Fear Thou Not; For I Am With Thee

Wow. What a cheesy piece on Alien encounter. After Ender's Game, I expected something more compelling than this. As story went on, plot became more and more predictable. Card clearly wanted to make text more scientifique, but I really did not enjoy his means on going about doing that. Here are my observations on the Speaker for the Dead:

1. Too much Discovery Channel: Who knew reproduction/ mating patterns / skills could tell us so much...and yet nothing? I don't know why Card had to pull all Discovery Channel on his readers. Perhaps he was trying to show how we live in a pluriverse and there are different meanings attached to extra-marital sex, or sex without marriage in Piggies and in humans realms. I still don't think having almost 200 pages dedicated to implicit/explicit understandings/observations of sex and pleasure-giving among piggies. I agree with Jane "Twisted and perverse are the ways of the human mind" (141).

2. Too Little Spiritual Conversation: I didn't expect Ender to give in to church this easily. He did not engage in any philosophical conversations- it never happened. Though Jane figures out that he is playing double, I wished there were more religious conversation. I really hoped Ender questioned the Children of Mind Ministers, at least to help the readers understand why they are doing what they are doing and why they live in that particular way. I felt the conversation they had about celibracy was too short, given the overall emphasis on sex throughout the book.

3. Infusion of Social / Natural Science: This aspect of the book looked promising. Xenobiologists sounded more like anthropologists, who are considered social scientists rather than actual scientists. In real life, social and natural scientists are part of two different realms. Scientists dismiss social science when it uses qualitative method with less emphasis on empirical evidence. Levels of accuracy in a social scientists work always comes into question, for scientists rely on duplicability of experiment results to make them more reliable. In Lusitania the participant observation of Xenobiologists is leading science. Another good observation was made by a fellow blogger, Morgan, who mentions in her post how the "xenologers were so absorbed in their own culture that even venturing into other ideas (like realizing that the trees were actually alive, and not totemic) was almost beyond their comprehension."

4. What is love? Despite his brilliance, I feel that Ender really needs to read some Aristotle. Where is Moderation?! Ender limits his feelings to love and hatred -there is no mention of liking someone- moderte love! Truth is, Ender's attitude sounds rather like love conqeers 'em all. Talk about cheese. Besides, Card goes as far as to quote Sheakespeare at some point...doesn't he know that Sheakespeare believes that uncontrolled love leads to madness? Is Ender really sane?

5. Emphaty and Lack of Fear: One big assumption near the end of the book is the assumption of perfect information; the assumption that we know all we need to know about the Piggies. Ender comes off as a know-it-all, because he communicates! He takes emphaty to such an extreme whch eliminates the fear of the other. Even though Card grasps the importance of language and actual communication, he does not grasp the importance of Culture of communication, and how much information is being utilized outside of the verbal communication. Though in the story this aspect is totally discarded, in real life we have high-context cultures and low-context cultures and the amount of information exchange is not necessarily limited to verbal exchange.

6. Domestic Violence: This is the first piece of sci-fi that I came across, which was this open about domestic violence. Regardless of education level, level of wealth of their husbands, women are subject to violence in their homes. It was interesting to find Ender justifying domestic violence comitted by Cao during his speech. Cao just wanted to be loved -Yeah, so does everybody else. Let's beat each other to death until we get some love. Ender's speech reminded me of Machiavelli's depiction of Fortuna. Going off with same approach in justification we can say that Machiavelli secretly wanted to be conquered by fortuna -not the other way round.


I didn't mean to be this critical but it happened. Yet I know Ender would have understood, and would have loved me regardless.