Heroes with Static Faces

I was hoping to get back on track with blogging last week after being incommunicado for most of the beginning of July, but then my computer stopped working on Wednesday. Its hard drive crashed, and my laptop was in the shop for the rest of the week. I'm trying to distract myself from thinking about all the files I lost, so I'll continue today with an entry about Orson Scott Card''s Ender's Game, as promised.

I wrote a lot in my last entry about how the most successful science fiction authors, in my opinion, don't forget that their characters are human, and therefore as vastly complex as the shiny chrome machines and futuristic societies that receive the focus of traditional sci-fi. To really capture my attention, a novel-whether sci-fi or fantasy or western or "realistic"- must make me care about its characters. Ender's Game, sadly, falls short of that mark for me, but I'm not sure it was for lack of trying.

The novel is told from a slightly modified third person limited point of view; that is, the narrator is outside of the story, but can tell the thoughts of one character (Ender Wiggin, in this case), for the most part. Occasionally, the narration floats into the inner thoughts of other characters, or reports on conversations and events in which the main character does not take part. I'm not sure why Card chose to float around like this; the things that happen outside of Ender's experience don't seem particularly vital to the telling of his story; it may have been more effective to settle into a traditional third person limited point of view, or even the first person, with Ender telling his own story. As it's written, a lot of potential suspense in the story is left out because we know what's being done to Ender long before he figures it out.

When Ender does finally reach certain conclusions, it's anticlimactic and not surprising in the least, not only because we've seen it coming from every other angle, but because Ender's character has hardly changed at all over the course of the novel. The Ender who says the following words to his sister on page 238 is little different (though perhaps slightly more self-aware) from the Ender who defeats an elementary school bully 231 pages earlier:

I've been thinking about myself...Trying to understand why I hate myself so badly...It took me a long time to realize that I did. Do. And it came down to this: 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...And then, in that very moment when I love them...I destroy them.

Ender's basic story, the understand-defeat-love-destroy cycle he refers to, repeats itself at least four times over the course of the plot, and it's an engaging dilemma- not unlike Gene's love/hate/ultimately-destructive relationship with Finny in A Separate Peace- but after the second time it gets rather predictable. It's boring when the protagonist always wins; and it's irritating when he beats himself up for how he wins, but never thinks to change the way he deals with a challenge.

That said, the final chapter, "Speaker for the Dead," with its tonal shift, takes a step toward redeeming the novel for me (though whether I would have made it to the final chapter if I didn't feel like I had to is up for debate). It remains to be see whether it piqued my curiosity enough to seek out the book's sequels.

Despite some shortcomings, I think Ender's Game deserves its place in the speculative fiction canon, if not for its literary merits then for its legions of (often superior) imitators. With its focus on a gifted child hero destined to save the universe, it's hard to read the book's war game scenes without recalling the quidditch matches of J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series, or even the pod race of Star Wars Episode I (to be fair, all of the above owe a great debt to Joseph Campbell's monomyth, as defined in his book The Hero with a Thousand Faces).

Additionally, as so-called "hard science fiction," Ender's Game does its job: Card's vision of a future in which population restriction laws are strictly enforced (Ender shouldn't technically exist, as he is a third child in a society where two is the limit) and the human race is reeling from two wars with an alien enemy gives readers a speculative lens with which to view the present in a new light. Over the course of the novel, Card addresses ethical dilemmas as diverse as overpopulation, competitive education, and preemptive war; and while to my mind he rarely arrives at satisfactory conclusions (Ender's tactical victories could serve as a defense treatise for any number of offensive wars, and according to Wikipedia the novel has been used as a textbook at the Marine Corps University in Quantico, Virginia), I appreciate his willingness to examine them.

Next up: Monster, by Walter Dean Myers.