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March 18, 2005

Chasing Shadows, Part 1

In which I geek out in re: Orson Scott Card's four-volume addendum to the Ender Wiggin saga

From a character development perspective, it's quite a challenge to top Ender Wiggin. In four volumes (Ender's Game, Speaker for the Dead, Xenocide, and Children of the Mind), Orson Scott Card took the Ender character from a shy child who becomes the leader of all the world's armies into a quasi-Messiah who unites all intelligent life in the universe. Then, in an additional four volumes, he returned to the same fictional world and retold the same story (at least the first part), only from the perspective of the Bean character, an important (but certainly not central) character from Ender's Game. Certainly an ambitious project, and one which -- mercifully -- can confidently be labeled a success.

I plowed through the latest (and possibly last?) installment of the Ender Wiggin saga last week; that is, I read the fourth book of the second set (the ones about Bean), called Shadow of the Giant. I knew I'd be writing about this book before I read it (and even tipped my hand a bit in the Hunter S. Thompson posting from a few weeks ago). What I didn't realize was that an intellectually honest treatment thereof (and I almost wrote that with a straight face!) would require more than a single posting. So. Here's how we're going to do this. Part 1 (NB: you are HERE) is going to try to get its head around the context and ambitions of the Ender series. Part 2 will go into the specifics of the latest book and give you some juice on where it fits in re: the other seven Ender books.

Check.

Assuming the (ahem) not everyone has read these books, let's catch up with the story of the film so far. Ender's Game was originally published as a short story in 1977, before being fleshed out to a full-length novel in 1985. The book was a huge hit with the sci-fi community (it won the two big sci-fi awards) and soon began to enjoy some crossover success with kids. I mean, for the sort of kid who's predisposed to like sci-fi in the first place, Ender's Game is a total layup: smart kid who gets picked on at school gets whisked away to a space to attend "Battle School" where he plays high-tech video games so well that he is chosen to save the world from scary aliens. It's like Harry Potter, only darker and more interesting (imagine if all the other kids hated Harry; also if Harry murdered classmates with his bare hands). Three more Ender books followed, but were dramatically different in tone and theme from the first: they detailed Ender Wiggin's adult exploits as a quasi-religious shaman, and his redemption for the sin of saving the world in the first book. (SPOILER ALERT!!! It turns out that in the course of "saving the world" he managed to murder all the aliens, who apparently weren't so bad after all.) Also, a computer program falls in love with him.

By the fourth book, the general story had wandered pretty far from Ender's Game (instead of cool zero-g games of laser tag, Ender was having imaginary conversations with trees and insect larvae -- no, I'm not kidding) and the series felt pretty dead. Ender wasn't so cool anymore (a real wet blanket, you know) and I was feeling borderline stung by the repeated disappointments of Xenocide and Children of the Mind. (The obsessive-compulsive-disorder planet? Seriously. Not that sweet.) Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, well, we won't be fooled again. But no -- in a moment of narrative (and marketing) genius, Orson Scott Card decided to start over. That is, he took the story back to Battle School and told the story of Ender's Game from another character's perspective. Thus, we get the tale of Bean, the one kid in Battle School who most reminded Ender of himself. And if the Ender character had been neutered by books 2, 3, and 4, the first Bean book, Ender's Shadow completely mummified him. In the retelling, it turns out that Ender actually wasn't that cool after all. In fact, there were all sorts of complex machinations going on behind the scenes at Battle School as Ender -- oblivious to it all -- quietly goes about his business of saving the world.

From a narrative perspective, this could have been a complete debacle: you're messing with your most popular character ever, AND you're recycling a story. Although we didn't know all the details in re: the travails of Bean, we generally knew where the story was going. And yet, he pulls it off -- Ender's Shadow completely works, mostly because Orson Scott Card came up with a great backstory for Bean. And from there, he took the story in a completely different direction. At the end of Ender's Game, we get a couple paragraphs telling us that after Ender saved the world and flew off into the sunset, his older brother (evil bully Peter Wiggin) united the world under one government. The next three Bean books explain how all that (in re: those paragraphs and the uniting the world thing) went down. And it's quite a story.

Essentially, choosing to tell the Bean and Peter Wiggin story allows Orson Scott Card to imagine the next 100 years of geopolitics. Here he seems to have done his homework. In this imagined not-too-distant future, the US has gone isolationist, Europe has lost whatever influence it now maintains, and the main struggle for power takes place in Asia between China, India and a large politically unified Muslim state. (Eerily enough, his assumptions seem very much in line with this CIA report.) This all seems a pretty safe bet, though he glosses over some bigger issues which will likely impact geopolitics, namely the economics of it all and also the effects of global climate change. But I'm quibbling over details -- for the most part, it's a pretty persuasive view of the future.

In fact, what's most remarkable is that there isn't a glut of entertainment products (books, movies, games) about this scenario already. Where is the Red Storm Rising for the 21st century? Sure, all the indicators suggest that conventional wars (with tanks, plans, soldiers, etc) between nations are a little passe, but that view is probably a little too US-focused. That is, I do think it's safe to assume that the United States won't be fighting very many tank and naval battles in the coming years -- you'd have to be completely bonkers to start a war with the US. But what about China fighting Russia? India fighting Pakistan? A unified Muslim state tussling with China's western frontier? There should be TONS of books/ movies/ games about this. TONS.

What makes these stories of world wars yet to come really hum (and offers Orson Scott Card an extremely valuable narrative device) is that he can tell the story of warring nations through the interactions of a roster of familiar characters. That is, all the kids who helped Ender against the Buggers are now leading the armies of the world's great powers. Thus, Orson Scott Card gets to distill the mind-bending complexity of a global war into a few highly visible characters, and it actually makes sense. I mean, if these kids DID save the world from aliens, then they would end up leading armies on Earth. Instead of China versus the Muslim State versus Russia, it's Hot Soup versus Alai versus Vlad, with Bean, Petra and others in the mix. And with that structure, the whole story just cruises along.

At the same time that I can't help but gush over the ambitions of the story Orson Scott Card has chosen to tell, I don't think his vision is perfect. I think he's a bit too down on Islam (that is, he imagines that Islam intrinsically dooms Islamist states to be ugly, oppressive aggressors) and doesn't do enough to fill in some of the gaps in the world he's created (that is, he doesn't ever really engage in a discussion of what the future world's economy looks like). All that said, given where the Ender books stood following Children of the Mind, the Bean books are a HUGE second-half comeback. Huge. And, if anything, I want to consume more stories about the future of geopolitics: there's a lot of juicy scenarios that should make GREAT fodder for imaginative people. (Just think: you can write and digitally animate wars between China and India -- holy crap!)

As for the details of the actual story, what worked, what didn't, and my thoughts on where it fits in the overall rankings of all the Ender books, I'm squirreling that all away for Part 2. Stay tuned.

Posted by thatkid at March 18, 2005 2:53 PM under Stuff To Buy

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