The Sci Fi Guy

I’m spending a little more time on the Orson Scott Card Ender saga than anything else (well, except maybe for Lost) because honestly his books have really influenced how I read science fiction, and how they shape my opinions of other works within the genre. The first post that I wrote about was regarding the act of speaking, which is essentially like a funeral of truth. Card covers another interesting concept in Speaker for the Dead as well, which is the ability to observe something while trying not to change it.

In Speaker, the humans of Milagre are attempting to maintain an isolated living environment while observing the pequenos (more commonly called the Piggies). What turns out though, is that there’s really no way to get around the observer effect, which is to say that you can’t observe something without interfering with the outcome or the natural state of things before you started observing it.

As can be fairly easily predicted - once humans begin to intervene on the Piggy’s way of life, the social structure and community standards that were previously in place begin to change; but unfortunately the humans don’t exactly see how they’re changing things. Not only that, but the Piggy’s themselves seem to have strange heirarchies in their society that don’t fit human norms, and so the words they use don’t quite make sense (things like “father trees”, “mother trees”, brothers and wives…) The end result is the death of not one but two of the most prominent researchers (xenobiologists, actually) on the planet, which unravels to force the remaining humans to choose between their lives and the success of their mission. In the process, Ender himself is called by Novinha to speak the death of her surrogate father, Pipo. Well - once Ender shows up, you know things get interesting!

One thing that intrigues me about a story like Speaker for the Dead, and in fact many other alien discovery stories, is what would actually happen when we find them (er… if we find them). Another author, Ken Macleod, wrote a trilogy of books about a future where we discover alien creatures that are again fundamentally different - in both form and thought - to humans (and it’s a great series of books, I’ll be sure to cover them in the coming weeks). If we were visited by aliens tomorrow, I’d suggest we put a science fiction writer out front - they’ve thought out a lot of what happens when we finally meet alien kind.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 18th, 2007 at 3:47 pm and is filed under Science Fiction Books, Orson Scott Card, Ender's Game. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.