ewee (29/26): Xenocide by Orson Scott Card

Under the wire (actually, I finished it last week, just been too busy to post, so I'm counting it in last year's count...).

This book resonated with me -- both good and bad. First the good.

When I was a child, I remember being captured by the idea in this book connecting OCD behavior and being godspoken (the folks who hear the voices of the gods). It's an interesting parallel, but I read it so long ago (and my memory is so faulty) that I completely gave up on ever locating the reference.

So, imagine my surprise, when early in this book, it became apparent that this was the source of that story. It was a neat bit of tucking in loose ends. (Since then, I've read Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down--an excellent and true story that explores the intersections of epilepsy and culture.)

The bad, well, the book was going along fine. And then it seems like Card hit a wall, and had to tie up all his loose ends. So he created a place (a nonplace?) where all the rules were suspended, and he could make anything he wanted happen. (Deus ex machina, anyone?) Kinda lame ending. And been reading a bit about Card, and not all of it is so nice. But quite outside of his homophobic (A variation of "don't ask, don't tell") and supposedly Democratic opinions (Real Democrats vote Republican! And are pro-war...huh?), there's some good and not-so-good (but valuable) analysis out there. Some snippets below.

From Ender and Hitler: Sympathy for the Superman (20 years later) by Elaine Radford (some is a bit inflamatory, but the author has a point):

...Anyway, if I wanted to nutshell it, I'd say that my objection to Ender's Game is that our society already focuses too much on telling the powerless to forgive and forget. We've got entire religions devoted to it."

From Creating the Innocent Killer: Ender's Game, Intention, and Morality by John Kessel (an extremely well written and well thoughtout essay):

It offers revenge without guilt. If you ever as a child felt unloved, if you ever feared that at some level you might deserve any abuse you suffered, Ender's story tells you that you do not. In your soul, you are good. You are specially gifted, and better than anyone else. Your mistreatment is the evidence of your gifts. You are morally superior. Your turn will come, and then you may severely punish others, yet remain blameless. You are the hero. ...

The problem is that the morality of that abused seventh grader is stunted. It's a good thing I didn't have access to a nuclear device. It's a good thing I didn't grow up to elaborate my fantasies of personal revenge into an all-encompassing system of ethics. The bullying I suffered, which seemed overwhelming to me then, was undeniably real, and wrong. But it did not make me the center of the universe. My sense of righteousness, one that might have justified any violence, was exaggerated beyond any reality, and no true morality could grow in me until I put it aside. I had to let go of my sense of myself as victim of a cosmic morality play, not in order to justify the abuse--I didn't deserve to be hurt--but in order to avoid acting it out. I had to learn not to suppress it and strike back.

We see the effects of displaced, righteous rage everywhere around us, written in violence and justified as moral action, even compassion. Ender gets to strike out at his enemies and still remain morally clean. Nothing is his fault. Stilson already lies defeated on the ground, yet Ender can kick him in the face until he dies, and still remain the good guy. Ender can drive bone fragments into Bonzo's brain and then kick his dying body in the crotch, yet the entire focus is on Ender's suffering. For an adolescent ridden with rage and self-pity, who feels himself abused (and what adolescent doesn't?), what's not to like about this scenario? So we all want to be Ender. As Elaine Radford has said, "We would all like to believe that our suffering has made us special--especially if it gives us a righteous reason to destroy our enemies."

But that's a lie. No one is that special; no one is that innocent. If I felt that Card's fiction truly understood this, then I would not have written this essay.