The Sci Fi Guy

On rare occasions a book shows up in the mail from a publisher or publicist. I am always grateful when they do, because at least I know someone came to the website! But I also like to make sure that you the reader understands when something has been provided to me so that you can judge whether or not I’m being biased. Well, lo and behold, one publicist discovered Scifi-Guy.com and noted that I’m an Orson Scott Card fan (which is definitely true) and she was kind enough to send me a copy of The Authorized Ender Companion.

When it arrived, I was first struck by the sheer size of the book! At 429 pages, this is about twice as long as the original Ender’s Game novel itself. But, it proved to be well worth the depth. There is a bounty of information contained within this companion, and it provides an amazing review of all things Ender.

The core of the book itself is an alphabetical listing of the characters, settings, features, and basically any nouns that exist within the Ender-sphere, noted as the “Encyclopedia”. It ranges from ansible to Xenocide, from Jane to Ender himself, and allows a singular place to reference virtually anything related to any of the books that have been written to date.

In addition to the encyclopedia, there are also some other sections of the book, including a breakdown of the technology Card uses thoughout his novels, as well as a short essay regarding the creation (or, ahem, lack thereof) of an Ender’s Game movie. All told, even for this hard-core Ender aficionado, there’s a lot to consume. It’s an amazing compilation of work, and it’s a tribute to Card’s imagination that a book like this even can exist, let alone fill as much shelf space as this one does.

However, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention my ultimate reaction to the book. It’s a strange reaction, but bear with me. It shouldn’t exist.

This isn’t to say that the material contained within isn’t valuable – far from it. Author Jake Black has done a wonderful job of summarizing every detail and character imaginable from this universe. What I mean by that statement is that the book itself is ultimately the wrong format for this material. Perhaps it’s the “wiki” in me, but an alphabetized encyclopedia seems like a step in the wrong direction. However, the flip-side of the coin is obvious; there’s no medium available as of yet for a book like this to exist, profitably but without annoying advertising and sponsorships, on the Internet today. When I say that the “wiki” in me is frustrated, what I mean is that just like the Ender stories and characters, everything is interconnected. In a flat alphabetical structure, the material suffers because those interconnections cannot be revealed; or at least struggle to be maintained. And the ultimate curse befalls this format as well: If Card writes a new book, this collection of resources that Black has assembled becomes less relevant, or even potentially wrong. What if Card suddenly decides that the buggers are actually an off-shoot of another species which is now invading populated space, but operates on a whole different set of rules than before. I’m not saying that these are likely, but the same value placed in print (the fact that its a fixed medium) upsets the value in a book like this (which would fit much nicer in a dynamic environment such as the web).

So here’s the final word. This is a valuable book in and of itself. Jake Black has done a great job condensing the Ender-verse in to merely a few hundred pages (considering the thousands upon thousands that Card has crafted, this is hardly a small feat). If you are a fan of the Ender novels, or the Bean novels, or the various short stories also circulating about Ender and this universe OSC has generated, you may find great value in having this companion nearby. There are references to far-flung characters and clarifications of complex character developments that took several books to complete, and these resources are remarkably well written and complete. That all being said, I still wish it were a website, or somehow dynamic in nature. I know authors cannot pay mortgages with website traffic (sometimes), and it fits outside of the model traditional publishing has been built upon for a hundred and fifty years… But a SciFi-Guy can wish, can’t he?

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.

Ask anyone that knows my reading preferences, and one author will probably be at the top of the list: Orson Scott Card. The first Card book that I read, like most people, was the thrilling Ender’s Game. That novel places a young boy on a battle school in orbit, to train to fight the most terrifying opponent mankind has ever faced – the dreaded “Buggers”.

Speaker for the Dead is Card’s original sequel to Ender’s Game. I say “original”, because Card has incredibly crafted other tangential storylines to Ender’s Game, which include a companion novel, Ender’s Shadow, which features the story of Ender’s Game told from Bean’s perspective (Bean is one of Ender’s classmates at the Battle School). Well, anyways, getting back on track, I wanted to talk about Speaker, right?

Card does a great job of transforming the story of Ender from a boy in a battle school on not-too-far-in-the-future Earth, all the way to several thousand years in the future of humanity. Ender himself isn’t even specially featured in the first few chapters, as the story of Milagre is told. Milagre is a Portuguese (well, Brazilian) colony world that features a living, sentient species known as the “Piggies”. This homeworld, however, also features a terrible plague and a terrible secret that haunts another of our main characters, the young xenobiologist, Novinha.

Ender is called to Milagre to speak a death, and in doing so unravels the truth about so many things on this small world. The act of speaking a death itself is most of what I want to talk about. In Card’s future universe, Ender has righted many of his past doings by writing the story of the true nature of the ominous “Buggers”, which is titled The Hive Queen. However, over the course of several thousand years, the fact that Ender is The Speaker and The Speaker is Ender has been separated. The Speaker is good – Ender himself is seen (even within his own writing) as the Xenocide – the devestation of the Buggers and the worst of mankind.

The concept of speaking, however, is a great idea for someone like myself. The idea is that the speaker reveals as much as he or she can to the audience – to the world. This truth is revealed from a 3rd persons’ perspective, in this case a Speaker – who can unravel a person’s life and identify more than what they did, but why they did it. I was unfortunately recently at a memorial service for a loved one that passed, and I found traces of a speaking in the memorial given. There were events, there was life, there were actions. There was simple truth about what motivated the life of the deceased, and an order for how each previous action propelled the next one.

I know, at this stage in my life, were I to pass I would eagerly welcome a speaker. For the time being – I’ll be content to read about them.