other—the alien. Both Chodorow and Dinnerstein conclude that patriarchal societies and their traditional family structures create a mother who, to children and the society as a whole, is the Other. Dinnerstein claims that since the mother is the "unbounded, shadowy presence toward which all our needs were originally directed," she and other women become "the alien and unknowable" throughout a person's life (164). Dinnerstein, who admittedly has more of a rhetorical flare than Chodorow, continually refers to the image of a mother in a patriarchal society as "quasi-human" or "quasi-person" (93, 110). Chodorow simply states: "Given that women are primary caretakers, the mother, who is a woman, becomes and remains for children of both genders the other, or object" (Feminism 108). In both of their theories, the roots of the mother's Otherness develop in the pre-Oedipal period. Before I can fully apply these theories, then, I must first look at how, in these science fiction texts, the relationships between the protagonists and their alien Mothers mirror the early mother-infant relationship and how these relationships are gendered—how they differ for Ender and Raen, for a boy and a girl.

Even without the presence of the protagonists, the hive cultures resemble the pre-Oedipal scene. Chodorow explains: "A child of either gender is born originally with what is called a 'narcissistic relation to reality': cognitively and libidinally it experiences itself as merged and continuous with the world in general, and with its mother or caretaker in particular" (Feminism 102). The most noticeable characteristic of the hives in these novels is their lack of individuality, their "merged" consciousness. The narrator in Serpent's Reach states: "The hive mind was one" (21). The hive Queen herself in Xenocide, the third novel in the Ender trilogy, says: "I almost always re-fer to myself as we" (394). Later in that novel, when the hive Queen is trying to explain this concept to Ender, she elaborates: "We're the hive queen. And all the workers. We come and make one person out of all…. We're the center. Each of us" (466). As I will show later, this lack of individuality is—to the humans (although not necessarily the protagonists)—the most frightening aspect of the hive culture and the most difficult to understand.

Chodorow further states that, in this pre-Oedipal situation, the infant's "demands and expectations (not expressed as conscious wants but unconscious and preverbal) flow from this feeling of merging. Analysts call this aspect of the earliest period of life primary identification…. The infant reaches a 'symbiotic' stage of 'mother-child' dual unity" (Reproduction 61; see also Dinnerstein 30). The communication between members of the hive is also "preverbal" or, more accurately, nonverbal. For example, when a member of the hive needed to send an urgent message to the Queen in Serpent's Reach, the narrator explains: "Worker was already in contact with Mother, after that subliminal fashion which pervaded the hive" (20). And the military commanders in Ender's Game, observing the hive's constantly changing battle formations, state: "They aren't having a mental conversation between people with different thought processes. All their thoughts are present, together, at once" (294).

In both stories, the hive has also learned how to communicate with humans, but this communication is often more similar to the preverbal mother-infant communication than to adult human language. When Valentine, Ender's sister, finally meets the hive Queen for the first time (along with the readers) late in the trilogy, she

tried to conceive how the hive queen was managing to speak [American English] into her mind. Then she realized that the hive queen was almost certainly doing nothing of the kind…. The hive queen wasn't sending language to them, she was sending thought, and their brains were making sense of it in whatever language lay deepest. When Valentine heard the word echoes followed by reverberations, it wasn't the hive queen struggling for the right word, it was Valentine's own mind grasping for words to fit the meaning.

                                   (Xenocide, 186-87)

Those "echoes" and "reverberations" are part of what Dinnerstein calls the "feelings of infancy, feelings for which we then had no words, no language-dominated thoughts, and which cannot be rediscovered in their original fullness except in touch, in taste and smell, in facial expression and gesture … and by mutual accommodation of body position" (31). When Raen first meets the Queen in Serpent's Reach, the narrator states: "Mother sat in a heaving mass of Drones and attendants. The smell was magnetic, delirious. Worker came to Her in ecstasy, opened its palps and offered taste and scent, receiving in turn." Later in that same scene, the Queen wants to communicate directly with Raen: "The auditory palps swept forward. Mother inclined Her great head and sought touch. The chelae drew her close. Mother tasted her tears with a brush of the palps" (27). Raen, at this point, is adopting the everyday mode of hive communication, and she is repeating, along with the other participants in the hive cultures, early mother-infant interaction.

In this hive communication and in all other aspects of the hive, the Queen, the Mother of the hive, is the predominant figure. Women, according to Chodorow, "get gratification from caring for an infant … because they experience either oneness with their infant or because they experience it as an extension of themselves" (Reproduction 85). As the previous examples have hinted at, these two experiences describe the precise role of the Queen in these hive cultures. Ender in Ender's Game states that the hive is "a single person," and each member of the hive is "like a hand or a foot" of the Queen (294). In these roles, Chodorow continues, "A mother looms large and powerful" (Reproduction 85). Dinnerstein uses the word "over-whelming" (111). Jacques Lacan, from a different perspective in "The Mirror Stage," asserts that the mother "appears to [the child] above all in a contrasting size" (2). At the end of Serpent's Reach, the Queen of a particular Majat hive is forced to move. This movement of the Queen does not happen often and Cherryh presents the event as momentous: "It was Mother, who moved. Who heaved Herself along the tunnel prepared for Her vast bulk. The walls echoed with Her breathing. About Her were small majat who glittered with jewels; and before Her moved a dark heaving flood of bodies" (266). The size of the Queen dominates the scene. And Cherryh's constant use of the proper name of "Mother" and proper pronoun "Her" in this scene and throughout the novel further reminds the reader of the Queen's physical and emotional power. Earlier, when the reader and Raen first meet the Queen in Serpent's Reach, Cherryh comments: "She filled the Chamber. Raen hung in the grip of the Workers, awed by the sight of Her, whose presence dominated the hive." A few sentences later, Cherryh relates the first time that the Queen speaks:

Air stirred audibly, intaken.

"You are so small," Mother said. Raen flinched, for the timbre of it made the very walls quiver, and vibrated in Raen's bones.

"You are beautiful," Raen answered, and felt it. Tears started from her yes … awe, and pain at once.

It pleased Mother …

                                         (27)

In this scene, Raen is dumbfounded. Her reactions and the reactions of the other members of the hive to the Queen imitate both the physical and emotional nature of the mother-infant relationships. The queen is not simply large in stature; her ability to communicate instantaneously with other members of the hive and to command attention and reverence creates a large mental presence as well. The Queen's reactions to Raen and others, moreover, demonstrate that she is conscious of her motherly role. She understands that the hive is, in Chodorow's words, a mere "extension" of herself. A similar scene occurs in Card's Xenocide, when the reader, along with several characters, first meets the Queen:

There were workers all around, but now, in the light, in the presence of the queen, they all looked so small and fragile. Most of them were closer to one meter and a half in height, while the queen herself was surely three meters long. And height wasn't the half of it. Her wing-covers looked vast, heavy, almost metallic, with a rainbow of colors reflecting sunlight. Her abdomen was along and thick enough to contain the corpse of an entire human.

                                        (183)

Freud, in a famous passage in "Female Sexuality," actually speaks of "the surprising, yet regular, fear of being killed (? devoured) by the mother" (21: 227). This underlying fear (even Freud left it within paren-theses), exemplified in the last sentence of that last passage, permeates human society in both Card's and Cherryh's novels. Later, in my more extensive analysis of mother as alien, I will discuss this fear in more detail. At this point, I need only mention that the child protagonists in both of these novels experience both dreams and nightmares of the Queen (Cherryh 31; Card, Ender's Game 305, 312).

As Chodorow states, however, while "merging brings the threat of loss of self or of being devoured," it also brings "the benefit of omnipotence" (Reproduction 69). Raen asserts that "death is a minor thing" for the individual Majat in Serpent's Reach (126). And a military commander in Ender's Game states: "Murder's no big deal to them. Only queen-killing, really, is murder" (295). In both cases, the members of the hive feel that the Queen protects them or, at least, that they will live on in the Queen, even if their bodies die.

For all of the above reasons, the hives mirror the pre-Oedipal scene. Even more importantly, however, the child protagonists in these stories treat the Queen as Mother. Raen and eventually Ender accept and reenter the pre-Oedipal situation, even though their societies attempt to keep a safe distance from the alien hive communities. After escaping death, Raen wakes up inside a hive of the Majat. The first moments of this reawakening suggest that Raen is in a womb or is emerging from one. It is dark and Raen is injured and unable to move. The Majat "Workers" ensure that "an endless trickle of moisture and food was delivered from their mandibles to her mouth." The palps of several Workers, moreover, are constantly touching Raen, tending to her various wounds (24). Chodorow comments that the mother is a child's "'external ego,' serving to both mediate and provide its total environment…. Dependence, then, is central to infancy…. Most infantile psychological activity [is] a reaction to this feeling of helplessness" (Reproduction 58-59). Raen tries to move but almost faints from the effort. Even though she exists only on the edge of consciousness during these days, however, "She was aware of Mother" (24). Chodorow also comments: "Children preoccupied with attachment are concerned to keep near their mother and demand a large amount of body contact" (Reproduction 71). Once Raen is able to speak, she demands to see Mother. Once she sees Mother, she demands to taste and touch her, even though she does not know why she wants to, even though most humans—even Kontrin—would cringe at the thought of it. After her extended period within the hive, Raen refers to herself as part of the hive-family: "I'm blue-hive. That's what I have left" (126). Later, she calls the hive "home" (267).

Ender's entrance into hive culture, into an intimate relationship with the Queen, is not as immediate as Raen's. Nevertheless, when the Queen begins to speak with him at the end of Ender's Game and when he later meets her face-to-face, he also experi-ences an extraordinary connection with her. Several years after Ender destroys the hive culture (I will explain that process later), he discovers an egg which holds the fragile continuance of the hive culture. From that moment on, the Queen begins to communicate with Ender internally (Ender's Game 351-52). The Queen later claims that Ender had been "calling" and "searching" for her all along. By using a new type of physics, the Queen explains to Ender that—even before her first communication with him—the two of them had been literally connected across the light-years by invisible strands called "philotes" (Xenocide 463-68). Chodorow describes the process of a child's internalization of the mother in a similar way: "The 'thereness' of the primary parenting person grows into an internal sense of the presence of another who is caring and affirming. The self comes into being here first through feeling confidently alone in the presence of its mother, and then through this presence's becoming internalized" (Feminism 106). Ender, in fact, demands to be alone when he first senses his connection with the Queen (Ender's Game 350).

Ultimately, I cannot describe Ender's or Raen's connection with the hives and their need for a reconnection with a pre-Oedipal Mother without first addressing their problematic childhoods. In a broad summation of Freud, Chodorow states: "Adults unconsciously look to recreate, and are often unable to avoid recreating, aspects of their early relationships, especially to the extent that these relationships were unresolved, ambivalent, and repressed" (Reproduction 51). Dinnerstein corroborates this position: "The nature of these earliest ties colors all our later reactions to the environment…. It colors our stance toward nature, our response to the authority of social leaders and societal proscriptions…. And of course it colors our attitudes toward people: what attracts us to them, what we expect of them, what frightens or angers or delights us in them" (31). Both Raen and Ender's childhoods are, in Chodorow's words, "unresolved" and "ambivalent." Both of them, moreover, with their stern, unforgiving attitudes toward others, are prime candidates for repression. Their tumultuous childhoods, I argue, prepare each of them for their eventual communion with an alien Mother.

Raen in Serpent's Reach is fifteen years old when the rival sect of Kontrin kills her entire family at the beginning of the novel (7). But Kontrins, thanks to technology they have borrowed from the Majat hives, are practically immortal or, at least, immune from diseases. The eldest in their community is over 700 years old (44). The fifteen-year-old Raen, therefore, is still mocked as a child for her "precocious cleverness" (52). Since she is still essentially preadolescent, the assassinations of her mother and father possess an added significance. As I indicated earlier, the significance of the mother figure in this culture is undermined by the fact that azi nurses raise the children. But azi nurses, like all azi, die when they reach forty years-old. This fact, as a result, only reinforces Raen's "unresolved" and "ambivalent" attitudes toward mothering. Often the azi nurses die while the children are still young. Raen's "real" mother explains: "It's part of growing up…. We all love them when we're young. When one loses one's nurse, one begins to learn what we are, and what they are; and that's a valuable lesson, Raen. Learn to enjoy, and to say goodbye" (16). Raen's mother states explicitly in that explanation that the nurses, the mothers in this cultures, are "they," others, aliens. When Raen eventually meets her alien Mother, therefore, she is already longing for it and is already ready to accept it.

After Ender leaves his parents at the beginning of Ender's Game, he never sees them again. In fact, he never has a desire to see them (254). At one point, when two unnamed officials in the military are discussing Ender's training, one of them worries sarcastically about Ender's isolation: "You're right. That would be terrible, if he believed he had a friend." The other voice responds ominously: "He can have friends. It's parents he can't have" (40). Ender spends all of his preadolescent life in the battle school. Other than the battle training and his schoolwork, the only other edifying part of Ender's life is an animated computer game he plays on his portable desk. The computer continually creates new scenarios—puzzles and obstacles—through which the character that Ender controls must pass. In many ways, this world within a world is reminiscent of Alice in Wonderland. For example, Ender's character approaches a well with a sign saying "Drink, Traveler" (77). In any case, this game is explicitly regressive. Once Ender's character reaches a very advanced level, Ender discovers that "in the game he had become a child, though usually his figure in the games was adult" (76). Ender discovers at the very end of the trilogy that it was through this computer game that the hive Queen was able to first communicate with him, although he was not aware of it. As a result, the military, while separating Ender from his earthly family, unintentionally encourages and prepares him to meet his alien Mother.

Unlike Raen, however, Ender is distant—emotionally and physically—from this alien Mother for the duration of the first novel in the trilogy. Before Ender was born, the hive culture—which everyone on earth simply refers to as the "buggers"—had already "invaded" Earth twice. (I place "invaded" in quotation marks because the buggers would not have tried to kill the humans if they had thought that they were an intelligent species). The military grooms Ender to be the commander of a fleet of starships that are going to invade the bugger's homeworld. Ender, like everyone else on earth, treats the buggers as his ultimate enemy, even though he experiences a few moments of doubt. At the end of the first novel, Ender destroys the entire hive culture by daring to go straight for its heart—the Queen. He kills the Queen without ever seeing her face-to-face. The military leaders had told Ender that he was only running a simulation, a dry run of the invasion, but, in reality, the fate of the world was riding on his every command and maneuver. (Ender, in this sense, did not recognize the alien Mother. Lacan claims that the pre-Oedipal "mirror stage" is a méconnaissance, a misrecognition. The child assumes that the image of the Mother is part of her or him and not a separate entity (6). This méconnaissance helps to explain Ender's initial confusion and his eventual regret. And it points toward my later discussion of how the military and the government in Ender's Game create the alien Other). Ender realizes at this point that, although he is heralded as the savior of the world back on earth, he has really committed xenocide, the elimination of an entire species. Of course, Ender did not destroy the entire species. In his subsequent travels, he discovers an egg (which the last Queen has left for him to find) which contains the larvae needed to continue the hive culture. He writes a story in the voice of the Queen and anonymously signs it "Speaker for the Dead." The book is distributed around the world and everyone on earth mourns the loss of the hive culture. Ender eventually plants the egg at the end in the second book of the trilogy and, by the third book, it has flourished into a civilization. In the last book, he is finally able to establish a loving relationship with the Queen, the alien Mother.

In contrast, Raen in Serpent's Reach establishes her relationship with the alien Mother immediately. She joins forces with the Queen in order to exact revenge on the killers of her family. Each of these protagonists—in their initial encounters with the Queen of the hive—act out the "gender differentiation" which, according to Chodorow and Dinnerstein, occurs at the end of the pre-Oedipal scene. A boy realizes, at that point (with the help of the third figure, the father), that he is different from the mother. This difference, nevertheless, is difficult to reconcile with the innate feelings of connection during the pre-Oedipal period. Chodorow offers this explanation:

Because women mother, the sense of maleness in men differs from the sense of femaleness in women. Maleness is more conflictual and more problematic. Underlying, or built into, core male gender identity is an early, non-verbal, unconscious, almost somatic sense of primary oneness with the mother, an underlying sense of female ness that continually, usually unnoticeably, but sometimes insistently, challenges and undermines the sense of maleness…. A boy must learn his gender identity as being not-female, or not-mother.

                                 (Feminism 109)

Ender, a mere cog in the military machine at the beginning of the story, adopts the military's attitude toward the hive culture and its Queen. The military's attitude emphasizes the differences between the humans and hive cultures, instead of the potential connections between them. Ender, despite his allegiance to the military, eventually feels torn between this military mindset and his vague, but growing attachment to his alien Mother. Within Chodorow's psychoanalytic framework, Ender is caught between his need to assert his "maleness" and his innate feeling of connection with his mother. Looking back on these years, Ender comments: "We thought they wanted to kill us. We were wrong, but we had no way to know that…. Except that I knew better. I knew my enemy. That's how I beat her, the hive queen, I knew her so well that I loved her, or maybe I loved her so well that I knew her. I didn't want to fight her anymore. I wanted to quit. I wanted to go home. So I blew up her planet" (Speaker for the Dead 403). Dinnerstein comments that a boy's "main task is to find balance between two contrasting varieties of love, one that provides primitive emotional sustenance, and another that promises … to offer membership in the wider community where prowess is displayed…. His old tie to this mother starts at this point to be felt as an obstacle" (48). Dinnerstein (in her chapters on "The Dirty Goddess" and "The Ruling of the World") explicitly connects a boy's need for differentiation from the mother with men's later misogyny and abuse of the female body. Ender, by fulfilling his military assignment, unwittingly participates in his patriarchal society's systematic physical devaluing and ultimate disregard of women.

Although the military in Ender's Game misleads Ender and most civilians into dehumanizing the hive culture, the military hierarchy, as earlier examples have indicated, does possess a preliminary understanding of "merged" consciousness of the hive and the dominant maternal presence of the Queen. Despite this knowledge, however, the military leader still portrays the hive as "buggers," as a distant and irreconcilably different alien force. When the military invades the hive world (with Ender in command), they have not been provoked. In fact, by this time, the hive has realized that the humans are an intelligent species and do not want a war. Nevertheless, the military needs an alien.⁵ In contrast to this male need for difference, Chodorow contends, a girl "remains preoccupied for a long time with her mother alone. She experiences a continuation of the two-person re lationship of infancy" (Reproduction 96—see also Dinnerstein 67-68). As my earlier analysis indicated, Raen aligns herself with the "blue-hive" immediately after the death of her family. She becomes another member of that hive and treats the Queen as Mother. "Core gender identity for a girl," Chodorow claims, "is not problematic in the sense that it is for boys. It is built upon, and does not contradict, her primary sense of oneness and identification with her mother…. They do not define themselves as 'notmen' or 'not-male' but as 'I, who am female'" (Feminism 110). Raen, I have yet to mention, is also a queen. Before her family dies, she was in line to become the next leader of the Kontrin in the Reach. The Queen of the blue-hive feels a continuity with her because of this fact. The hive Mother keeps repeating: "Queen…. Queen…. Feed Kethiuy's young queen. Heal her. She is not threat to me. She is important to the hive" (21-2). Unlike Ender, Raen is able to fall back easily into a pre-Oedipal attachment to Mother.

This residual pre-Oedipal attachment, however, still causes problems for women and Raen, in particular. Chodorow states: "The pre-Oedipal attachment of daughter to mother continues to be concerned with early mother-infant relational issues. It sustains the mother-infant exclusivity and the intensity, ambivalence, and boundary confusion of the child still pre-occupied with issues of dependence and individuation" (Reproduction 97). Chodorow and Dinnerstein speak elsewhere of this "boundary confusion" in women; they explain it in terms of the inability of women to possess an independent identity in their relationships (Reproduction 110; Dinnerstein 68). When Raen is escaping from the rival Kontrin who are invading her home, she is not sure where to go at first. She realizes that no ordinary human place will offer her refuge from the wide arm of her enemies. As a result, she finds herself running up a hill toward the hive, even though a long-standing treaty prevents humans from entering into hive territory. Raen comments: "Here was the boundary, the point-past-which-not for any human" (18). When she eventually crosses that boundary, she loses control of herself: "She knew the meaning of the hedge, knew that here was the place she must stop, must. Her frightened body kept moving with its own logic, heedless of dangers; her mind observed from a distance, carried along helplessly, confused" (19). This boundary is the boundary between humans and the Other, the alien, and Raen does not know on which side of it she belongs. Once she experiences the Queen's presence, she is content, but throughout the rest of the novel, she continually moves at the liminal point between the human and alien cultures as an "Intermediary" (284). Her attachment to the Queen, the attachment of women to the pre-Oedipal figure of Mother, has its price.

This analysis of gender differentiation demonstrates the role of differentiation in the creation of the alien Mother. For both Chodorow and Dinnerstein, mothers become the Other because they are the primary caretakers in Western society, because they are the primary source of differentiation. Chodorow writes: "Differentiation, or separation-individuation, means coming to perceive a demarcation between the self and the object world, coming to perceive the object/self as distinct, or separate from, the object/other…. Differentiation happens in relation to the mother" (Feminism 102). As the earlier analysis has shown, Card and Cherryh take this theory literally by representing the alien in their novels as the quintessential pre-Oedipal Mother. The post-maternal cultures in these novels fear the mother's size, intelligence and influence. The authorities in these cultures (they are explicitly patriarchal in Ender's Game; they are, at the very least, hierarchical in Serpent's Reach) are either attempting to destroy or co-opt the Mother's power.

The protagonists, on the other hand, struggle to different degrees to understand the alien Mother, and both Raen and Ender eventually see her as an intelligent, independent, loving being. As Chodorow states, the protagonists, in this regard, are following a feminist praxis: "Since women, as mothers, are the primary caretakers of infants, if the child (or the psychoanalytic account) only takes the viewpoint of the infant as a (developing) self, then the mother will be perceived (or depicted) only as an object. But, from a feminist perspective, perceiving the particularity of the mother must involve according the mother her own selfhood" (Feminism 103).

In order to accord the mother "selfhood," however, the protagonists must overcome the prejudice, the xenophobia, of their respective cultures. Both cultures institutionalize their fear of the alien hive cultures. In this sense, they participate in the systematic denial of mother's (the Queen's) autonomy; they participate in a masculine need for differentiation from the mother. In her chapter "The Ruling of the World," Dinnerstein explains that children learn difference in terms of the mother, and, therefore, the mother, for society as a whole, represents difference. Maternal power, as a result, is a negative force. It is the overbearing force which inhibits individuality (163-65).

These cultures, therefore, portray the hive as a threat. In Serpent's Reach, Raen must continually help other people overcome a fear of the Majat. When Jim, her azi companion, first confronts a majat, he almost faints: "Jim left his corner and came, stopped at yet a little distance, as if suddenly paralyzed…. Jim had simply shut his eyes in panic…. Jim's face broke out in sweat" (87). And the betas (the slightly higher class created by the Kontrin) react similarly to the presence of a majat: "He looked toward the door with an inward shudder, thinking of the majat stalking the corridors at liberty" (93). While this fear is not always irrational (the Majat are supposedly dangerous in certain states), it, nevertheless, develops from a human's early education. Apparently, this education only stresses how to avoid the Majat and how not to provoke them. Only a select few Kontrin actually deal with the Majat personally and know them as more than simply dangerous aliens. Outside the Reach, in other parts of the galaxy, moreover, a Kontrin elder states: "They don't want the majat. They don't want hives in their space" (49). Raen simply claims euphemistically: "Not many folk care to be around them" (84).

In Ender's Game, children grow up learning to treat the hive as a threat. Ender's brother suggests: "Let's play buggers and astronauts" (10). This reference to a game like "cowboys and Indians" draws an explicit parallel to previous episodes in Western history when humans had attempted to commit genocide by portraying other humans as savage, as threats to a particular way of life. During his time at battle school, Ender still possesses his culture's propaganda, even though he has begun to appreciate the complexity and intelligence of the hive culture: "He felt ashamed and afraid of learning from them, since they were the most terrible enemy, ugly and murderous and loathsome" (206). Later in the trilogy, when the hive culture is reestablished, this cultural prejudice still persists. The hive sent some of its members to protect another species from a human mob: "They made no threatening gesture … but no gestures were needed. The sight of them was enough, stirring memories of ancient nightmares and horror stories" (Xenocide 356). In both Cherryh's and Card's novels, as I indicated earlier, the hives have entered into the culture's subconscious. Ender says once to the hive Queen: "Your children are the monsters of our nightmares now. If I awoke you, we would only kill you again" (Ender's Game 353).

The cultures in these novels also portray the "merged" consciousness of the hives as a frightful and menacing quality—a quality which contradicts a coherent sense of self. Chodorow explains further: "An essential early task of infantile development, it involves the demarcation of ego boundaries (a sense of personal psychological division from the rest of the world) and of a body ego (a sense of the permanence of one's physical separateness and the predictable boundaries of one's own body, of a distinction between inside and outside)" (Feminism 102, emphasis mine). The hive structure breaks down these boundaries between "inside and outside." They are one person and many simultaneously. Therefore, hive cultures have difficulty assimilating into human worlds, where the emphasis on "separation-individuation" pervades. Only the protagonists, through their pre-Oedipal fantasies, are able to overcome (regress from?) their need for individuality. The Queen enters inside Ender's brain, but others cannot handle any sense of intimacy with the hive. And, although Raen identifies herself as part of the hive, the other humans do not care to know the basics of hive culture. At one point, Raen is listening to the Warrior-song of the hives: "'Hear it?' Raen asked, looking at Jim. "The hives are full of such sound. Humans rarely hear it'" (95).

Raen and Ender's ability to fight their culture's prejudice and communicate with the hives represents the hope within Cherryh and Card's stories and also within Chodorow and Dinnerstein's psychoanalytic framework. Chodorow writes:

No one has a separateness consisting only of "me"-"not-me" distinctions. Part of myself is always that which I have taken in—we are all to some degree incorporations and extensions of others…. Differentiation is not distinctness and separateness, but a particular way of being con-nected to others. This connection to others, based on early incorporations, in turn enables us to feel that empathy and confidence that are basic to the recognition of the other as a self."

                            (Feminism 107)

By recognizing the Queen or Mother as part of themselves, Raen and Ender recognize her as a self, she is no longer Other. Ender, in particular, must first struggle with his culture's identification of the Queen and the "buggers" as "not-me," as alien. He must first realize the destructive force of that dichotomy before he finally establishes an enduring connection with his alien Mother.

Thus far, this analysis of Raen and Ender and their alien Mothers has appeared ahistorical. I have been working, in fact, in the tradition of both sf criticism and psychoanalytic criticism—both of which have often ignored the historical contexts of their subjects. These forms of criticism tend to concentrate on individual stories and their internal implications. While science fiction criticism certainly deals with the social and political differences between the novel and author's culture, it rarely attempts to understand how the author's culture has helped produce this alternative vision of reality. It frequently assesses the quality of an author's "world-building," but it rarely addresses the historical motivations behind the author's construction. In the same manner, psychoanalytic criticism must do more than provide a formula in which a critic can plug in certain elements from a text. As Chodorow states, "Psychoanalysis was developed not only to explain our early psychic formation but to show us how to overcome its limitations" (216). In the spirit of a more relevant criticism, then, I wish to conclude my analysis by briefly suggesting how the cultural climate of the United States in the late 1970s helped shape both Card and Cherryh's choice of an alien Mother and how both novels demonstrate the need to change the traditional Western familial arrangement.

Although Card published the Ender trilogy in the late 1980s, he published the initial version of the story as a novella in 1977 (Ross 82). That earlier date places it in closer proximity to both Chodorow and Dinnerstein's theories and the publication of Serpent's Reach. As both Chodorow and Dinnerstein assert in their introductions, the feminist movement at this time had begun to wonder "what it meant that women parented women" (Reproduction vii). Both theorists mention that they had been working through their theories with other women throughout the early seventies (Reproduction vii; Dinnerstein xii). Card and Cherryh, whether consciously or not, expressed this growing dissatisfaction with familial arrangements in their stories. The alien hive Mother is the perfect, exaggerated representation of the effects of an exclusive child-care arrangement through which mothers (and women in general) simultaneously become the object of their culture's scorn and the symbol of its salvation. As I explained earlier, Chodorow and Dinnerstein both accuse patriarchal society of denying mothers "selfhood," of categorizing them as the "object/other." "Men," Chodorow writes, "have the means to institutionalize their unconscious defense against repressed yet strong experienced developmental conflicts. [Their] interpretation of difference is imposed on earlier developmental processes" (Feminism 111). The alien hive Mother, then, represents the return of the repressed.

Card's 1977 novella was, in fact, a modified version of his very first science-fiction story, which he wrote when he was sixteen years old. In that story, he concentrated solely on "war games" and did not yet conceive of the redemptive figure of Ender Wiggin. As Card's vision grew, just as Ender's grows beyond the "war games" of the military, he began to critique his own inspiration. His novel, as other science fiction critics have suggested, is a "critique of the late twentieth-century military paradigm" (Blackmore 124). That paradigm, however, is founded on difference, difference between men and women and children and their mothers. The Ender trilogy, therefore, is also a critique of the Western familial ideal.

Cherryh's science fiction, which she began writing in the late 1970s, addresses gender politics more directly. Her commitment to female protagonists and the probing of (often feminine) alien psychology in such earlier works as The Books of Morgaine, Hunter of Worlds, and The Faded Sun trilogy enabled her to offer a more consistent critique of this Western ideal in Serpent's Reach. Unlike Card, Cherryh can foreground the struggle of women and mothers without first passing through the male psyche. From the beginning of Serpent's Reach, through the daring actions of Raen, she is able present a more complete view of the alien Mother. Since issues of reproduction and mothering are at the center of her culture's consciousness, the Majat and their Queen are the center of her story.

Cherryh and eventually Card (Raen and eventually Ender) confront their own culture's traditional view of the mother as "alien and unknowable." By presenting protagonists which interact with this mother as an individual, both authors demonstrate the method by which their culture must accord "selfhood" to the mother.

Notes

1. This discussion of hive cultures is only a brief, suggestive overview, but I feel it begins to demonstrate the rather dramatic differences between traditional representations of hives and Card and Cherryh's representations. I am not contending that Card and Cherryh's representations are the only positive ones in the history of science fiction, but their focus on the alien mother and the human cultures' xenophobia toward it appears to be unique revision of the tradition.

For a more complete (although by no means definitive) list of hive cultures in science fiction, see Brian Stableford's entry on "Hive-Minds" in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction.

2. Although the female alien in general has been somewhat theorized (most notably in Jenny Wolmark's Aliens and Others, Marleen Barr's Alien to Femininity, and Robin Roberts' The New Species), the more specific case of the alien mother has not. An exception is Jane Donawerth's recent essay (which includes a discussion of Serpent's Reach). Theorizing on the alien mother, as my essay demonstrates, leads to an analysis of the construction of gender.

3. Tim Blackmore's essay is the most complete analysis of militarism in the Ender trilogy.

4. Most of the criticism so far on Cherryh's work has concentrated on her revisions of Arthurian legend in The Books of Morgaine. Other than the essay by Donawerth, the only direct analyses of gender roles in Cherryh's fiction are two brief articles by Mary T. Brizzi and Lynn F. Williams.

5. I have not mentioned that the military station from which Ender leads the invasion against the buggers is on a planet which the humans call, ironically, Eros, which, in psychoanalytic terminology, is the libidinal force that Freud originally contrasted with the death-instinct. Freud does mention, however, at one point, how Eros can collude with the death-instinct: "[A] portion of the [death-]Instinct is diverted towards the external world and comes to light as an instinct of aggressiveness and destructiveness. In this way the instinct itself could be pressed into the service of Eros, in that the organism was destroying some other thing, whether animate or inanimate, instead of destroying its own self' (21:119; see also 18:59). The military in Ender's Game continually uses the rationale of self-preservation as the defense against the anticipated accusations of xenocide. In this sense, they are Eros, working in tandem with the death-instinct, to destroy the "other thing."

Works Cited

Barr, Marleen S. Alien to Femininity: Speculative Fiction and Feminist Theory. NY: Greenwood Press, 1987.

Blackmore, Tim. "Ender's Beginning: Battling the Military in Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game." Extrapolation 32:124-42, Summer 1991.

Brizzi, Mary T. "C. J. Cherryh and Tomorrow's New Sex Roles." The Feminine Eye: Science Fiction and the Women Who Write It. Ed. Tom Staicar. NY: Frederick Ungar Publishing, 1982.

Card, Orson Scott. Ender's Game. NY: Tor, 1985.

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Cherryh, C. J. Serpent's Reach. NY: DAW Books, 1980.

Chodorow, Nancy. The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender. Berkeley: U California P, 1978.

――――――. Feminism and Psychoanalytic Theory. New Haven: Yale UP, 1989.

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Donawerth, Jane. "Mothers are Animals." Graven Images: A Journal of Law, Culture and the Sacred 2:237-47, Fall 1995.

Freud, Sigmund. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Ed. and tr. James Strachey. London: Hogarth Press, 1961. 24 vols.

Gibson, William. Neuromancer. NY: Ace Books, 1984.

Heinlein, Robert A. Starship Troopers. NY: Berkley, 1959.

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Lacan, Jacques. Écrits: A Selection. NY: W. W. Norton, 1977.

Rose, Jacqueline. Why War?: Psychoanalysis, Politics, and the Return to Melanie Klein. Cambridge: Blackwell, 1993.

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Schapiro, Barbara Ann. Literature and the Relational Self. NY: New York UP, 1994.

Stableford, Brian. "Hive-Mind." The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction. Ed. John Clute and Peter Nicholls. NY: St. Martin's, 1995.

Them! Dir. Gordon Douglass. Warner Brothers, 1954.

Wells, H. G. The First Men in the Moon. 1901. NY: Airmont, 1965.

Williams, Lynn F. "Women and Power in C. J. Cherryh's Novels." Extrapolation 27:85-90, Summer 1986.

Wiloch, Thomas. "Carolyn Janice Cherry." Contemporary Authors: New Revision Series. Ed. Linda Metzer. Detroit: Gale Publishing, 1985. 10:316-19.

Wolmark, Jenny. Aliens and Others: Science Fiction, Feminism and Postmodernism. Iowa City: U Iowa P, 1994.

Suzanne Elizabeth Reid (essay date 1998)

SOURCE: Reid, Suzanne Elizabeth. "A New Master: Orson Scott Card." In Presenting Young Adult Science Fiction, pp. 36-52. New York, N.Y.: Twayne Publishers, 1998.

[In the following essay, Reid offers a critical reading of the thematic and allegorical imagery found throughout Card's literary canon, particularly in his various young adult science fiction novels such as the Worthing Saga, the "Ender" series, the "Alvin Maker" series, and the "Homecoming" series.]

A prolific writer of science fiction as well as drama, essays, and poetry, Orson Scott Card uses his energetic mind to plumb beneath the conventional notions of human behavior. Popular with the most inquisitive young readers of sf, his writings touch many, thrill some, and horrify a few. His sf novels tend to evoke passionate responses, including the highest praise of all: "That book changed my life."

Card's story lines are epic, and his probing character development draws the reader to speculate deeply about human motivations, definitions of good and evil, and the place of the individual in society; yet his work is also highly entertaining and readable. His various sf series include the Worthing saga (Tor, 1989; from stories of 1979), Ender (Tor, beginning 1985), Alvin Maker (Tor, beginning 1987), and Homecoming (Tor, beginning 1992). They build on Card's earlier writings, thus revealing a maturing philosophy. Recurrent themes are the influence of religious discipline, the relation of individuals to their communities, and the specialness of some individuals.

Personal Background

Born on 24 August 1951 in Richland, Washington, Orson Scott Card was the third child of Willard Richards Card, a schoolteacher, and Peggy Jane (Parks) Card, a secretary. They reared Orson as a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, commonly known as Mormonism. After graduating in 1975 from Brigham Young University, Card did graduate work at the University of Utah before beginning his career as a teacher and a writer.

Card's religious training is an important aspect of his writing. He published several plays and various other writings about Mormon culture, including The Folk on the Fringe (1989), a sf collection of linked short stories. Card's first story, "Ender's Game," published in Astounding Science-Fiction in 1977, was nominated for a Hugo Award and later served as a nucleus for the interplanetary Ender series. As with Frank Herbert, author of the Dune series, much of Card's work is allegorical, cloaking his version of Mormon philosophy in sf metaphors. Card and his family continue to work actively as members of the Mormon church; during the 1970s he served for two years as a missionary in Brazil. Card's Mormon background is evident in the mythic complexity of his plots, the messianic nature of his protagonists, and the moral seriousness of his themes. His attractiveness to young readers may indicate their need for resources deeper than mere information or entertainment.

The Worthing Saga

The saga of Jason Worthing, which builds on the short story "Hot Sleep" (Baronet, 1979) and the stories in Capitol (Ace Books, 1979), eventually extends many centuries before and after the protagonist's extremely long life. An extended time span is one of several devices Card uses to give his stories a sense of religious epic. Like the Judeo-Christian Bible, his works stretch over many generations and contain episodes that mark significant events and also hint at other important happenings that occur in between. The first book of the saga, The Worthing Chronicles, introduces the telepathic Jason Worthing as he is shipwrecked on a planet. Using the knowledge his special mental ability gives him, he saves the lives of his ship's colonists, whose minds have been numbed to enable them to endure interstellar travel. Unable to restore the memories of his normal peers, Jason sets them up as a primitive society and uses the spaceship's powers to put himself into a life-preserving sleep, waking intermittently over the centuries to guide his fellow colonists as their civilization advances.

An important feature of Card's storytelling is the shifting point of view. The narrative is first told by Jason as he establishes his colony—a typical sf story of superpowers, intergalactic intrigue, and spaceships. Then the narrative shifts to the viewpoint of a newly born colonist, who despite being an adult has no memories of his former life. He puzzles through the basics of living, assuming that Jason is either his father or a god. Already, there is an important rift between the characters involved. The perspective widens as the society becomes bigger, and gradually, individual characters lose importance in the story. Characters who starred as protagonists become mythical to their descendants; Jason, now in hibernation for several centuries, is accepted as a divinity by most of the colonists. As the planet's history is related, what seemed visceral and immediate in the original version becomes conceptualized into myth. The book no longer focuses on individuals but on a social entity. Hidden from the others, Jason takes a wife and forms a family, which prospers until their inbreeding makes it apparent that they must merge into the larger society. Jason's genetic heritage gives the family remarkable powers, and they eventually dominate the planet.

Centuries later Jason's ship is found on the bottom of the sea, and he is awakened from hibernation and asked to judge the world he has helped create. The people of Worthing, having colonized all the planets, now control the universe. Benevolent despots, they heal all wounds and erase the memory of pain. When anyone dies of natural causes, their family's sorrow is softened until it barely exists. It is a universe without suffering.

Jason, still revered as a common ancestor, is dismayed by this turn of events. He argues that people whose lives are completely controlled, even if the intent is to banish suffering, are not really living. Because Jason is defined as God, the people of Worthing accept his judgment as valid and correct. But because they now perceive their lives as without meaning or purpose, they commit suicide on a planetwide scale.

The only people who remain from the original group are Jason and a woman called Justice, the lone dissenter to the decision to commit suicide rather than face pain. These two are left to explain to people of other worlds just why they are experiencing this new sensation called pain. A farmboy still learning to cope with this newfound sensation listens to their story and questions their decision. As a result, Justice decides to continue healing people's wounds but to leave their memories and fears intact.

The Worthing saga raises important questions about the assumption that cessation of pain is a worthy goal. Can one appreciate the joys of life without pain? Is life without pain possible … or desirable? These questions are also examined by Lois Lowry in The Giver.

The Ender Series

The Ender series begins with Card's most popular works, Ender's Game (1985) and Speaker for the Dead (1986), both winners of the Hugo and Nebula awards, followed by Xenocide (1991) and Children of the Mind (1996). Ender's Game focuses on the educational development of its protagonist, Ender Wiggin, before his life spreads out to encompass a community of characters. Ender Wiggin is a third child during a time when the government has imposed strict population controls, allowing a family only two children under normal circumstances. The government has sanctioned Ender's birth, however, because various factors lead it to believe that he could become the great military leader needed to defeat the alien Buggers, who had been conquered decades earlier only by chance and continue to pose a threat. Ender's education takes place in an orbiting station called the Battle School. Although Ender's two siblings share his intelligence, both have been denied admission. The eldest child, Peter, was deemed far too harsh to succeed as a leader, and the second child, Valentine, too compassionate, but in Ender the adult supervisors find a perfect combination of both siblings. A main motif of this series is Ender's constant struggle to live his life according to an idealized image of his sister, Valentine, whom he contrasts to the monster he sees in his older brother.

In a telling early scene, Ender tries to prevent further abuse from a school bully by defeating him so completely that the bully is afraid to attack again. End-er's cold calculation is tempered by a fierce compassion; after winning the battle, he cries. Ender's ability to manipulate people coupled with a lack of ambition for power destines him to become a great leader. As the story progresses, the extent to which Ender's life is being engineered by behind-the-scenes adult manipulators becomes chillingly clear. Ender's confrontation with the bully is just one of the ways he is being tested, isolated from other children, and challenged, often at great physical risk to himself. He responds with amazing resourcefulness, constantly achieving the impossible. Soon he becomes the leader of a squad of 40 children, who are pitted against each other in strategic battle games in zero gravity. Although the odds for winning are stacked against Ender by the mysterious supervisors, he perseveres, inventing new strategies and finding unimaginable strengths in himself.

But the stress is terrible. To relieve his mind, Ender becomes addicted to a game of artificial intelligence that is rigged to test the player's courage and drive; the last child who shared Ender's compulsion for the game eventually committed suicide. When Ender finally defeats the game with an utterly vicious move, it shocks him and the supervisors to the core. Yet still the adults drive the young man. The game adapts, and Ender finds himself in a whole new virtual world. In his real world he loses all of his friends when he is made their commander. He is physically attacked by a jealous rival in a battle reminiscent of his fight with his schoolyard nemesis, and when he uses violence to defend himself, he is again haunted by the fear of becoming his brother, Peter. Now, instead of engaging in the childhood games of his early education, he will be pitted against the Buggers, the enemy of the planet.

In what he thinks is a virtual reality game, a fantasy engineered by his mentor to simulate future battles against the Buggers, Ender finally overcomes the enemy, despite the bizarre nightmares of guilt that disturb his sleep during this time. In a final "virtual" battle, Ender sends all his ships on a suicide run that destroys the enemy planet. Tired of playing the violent war games that cause him so much guilt, he uses this strategy to retaliate against his adult teachers for the immense pressure they have imposed on him as part of his military training. He thinks he has destroyed their game.

When he discovers the authorities celebrating, however, he realizes he has not been playing a game. He really has sent the fleet to its destruction, dooming an entire intelligent species to extinction. The troubling dreams have actually been telepathic communications from the Buggers, who are trying to negotiate with Ender to prevent further attacks and formulate peace. The Buggers' first "invasion" had been a cultural misunderstanding. Organized as a "hive mind," the species is a collective consciousness that views individual lives and deaths as unimportant events, on a level with toenail clippings. Their first attack, which humans viewed as the merciless destruction of life, was just an indication of the Buggers' natural curiosity about another species, a mere lab experiment involving some dissection. As Ender's ship approached the Buggers and they realized their danger, they had tried to extend their consciousness to Ender through nightmares. Ender's "virtual reality game" thus had real consequences. At the end of the book, Ender finds an unhatched Bugger Queen, the repository of the Buggers' cultural memory. Saving her will rescue their race from extinction, but it will preserve a terrible threat to the human race. Ender must decide whether to endanger the humans who have been training him all his life, or to retain his self-respect.

Ender's rigorous education depends not on a single event marking his "coming of age" but on a series of smaller exercises that mercilessly test his ability to thrive by adapting to new knowledge and new experiences. Those who fail to adapt, fail. Ender succeeds because he is more imaginative, more persistent, and fiercer than the others. He learns to examine his own strengths and weaknesses as well as those of his enemies and is ruthlessly honest in his assessment of both. To win the confrontations that Ender thinks are training games, he learns to strike early and viciously, but he also learns the heartbreaking consequences. He is an empathetic killer. He knows his enemies well enough to realize that none are completely evil, merely misunderstood. Ender's exquisite sensitivity to the pains of others is his curse. Never does he forget the intense embarrassment and pain caused by his older brother's cruelty and his friends' teasing. The pathos of this book is Ender's anguish in realizing his greatest fear: in the process of inflicting such agony on his victim, he has become just like his brother, Peter. Ender mourns both the loss of his own innocence and the lost lives of those he kills. The clarity of his vision about the evil he has done is more painful than any other hurt he has ever suffered.

To atone, Ender becomes Speaker for the Dead, traveling from planet to planet with his sister, Valentine, writing and speaking about the people who have died, particularly the alien Buggers, and explaining their lives. At first his brutal honesty shocks his audiences, but his stories are so compelling that a sort of humanist religion evolves, with Ender as an anonymous participant. As a result of Ender's confessional writing, the public, unaware of Ender's identity as Speaker for the Dead, condemn him for his destruction of the Bugger civilization and laud Peter, whom Ender has forgiven and whose actions he has justified in his writing.

The second volume, Speaker for the Dead (1986), extends the story of Ender Wiggin, who has traveled the planets with his sister for several thousand years spreading a gospel of tolerance toward alien races and forgiveness through understanding. Through the effects of faster-than-light travel, neither sibling has aged beyond 30. Now humanity encounters another intelligent alien species. Largely because of Ender's teachings as the Speaker for the Dead, most of humanity decides they have been given a second chance, a way to repent for the xenocide Ender has committed. Because of the aliens' porcine appearance and bestial behavior, the humans nickname them "Piggies," a term of derision also used in other literary works by humans who underestimate the intelligence and innate worth of others. Despite the generous intentions of human nature, the cultures clash, and several deaths occur. Once again Ender is called upon to intervene. Soon he finds himself defending the aliens from the humans' fleet of ships. This crisis extends for the three books that conclude Card's original plan for the Ender series.

In this volume Card explores the complex realization that understanding a foreign culture will bring about tolerance and reduce fear and violence. Using the pseudonym Demosthenes, Ender's sister, Valentine, establishes a hierarchy of types of alien groups to use as an ethical basis for human reactions toward them. Her distinctions are based not so much on biological differences as on how well the comprehension between two beings can evolve. A stranger from another land, an utlanning in Valentine's typology, can eventually be understood, though cultural conflicts may at times cause misunderstandings leading to war. War is inevitable, however, with the completely alien ramen, whose behavior and values are totally incomprehensible to humans. The premise of these books is that humans must determine which species are merely foreign and which are altogether alien.

This task is complicated by the number of species involved. Ender has been carrying with him the Bugger Queen embryo, with which he regularly communicates telepathically and for whom he is seeking a new home. He knows that humanity, regardless of its goodwill, is not ready to accept the return of the insect-like Buggers. Another alien species, with only one member, is an artificial intelligence that lives in the communications network between planets and calls herself Jane. Communicating with Ender through a small jewel in his ear, Jane joins in trying to stop the starship fleet that threatens the Piggies, though her efforts endanger her own existence. When humans do learn about Jane, they plan to shut down all computers in order to destroy her. Danger to the universe mounts. While these species plan attacks and defenses of each other, another threat arises, a disease that may destroy the whole colony. Then a biologist discovers that the bacteria themselves may be intelligent; they may have caused the Piggies to evolve into a species with enough intelligence to speak. The mixture of ethical and pragmatic decisions that confront everyone becomes ludicrously complex, though not unlike real life. Some critics have complained that the end of the third book, Xenocide (1991), wraps up the story too easily to be credible. Readers demanded that Card continue the story.

In the latest book of the Ender saga, Children of the Mind (1996), Peter and Valentine, who reappear as children through Ender's accidental cloning of his brother's and sister's remains, help save the planet Lusitania and its three racial groups from destruction by the Starways Congress. Jane, a sentient artificial intelligence with her own charm, transcends the light-speed barrier to assist. This novel delves deeply into the relationships between people, aliens, and the warring sides of Ender himself. Is this the end? A number of profound questions about the characters and their motivations remain to justify yet another sequel for Card's admiring readers. However, at least one fan of Card protests: "No way—Ender dies. It's very powerful. Card wouldn't dare!"

Ender's Game and its immediate sequel, Speaker for the Dead, were highly acclaimed by some critics for the impact of their language and for their antiracist message: "[Ender's Game ] is direct, real, bedded in military ruthlessness and military values. It's the best sf 'military academy' novel I've ever read."¹ "Ender's Game and Speaker for the Dead succeed equally as straightforward SF adventure and as allegorical, analogical disquisitions on humanity, morality, salvation, and redemption …; both novels are compelling simply as psychological studies of strong characters. Both are highly recommended for readers interested in the cultural complexities and ambiguity the best science fiction novels explore."²

Elaine Radford's review, however, raised a tempest of critical controversy by comparing Ender to Adolph Hitler:

Let me tell you about a book I just read. It's the story of a young boy who was dreadfully abused by the grown-ups who wanted to mold him into an exemplary citizen. Forced to suppress his own emotions in order to avoid being paralyzed by trauma, he directed his energy into duty rather than sex or love. In time, he came to believe that his primary duty was to wipe out a species of gifted but incomprehensible aliens who had devastated his kind in a previous war. He found the idea of exterminating an entire race distasteful, of course. But since he believed it was required to save the people he defined as human, he put his entire weight of his formidable energy behind the effort to wipe out the aliens.

You've read it, you say? It's Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card, right?

Wrong. The aliens I'm talking about were the European Jews, blamed by many Germans for gearing up World War I for their own profit. The book is Robert G. L. Waite's The Psychopathic God: Adolf Hitler.³

After noting the parallel incidents in the lives of Hitler and Ender, Radford accuses Card of exonerating Hitler by creating a sympathetic character who commits genocide: "Look at the fact that the Fuhrer was sincere and re-defined his life as dedicated rather than evil. Forgive Hitler? Card, from your privileged position as a white male American Christian, you have no right to ask us that" (Radford, 49).

In an impassioned and thoughtful response, Card asserts that a careful reading of his work refutes Radford's accusations, and most of Card's readers agree.4 Ender, unlike Hitler, does not initiate the war games, and his enforced involvement is self-aware and anguished, qualities one does not sense in Hitler. As a talented wordsmith, however, Card wields great power with his exquisite use of language, and his depiction of the problem of power and violence has disturbed other critics and readers.

The sequels to the first two books of the Ender series received less-enthusiastic acclaim, not because they weren't good fiction but because they weren't as excellent: "At best, Children of the Mind would be a slightly better than average novel by an average science fiction writer. But Card is not just an average science fiction writer; he is very good, as his earlier Hugo and Nebula Award winning Ender's Game and Speaker for the Dead show. As a sequel to these brilliant novels, Children of the Mind is mediocre."⁵ The Ender series is controversial precisely because it is such a powerful stimulus for critical thinking about the nature of humanity and about our cultural responses to those instincts.

The Alvin Maker Series

Another series focuses on tales about the powerful Alvin Maker and includes Seventh Son (1987); Red Prophet (1988); Prentice Alvin (1989); Alvin Journeyman (1995), winner of the Locus Award for best fantasy novel; and The Crystal City (in progress). It is set in a colonial North America as it might have existed had Native American Indians continued their traditions in a country where the American Revolution never happened. (Followers of this series can join an online community on the Internet: http://www.hatrack.com.)

This America is a world where folk magic really works. The story focuses on Alvin, born the seventh son of a seventh son, a mystically significant situation confirmed by Alvin's magical powers, which earn him the surname Maker.

Alvin learns the dangers of his powers at a young age. After his sisters play a prank on him by putting needles in his pajamas, Alvin seeks revenge by "convincing" cockroaches to terrorize the girls. However, in a mystical experience he is visited by Lolla-Wissiky, the Indian brother of Tecumseh, who demonstrates how Alvin is causing pain to the innocent cockroaches, a species as sentient as humans. Horrified, Alvin swears to use his powers only for the good of others. To assuage his guilt and to express his gratitude, he begins his good works by healing Lolla-Wissiky of alcoholism and enabling the Indian to become Red Prophet, the protagonist of the second book in the series. Alvin's powers attract a mentor named Taleswapper, Card's representation of the poet William Blake, who convinces Alvin to use his powers to "re-Make" himself, changing his original oath and swearing to use his powers against the "Unmaker," an evil entity that is the great threat to all that is good. So Alvin swears to become a "Maker," an enemy of all that is not good. As he matures, he realizes that he must find a teacher who will help him discover exactly what a Maker does.

In the second book of the series, Red Prophet, Alvin ventures forth to discover his identity. In this novel Card explores tensions between white settlers and the Indian population. Local politicians stir up hatred toward the Indians; one actually hires men to impersonate Indians and kill some local white boys. Alvin gets caught in the middle but survives the experience and becomes "apprenticed" to Tecumseh, the great Indian leader. The white settlers, however, are fooled by the ruse and end up participating in a large slaughter at the Indian town of Tippy Canoe. Tecumseh's pacifist brother, the Red Prophet, forces the settlers to atone for their mistake by confessing it to any stranger who happens by, or else their hands will be covered in blood.

In this book, which is more mystical than the first in the series, Alvin learns much about himself and the art of Making from his mentors Tecumseh and the Red Prophet. He decides his final mission as a Maker will be to create the Crystal City, made up of all races of people working and living as one. Fortunately, Alvin is apprenticed to a blacksmith to learn skills that prove quite useful in his mission.

The third book, Prentice Alvin, tells of Alvin's jealous master and of the girl with special powers who devotes her life to teaching Alvin how to be a Maker. It is also a story of slave trading, and Alvin's dealings with a young black boy named Arthur Stuart who has escaped slavery make him many enemies. A judgmental preacher who has condemned Alvin's powers of folk magic joins with a Southern plantation owner to plot Alvin's destruction. Meanwhile, Alvin develops his powers, testing them to end his apprenticeship by making an automated golden plow from ordinary steel, a first step toward creating the Crystal City. His master tries to claim the gold, but Alvin refuses to surrender the plow. Meanwhile, slave traders have tracked down Alvin's young friend, but when they use their powers to determine that he is in the town, Alvin uses his to change the boy's genetic structure so they no longer can recognize him. The slave traders die, but not before they kill the boy's mother, Peggy Guester. Alvin returns with the boy to his hometown and tries to use what he has learned to teach others. Here the fourth book, Alvin Journeyman, begins.

Having made many enemies, Alvin is eventually brought to trial for the death of the slave trader who killed Peggy Guester. He is also accused of stealing the golden plow he had created. Ultimately he clears himself of these charges and continues to pursue his dream of building the Crystal City.

The fifth book, The Crystal City, still in progress, promises by virtue of its title to bring together the threads of this story, which by now have become a rich tapestry on the level of the folklore that it imitates. The story of this series was inspired by an epic poem that Card first published in 1981 entitled "Prentice Alvin and the No-Good Plow."

The Homecoming Series

In the Homecoming series, Card again explores the mythical and religious aspects of creating a global society with a single totalitarian government. In the first volume, The Memory of Earth (1992), a planet of settlers originally from Earth decide to prevent global self-destruction by surrounding their planet with a system of manned satellites that prevents any country from starting war. This warless society creates wonderful technology but is forever inhibited by the satellites from space travel and even air flight. Eventually the people forget the purpose of the satellite system and start worshiping them as the Oversoul. Failing to maintain an educational structure that transmits knowledge of the past, they lose the technical knowledge base to sustain the military and industrial superstructures of their forebears. The global technology of the past becomes mythology. Just as Europeans of the early medieval period forgot how to replicate the architecture and plumbing of classical Greek civilization and relegated faint memories of these wonders to mere story, the characters of Card's tale allegorize their own distant history.

The plot of the second and third novels of the series, The Call of Earth (1992) and The Ships of the Earth (1994), unfolds the story in the present tense as the Oversoul is leading a group of people who build a spaceship and travel to Earth. Once there, the group hopes to find an ancient being known as "Keeper of Earth," who will give them further instructions. The main protagonist is Nafai, a talented young boy who gradually accepts more responsibility for the mission as he matures. His older brother, Elemak, chafing at Nafai's reputation for righteousness, reacts by discrediting the Oversoul and everything that Nafai values.

Earthfall (1995) relates how the group reaches Earth and sets up a primitive society in order to survive while they await further instructions from the Oversoul. The settlers discover two intelligent races on Earth—the aggressive earth-dwelling Diggers and the Angels, a smaller race with a limited ability to fly. The colonists try to live peaceably with these remnants of genetic experiments engineered by the ancient human race, but Elemak's jealousy interferes. He joins with the warlike Diggers and declares war on the colonists, now led by his brother, Nafai.

In Earthborn (1995) Nafai decides, partially at the Oversoul's direction, to keep a record of all that has transpired. He wants to insure that his story, and the true story of his people, is preserved through the generations. But since his children are not interested in learning to read—a skill that has little practical use in this primitive society without books—Nafai worries about their ability to understand. He creates two separate documents, both written on metal. One version relates the complete story, with complicated details. This he hides away for future generations. The other Nafai tells in the simplest terms possible, even creating a new method of writing to make the tablets easier to decode. He begins a tradition of teaching the oldest son in each family how to read this simple script.

Like the Worthing chronicles, the Homecoming series progresses from an individual point of view to a mythic saga of settling a planet. The Cain and Abel story of Nafai and Elemak and the division of their descendants into different cultures adds a more complicated dimension. Like Jason Worthing, Nafai is deified when he uses special knowledge to help his people change. When the Oversoul presents him with the Starmaster's Cloak, imparting knowledge of technology, some of the more superstitious inhabitants of the planet elevate him to a godlike status. The magic disappears, however, when the cloak is passed on to another original settler who is less involved with Earth.

In this epic tale describing the history of a culture, Card again draws a great number of parallels to biblical stories. In the last volume of this series, the descendants of the original settlers uncover evidence that they are not the first group to return to Earth. Previous groups have failed to live in peace with the other races and have disappeared or self-destructed. Theorizing a time of great trial, these descendants struggle to come to terms with each other and with their new knowledge. In their attempts to improve themselves, they realize that the attempt to live peaceably is all that is humanly possible. Card sums up this philosophy in a dialogue between a racist king who regrets his former habits and his mentor: "I want to change my heart, and I don't know how," confesses the king. The comforting advice he is given could apply to us all: "Wanting to is the whole lesson, all the rest is practice" (300). The mission to find the Keeper of the Earth and fulfill his orders to the Oversoul is completed as the people examine their morality and strive to live peaceably.

Card continues to examine the implications of alternate history and time travel in his most recent science fiction, the Mayflower books. In Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus (1996), scientists try to alter history by traveling back to Columbus's time and changing the motivation for his journey from profit seeking to peaceful coexistence.

Like many other authors of science fiction, Card also explores the boundaries of fantasy, as in Treasure Box (1996). The novel starts as a romance between self-made millionaire Quentin Fears and his lovely fiancée, Madeleine, but soon slides spookily into a ghost story. This example of Card's work outside of sf focuses on subtle character development as Quentin tries to decide to what degree the elusive personality of his new wife is related to the early loss of his beloved sister.

Card's moral message is that gifted individuals bear the burden of living responsibly for the sake of their community, that one person and his or her followers can make a difference. His work exemplifies the best of that type of science fiction written to teach. Didactic science fiction, often intended for an audience of young people, can be preachy and self-righteous. Card's work isn't. His characters are endearing because he details their faults and their heroic virtues with sensitivity and honesty. His plots move quickly and contain intelligent surprises that stretch the reader's critical imagination and allow the reader to delve deeply into the issues he explores. His work inspires the intense examination of basic ethical and cultural habits, which many believe is necessary to preserve our planet through the twentieth-first century. Even readers who do not agree with all facets of his philosophic outlook are impressed with the scope and depth of the conversation he instigates in his works.

The popularity of Orson Scott Card continues to grow, especially among his young followers. His work is available to many on the Internet site named Hatrack, cited previously. In early 1997 Fresco Pictures bought the film rights to the entire collection of works by Card, beginning with Ender's Game and including the romantic ghost short stories "Homebody" (1997), and "Feed the Baby" (1997), about a singer looking for new inspiration after a long career that's getting tired.⁶ Can Card's fictions, especially the compelling tales of Ender, be translated into film versions that will match the books' soul-shivering power and appeal? His devoted fans must wait and see.

Card is a teacher as much as a writer, practicing his craft through speeches to various organizations, in lively correspondence on the World Wide Web, and in the classes he teaches about literature and writing at a college in North Carolina.

Notes

1. Richard E. Geis, review of Ender's Game and Speaker for the Dead, by Orson Scott Card, Science Fiction Review 15.1 (February 1986): 14-15.

2. Michael R. Collings, "Adventure and Allegory," Fantasy Review 9.4 (April 1986): 20.

3. Elaine Radford, "Ender and Hitler: Sympathy for the Superman," Fantasy Review 10.5 (June 1987): 11; hereafter cited in text.

4. Orson Scott Card, "Response," Fantasy Review 10.5 (June 1987): 13-14, 49-52.

5. Wendy Morris, review of Children of the Mind, by Orson Scott Card, Roanoke Times, January 12, 1997.

6. Both stories published by Hatrack River Publications.

Christine Doyle and Susan Louise Stewart (essay date April 2004)

SOURCE: Doyle, Christine, and Susan Louise Stewart. "Ender's Game and Ender's Shadow: Orson Scott Card's Postmodern School Stories." Lion and the Unicorn 28, no. 2 (April 2004): 186-202.

[In the following essay, Doyle and Stewart characterize Ender's Game and Ender's Shadow as science fiction recontextualizations of the "school story" genre, arguing that the two novels "reveal the conflicts between what we want the world to be—safe and nurturing—and what it often is—uncertain and menacing."]

In 1999, Orson Scott Card published a most unusual novel, Ender's Shadow, a book described as neither a sequel nor a prequel, but a "parallel novel" to his earlier Ender's Game (1985). Ender's Shadow is set in the same time and place as the earlier novel, and tells the "same" basic story: children from Earth are sent to Battle School by Earth's International Federation in order to be trained to counter an anticipated invasion by an alien species that has already attacked Earth once. Ender's Shadow, however, tells the story mostly from the point of view of Bean, one of the minor characters in Ender's Game, which is told mostly from the title character's perspective. While Card uses a highly traditional form—the school story—for this unusual pairing of novels, he departs from its structural conventions in significant ways. At the same time, he employs a highly unusual narrative approach between and within these novels, not only using two separate novels to tell the "same" story, but utilizing multiple voices within the novels in innovative ways. Card's own reflections on his creation of Ender's Game point to the ideological project here; he wrote in his introduction to the book that Ender's Game developed from his speculations that "[one] would have to think differently in space because the old ideas of up and down simply wouldn't apply anymore" (xiv). Our premise is that Card's innovations in the school-story form and his departures from conventional narrative structures are inextricably linked to his assertions that we need to "think differently," as he puts it, about narrative, about education, about the relationships between adults and children—and ultimately, essentially, about what it means to be human.

Game and Shadow do contain many of the most traditional conventions of the school story (see Musgrave 130-34). For example, the school itself is seen as an organization with a tightly controlled hierarchical structure; actually, the setting in space, where tight control of the atmosphere in every respect is essential for existence, and the fact that it is a military operation, serve particularly to emphasize this aspect of the traditional form. Further typifying the genre, the schoolmasters—military officers all—are generally regarded as enemies by the students. There are athletic contests ("Battle Games") that produce potent rivalries among the students, especially since huge scoreboards in the dining hall constantly remind the students of their team "standings." The heroes develop character by means of the school experience and encounter a number of bullies who display a lack of it.

The novels even contain some characteristics of the early school stories of the mid-nineteenth century (Tom Brown's era) that dropped out as the genre developed over time: the emphasis on the hero's family and the "spirit of patriotism" as a motivating factor (Musgrave 130). Rather than dropping either main character immediately into the school situation, for instance, the reader observes Ender at home and at school, and is privy to the difficulty with which he leaves home, knowing that it will be years before he can return. Ender's brother Peter and sister Valentine are particularly important to his development as a heroic figure. As for "patriotism," it is Colonel Graff's contention that "'there's a chance that because you're with the fleet, mankind might survive and the Bug-gers might leave us alone forever" (Game 25) that persuades six-year-old Ender to leave his family for Battle School.

Although Bean is actually a clone "grown" in a laboratory, a sense of "family" is provided in Ender's Shadow through an opening section that follows first his life as a member of a street "family" in Rotterdam and then his complicated relationship with Sister Carlotta, who rescues him from the street, realizes his potential, and serves somewhat as a surrogate mother to him. Bean's prime motivation in leaving Earth for Battle School is not patriotism, but to escape a Rotterdam bully who wants to kill him (and the cynicism of his motives is an early indicator of further distancing from the traditions of the school story the second time around), but even Bean reacts positively to the men from the International Federation (I.F.) who take him off to school: "This was the uniform of distant power, of safety for humanity, the uniform on which all hope depended. This was the service he was about to join" (74).

Nonetheless, Card's novels veer from traditional school story conventions in important ways. Beverly Lyon Clark notes that these tales usually feature an "ordinary, good-natured boy, not particularly intelligent, but keen on sports"; that the school involved traditionally excludes females; and that the school structure empowers children to some extent by freeing them from adult supervision (4). If we just consider that children are selected for Card's Battle School specifically because they are not ordinary but gifted intellectually (Ender is exceptionally gifted and Bean, who has been genetically altered, is even more so); that sports in the school are not metaphors for future war or for the marketplace (as is conventional) but overtly presented as practice for combat; that there are females as well as a diversity of races and ethnic backgrounds present; and that the adults closely monitor not only the students' physical movements but their psychological processes as well, it is quite clear that these are no ordinary school stories. Our assumption in examining some of Card's violations of structural conventions is that divergences in form may signal accompanying deviations from the conventional didactic purpose of the traditional school story, which was "to indoctrinate children into the social order" (Clark 4).

Two especially illuminating elements of change regarding story structure concern Card's use and development of character: the fact that the students at the Battle School are extraordinarily gifted—the heroes even more so—and that the teachers, far from being tangential, are extremely important elements of Card's story and, therefore, are much more fully realized characters. In reconstructing the school story along these lines, Card forces the reader into a position of continually revising his/her attitude toward the characters.

At first glance, it may appear that student-teacher relationships at Battle School mirror those of the most traditional forms, in which, as Musgrave puts it, teachers "are seen as enemies by the boys involved" (244). Several of the major characters do, in fact, reflect this view: Petra, one of the few girls in the school and the one who first helps Ender to become a competent soldier, suggests to Ender that "'the adults are the enemy, not the other armies'" (Game 82). Dink Meeker, Ender's first "toon" leader, says it more explicitly: "'It's the teachers, they're the enemy. They get us to fight each other, to hate each other'" (108). Ender's brother Peter, just as intellectually gifted as Ender but unsuited for Battle School due to his utter lack of compassion, regards his own sister contemptuously because "'You still believe that teachers know something worth learning'" (128).

In many ways, the teachers seem to deserve their inimical status. Card interrogates the traditional school story's focus on honesty—an understood code among students that "'sneaking' and lying are … dishonorable" (Musgrave 133)—not so much through the student characters as through the teachers depicted in the novels. When Colonel Graff and Major Anderson first discuss how to get six-year-old Ender to agree to leave his family to go to Battle School, Graff says, "'I'll lie to him,'" to which Anderson replies, "'And if that doesn't work?'" The answer: "'Then I'll tell him the truth. We're allowed to do that in emergencies'" (Game 16). Being the bright children they are, all the major characters do in fact realize that the teachers lie to them on an ongoing basis, which leads to darkly comic one-upmanship between the two camps and bizarre contortions of "logic," such as when the teachers realize that Bean has figured out that Earth is preparing an offensive, not a defensive, war and worry that he might pass along the information: "'All we have to do is come up with a lie we think he'll believe'" (Shadow 140). Added to this inherent dishonesty is a level of surveillance that makes Jeremy Bentham's panopticon look amateurish: the Battle School administrators not only track the students' whereabouts at all times through sensors in their clothing; they also track their psychological attitudes through a "mind game" they play, supposedly as recreation, on their laptop computers. All the computer functions, in fact, are also monitored.

Furthermore, the teachers are not only spies, but manipulators as well. From the time their respective launch groups leave Earth for Battle School, the teachers create situations that will isolate both Ender and Bean from the other students. They foster competitiveness and minimize cooperation among the students by means of the prominently displayed scoreboards that show team and individual standings in the "Battle Game," the school's athletic contest—which is also yet another way of isolating Ender, who is always on top. They manipulate the Battle Game itself whenever they believe it suits their needs. They even allow Bonzo, a bully with a special hatred for Ender, to attack him in the shower, an attack that results in the death of the bully. They do all this in order to accomplish their purposes. In Ender's Shadow, they allow Bean to deal with another bully in a scenario that could easily mean death for one or the other of them, in order to see exactly what Bean is made of.

Card makes all of this even more appalling by frequently reminding the reader of the youth of the protagonists: Ender is six years old when he leaves for Battle School, nine-and-a-half when he commands his first army for the school's war games, and eleven when he saves Earth by obliterating an entire alien world. Bean, Ender's second in command in the final battle, is two years younger than Ender. Even more sinister implications arise because several of the most insightful students, including Bean, suspect the true purpose of the school: not to fight a war that may either already be over or in which the military has no intentions of using children, but to keep these potential military masterminds away from Earth and dissociated from their countries of origin, on the assumption that political powers will start their own wars for hegemony once it becomes known that humanity as a species is safe from the extraterrestrial invaders.

In the traditional school story, the teachers' relative absence from actual plot developments (Musgrave notes, "Masters are rarely central to the plot" [244]) allows them to be abstractly "the enemy" even while the system they support is one into which the students will be eventually expected to grow. Indeed, according to Roberta Trites, one usually expects that the school story will "conclude with an affirmation of the school's purpose in training young people to take their place in the status quo of the social order" (32). Further, because the students typically are young adults, some of the difficulties they encounter are clearly meant to be experienced as acceptable "coming-of-age" encounters. Thus the hero, and the reader, might be expected to uphold the status quo in the final analysis, regardless of their scorn for some of the adults who represent that status quo. But here the sinister obtrusiveness of the teachers and the tender age of the students lead readers in a very different direction. These stories encourage the reader to question a system that is so intrusive, so manipulative, and so destructive of childhood. The virtual nervous breakdown Ender suffers even as his "mission" succeeds might lead us to read these novels as clear-cut warning tales with grave implications in terms of educational systems—that is, that Card would simply have the reader switch from one side of the duality (schools are tough but good; the status quo is good) to the other (schools are bad; the status quo is bad).

As readers of Orson Scott Card's work soon come to realize, however, it is never that simple. Neither the students' nor the teachers' perspectives—in fact, no single perspective—is exactly accurate. The teachers who "control" the lives of the young people in these novels cannot simply be categorized as upholders of the status quo as they are in both the traditional school story and, in a more pernicious way, in more contemporary school stories such as Cormier's The Chocolate War. Neither are they simply "typical" military minds, the Dr. Strangeloves of Card's futuristic society, with all of the negative implications that suggests. Certainly, there are elements of that. Graff, the school's head teacher, is frequently in the middle of a running competition between Dap and Dimak as each tries to support his respective protégé, Ender or Bean, for the position of savior of the world. There is Major Anderson, who in the aftermath of the final victory accepts a position as commissioner of the (International?) football league on Earth—even though he is offered the presidency of several universities—because he is honest enough to admit, "'all I ever cared about at the Battle School was the game'" (Game 306). But there is never even a suggestion that any of these characters lose sight of their ultimate task, to save the Earth and the human species from destruction. In fact, one of the few things that the teachers and the two heroes, Ender and Bean, do agree upon is that the "Buggers"—the aliens—are their true enemy (of course, in true Card fashion, even that turns out not to be as true as one would want it to be). Card humanizes all of the teachers by developing them into characters who are flawed but also committed and caring individuals. In novelistic exposition to which Ender is not privy, we learn some of the reasoning behind the choices the educators make: reasons that are never selfish and that frequently leave them as tortured as their child hero.

For example, the strategy of isolating Ender, then Bean, at Battle School is torture for both of the boys, but Ender and Bean come to realize that letting them be part of the group would make them like the rest of the group, when the battle ahead requires them to be extraordinary. Ender understands that "Graff isolated him to make him struggle…. It made him a better soldier than he would ever have been otherwise" (Game 167-68). When Graff decides to allow both Ender and Bean to confront bullies who clearly would like to see them dead, he is "sick at heart" but also knows that

In both cases, the child had serious doubts about his own courage…. Graff knew that Ender had the courage to strike, without restraint, when the time came for it…. But Ender didn't know it, and he had to know…. Self-doubt was the one thing that neither candidate could afford to have. Against an enemy that did not hesitate—that could not hesitate—there could be no pause for reflection. The boys had to face their worst fears, knowing that no one would intervene to help. They had to know that when failure would be fatal, they would not fail. They had to pass the test and know that they had passed it.

                                    (Shadow 259)

Perhaps even more telling is Graff's final musing on the subject. He realizes that if he doesn't go through with exposing these young children to such clear danger because of his sympathy for them and because they are children, and the war is lost because they cannot be the commanders they need to be, no one will really blame him—except himself. Still, he acknowledges the extent of his own responsibility: "'I'm not a bureaucrat, placing my career above the larger purpose I was put here to serve. I will not put the dice in someone else's hands, or pretend that I don't have the choice I have'" (Shadow 260).

In the aftermath of the final battle, Card allows Graff and Mazer Rackham to justify some of the most unsavory aspects of adult manipulation—why they had to trick Ender into believing the actual battle was another game and why they used children as soldiers—in order to bring Ender out of his despair. Ender's deep empathy is what makes him both a powerful leader and a powerful enemy: his troops follow him and he understands the foe. But the other side of that empathy is that "somebody with that much compassion could never be the killer [Earth] needed. Could never go into battle willing to win at all costs. If you knew, you couldn't do it" (Game 298). Rackham, Earth's hero from the previous war and Ender's final teacher, tells him, "'[I]t had to be a child…. You were faster than me. Better than me. I was too old and cautious. Any decent person who knows what warfare is can never go into battle with a whole heart. But you didn't know. We made sure you didn't know. You were reckless and brilliant and young. It's what you were born for'" (Game 298).¹

This is not to say that Card shows the teachers as always right in their judgments or as powerful enough to control the situations they initiate. Ender's fight with Bonzo Madrid results not only in Ender's assurance that he can act when he needs to, which is planned, but also in Bonzo's death, which isn't. It is Bean who explains to Graff that somewhere within himself Ender knows that he killed Bonzo even though they haven't told him so, and Bean adds, "'What you don't seem to understand is, sometimes you have to just tell people the truth and ask them to do the thing you want, instead of trying to trick them into it'" (Shadow 362). The teachers are seen as complex characters, not abstract entities; thus, we are left with the knowledge that their process worked, although sometimes the Child (in this case, Bean) is Father to the Man.

The reader's uncertainty is heightened by the fact that the student characters are also far from perfect. For example, Bean leads a revolt in Battle School to get rid of the scoreboards that make the students enemies of one another instead of the invaders, which prevent them from learning as much as they might because they operate with secrecy and fear of failure as their main goals. "'We can take charge of our own education,'" Bean exhorts them, as they demand that the scoreboards be removed (Shadow 290). But after the boards come down, Bean adopts the same deceptiveness he had attributed to the teachers in promoting competitiveness; he urges his army to "win" so that they will try their best, when his real aim is to experiment with new ways of conducting the battles. Bean draws the wrath of the soldiers he commands for not telling them until he is leaving for Command School that he didn't care that they didn't win their battles: "'At least you could have told us it was OK not to win.'" Bean doesn't apologize, but justifies his own deceit and deception with the same self-assurance as the adult commanders: "'I didn't tell you because it only works if you think it counts'" (Shadow 322). Competition and fear of failure are not pleasant motivations, but they do, it seems, get the job done.

In fact, both Bean and Ender, when they become leaders, think of themselves as teachers and come to understand and accept some of the principles that guide these former "enemies" they have now joined. Adopting some aspects of the "status quo" becomes essential in order to accomplish their larger purpose. In particular, Card uses the character of Bean to further justify the teachers' choice to keep from the students the fact that their final "war game" is the actual war. Bean figures this out just prior to the final battle; as a more intellectual but less empathetic character than Ender, and a "street smart" child, Bean might be expected to be even more cynical and less disturbed by his discovery than Ender (or most readers) would be. Yet even he is devastated by the knowledge and so unable to come to terms with it that he has to force himself to "'disbelieve it'" (Shadow 342) in order to continue. He fully accepts that "'the teachers were right to keep this secret from us'" (342). Card's approach to the school story, then, leads to a vision of the student-teacher dynamic that offers no clear-cut "right" way to see things. It leads past dualism: it leads to postmodernism.

Card's postmodern project is even more in evidence when we consider the unusual narrative style that occurs between and within these two novels. In both novels, Card incorporates and blends several narrative strategies that duplicate the complicated nature of the world, of humans, of gifted children, and even of war, employing what Bakhtin would call "double-voiced discourse." Mike Cadden explains that a "double-voiced text represents voices as equal and provides alternative interpretations that offer, in their aggregate, no single and final answer for the reader" (147). This type of narration avoids the "single-voiced text [where] there is one dominant and didactic voice with no representation of a legitimate alternative position" (147). In other words, instead of being told what to think, readers must think for themselves and synthesize the various voices and ideas. Readers share subjectivities with several characters and assume multiple subject positions. The above, however, is not unproblematic. While some theorists would argue, as Cadden has, that didactic literature comes closer to a single-voiced text than a multivoiced text, Robyn McCallum points to Bakhtin's theory that "the novel as a genre is inherently polyphonic and that fiction for children, by virtue of the fact that its evolution was simultaneous with the adult novel, is also inherently polyphonic" (McCallum 25). According to Bakhtin the novel includes "[a]uthorial speech, the speeches of narrators, inserted genres, the speech of characters [that] can enter the novel; each of them permits a multiplicity of social voices and a wide variety of their social links and interrelationships …" ("Discourse" 263). The novel differs from the epic in that the "epic world is an utterly finished thing …"—a closed, static, unmovable, "immutable" system ("Epic" 17). In contrast, the novel is necessarily mutable. Nevertheless, while the traditional school story might contain multiple voices, by the end of the text there is little doubt as to the conclusions a reader should draw. Thus, the reader is deprived of any decision making: if, that is, the reader assumes the position that the author constructs. This is not necessarily true in Card's novels, and in fact, the voices become even more mutable, which is particularly important for readers in that it locates "implied readers as active subjects within a narrative discourse …" (McCallum 25). Again, readers become decision makers as a result of Card's radical narrative approach.

Card achieves double-voiced discourse in several ways. Internally, both texts are identical in narrative structure in that the beginning of each chapter is devoted to the voices of authority, to the commanders of the Battle School and other adults associated with the school's hierarchy. Card presents their voices through pure dialogue, that is, dialogue written in present tense, minus tags, appearing as a direct recording of the spoken event—as a transcript, so to speak. These sections are printed in bold and the font lacks serifs, which communicates another level of authority. While these sections are much shorter than the remainder of the chapters and thus might not appear to be equal, they gain equal footing because they are presented in pure dialogue and, as far as the speakers know, out of the hearing of Ender and Bean. Consequently, the speakers have no need to lie to, mediate with, or posture in front of Ender and Bean. These segments frequently reveal the authorities' reactions to events in which Ender and Bean have been involved and the authorities' future plans for them. The segments also allow readers to understand the power struggles, the inner workings, and the infrastructure of the I.F. and the Battle School. Furthermore, the beginning segment of each chapter establishes and controls the direction of the remainder of each chapter. Thus, these very short segments are heavily weighted: they give the reader the sense of an omniscient narrator to whom the characters them-selves are not privy, and they heighten the sense of power and surveillance that is in the hands of the authority figures. The opening segments also function to keep Ender and Bean unaware and, in effect, innocent of how Ender will ultimately accomplish his mission, but they privilege readers in that we know precisely what is occurring. Although Bean finds a way to eavesdrop on some of the adult conversations, Ender is seldom privy to them, illustrating the separation of adult and child and the reason Ender must indeed be kept innocent in order to destroy the Buggers. When Bean does deduce that the games are real, he wonders, "'How will it change the way I play? I can't let it, that's all. I was already doing my best—knowing this won't make me work harder or play better. It might make me do worse. Might make me hesitate, might make me lose concentration'" (Shadow 342). He concludes that he must "'disbelieve it'" and "'forget that it's true'" (342). The irony of this narrative method is that readers are acutely aware of the adult machinations while the characters are not, even while they occur right under the protagonists' noses. All the while, Ender remains unaware of the extent of adult manipulation.

Additionally, the complementary or "parallel" nature of the two novels as whole entities—the "same" story told first through Ender's point of view and then through Bean's—provides another type of double-voiced discourse, which serves to demonstrate the intersection of and interaction between the two characters. This would appear to be a difficult task, since Ender and Bean don't even meet until the last third of Ender's Game. Their initial meeting is relatively insignificant to Ender, who simply notes that one of his new trainees is "'a small kid, obviously underage. There was no way he was going to reach the ceiling handhold'" (159). Prior to this meeting, Ender has no idea of Bean's existence. Bean, on the other hand, is fully aware of Ender, making Ender much more of a presence in Bean's story (Shadow ) than Bean is in Ender's (Game ). From the moment he arrives at the (I.F.) Battle School, Bean watches Ender's every move—shadows Ender—studying how Ender has assumed his power and how he wields it, but readers are not aware of this unless they read Ender's Shadow. Additionally, readers who come to Shadow after Game have an immediate advantage over Bean in "knowing" Ender already, in knowing from the start what the Battle School training is really about, and in knowing the final result of the Bugger war. By reading both texts, then, we experience double discourse and multiple perspectives.

Card provides readers with even more interesting "double vision" regarding Ender and Bean by actually including some of the same dialogue in both texts while giving each character's interpretation of the occurrences. When Bean quickly demonstrates his tactical genius, Ender begins to take notice of him. However, the characters meet each other as adversaries rather than allies. Consequently, they experience the episode quite differently, as can be seen in the following side-by-side representation taken from Game and Shadow:

From Ender's Game:

"Poor kid. Nobody's treatin' him fair." Ender gently pushed Bean back against the wall. "I'll tell you how to get a toon. Prove to me you know what you're doing as a soldier. Prove to me you know how to use other soldiers. And then prove to me that somebody's willing to follow you into battle. Then you'll get your toon. But not bloody well until."

                                        (166)

From Ender's Shadow:

"Poor kid. Nobody's treatin' him fair."

Wiggin's deliberate obtuseness infuriated Bean. You're smarter than this Wiggin!

Seeing Bean's rage, Wiggin brought a hand forward and pushed him until his back rested firmly against the wall. "I'll tell you how to get a toon."

                                     (202-03)

Immediately after this incident, the boys separate and retreat to their own thoughts:

When he got to his room he lay down on his bed and trembled. What am I doing? My first practice session, and I'm already bullying people … Shoving people around. Picking on some poor little kid so the others'll have somebody they all hate. Sickening. Everything I hated in a commander, and I'm doing it.

                                        (166)

Unlike you Wiggin, I do give the other guy a chance to learn what he's doing before I insist on perfection. You screwed up with me today, but I'll give you a chance to do better tomorrow and the next day.

But when Bean got to the pole and reached out to take hold, he realized his hands were trembling and his grip was weak.

                                        (203)

Several things occur simultaneously here relative to the narrative structure. Reading them separately, we hear either Ender's voice or Bean's, but when read-ing them together, we hear both voices and witness two perspectives on the same experience. Through instances like the ones above, we see how Ender and Bean complete each other. Both construct similar facades in order to establish their authority, but when they separate, those facades collapse and each boy is left trembling, further isolated, angry, and disillusioned.

Additionally, as can be seen in the "Bean's thoughts" portion above, the narrative often slips from third person into what Seymour Chatman terms "direct free thought," wherein the narration excludes quotation marks and tags ("s/he said") (182), uses present tense, and even employs first-person comments "which are narrator-mediated, albeit minimally and sometimes ambiguously so" (183). As Maria Nikolajeva indicates, it is common in children's fiction to italicize these moments, but in Ender's Game and Ender's Shadow, they are not italicized. As such, these slippages might go unnoticed by the casual reader. Instead, readers are guided in and out of the protagonist's consciousness, which adds a psychological dimension to the text. It lets readers know precisely what the protagonist is thinking while still maintaining narrative distance because the narration returns to third-person, but the process is entirely unobtrusive. Chatman asserts that "access to a character's consciousness" is "the usual and quickest means by which we come to identify with him" (157). Readers, as Nikolajeva notes, "share the … character's subjectivity" (185). Nikolajeva, however cautions that when a "didactic adult" narrator tells the story, sharing the character's subjectivity might make readers "feel their own inadequacy," particularly when the character is obviously less sophisticated than the narrator (185). However, because both Ender and Bean are highly intelligent and cognitively advanced, if readers do share their subjectivity, they should not "feel their own inadequacy." In fact, the distance between the narrator's and characters' cognitive abilities is slight. While Ender and Bean's voices differ from the narrative voice during these narrative slips, readers understand that Bean, Ender, adult characters, and the narrator are intellectual equals. Indeed, the fact that Ender and Bean are chosen by the I.F. to "save the world" (and actually exceed the I.F.'s expectations) supports this.

In addition to Ender's Game and Shadow being double-voiced, they are also "'active' double voiced," wherein, according to Cadden, "no single position in the text is clearly endorsed" (147). Along with Ender's and Bean's point of view, readers are also guided to contemplate the points of view we're given through the beginning segments. While Card encourages readers to share Ender's and Bean's subjectivity, we are also encouraged to empathize with Colonel Graff as he makes difficult and often questionable decisions regarding his treatment of the young soldiers. The complexity of Graff's character that so violates the conventions of the school story in ways discussed earlier is much more clear to the reader than to Ender or Bean because it is often revealed by "voices" of the text that speak to the reader, but not to either of them. The reader, for example, knows about Graff's personal fondness for Ender, about his ethical arguments with Dap and Dimak, about his internal moral struggles. Ender gets some appreciation of these issues when the I.F. commanders attempt to alleviate some of Ender's guilt by telling him, "'[Y]ou had to be a weapon, Ender, like a gun,… functioning perfectly but not knowing what you were aimed at. We aimed you. We're responsible. If there was something wrong, we did it'" (Game 298). By this time, readers understand more fully than Ender does why Graff makes certain decisions, and perhaps readers even agree with those decisions even though they find them morally reprehensible.

Ultimately, though the texts internally replicate each other in terms of style and sometimes substance—and externally complement each other—they are still separate texts, and Card's narration establishes two modes of discourse that intentionally fail to speak to each other. The narrative fully informs only the reader, not Ender or Bean or the adults involved in the elaborate plan to destroy the Buggers. This creates something of a narrative war, which duplicates the battles in which Bean and Ender are engaged. The ironic nature of this predicament becomes clear when Ender speculates that there might be no need to destroy the Buggers, for as he observes, "'So the whole war is because we can't talk to each other,'" to which Graff responds, "'If the other fellow can't tell you his story, you can never be sure he isn't trying to kill you'" (Game 53). Ender's speculation is correct, as we later discover, and the war is, in reality, a needless waste of life that leads to the near destruction of an entire species.

Just as we witness a narrative battle, Ender and Bean experience something of a battle between subjectivity and subjugation. Indeed, the I.F. considers Ender a "subject" who must "remain useful after the training program" (Game 174). The Battle School represents a site of contestation, suppression, and empowerment and parallels Card's narrative, a narrative that power-fully demonstrates the necessity of accessing and appreciating multiple perspectives in order to ensure survival. What is true about life in Battle School is true about life in the postmodern world.

How, then, might these radical departures from form and these horrifying scenarios about adults, children, and the relationships between them relate to commensurate departures from the conventional function of the school story? Card himself, reporting some of the criticism Ender's Game has received, proposes that the novel "disturbs some people because it challenges their assumptions about reality" (Game xix). In casting the child heroes of Ender's Game and Ender's Shadow as gifted, not ordinary, children, and in developing the characters of the teachers with a complexity and a sympathy not typical of school-story convention, Card indeed challenges assumptions. His use of multiple perspectives leads the reader to understand that the condition we call "giftedness" is replete with drawbacks that match every advantage it offers. The gifted children in his novels are the world's saviors, but they are also lonely, isolated beings who both revel in their "specialness" and mourn their inability to be "normal," whose every academic advancement is both an acknowledgement of their talents and an additional source of resentment by those around them. Their intelligence deprives them of many of the pleasures of childhood and replaces those pleasures with unconscionable pressures and expectations, including the pressure never to fail. Rather than building confidence, their habitual success increases their fear of failure and actually hampers their creativity because they're afraid to try things that might fail. It's interesting in both of these novels that only the child characters, Ender and Bean, ever give the other children encouragement to try "crazy" things that may not succeed. Equally interesting, Ender's greatest success—the last battle in Battle School (Chapter 12) and the climax of the war (Chapter 14)—occur when he actually gives up and decides he does not want to play the game anymore. Certainly, this can be read as anger at the "system" or despair, but even at that, he does not fear failure. Rather, as he faces the last battle, he embraces failure as he breaks the standard rules of engagement, claiming "'If I break this rule, they'll never let me be a commander. It would be too dangerous. I'll never have to play a game again. And that is victory'" (Game 293).

The adults around them fluctuate between insisting, on the one hand, "'they're only children,'" and asking these children to perform tasks too abhorrent and too difficult for the adults themselves. It is a testimony to the accuracy of Card's propositions that the most critical statements about Ender's Game came from a teacher of gifted students, who insisted that "gifted children … just don't talk like that. They don't think like that" (Game xix), while a group of gifted children wrote to thank him for making them feel less alone: Card says, "They didn't love Ender, or pity Ender (a frequent adult response); they were Ender" (xxii).

Furthermore, Barbara Wall speculates that authors who insist on treating young readers as equals often "[ignore] the fact that, as readers, children and adults are not equals, and cannot be" (15). She asserts that when authors "write with an educated adult audience in mind—their own peers—their stories will surely be, at best not always interesting and probably often unintelligible, and at worst positively harmful, to children, even when a child appears as a central character …" (15). And certainly, much has been made as to whether or not Game and Shadow should be considered "children's" novels, even though Ender's Game is now being specifically marketed to young readers—the cover of the 2002 edition depicts a young Ender, dressed in a blue flash suit, in various acrobatic positions, presumably in the battle room. Game and Shadow may very well be uninteresting or even "unintelligible" to some young readers, but the same can also be said of some adult readers. Young readers have embraced the novels. Additionally, the novels, particularly Game, are being used in high school literature classes. While it seems true that Card demands or assumes much of his readers, it also seems true that he respects them a great deal, regardless of their ages. Game and Shadow ask adults to look at children through different lenses; the novels also ask young readers to perhaps perceive themselves differently.

Card's challenge to commonplace ideology about children goes beyond the particulars of the gifted child, however. These two novels represent a threat to the lovely, innocent picture Western culture has painted regarding children since the Romantic writers began depicting them as angelic beings who needed to be protected from an often ugly, brutal world. According to commonplace thought, children should not be exposed to violence or death, and they certainly should not participate in it. Ender's Game and Ender's Shadow reveal the conflicts between what we want the world to be—safe and nurturing—and what it often is—uncertain and menacing. The novels acknowledge that the world contains both aspects, and that the child, as part of the world, can also be nurturing and menacing, and will undoubtedly experience these very conflicts, whether or not we consciously expose him or her to negative aspects of life.² Card says that Ender's Game "asserts the personhood of children…. Children are a perpetual, self-renewing underclass" (xx). These two novels challenge adults to recognize this "personhood," to understand that there are complex consequences in the decisions we make about children's educations—and about how we "use" children in general—to face up to the complexities of assuming that what we teach children is "good for them" or even that it is for a common good. Neither modern life, nor the children themselves, are simple enough for us to make such assumptions.

On an even broader level, Card issues a challenge to those who live in the modern world, a challenge to acknowledge the importance of approaching problems from a multiplicity of viewpoints. As Ender comes to realize, the war between the Buggers and Earth has, in fact, come about "Because we can't talk to each other." This is true in a literal sense, for the aliens function like a hive of bees, with communication being instantaneous or not at all. The humans have not been able to find any way of breaking into that communication system. It is a telling point in Card's story that Ender is able to understand the Buggers' strategy and defeat them by studying them, by analyzing and objectifying them, but his own healing comes about only when the one remaining Hive Queen draws Ender close enough to communicate with him. The reader comes with Ender to the realization that the Buggers, upon recognizing that the Earth creatures were sentient beings, were horrified at what they had done in attempting to colonize Earth. The Buggers had no intention of attacking again, but they had no way to express their regret or to let Earth know that humans need not be afraid of future attack.

Anthropologist Clifford Geertz argues that the complexities of modern life in a global community are increasingly producing problems whose solutions necessitate moving from the place "where each side merely wonders, now wistfully, now skeptically, whether the other might have something somewhere that could be of some use to it in coping with some of its own classic problems" to "a heightened, more exact awareness of what the other is all about" (169). Ender is a hero specifically because of his heightened level of empathy. Bean becomes a hero only after his one friend Nikolai says to him, "'That's the thing that I don't think you really get. How it feels not to be you'" (Shadow 255)—and Bean begins to develop that feeling, too. This is the rich awareness toward which Card's strategies in his school stories point us: they are strategies for coping with life in the postmodern world. Or, as Card himself put it, "[One] would have to think very differently in space, because the old ideas of up and down simply wouldn't apply anymore" (Game xiv). The need to think differently, to perceive differently, and to exist in the world differently become both form and function in Card's postmodern school stories. We must constantly acknowledge and negotiate a multiplicity of voices, of subjectivities, of positions, if we are to escape narrowly defined perceptions about education, about gifted children, and about what it means to live and grow up in a postmodern world.

Notes

1. It seems more than a little ironic that when six-year-old Ender offered Colonel Graff "'It's what I was born for'" (Game 26) as his reason for agreeing to leave home for Battle School, Graff had responded that that reason was "'Not good enough.'"

2. In addition to Ender, who is horrified to discover a capacity for harming others within himself, these novels assert a decidedly unromantic view of the child in characters such as the bullies Bonzo and Achilles, both of whom have murderous hearts, and even Ender's brother Peter, whose idea of entertainment is to stake out squirrels and half-skin them alive so he can watch them suffer. Colonel Graff refers to Peter as "one of the most ruthless and unreliable human beings we've laid hands on" (Game 122)—and he never has even been exposed to the teachers or the system at Battle School!

Works Cited

Bakhtin, M. M. "Discourse in the Novel." The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M. M. Bakhtin. Ed. Michael Holquist. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: U of Texas P, 1981. 259-422.

――――――. "Epic and Novel: Toward a Methodology for the Study of the Novel." The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M. M. Bakhtin. Ed. Michael Holquist. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: U of Texas P, 1981. 3-40.

Cadden, Mike. "The Irony of Narration in the Young Adult Novel." Children's Literature Association Quarterly 25.3 (2000): 145-54.

Card, Orson Scott. Ender's Game. 1985. New York: Tor, 1991.

――――――. Ender's Shadow. New York: Tor, 1999.

Chatman, Seymour. Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1978.

Clark, Beverly Lyon. Regendering the School Story: Sassy Sissies and Tattling Tomboys. New York: Garland, 1996.

Geertz, Clifford. Local Knowledge. New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1983.

McCallum, Robyn. Ideologies of Identity in Adolescent Fiction: The Dialogic Construction of Subjectivity. New York: Garland, 1999.

Musgrave, P. W. From Brown to Bunter: The Life and Death of the School Story. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985.

Nikolajeva, Maria. "Exit Children's Literature?" The Lion and the Unicorn 22 (1998): 221-36.

Trites, Roberta. Disturbing the Universe: Power and Repression in Adolescent Literature. Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 2000.

Wall, Barbara. The Narrator's Voice: The Dilemma of Children's Fiction. New York: St. Martin's, 1991.

TITLE COMMENTARY

ENDER'S GAME (1985)

Tim Blackmore (essay date summer 1991)

SOURCE: Blackmore, Tim. "Ender's Beginning: Battling the Military in Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game." Extrapolation 32, no. 2 (summer 1991): 124-42.

[In the following essay, Blackmore suggests that Card's Ender's Game functions as an indictment of military practices, stating that, "Card has not merely produced an excellent adventure novel, but he has written a meditation on political, social, and ethical behavior."]

Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game has been interpreted as a Johnny-got-his-gun story, a simple militaristic document (Saunders), a complex religious narrative (Collings), and an argument for fascism.¹ The text shows that Card engages in a critique of the late twentieth-century military paradigm. Interwoven with the critique is a meditation on the power and control the individual may or may not possess. Card delineates the military paradigm, its assumptions, and operations. Once he has constructed the paradigm, Card focuses on one individual who is forced to become a professional warrior if he is to survive. The process of Ender's transformation from civilian to warrior is intricate. The results of such a transformation are disastrous to the self: Ender is nearly destroyed by the pressure the military exerts on his paradigm. Card hints at a replacement for the military paradigm. This article traces Card's development of the military paradigm and that of the warrior who lives inside it.

Arms and the Child

The main foundations of every state, new states as well as ancient or composite ones, are good laws and good arms; and because you cannot have good laws without good arms, and where there are good arms, good laws inevitably follow, I shall not discuss laws but give my attention to arms.

                        —Machiavelli, The Prince

Strength lies not in defense but in attack.

                            —Hitler, Mein Kampf

Ender lives in a military paradigm which assumes humans are malleable, controllable objects. Control resides in large institutions, not individuals or parochial units. The military paradigm abides by a strict utilitarian philosophy in which ends overcome any and all means; human costs are unimportant. Within the paradigm is an accepted paradox that the individual must be sacrificed in order to maintain the rights of other individuals. Because it accepts its own built-in flaws, the military paradigm is extremely robust. Graff lectures Ender: "The Earth is deep, and right to the heart it's alive, Ender. We people only live on the top, like the bugs that live on the scum of the still water near the shore" (267). Graff's aerial view distances him from the unpleasant decisions he must make if the war is to be won. There is no room for doubt that all wars, or contests, must be won—especially when these "bugs" cling so tenaciously to life (the word "bugs" is loaded with meaning; Card uses it to refer both to humans and "buggers" [37]). Graff is proud of, rather than ashamed of, the power that allows the military to "requisition" Ender (25). At the core of the military paradigm is a mechanistic view of humans, who are to be shaped to the purposes of the machine. Anderson expresses the utilitarian military code tersely: "All right. We're saving the world, after all. Take him" (1); he picks up Ender as one might choose a tool from a tool kit.

Much of the paradigm's invulnerability comes from the fact that the characters are aware of their roles in the machine. The reader feels sympathy for them because they have thought through their beliefs; they don't blindly follow a creed. Yet their humane qualities—emotion and heart—never interfere with their decision to sacrifice anything necessary to keep the mechanism functioning. Graff directs us to practicalities—"We're trying to save the world, not heal the wounded heart" (71)—and provokes a further exchange:

"General Levy has no pity for anyone. All the videos say so. But don't hurt this boy.

"Are you joking?"

"I mean, don't hurt him more than you have to."

                                             (71)

In a utilitarian world a plea to leave Ender untouched is not only irrelevant, it is potentially treasonous. Physical and psychological pain are necessary if Ender is to be deformed for the machine's uses. The amount of pain indicates the degree of injustice the individual meets at the hands of the system; and in Ender's case, both the pain and injustice are severe. The military is purposefully structured to be unjust, breaking those who cannot rise above injustice fast enough. Those who survive the injustices will become commanders—they will be given the power to inflict pain. The children in the Battle Room raise "a tumult of complaint that it wasn't fair how Bernard and Alai had shot them all when they weren't ready" (66). The military world has no patience for those who demand fairness; Graff notes bluntly, "Fairness is a wonderful attribute, Major Anderson. It has nothing to do with war" (106).

Card prevents the reader from making quick judgements about Graff and Anderson. At first the two men seem dangerously smug about their roles ("We promise gingerbread, but we eat the little bastards alive" [9]). The utilitarian seems to forget he is dealing with humans, coldbloodedly informing Ender that "maybe you're not going to work out for us, and maybe you are. Maybe you'll break down under pressure, maybe it'll ruin your life, maybe you'll hate me for coming here to your house today" (26). Graff's ability to speak such truths impresses Ender, who otherwise would not be lured away. Graff's honesty is not a sham; in private he notes ominously that "this time if we lose there won't be any criticism of us at all" (39). Accustomed to serving the machine, Graff and Anderson slide unhesitatingly into the worst Machiavellian tactics to achieve their goals. Petra warns Ender to "remember this…. They never tell you any more truth than they have to," a fact all the children promptly forget (89). Graff and Anderson, the two Machiavels, prepare to trap Ender:

"So what are you going to do?"

"Persuade him that he wants to come with us more than he wants to stay with her."

"How will you do that?"

"I'll lie to him."

"And if that doesn't work?"

"Then I'll tell him the truth. We're allowed to do that in emergencies. We can't plan for everything, you know."

                                             (16)

There is gleeful madness in this speech; the two most "practical" characters are quick to accept the interchangeability of lies and truth. It is impossible, ap-parently, to detect Graff's and Anderson's true feelings. The latter notes grimly, "Sometimes I think you enjoy breaking these little geniuses," recognizing that Graff, like Anderson, has a favorite game (28). Anderson's concern—"what kind of man would heal a broken child … just so he could throw him back into battle again"—maintains our faith in the two commanders (169). Card forces the reader to move between two viewpoints: that of the suspicious, manipulated child and that of the paranoid, utilitarian machine worker.

The phrase "the good of the whole" sanctions military atrocities. Ender's relationship with Valentine is like one of "billions of … connections between human beings. That's what [he's] fighting to keep alive" (267). The reader is one such unit, for the audience may be forced to approve of—even as it dislikes—Graff. Each individual must surrender the self completely. The post of officer, or supreme commander, does not make Ender an individual; it simply gives him a higher function in the machine. Graff has made peace with the possibility that "we might both do despicable things, Ender," because "if humankind survives, then we were good tools" (37). Ender begins to realize the magnitude of his sacrifice, asking, "Is that all? Just tools?" And he elicits the utilitarian answer from Graff, "Individual human beings are all tools, that the others use to help us all survive" (37). Here is the paradox of one stripped of his individuality in order to protect the ideal of individuality.

Games, game theory, and simulation are an integral part of the mechanistic Machiavellian world; surprises or spontaneity are dangerous because they are organic. Graff notes brusquely, "as for toys—there's only one game" (27). The supremacy of the game and the Battle Room is total; those who believe in endless rehearsal refuse to draw the line between simulation and reality for the child-warriors (24). The principal danger of game theory is that reality becomes blurred, making human costs appear inconsequential. Anderson is angry that Graff has played one of his games "betting [Anderson's] life on it" (58). It comes as an unwelcome—and ironic—shock for a gamer to discover that he too is on the playing board.²

The military paradigm consisting of a utilitarian stance, belief in the good of the whole, subordination of the individual, and simulation of reality takes great pleasure in its rituals and makes a religion out of war. It is extremely dangerous that "status, identity, purpose, name; all that makes these children who they are comes out of this game" (106). The children have become ciphers. It follows that if the ritual of the game is not upheld, the identities of whole groups may be erased. Particularly striking is Card's revision of Golding's Lord of the Flies. Bonzo accepts Ender into his army and begins a ritual war chant:

"We are still—"

"Salamander!" cried the soldiers in one voice …

"We are the fire that will consume them, belly and bowel, head and heart, many flames of us, but one fire."

"Salamander!" they cried again.

"Even this one will not weaken us."

                                             (83)

The ritual call-and-response nature of this chorus is an example of the unity Anderson strives to instill in all his recruits: alone they are flames, but together they are a fire that overwhelms others.³ The philosophy may be rooted in the past, but the military is firmly webbed to the future—specifically technology. The military sees technology as a mystical force allowing basic laws of nature to be revoked, such as gravity and time (89, 273, 281). It also relies on machines to explore human minds. Ender charges the two commanders, "You're the ones with the computer games that play with people's minds. You tell me" (208). Dink is simultaneously correct and incorrect when he claims that "the Battle Room doesn't create anything. It just destroys" (119). The Battle Room destroys individuality while it creates a unitary killing machine.

Of the tools the military paradigm uses to manipulate individuals, isolation is the most powerful. Ender must be prevented from being "at home" or able to "adopt the system we have here," because as soon as Ender finds a surrogate family the military will lose their leverage on him (28). Isolation makes dependence on others impossible; Ender is forced to fall back on and develop his own resources. Graff argues defensively that "isolation is—the optimum environment for creativity. It was his ideas we wanted, not the—never mind" (162-63). Graff cuts off the admission that isolation may well bring madness and alienation, not creativity. Ender sees the machine at work and knows instinctively that "this wasn't the way the show was supposed to go. Graff was supposed to pick on him, not set him up…. They were supposed to be against each other at first, so they could become friends later" (33). Neither Ender nor Graff realizes that isolation will, simultaneously, ostracize Ender from the human race and create an unbreakable bond with an alien one. Graff panics when Ender's isolation excludes the commanders and the military. Upset with Major Imbu, Graff notes that there is nothing in the manuals "about the End of the World. We don't have any experience with it" (131). Card's irony underlines just how much the military is fixated on simulation. Here is one scenario they cannot countenance, nor can they go to Ender and display their ignorance. Panic turns to anger as Graff barks, "I don't want Ender being comfortable with the end of the world" (131). Graff's comment indicates how much he has underestimated Ender.

Truth and trust are also useful tools. Graff uses Machiavellian means to further utilitarian ends. Ender consistently swallows Graff's lies regarding Stilson and Bonzo. Doubt nags at Ender because he has equated trust and friendship with the fact that the Colonel "didn't lie." Graff answers, "I won't lie to you now, either…. My job isn't to be friends. My job is to produce the best soldiers in the world" (36). What Graff never fully explains are the enormous personal costs Ender faces. Graff understands the risk of being able "to decide the fate of Ender Wiggin," but the utilitarian in him triumphs as he lashes out at Major Anderson: "Of course I mind [the interference], you meddlesome ass. This is something to be decided by people who know what they're doing, not these frightened politicians" (107). Military belief in specialization and expertise overrides Anderson's concerns. The military organizes the pieces of events it needs to provide useful truths. Ender has internalized the commander's law: no soldier can rise above the others because "it spoils the symmetry. You must get him in line, break him down, isolate him, beat him until he gets in line with everyone else" (184).

In the service of manipulation of the individual, the military abolishes parents (40). Friends can only provide part of the reassurance a parent offers the child. Dink sees pieces of truth: "The game is everything. Win win win. It amounts to nothing" (117). The military has declared what is and is not to be important in these children's lives. Dink notes caustically, "They decided I was right for the program, but nobody ever asked if the program was right for me" (117-18). Parental authority is replaced by dependence on the self; Ender "must believe that no matter what happens, no adult will ever, ever step in to help him in any way. He must believe, to the core of his soul, that he can only do what he and the other children work out for themselves" (220).

Manipulation of truth continues when the military takes charge of the media. Free speech is an acceptable concept, as long as the true bastions of power are not attacked. Ender cannot figure out why, if "students in the Battle School had much to learn from Mazer Rackham … [everything] was concealed from view" (207). Due to military caginess (or vanity), the truth—that nobody understands Rackham's victory, except perhaps Rackham himself—does not come out until it is almost too late. Ender feels the full impact of media handling when he receives Valentine's letter but must force himself to discount it: "Even if she wrote it in her own blood, it isn't the real thing because they made her write it. She'd written before, and they didn't let any of those letters through. Those might have been real, but this was asked for, this was part of their manipulation" (165). The manipulation of Valentine by the military teaches Ender more than Dink can ever tell him about their "skills" with communication. Ender notes succinctly, "So the whole war is because we can't talk to each other" (278). This exchange between Ender and Graff recalls one of the most striking scenes in Joe Haldeman's The Forever War: "The 1143-year-long war had begun on false pretenses and only continued because the two races were unable to communicate. Once they could talk, the first question was 'Why did you start this thing?' and the answer was 'Me?'" (122). Both Card and Haldeman stress that energy would be better spent on communication than on war games. The military appears to be using force out of desperation, just as Ender does when fighting Stilson and Bonzo, but it may simply prefer the role of aggressor. Even if the latter is the correct motive, it is cloaked by the former.

The military regularly pawns off horrible responsibilities to generals in the front line. For example, when Ender asks whether the Molecular Detachment Device (M.D. Device, a.k.a. the Little Doctor) works on a planet and "Mazer's face [goes] rigid. 'Ender, the buggers never attacked a civilian population in either invasion. You decide whether it would be wise to adopt a strategy that would invite reprisals'" (320). Like those who flew the Enola Gay, Ender becomes much more than an accomplice to the military's most unconscionable acts. There is no hypocrisy from the military; Graff and Rackham believe Ender had saved them all (326). Typically, Mazer Rackham pushes both victory and genocide on Ender: "You made the hard choice, boy. All or nothing" (326). In Haldeman's The Forever War, Potter and Mandella sum up the feeling of being abandoned by the military:

"It's so dirty."

 I shrugged. "It's so army."

                                             (122)

The military paradigm withstands severe attacks without fracturing. The pressure forces Graff to comment sourly that his "eagerness to sacrifice little children in order to save mankind is wearing thin" (190). The incredible speed with which Ender becomes a commander leads Bean to guess that "the system is breaking up. No doubt about it. Either somebody at the top is going crazy, or something's gone wrong with the war, the real war, the bugger war" (245). None of these pressures divert Graff, Anderson, or Rackham from their course. With victory, the paradigm snaps back into shape. Graff recounts that after Ender's "rights" had been explained "it was simple. The exigencies of war" explain everything (336). If anything, there is increased faith in game theory—the system has worked. Anderson notes wistfully, "Now that the wars are over, it's time to play games again" (337). The military would rather not handle shades of grey. The Major notes, "It's too deep for me, Graff. Give me the game. Nice neat rules. Referees. Beginnings and ending. Winners and losers and then everybody goes home to their wives" (339). During the lifetime of Ender's tyrant brother Peter, the military paradigm continues to exist. Only later, when Ender has grown in power, does he provide an answer in the form of a religious paradigm which is constructed around the concept of the Speaker for the Dead. The Speaker is a figure who gives an account of an individual's ethical role in life and society. Before he can achieve that stage, Ender's own paradigm must be tested and purified. It is ironic that the military's most successful creation will also bring the eventual downfall of the paradigm.

War in Peaces

Lord Naoshige said, "The Way of the Samurai is in desperateness. Ten men or more cannot kill such a man. Common sense will not accomplish great things. Simply become insane and desperate.

"In the Way of the Samurai, if one uses discrimination, he will fall behind. One needs neither loyalty nor devotion, but simply to become desperate in the Way. Loyalty and devotion are of themselves within desperation."

                           —Yamamoto, Hagakure

Card endows each of the three Wiggin children with a particular strength: Peter is a conqueror, another Alexander; Valentine is an empath; and Ender is a warrior who hates fighting but must win.

Given this trinity it is not hard to separate the three and then join them into one. Ender functions as a cross between the head and the heart, with Peter as the head and Valentine as the heart. Fitting the three into a Freudian schema is possible with a bit of manipulation. The three children, all equally powerful in their own way (250), form a sort of trinity: the head (Ender), the heart (Valentine), and the unknown, unconscious self, the Id (Peter). Perhaps the three fit more easily into a Jungian pattern, with Ender as the ego, Peter as the shadow, and Valentine as Ender's anima. As Ender absorbs each of these he eventually becomes the wise old man (331). Even further afield is the possibility that the three form a religious Trinity. Rather than push any of these readings on the characters, attempting to make them into one, the author accepts the fact that Card saw fit to write three separate characters, where each listens to, and learns from, the others. It seems wiser and more useful, in terms of opening the text, to consider them as three discrete individuals, each representing a separate paradigm.

Ender's pacifism separates him from the other soldiers, the military, and his society. His apparently fatalistic attitude toward beating others is remarkably similar to what Eastern philosophy would call Bushido, or the Way of the Warrior (Samurai). Ender represents an elite, powerful warrior class which is at heart pacific but often fights in order to prevent further battles. Ender is a triple outcast. On Earth he is an "outcaste," wanting "to scream at [his father], I know I'm a Third. I know it" (15). Ender is a persona non grata who "has no rights" (17); and at the Battle School his excellence and isolation ensure his outcast status. For a long time even Ender rejects himself: "[Ender] didn't like Peter's kind, the strong against the weak, and he didn't like his own kind either, the smart against the stupid" (21). Balancing his alien status is Ender's possession of something unique for a soldier, a name. After a victory he thinks, "[I] may be short, but they know [my] name" (88). Mick, a fellow student, notices the implications right away: "Not a bad name. Ender. Finisher. Hey" (44). Finishing things is Ender's way of attempting to gain peace: "Knocking him down won the first fight. I wanted to win all the next ones, too, right then, so they'd leave me alone" (19). He wins not for the sake of winning, but so he needn't "fight every day [until] it … gets worse and worse" (8). Anderson comes to the realization that "Ender Wiggin isn't a killer. He just wins—thoroughly" (247). Ender admits ashamedly, "I didn't fight with honor … I fought to win" (243). For Ender finishing is winning. Learning to rely only on "his own head and hands" (105), Ender embodies the archetype of the individual who maintains his identity in the face of a hostile society and environment.

Card uses the Battle Room as a metaphor for life. Winning does not mean peace; it simply means one is allowed to play again. Ender catches on late that what he plays are no longer games; "It stopped being a game when they threw away the rules" (236). The events in and outside the Battle Room are "sometimes games, sometimes—not games" (260). Ender has been aged by the constant threat of annihilation: he must be able to end each game, otherwise his life is worthless. He notes desperately that losing is "'the worst that could happen. I can't lose any…. Because if I lose any'—He didn't explain himself" (216). Ender is more strategist than aggressor. While the children are "all wondering if [Stilson] was dead…. [Ender] was trying to figure out a way to forestall vengeance" (7). Discussing similar strategy, Yamamoto comments, "In the 'Notes on Martial Laws' it is written that: The phrase, 'Win first, fight later,' can be summed up in the two words 'Win beforehand.'" (153).

Ender's perpetual attempts to co-opt the system, to "use the system, and even excel" (51), are symptomatic of his lifelong obsession with preparedness. In order to work free of the commanders' power, Ender must prepare more than he ever has. Obedience is not a Manichean issue, as Dink suggests it is (111). Ender is vulnerable, as the military knows, to pressure exerted on Valentine. In his Earth school he's left alone because "he always knew the answer, even when [the teacher] thought he wasn't paying attention" (5). Preparation and risk-taking give Ender an ability to adapt to and master any given situation. The result is that he never makes the same mistake twice. Faced by the challenging Battle Room, he plunges in: "Better get started" (59). But even here he is prepared. During the shuttle flight to Battle School, Ender has observed that "Gravity could go any which way. However [he] want[s] it to go" (32). All things are a prelude to battle: "If one makes a distinction between public places and one's sleeping quarters, or between being on the battlefield and on the tatami, when the moment comes there will not be time for making amends. There is only the matter of constant awareness. If it were not for men who demonstrate valor on the tatami, one could not find them on the battlefield either" (Yamamoto 76). Ender scrutinizes his environment, noticing on the shuttle "how Graff and the other officers were watching them. Analyzing. Everything we do means something, Ender realized. Them laughing. Me not laughing" (29). Ender's mind automatically produces strategic analyses. Traded from Salamander, "Ender listed things in his mind as he undressed…. The enemy's gate is down. Use my legs as a shield…. And soldiers can sometimes make decisions that are smarter than the orders they've been given" (104). Such dispassionate analysis gives Ender the necessary information he needs to win his coming battles. The more he understands how he works, the more he sees that emotions, particularly anger, interfere with decision making. Ender instructs his class, "If you ever want to make your enemy crazy, shout that kind of stuff at them. It makes them do dumb things…. But we don't get mad" (123). Ender's ability to calculate probabilities makes him appear as canny as the adults around him. They treat him so well he wonders, "How important am I…. And like a whisper of Peter's voice inside his mind, he heard the question, How can I use this?" (268).

Part of the warrior's way is to use, not be used. Valentine's letter makes him lose hope because "he had no control over his own life. They ran everything. They made all the choices" (165). Despite his wish to deny his human fragility, Ender eventually incorporates his flaws, reassuring himself that "although he had never sought power, he had always had it. But he decided that it was power born of excellence, not manipulation" (269). He accepts that he has power over others, just as others have power over him; however, he can control a great deal of power. Ender "could see Bonzo's anger growing hot. Ender's anger was cold, and he could use it. Bonzo's anger was hot, and so it used him" (94). Ender cannot afford to lose control once. He uses a meditation trick to distract himself, and when he returns to his thoughts "the pain was gone. The tears were gone. He would not cry" (46). Things that affect him after this make "him sorrowful, but Ender did not weep. He was done with that," and using his anger "he decided he was strong enough to defeat them [all]" (188). Ender relinquishes his trust in adults, learning to show them "the lying face he presented to Mother and Father" (47). Ender's isolation goes beyond anything Graff could have dreamed of. Confronted by Petra's plea for forgiveness ("Sometimes we make mistakes"), it is the warrior in Ender who answers coldly, "And sometimes we don't" (312). Meditation, cold anger, hidden emotion, lack of forgiveness, and utter solitude are superb defenses against a deadly world as well as trademarks of a blind form of Puritanism. The Puritan vein in Ender explains why and how he manages to live without love, loyalty, and companionship. Through the bars of his cell, Ender sees that "they knew about everything and to them Val was just one more tool to use to control him, just one more trick to play" (166). The biggest mistake he can make is to show emotion and reveal a desire. As a commander, Ender does not fool himself that his soldiers are loyal to him; they are in awe of him, revere him, but he won't (perhaps with the exception of Bean) allow them to be loyal to him. Love and loyalty are vulnerabilities that neither the Samurai nor the Puritan warrior can afford.

Nor can the warrior conceive of spontaneous acts of affection. When Graff touches Ender's hand, Ender decides "Graff was creating a commander out of a little boy. No doubt Unit 17 in the course of studies included an affectionate gesture from the teacher" (270). Similarly, he cannot trust Valentine's childish affection any longer (257). Loyalty is replaced by obedience; Ender notes calmly in the face of his peers' disbelief, "I obey orders" (100). When his army "attempt[s] to start a chant of Dragon, Dragon," Ender puts a stop to it (196). Tribal rituals suggest tribal loyalty, and Ender knows that he may face any member of his army in the Battle Room one day. Loyalty, like all emotion, clouds strategy and preparedness; but obedience does not.

It is also necessary that the warrior cultivate empathy, particularly the ability to empathize with the enemy. Peter notes proleptically, "They meant you to be human, little Third, but you're really a bugger" (12). Collings notes that "Ender cannot become fully human" because "he is constantly manipulated by others" ("The Rational" 8). Ender points out to Valentine, the empath, that "every time, I've won because I could understand the way my enemy thought. From what they did…. I'm very good at that. Understanding how other people think" (260-61). Empathy allows Ender to exchange his worldview for the enemy's, see the internal vulnerabilities, and attack in precisely the right spot.

The final and most important part of the warrior's paradigm is the complete acceptance of death. Learning to fight each battle as if it were the last, the warrior must face "lots of deaths…. That was OK, games were like that, you died a lot until you got the hang of it" (67). And in getting "the hang of it," the individual becomes accustomed to dying (not an unfamiliar theme for Card)⁴. Death means a release from the battles of life and is, therefore, much desired by Ender. The combination of readiness and relaxation (193) prepares Ender's troops to "win beforehand." They are relaxed because they are ready to die. As Yamamoto states: "There is something to be learned from a rainstorm. When meeting with a sudden shower, you try not to get wet and run quickly along the road. But doing such things as passing under the eaves of houses, you still get wet. When you are resolved from the beginning, you will not be perplexed, though you still get the same soaking. This understanding extends to everything." (Yamamoto 38). Stoicism and resolution of this nature are crucial to the Puritan warrior who is self-sufficient; he is not a fighter, but he wins battles when and where he must; he is not a joiner, but he is ready to lead; he is not anxious, but he is always prepared; most of all, he hates power, but he is supremely capable of handling it. Such self-reliance gives the warrior the strength to deny love and loyalty, understand the enemy, and accept death unhesitatingly. The rugged individualist who lives his own life and relies on his neighbors to do the same is caught in a terrible vice when his community demands his help.

Thrown into the morass of deciding which is more important, the needs of the one or the needs of the many, the warrior must make a judgement while feeling "lonely, afraid, angry, untrusting" (184). Unconsciously socialized into the role of protector, the warrior accedes to communal wishes: "I'll do it because I choose to, not because you tricked me, you sly bastard" (277). In order to save Valentine, Ender must serve the whole community: for all his dislike of the military practice, Ender is "in favor of surviving" (279).⁵ The cost of survival is very high. Ender's need to finish lays Stilson out; it "didn't occur to [Ender] that Stilson didn't take a fight like this seriously, that he wasn't prepared for a truly desperate blow" (7). Yamamoto remarks, "Ten men or more cannot kill such a man…. 'One needs to become desperate in the Way'" (45). The reader is at once thrilled and disgusted that Ender carries out the fight long after it seems to be over. Ender knows that "only an animal" would strike a helpless opponent (8); he uses just such a beating as an object lesson for the others: "'You might be having some idea about ganging up on me. You could probably beat me up pretty bad. But just remember what I do to people who try to hurt me. From then on you'd be wondering when I'd get you, and how bad it would be.' He kicked Stilson in the face. Blood from his nose spattered the ground nearby. 'It wouldn't be this bad,' Ender said. 'It would be worse'" (8).

Here is an instance of "winning beforehand." It is, paradoxically, a state of rational desperation: "If I'm to walk away from here, I have to win quickly, and permanently" (229). Ender's displays of ferocity are always followed by revulsion, the empath's true remorse (35, 233). But his empathy for the enemy does not prevent the warrior from winning; he would "rather not be the unhappiest at the end" (7). His dictum when facing the worst odds follows that of the warrior Naoshige: "Win first, ask questions later" (Yamamoto 210). The limitless extent of Ender's desperation is shown when he smashes Bonzo into pulp, hitting, "again and again until the will to fight was finished. The only way to end things completely was to hurt Bonzo enough that his fear was stronger than his hate" (231). The delicate balance between terror and hatred in Bonzo is so utterly destroyed by Ender that Bonzo's survival is impossible; mind and body have been crushed. Ender's desperation, his strict adherence to the Way, to a severe code of self-government, are all passed on to his army, and the many benefit from the power of the one. A modern American warrior, Vietnam veteran Al Santoli recalled, "I never had the opportunity to directly save people's lives. My responsibility was to kill and in the process of killing to be so good at it that I indirectly saved my men's lives" (132).

Lured to Battle School with the visions of brotherhood and fantasies of "just living," Ender bows to the good of the whole and takes charge of an army (80). Once in command, Ender must internalize all his memories of friendship and love: "The kiss, the word, the peace were with him still. I am only what I remember, and Alai is my friend in memory so intense that they can't tear him out. Like Valentine, the strongest memory of all" (188). Ender's crucial exchange with Bean (who is set aside, just as Ender was) points out Ender's new attitude which demands both obedience and subordination:

"Ho, Bean."

"Ho, Ender."

Pause.

"Sir," Ender said softly.

                                                (181)

Ender's insistence on the commander's honorific puts him on an irreversible course. He must act like a strategist, deciding coolly to "let the boys learn that leniency comes from their toon leaders, and harshness from their commander—it will bind them better in the small, tight knots of this fabric" (197). The boys are no longer individuals; they are loose threads he will weave into the cloth of an army. "Now in command, he was the master soldier, and he was completely, utterly alone" (153). The power of command forces him to reappraise Peter's beliefs: "Peter had been right, always right; the power to cause pain is the only power that matters, the power to kill and destroy, because if you can't kill then you are always subject to those who can, and nothing and no one will ever save you" (232). The logical extension of Peter's selfish philosophy is genocide, since every living being poses a threat. Ender is unable to see his implicit danger.

Ender "finishes" what he starts because he is willing to break the game. He never expects an attack to work twice, so he is constantly in search of new ways to defeat the rules (307). His rebellion at the injustice of the Giant's Drink ("I hate this game. It isn't fair. It's stupid" [69]) destroyed the game as "he kicked one [glass] over, then the other," and the Giant complained "Cheater, cheater" (69). Ender can live in a world of malleable rules. His all-out suicide rush into the Battle Room, following Bonzo's order, is just a beginning, and "Word got around. From now on no one could take five or ten or fifteen seconds in the corridor to size things up. The game had changed" (116). The warrior refuses to accept an inferior position and grasps the whole mechanism, turning it to his advantage.

Ender's willingness to break the game threatens the structure of the Battle School. Fighting little battles, rather than one orchestrated war, means that Ender "was not planning to do anything that had been done before … he trained his toon leaders to use their small units effectively in achieving limited goals" (191). Ender's adoption of guerilla tactics removes all possibility of honor and courtliness from the war. Ender tells Bean that "most boys in this school think the game is important for itself, but it isn't," hinting that the object of the game is to break the game (215). The warrior acts calmly when faced with a situation where "the rules could be anything and the objective … known to [the authorities] alone. So he wouldn't play. He also refused to get angry" (286). Card underlines that there are some situations in which passivity is an act of aggression.

Preparing for the worst, Ender studied the vids and "began to see how well the buggers used seemingly random flight paths to create confusion, how they used decoys and false retreats to draw the I.F. ships into traps" (205). Graff and Anderson are made uneasy by Ender's new practice, as they should be. Cast out of Earth as a Third, cast out of his family, and cast out of the Battle School as an unbeatable enemy, Ender studies those closest to him—other aliens. Ender must "learn strategy, of course" (209) if he is to survive in a world of three races—Humans, Buggers, and Ender. The two commanders are nervous that Ender may not remain loyal to "humans," and Graff and Anderson have been relying on the threat to humanity to keep Ender motivated. Of the others, only Mazer Rackham understands: "There is no teacher but the enemy. No one but the enemy will ever tell you what the enemy is going to do. No one but the enemy will ever teach you how to destroy and conquer. Only the enemy shows you where you are weak. Only the enemy tells you where he is strong. And the only rules of the game are what you can do to him and what you can stop him from doing to you" (288). Rackham puts into words something Ender has known for a long time: If the enemy is to be beaten, he must be embraced. Rackham does not know that Ender, having lived with Peter, has already faced the situation where "from now on the enemy is more clever than you. From now on the enemy is stronger than you. From now on you are always about to lose" (289). Rackham's anger with Ender ("You cannot absorb losses!" [308]) ends when the pragmatic warrior replies, "I can't win battles if I'm so terrified of losing … that I never take any risks" (309). Rackham is now sure that Ender, prepared to die, cannot be beaten.

Bean is the catalyst for Ender's ambivalence about his life as a warrior. Graff tells Ender he was intended "to be half Peter and half Valentine" (25) and that, "as far as we can tell," the mix was successful (25). Ender knows that he must confront the conquering sadist in him. Ender unthinkingly employs the arrogant conqueror's tactics to shape his army, focusing on Bean: "'At least I have one soldier who can figure things out.' Ender could see resentment growing … the way they avoided looking at Bean. Why am I doing this … making one boy the target of all the others?" (177). In Bean Ender sees himself. He also sees Peter in himself, nagged by suspicions, Ender wonders, "what was this thing with Bean? Why had he gone for the smallest, weakest, and possibly the brightest of the boys? Why had he done to Bean what had been done to Ender by the commanders that he despised[?]" (183). Ender excuses the hurt he causes Bean because pain will work "to make [him] a better soldier…. To sharpen [his] wit" (184). But Ender repeatedly hurts people, bringing him face to face with Peter who lives for others' pain. Ender thinks he has chosen to become more like Peter in order to protect Valentine (27). His emotions tell Ender otherwise when he panics, "'I am Peter. I'm just like him…. I am not a killer,' Ender said to himself over and over. 'I am not Peter. No matter what he says, I wouldn't. I'm not. I was defending myself'" (35). This is a constant refrain as Ender faces Stilson (8), thugs in the Battle Room (126), and the myriad terrors of the Giant's Drink (70). Ender's fear is ignited by the knowledge "that he was a killer, only better at it than Peter ever was" (129). The empathy that allows him to understand others makes him a better killer. Anguished, he tells Valentine:

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

                                            (261)

Each death becomes Ender's death. His love and empathy make him into his own enemy, and then Ender—no longer Ender—kills himself, the enemy. No one can protect him from the killer in him, for "in the darkness he did not have his army" (224); in the darkness he faces the specter of a saddened Valentine (224). Confused and dismayed by the new Ender she meets, she is scared that while "Peter has mellowed, [Ender has been] made … into a killer. Two sides of the same coin, but which is which?" (261). Contact with Valentine renews Ender's self-scrutiny. A massive upheaval in Ender's paradigm signals its arrival when he admits that "he had never, except perhaps with Bean, used his power to hurt someone" (269). This first small admission of the infliction of pain opens the way for a full confrontation of that part he loathes in himself most—Peter. Other pressures squeeze Ender. Graff underestimates the complete effect the isolation will have on Ender. Ender's childlike belief that "the teachers got me into this—they can keep me safe" (an oft-repeated litany [36, 213, 225]) fails him. His faith in the state, in his parents, in all adults, and in most of his peers is ground down by the friction of the events. Neither child nor adult, Ender, without friends and separated from Valentine, becomes as alien and dangerous as the hive-queen.

Ender's paradigm cracks and finally shatters from the pressure it bears. Doubt about games puts stress along the fault line between illusion (games) and reality (killing). Doubts about the military paradigm begin to surface: "The I.F. controlled a lot of things, but it didn't control the videos and the nets…. Ender knew that lies could not last long in America. So he believed. Believed, but the seed of doubt was there" (121). Hesitancy grows from this seed of doubt. In the warrior's paradigm of swift and lethal action, hesitation is fatal. Very late in the game, Ender tries vainly to convince himself that "they need me, and if I fail there might not be any home to return to. But he did not believe it" (321). He finally asks, "Why are we fighting the buggers?" (277). The unquestioning mind of the warrior begins to falter, and with it the paradigm.

Doubt, alien to the warrior, causes Ender to take any escape, even if it is as limited as a video village in the Giant's Drink (80). The Giant's Drink is a Rosetta stone for Ender; when he despairs, "I'm trapped here … at the End of the World with no way out" (154), he is being prepared for the end of this game with the buggers.⁶ Ender's feeling of trapped despair increases when Valentine confronts him with her version of his "duty." His anguish is palpable: "I'm a killer no matter what" (265). He is terrified of calling on all the power available to him, knowing that much of it comes from the murderer in him (265). Ender's dreams put more pressure on the paradigm. He sees himself buried and "dried out … a home for buggers, like the Giant was" (317). Here two powerful images are united, that of the digger-wasp and the Giant's skeleton (the buggers understand enough about him to send him these mental pictures). Ender reflects brokenly, "I think that Bonzo died. I dreamed about it last night" (315). Pressure begins to fog his mind and the rules of the Way. Ender starts to disintegrate, trying "to remember how old he was. Eleven. How many years ago did he turn eleven? How many days?" (321). The paradigm's erosion nearly destroys Ender: "In my dreams … I'm never sure whether I'm really me" (315).

All of Ender's doubts and fears are confirmed and the paradigm smashed when he is told bluntly that it has all been "real. Not a game" (327). This unthinkable betrayal severs Ender from his warrior paradigm, his world, and his race. Ender must accept all the deaths: "I killed them all, didn't I?… All their queens … all their children, all of everything" (328). Such inconceivable slaughter destroys Ender's ability to justify his actions. The others have long since understood that "someone with that much compassion could never be the killer [the I.F.] needed" (328). The empathic Valentine in Ender has been used by the murderous Peter. Ender is amused by the ridiculous concern over a few human deaths: "In battle I killed ten billion buggers, who were as alive and wise as any man, who had not even launched a third attack against us, and no one thinks to call it a crime" (340). Having come to these realizations, Ender lets go of all he has been, talking with Alai:

Ender noticed the way he spoke in the past. I was good.

"What am I now, Alai?"

"Still good."

"At what?"

"At—anything."

                                          (333)

Ender must discover what he is good for, now that he has discarded the warrior's life. It has not occurred to the military that "this twelve-year-old boy might be as gifted at peace as he was at war" (341). Atonement and the peace of death lead Ender to build a new paradigm. He tells Valentine, his greatest human love, that he will travel and live on, not for her sake, but for the souls of his victims (346). He turns the warrior's paradigm away from the desperation of survival and toward the peace of repentance. Collings makes a similar observation: "At this point [after the bugger genocide] Ender's mission shifts from temporal salvation to spiritual enlightenment. [Ender] becomes a focus for redemption ("Rational" 8). In the alien mind he finds a true fellow and image of himself—"We are like you; the thought pressed into his mind" (353). Above all, there is a chance for peace without games: "How were we to know?" the aliens plead. "We could live with you in peace. Believe us, believe us, believe us" (354).

It is an indication of the complete disintegration of Ender's paradigm that he takes the word of his enemy before all others (354). The construction of a new paradigm is not immediate (Card uses Speaker for the Dead to outline the new paradigm). The Speaker's paradigm will be completed and life will begin only when he has found a starting place for the hive-queen. The words "atonement," "repentance," "forgiveness," and "peace" all carry religious associations. It is Ender's new paradigm of truthsayer, of Speaking for the Dead, that will eventually give him the right to continue life. Over a very long time the new paradigm will have massive societal and political consequences. Ironically the military creates the instrument of its own destruction. The shocking crisis in the warrior's paradigm spreads to the other paradigms, reforming all of them.

Card has not merely produced an excellent adventure novel, but he has written a meditation on political, social, and ethical behavior. This large book about a little boy challenges theories of militarism which many Westerners take for granted. Can the audience ever pardon the military for what they have done? How are we to view Ender? With loathing? Pity? Rather than provide facile answers to these questions, Card throws the audience back on all its differing beliefs; out of the discussion which Card initiates between "Locke" and "Demosthenes," readers must review their own paradigms. Such a review produces wildly diverse reactions to the novel, as seen at the start of this article. Card's purpose on one issue is very clear: Ender must not go on. Ender must end and be replaced by some new form of human wise enough to reject the military paradigm, no matter what it offers.

Notes

1. Elaine Radford, "Ender and Hitler: Sympathy for the Superman." Radford bases much of her argument on odd coincidences (ages, number of children in the family, marriage ages) to prove that Card is an apologist for Hitler. This "eccentric" reading [as Card was to call it] is less than convincing.

2. This article avoids an outright discussion of the many divisions between appearance and reality that plague the characters in the book. However, the schizophrenic universe Card lays out is well worthy of Heraclitus and Zeno. The divisions between Appearance and Reality, Seeming and Being, Illusion and illusion, the One and the Many are constantly examined by Card. They are paradoxes that reflect Ender's life and the "American Dream" of the individual's position as simultaneous master of, and servant in, civil society.

3. The E Pluribus Unum theme recalls the image of Hobbes's Leviathan.

4. One of Card's earliest and most difficult stories concerns a man who is "killed" repeatedly in an attempt to break his mind, similar to the function of Orwell's Room 101 in Nineteen Eighty-Four. The title, "A Thousand Deaths," is taken from the lines "the coward dies a thousand deaths, the hero dies but one," drawn from Shakespeare's Julius Caesar: "Cowards die many times before their deaths; / The valiant never taste of death but once" (2.2. 32-33). This can be found in Card's first collection of short stories, Capitol. New York: Ace Books, 1979.

5. Collings argues that although the line "And Jesus died to save all men, of course" was struck from the novel, it provides the key to the text. On the other hand, Collings quotes Card on this subject: "If anyone cares to hear about my church, I'll be glad to tell him or her, in a personal conversation. But in my stories, I am not out to support any particular institution. My moral beliefs are inseparable from my work: my theology and institutional membership have no place in it." Michael R. Collings, "Orson Scott Card: A Profile." Norwescon Programme (1987): 13.

6. Interestingly, one of the options Ender has is suicide, which he attempts in the game by picking up the snake and kissing it. This "death" awards him a new lease on life, a remarkable mixture of death/rebirth and Christian imagery.

Works Cited

Card, Orson Scott, Ender's Game. New York: Tom Doherty Associates, 1986.

――――――. "Response." Fantasy Review 102 (1987): 13-14, 49-52.

――――――. Speaker for the Dead. New York: Tom Doherty Associates, 1987.

Collings, Michael R. "Imago Christi: Christ-Figures in the Fiction of Orson Scott Card." The Leading Edge (Summer 1987): 15-24.

――――――. "Orson Scott Card: A Profile." Norwescon Programme (1987): 12-13.

――――――. "The Rational and Revelatory in the Science Fiction of Orson Scott Card." Sunstone (May 1987): 7-11.

Radford, Elaine. "Ender and Hitler: Sympathy for the Superman." Fantasy Review 102 (1987): 11-12, 48-49.

Saunders, Joe. "Tactics of Avoidance in Starship Troopers and Ender's Game." Paper delivered at Science Fiction Research Association Conference. Long Beach, California, June 1990.

Yamamoto, Tsunetomo. Hagakure: The Book of the Samurai. Trans. William Scott Wilson. New York: Avon/Discus, 1981.

XENOCIDE (1991)

Sybil S. Steinberg (review date 14 June 1991)

SOURCE: Steinberg, Sybil S. Review of Xenocide, by Orson Scott Card. Publishers Weekly 238, no. 26 (14 June 1991): 48.

Card returns to the highly popular, award-winning story of Andrew "Ender" Wiggin, the boy wonder who saved humanity from alien invasion and, guilt-ridden over his near-total destruction of the alien species, has now become a sort of traveling conscience. This third Ender novel [Xenocide ] picks up where Speaker for the Dead left off: on the planet Lusitania, Ender and the other human colonists strive to neutralize the "descolada," a possibly sentient virus that adapts itself rapidly to every attack. Meanwhile, tensions are rising between the colonists and the indigenous "pequeninos," who rely on the descolada for their survival; and the fleet sent by Starways Congress to destroy the rebellious colony closes in with its doomsday weapon. With the help of their family, their pequenino friends, and Jane (an artificial intelligence living in the galactic computer network), Ender and his sister Valentine race against time to resolve these crises. The plot is sometimes compelling, but the novel's many flaws make the book more often dull and irritating. Card's style is openly didactic, and when his characters do veer away from lengthy philosophical and scientific ruminations, they venture into contrived personality conflicts and endless self-deprecation. Some, notably Ender, Valentine and the wonderchild Wangmu, are simply too good to be true—too smart, too reasonable, too kind and generous. The reader quickly tires of such impossible perfection.

ALVIN JOURNEYMAN (1995)

Robin Deffendall (review date June 1996)

SOURCE: Deffendall, Robin. Review of Alvin Journeyman, by Orson Scott Card. School Library Journal 42, no. 6 (June 1996): 168.

YA—At last, Book IV of this terrific series. Set in an alternate history, Card's frontier America is a land where wives' tales are fact and magic—in the form of hexes, beseechings, and "knacks"—really works. Alvin has the most powerful knack of all; he is a Maker, with power over the physical world. In this installment, he ignores a prophetic warning and falls victim to the manipulations of The Unmaker, an ancient enemy that seeks anarchy. While embroiled in a legal dispute that places him in jail, Alvin draws to him the people who will assist in his quest to build the Crystal City of his vision. Alvin Journeyman is the springboard for this quest that will be played out in future volumes. Knowledge of previous titles is beneficial, so be sure to have copies available of Seventh Son, Red Prophet, and Prentice Alvin.

CHILDREN OF THE MIND (1996)

Sybil S. Steinberg (review date 24 June 1996)

SOURCE: Steinberg, Sybil S. Review of Children of the Mind, by Orson Scott Card. Publishers Weekly 243, no. 26 (24 June 1996): 49.

The first two volumes of Card's Ender saga, Ender's Game and Speaker for the Dead, each won the Hugo and Nebula awards for best novel. This adept fifth volume in the series [Children of the Mind ] (after Xenocide, 1991) continues the story of Ender Wiggin, hero, social conscience and unwitting mass murderer. Here, however, Ender, feeling the weight of his years, plays only a limited role in the desperate attempt to avert the destruction by the Starways Congress of the planet Lusitania and its three intelligent races. Foremost among those at center stage are Peter and Young Valentine, Ender's children of the mind, copies of his brother and sister whom he accidentally created on his trip Outside the universe in Xenocide. Also central is Jane, the prickly Artificial Intelligence whose unique ability to use the Outside to transcend the light-speed barrier is key to all attempts to save Ender's adopted world. Peter, Val, Jane and their companions must crisscross the galaxy to find new planets for Lusitania's refugees while trying to influence the politicians and philosophers who have the power to stop the Congress's approaching war fleet. Readers unfamiliar with earlier Ender novels may have trouble picking up some plot threads. But Card's prose is powerful here, as is his consideration of mystical and quasi-religious themes. Though billed as the final Ender novel, this story leaves enough mysteries unexplored to justify another entry; and Card fans should find that possibility, like this novel, very welcome indeed.

Cathy Chauvette (review date January 1997)

SOURCE: Chauvette, Cathy. Review of Children of the Mind, by Orson Scott Card. School Library Journal 43, no. 1 (January 1997): 139.

YA—This final installment in the series [Children of the Mind ] is also the end of Ender himself. A small child in Ender's Game (1985), a young man in Speaker for the Dead (1986), and increasingly world-weary in Xenocide (1992, all Tor), he is finally able to put down the burdens he has carried for humanity. It is this struggle to accept and resolve the problems of maturity that is at the heart of this story. All of the characters and, indeed, the worlds of the previous books, must either evolve or die. Ender, having made the longest journey, both within himself and in space and time, turns out to be the least able or willing to do so. Card writes with his usual flair. The characters give life to the thematic conflicts and the plot involves the fate of humankind, but the concerns are adult in a way that the previous books have not been. This book will not disappoint the author's adult audience; indeed, he has pulled off that most difficult of tricks, a satisfying conclusion to a great series. But YAs may find themselves at a loss to understand what all the fuss is about or dismayed by a resolution that may not meet their more idealistic needs. Buy a single copy and see how your readers respond.

STONE TABLES (1997)

Jackie Cassada (review date 15 April 1998)

SOURCE: Cassada, Jackie. Review of Stone Tables, by Orson Scott Card. Library Journal 123, no. 7 (15 April 1998): 111.

Raised as a favored son in Pharoah's court, Moses learns the harsh truth of his Israelite heritage when a rash action leads to his exile and transformation into a leader of his people [in Stone Tables ]. Written from his perspective as a practicing member of the Latter Day Saints, master storyteller Card offers a retelling of Exodus that exhibits the same profound and compassionate understanding of human nature that marks his best sf and fantasy efforts. The author's focus on the complex, fractious relationship between Moses and his siblings transforms one of the Bible's seminal stories into an examination of humanity's struggle to accept its covenant with the divine. Recommended as a solid addition to general fiction, inspirational, or fantasy collections.

FUTURE ON ICE (1998)

Cynthia J. Rieben (review date March 1999)

SOURCE: Rieben, Cynthia J. Review of Future on Ice, edited by Orson Scott Card. School Library Journal 45, no. 3 (March 1999): 229.

YA—A popular YA novelist and sci-fi writer has put together a second anthology of 18 short stories by important SF writers of the 1980s [Future on Ice ]. It is just as powerful as Future on Fire (Tor, 1991). Set in places uncannily familiar or disturbingly bizarre, the selections tell of family love, robot ambitions, language and loneliness, misguided political negotiations, and, of course, an assortment of very strange creatures. Card's notes tell in a particularly humorous and anecdotal tone about his encounters with the authors. The book is also worth having just for Card's introductory essay in which he takes an intriguing look at the way religious "ideas" can be and are often explored at some depth in this genre. Thought-provoking and illuminating reading, but best of all, entertaining.

HEARTFIRE (1998)

Sybil S. Steinberg (review date 29 June 1998)

SOURCE: Steinberg, Sybil S. Review of Heartfire, by Orson Scott Card. Publishers Weekly 245, no. 26 (29 June 1998): 40.

Fifth in Hugo and Nebula winner Card's immensely popular Tales of Alvin Maker, [Heartfire, ] this installment of alternative American history centers around two grievous social wrongs. Arthur Stuart, exiled King of England, reigns in Camelot (Charleston), capital of the slaveholding southern Crown Colonies; in New England, meanwhile, "witchers" connive to execute anyone with the "knack," the ability to connect to the powers of the universe. Just before civil war erupts, telekinetic Alvin and his historical friends, such as John James Audubon, and legendary ones, such as riverman Mike Fink, set about to abolish New England's antiwitch laws, while Alvin's wife and mentor, Margaret, uses her ability to read human souls to offer the hope of freedom to the Colonies' slaves and to heal Alvin's malevolent brother before he can kill her husband. Card's antebellum settings, dialogue and historical figures seem authentic and thoroughly researched, and, as always, he offers excellent differentiation of characters. However, Card is as occasionally windy and preachy as ever, and the plethora of lengthy philosophical and/or psychological digressions make for considerably less fictional sizzle than fizzle. Consider this a good bet for fans of the series, but not for a wider readership.

HOMEBODY (1998)

Alice Silver (review date August 1998)

SOURCE: Silver, Alice. Review of Homebody, by Orson Scott Card. School Library Journal 44, no. 8 (August 1998): 196.

YA—When Don Lark begins restoring a faded Southern mansion [in Homebody ], the house and neighborhood come alive with enchanting characters. Don himself is haunted by his tragic past—his alcoholic ex-wife killed herself and their young daughter in an automobile accident. His new neighbors, Miz Judea and Miz Evelyn, try to convince him not to repair the mansion, telling him that it is dangerous to continue the restoration. He discovers that the house is haunted by a squatter, Sylvie, who also implores him to leave it as it is. When Don discovers an old tunnel in the cellar, the mysteries of the house have an effect on all of them and Sylvie and his neighbors come together to prevent evils of the past from taking over their lives. This novel is fast-paced, magical, and full of unusual characters. The supernatural aspects are surprising, amazing readers and compelling them to continue reading to find out who survives. The author's fans will be excited by his newest book.

ENDER'S SHADOW (1999)

John Lawson (review date December 1999)

SOURCE: Lawson, John. Review of Ender's Shadow, by Orson Scott Card. School Library Journal 45, no. 12 (December 1999): 163.

YA—Card has added a parallel novel that occupies the same time frame as Ender's Game (Tor, 1985), and chronicles many of the same events. Children are being tested, the best and the brightest being placed into a school where they will be trained for the eminent and final fight to the death between humanity and the insectlike "Buggers." Ender's Shadow shifts from Ender to Bean as the protagonist and presents the events from Bean's perspective, with his own unique viewpoints. Complex three-dimensional characters, a strong story line, and vivid writing all combine to make this an exceptional work. Card revisits the themes of man's inhumanity to man, child exploitation, and the ends justifying the means. While Shadow stands alone, the two books work well together because the overlap builds on both of them, making them a rich and meaningful reading experience.

Stephanie Zvirin (review date 1 April 2000)

SOURCE: Zvirin, Stephanie. Review of Ender's Shadow, by Orson Scott Card. Booklist 96, no. 15 (1 April 2000): 1448.

Call it a parallel novel; call it a companion. Call it sf; call it adventure. No matter what it's called, this exciting novel, [Ender's Shadow, ] by the author of the very popular Ender's Game (1985), is what Card's readers have been waiting for. Bean, an orphan living on the streets, finds himself plucked from desperate straits and placed in Battle School, where his tactical skills earn him respect and a role with Ender Wiggin in battle. Wiggin's world is recognizable, but Bean's voice and character make this return to it extraordinarily fresh. This is a sure bet for Ender's Game's many teen fans, but it also stands very well alone.

SHADOW OF THE HEGEMON (2001)

Jan Tarasovic (review date June 2001)

SOURCE: Tarasovic, Jan. Review of Shadow of the Hegemon, by Orson Scott Card. School Library Journal 47, no. 6 (June 2001): 183.

Adult/High School—No wonder smart kids love the Ender saga so much: Card's young heroes are not just consistently smarter than adults, they are Masters of the Universe. [Shadow of the Hegemon, t]his sequel to Ender's Shadow (Tor, 1999) finds the wars over, with Ender in self-imposed exile off-planet. The remaining students of Battle School, now young teens, are trying to adjust to their civilian status when they are suddenly abducted—all except Bean, who escapes and goes into hiding with Sister Carlotta, the nun who raised him. Concluding that the mastermind behind the kidnapping is none other than Achilles, a homicidal megalomaniac from his past, Bean forms an uneasy alliance with Peter Wiggin, the most respected political mind in the world. With the help of coded messages from Bean's old friend Petra (now Achilles's prisoner), Bean and Peter close in on the villain, changing the paths of world powers on their way. Fans of the series will continue to overlook the implausibility of whole countries being turned over to teenagers who proclaim to know it all, but might be a bit disappointed in Peter as the good-guy candidate for ruler of the world. Achilles, a sort of evil James Bond, is the more interesting of the two, but that is typical of the moral dilemmas Card suggests to his readers. With two books still to come about Bean, it would be wise to stock up on all Card's books; enthusiasts may want to revisit the earlier stories while waiting for the next installment.

SHADOW PUPPETS (2002)

Sally Estes (review date July 2002)

SOURCE: Estes, Sally. Review of Shadow Puppets, by Orson Scott Card. Booklist 98, no. 21 (July 2002): 1796.

[Shadow Puppets, t]he third novel in Card's representation of the saga of Ender Wiggin from the vantage of Ender's strategist Bean opens with the hegemon of Earth, Ender's brother Peter, having the psychopath Achilles rescued from his Chinese captors, and Bean and Petra going into hiding. The plot threads are complex: the Chinese still rule Thailand, Burma, Vietnam, and India, where a grassroots movement works against them. Peter and his parents must flee the hegemony compound when they discover that Achilles, despite efforts to monitor him, is making progress in supplanting Peter as hegemon. Bean and Petra arrange parenthood through in vitro fertilization, which they hope will prevent transferring to the children the genetic alterations that made Bean a genius and that will kill him. Achilles steals some of the embryos, however, and Bean determines to rescue them and kill Achilles. A far-flung, pan-Islamic shadow government, of which the Chinese and Achilles are unaware, springs Bean and Petra from hiding, enlisting their assistance in preparing war against the Chinese. Angst haunts the proceedings, what with Peter sinking into depression after Achilles outsmarts him and Bean's more wrenching agony over whether he is human. Once again, Card keeps the action, danger, and intrigue levels high; maintains consistency of characterization from Ender's Shadow (1999) and Shadow of the Hegemon (2000); paves the way for further Ender-Bean developments; and leaves his readers eagerly awaiting them.

Jackie Cassada (review date August 2002)

SOURCE: Cassada, Jackie. Review of Shadow Puppets, by Orson Scott Card. Library Journal 127, no. 13 (August 2002): 152.

In the aftermath of the war against the alien insectoid Formics, the people of Earth experienced a period of unity under the benevolent rulership of the Hegemon Peter Wiggin, brother of war hero Ender Wiggin. As the fragile political peace erodes and internal wars threaten to erupt [in Shadow Puppets ], the childwarriors of the Battle School—now young adults skilled in the arts of leadership and politics—struggle to bring about a new kind of peace despite the efforts of traitors in their midst. The sequel to Ender's Shadow and Shadow of the Hegemon continues Card's visionary future history with a story of men and women thrust too early into positions of power. The author's thoughtful storytelling and compassionately moral characters make this a good addition to most sf collections.

THE CRYSTAL CITY (2003)

Peter Cannon (review date 27 October 2003)

SOURCE: Cannon, Peter. Review of The Crystal City, by Orson Scott Card. Publishers Weekly 250, no. 43 (27 October 2003): 48.

If not the best in the series, Card's latest Alvin Maker novel [The Crystal City ] (after 1998's Heartfire: Tales of Alvin Maker V ) still enchants. In the author's alternative American frontier world, Indians work the magics of nature, Africans transform themselves with trinkets and whites have knacks—magical talents that allow them to shape metal, find water, win the hearts of followers and more. Alvin, the powerful seventh son of a seventh son, can create things that cannot be destroyed. He also has more than his fair share of knacks as well as some Indian magic. Determined to stop suffering where he finds it, he dreams of building the Crystal City, which will help mankind live in peace. A large part of the appeal lies in the book's homegrown characters using their powers for ordinary purposes. A blacksmith's knack shapes axes that never dull, while a midwife can sense the health of her patients. Even as Alvin performs miracles to lead thousands of slaves out of bondage, he is filled with uncertainty about what to do with his life and self-doubt because he couldn't save his stillborn child. Alvin's fans will be relieved to know that the City is indeed begun in this volume, but those who were expecting the start of the civil war, previously billed as forthcoming, will have longer to wait.

FIRST MEETINGS: IN THE ENDERVERSE (2003)

Mara Alpert (review date January 2004)

SOURCE: Alpert, Mara. Review of First Meetings: In the Enderverse, by Orson Scott Card. School Library Journal 50, no. 1 (January 2004): 124, 128.

Gr. 6 Up—Andrew "Ender" Wiggin, a brilliant leader and tactician and destined to save Earth by destroying an entire alien civilization at the age of 12, was first introduced in Card's "Ender's Game" in Analog magazine (1977). That novella, plus three other stories (including one never before published) make up this appealing and entertaining collection of tales [First Meetings: In the Enderverse ], all dealing with first meetings that played significant roles in the life of Ender Wiggin. "The Polish Boy" introduces his extraordinary father, John Paul, who manages at the age of six to trick the Hegemony into bringing his entire family from Poland to the United States. "Teacher's Pest" is the story of how John Paul meets and romances the equally brilliant graduate student Theresa Brown. Finally, in "The Investment Counselor," a mysterious accounting program named Jane appears just when 20-year-old Andrew Wiggin needs help figuring out both his taxes and what to do with the rest of his life. All four stories use the future setting as a framework to explore various issues of religion, government control, population limits, education, and moral responsibility. Character, setting, plot—Card does them all right, and makes it look effortless. The graphic novelesque illustrations will appeal to teens. For newcomers to Ender's universe and longtime fans, this book will hit the spot and whet the appetite for more.

MAGIC STREET (2005)

Ray Olson (review date 15 April 2005)

SOURCE: Olson, Ray. Review of Magic Street, by Orson Scott Card. Booklist 101, no. 16 (15 April 2005): 1413.

One day, ultra-fastidious Byron Williams gives a grimy, bag-bedizened bum a lift in his immaculate Mercedes [in Magic Street ]. Weird? Not half, compared to what awaits Byron: his wife, Nadine, in labor—and only the bum seems to have known she was pregnant. When an abnormally small boy is born, the bum reappears, bags the newborn, and splits. Afterward, Nadine remembers nothing o f the experience. Ceese Tucker, 12, discovers the baby in the bag, resists very strange urges to destroy it, and gets single neighbor Ura Lee Smitcher to adopt. Ceese becomes informal big brother to the baby, dubbed Mack Street, who grows into a loner who walks the neighborhood day and night, cherished by all. Early on, Mack realizes that he can dream others' fondest wishes until they come true; but if he does, they turn on their wishers, so that, for example, a young swimmer who wishes she were a fish is found inside a water bed, permanently brain damaged from oxygen starvation. At 13, Mack breaches Fairyland via a house that only he can see; four years on, he becomes the focal figure in a battle of good and evil that impinges on fairy and human realms alike. Responding to a black friend's challenge to create a black hero, and inspired by Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream, Card has constructed a suspenseful fantasy thriller that, during the race to the last page, has one mulling over myth, morals, salvation, and will.

Jackie Cassada (review date 15 May 2005)

SOURCE: Cassada, Jackie. Review of Magic Street, by Orson Scott Card. Library Journal 130, no. 9 (15 May 2005): 111.

The young boy known as Mack Street lives with his adopted parents in Los Angeles, aware of his strange origins (he was found in a grocery sack) and unique and sometimes terrifying gift—the ability to dream the dreams of others. As Mack grows up [in Magic Street ], he learns how to handle his gift, or so it seems until his talent leads him to the land of Fairy. Veteran award-winning sf author Card (Ender's Game ) turns to modern fantasy in his portrayal of a young African American man caught between two worlds and burdened with a responsibility to both of them. The author's always elegant prose and storytelling talent add a dimension of grace and morality to his work, which results in a modern fable that belongs in most libraries.

SHADOW OF THE GIANT (2005)

Publishers Weekly (review date 21 February 2005)

SOURCE: Review of Shadow of the Giant, by Orson Scott Card. Publishers Weekly 252, no. 8 (21 February 2005): 162.

[Shadow of the Giant, ] Card's latest installment in his Shadow subseries (Ender's Shadow, etc.), which parallels the overarching series that began with Ender's Game (1985), does a superlative job of dramatically portraying the maturing process of child into adult. The imminent death of Bean, a superhuman 20-something Battle School graduate who suffers from uncontrolled growth due to a genetic disorder, leaves little time for Peter the Hegemon, Ender's older brother, to set up a single world government and for Bean and his wife and former classmate, Petra, to reclaim all their stolen children. When Card's focus strays from his characters into pure politics, the story loses power, but it's recharged as soon as he returns to the well-drawn interactions among Bean's Battle School classmates whose decisions will determine Earth's fate. They were trained to fight a (literally) single-minded alien enemy, but that war is over. Now, as young adults in command of human armies pitted against each other in messy conflicts with no clear solutions, Bean's old cohorts must help create a peaceful future for Earth after they're gone. Card makes the important point that there's always more than one side to every issue. Fans will marvel at how subtly he has prepared for the clever resolution.

Jackie Cassada (review date 15 April 2005)

SOURCE: Cassada, Jackie. Review of Shadow of the Giant, by Orson Scott Card. Library Journal 130, no. 7 (15 April 2005): 78.

Although the smallest student at the Battle School, Bean served Ender Wiggin faithfully until the end of the war and, with him, inherited the new world they and the other child soldiers created. Now, [in Shadow of the Giant, ] as a powerful part of Earth's ruling Hegemony, headed by Ender's brother Peter, Bean and his wife, Petra, want only to withdraw from the escalating political turmoil and take their children to the stars, where they can hope to live normal lives—but old rivals and new enemies threaten any hope of peaceful resolution. Award-winning sf author Card continues his brilliant Ender saga (e.g., Ender's Game ) with a story of love, sacrifice, and duty on the eve of global war. Highly recommended for most adult and YA sf collections.

FURTHER READING

Criticism

Card, Orson Scott. "Introduction." In Maps in a Mirror: The Short Fiction of Orson Scott Card, pp. 3-4. New York, N.Y.: Tor Books, 1990.

Card laments the trend of genre writers creating works of overt horror rather than nuanced dread.

D'Ammassa, Don. Review of Shadow of the Hegemon, by Orson Scott Card. Science Fiction Chronicle 22, no. 2 (February 2001): 42.

Evaluates the strengths and weaknesses of Shadow of the Hegemon.

Doyle, Christine. "Orson Scott Card's Ender and Bean: The Exceptional Child as Hero." Children's Literature in Education 35, no. 4 (December 2004): 301-18.

Explores the nature of the so-called "exceptional child" in Card's Ender series.

Additional coverage of Card's life and career is contained in the following sources published by Thomson Gale: Authors and Artists for Young Adults, Vols. 11, 42; Beacham's Encyclopedia of Popular Fiction: Biography and Resources, Vol. 1; Beacham's Guide to Literature for Young Adults, Vols. 5, 8; Contemporary Authors, Vol. 102; Contemporary Authors New Revision Series, Vols. 27, 47, 73, 102, 106, 133; Contemporary Literary Criticism, Vols. 44, 47, 50; Contemporary Popular Writers; DISCovering Authors Modules: Popular Fiction and Genre Authors; DISCovering Authors 3.0; Major 20th-Century Writers, Eds. 1, 2; Major 21st-Century Writers, Ed. 2005; Novels for Students, Vol. 5; Science Fiction Writers, Ed. 2; St. James Guide to Fantasy Writers; St. James Guide to Science Fiction Writers, Ed. 4; St. James Guide to Young Adult Writers; Something about the Author, Vols. 83, 127; and Supernatural Fiction Writers, Vol. 2.