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Orson Scott Card has become notorious of late, first for hateful attacks on gays as part of a campaign against same-sex marriage and then for a ludicrous conspiracy theory about Obama plotting to become president-for-life with a secret police force recruited from black gangbangers.
From the reactions of LGBT community, you’d get the
impression Card had hardly written anything in his life but anti-gay screeds.[i] In reaction to the Obama conspiracy
post, Dave Schilling proclaimed Card to be “officially” the most racist science
fiction author.[ii] The furor
over what turned out to be Card’s short-lived deal with DC Comics to
collaborate on an episode of Superman
may have been aggravated by fears that he would somehow sneak anti-gay
propaganda into the episode, but the protest soon expanded to call for a
boycott of the forthcoming movie of his 1985 novel Ender’s Game. Card stayed away from Comic Con, where producers of
the movie managed to talk about it without even mentioning his name – except
during the Q&A session. As for Schilling, it isn’t clear just what gives
him “official” authority to determine that Card is the most racist sf author
ever – he’s a comedian.
One thing is clear: Card is finished in the sf community.
Even if people keep buying his books, he can never show his face at a con
again. He’ll never be nominated for another Hugo or Nebula; for all I know, the
Science Fiction Writers of America might expel him. David Gerrold, the most
prominent gay sf writer, has opposed the boycott of the movie, much as he
detests Card’s rants, but his may be a minority opinion even among straights.
And Card has certainly brought it on himself; he could have opposed gay
marriage, as C.S. Lewis might if he were alive today, without characterizing
gays as sexual abusers or products of sexual abuse (Lewis opposed legal
sanctions against homosexuality, and – unlike the Religious Right today –
thought theocracy was the worst possible system of government.). And while
Cards’s rant against Obama may bring to mind a conspiracy theory popular among
liberals around 1970 – that Nixon planned to cancel the 1972 election and have
all his opponents thrown into concentration camps – it crossed the line in
racist venom as well as patent absurdity.
It’s safe to say Orson Scott Card the anti-gay racist is the
only Card most people know today; the media and Internet campaign against him
has gone viral. And that campaign has exaggerated his importance; you’d think
that he was the Prime Mover of the entire anti-gay movement, and if only he
could be stopped, it would usher in the Millennium for LGBT’s. I think the real
reason for singling him out is that he’s a soft target; his readers, and the
potential audience for the movie, are doubtless overwhelmingly straight – but chances are a good number of them
are liberal in the broad sense. Card can be hit where it hurts. What can gay
activists do about Pat Robertson – boycott The 700 Club? There’s a parallel with celebrity chef Paula Deen,
whose career went into the toilet after she was accused of racist remarks. Deen
may indeed be obnoxious, but from the furor directed at her you’d have thought
she was the Grand Dragoness of the KKK. She too was a soft target, compared to
racist political and religious leaders in safe (for them) constituencies.
When the controversy about Card erupted, I realized that I’d
somehow never gotten around to reading Ender’s Game and its sequels, although I was familiar with a
number of his other works. I’d also seen him at cons, back in the days when he
had a traveling road show called The Secular Humanist Revival Meeting, in which he poked fun at the Religious Right for
its opposition to the Theory of Evolution. I knew he was a Mormon, but in his
revival meeting he mentioned that the Mormons had abused secular power when
they had a chance, and in a series of Mormon sf stories, The Folk of
the Fringe (1989), he even seemed to be
flirting with heresy in “America,” a story in which one of the heroes has a
one-night stand with a native American woman and fathers “a boy who will become
the future leader of an America that is controlled by Native Americans.”[iii] Not, in any case, what you’d expect
from the “officially” most racist sf writer. And in Pastwatch: The
Redemption of Christopher Columbus (1996),
time travellers from an environmentally-devastated future Earth set things
right by undoing the genocide of Native Americans – introducing
genetically-engineered viruses in order to give them immunity to European
diseases, while also preaching a form of Christianity to persuade them to give
up human sacrifice.
Other novels of Card’s I’d read include Invasive
Procedures (2007), a variation on the hoary
old scenario of a Mad Scientist trying to take over the world. In Empire (2006), he decried the very sort of toxic
ideological politics he has since embraced, although in a sequel, Hidden
Empire (2009), he seemed to have accepted
Caesarism as inevitable. I’d also read some of Card’s non-fiction. In How
to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy (1990,
reissued 20 years later as The Writer’s Digest Guide to Science
Fiction & Fantasy), this rabid racist
praised Octavia Butler’s Wild Seed
(1988) as an example of the principle of “abeyance” in sf exposition –
withholding basic information from the reader until there’s good reason for the
protagonist to be thinking about it. In an introduction to the 2003 Modern
Library edition of H.G. Wells’ When the Sleeper Wakes (1899), he had intelligent things to say about Wells
and sf as a genre.
So how did we get from that Orson Scott Card to the pariah we know today? Perhaps the Mormon
hierarchy had been on his case for seeming deviation from the True Faith. Or
maybe he’s undergone one of those political conversions, where people do a 180
from liberal to conservative or vice versa. There may be a hint of this in Earth
Afire (2013, with Aaron Johnson), one of a
series of prequels to Ender’s Game
that deals with the first Formic War: here, the aliens have already invaded the
Solar System but the government and media try to cover it up in hope of
appeasing the enemy. Earth’s leaders make Neville Chamberlain seem like a war
hawk; is this really supposed to be about the Muslims, and an attack on liberals who
supposedly regard any criticism of jihadist Muslims as “islamophobic?” I don’t know, but I think I do know why
I’d put off reading Ender’s Game. I’d read the 1977 story from which it grew, and
thought it was over the top. I’d also read some of the stories in the Worthing Saga about the same time, and thought they
were pretty dumb. Maybe I thought Ender’s Game would be too.
Card himself had second thoughts about the novel, because
the version now available is a 1991 revision. I don’t know whether the changes
are substantive rather than cosmetic, but I assume the basic story is the same:
the boy Ender being trained from age six in battle simulations to prepare him
for combat against the Buggers – never realizing that he is being manipulated
every step of the way to turn him into a weapon that is supposedly the only
hope of victory. The whole point of the novel is that he is manipulated into
wiping out the enemy in what he thinks is only a simulation – and he has to
atone for his crime by finding a surviving hive queen and searching for a place
to give her refuge. It’s all very manipulative; it seems the hive queen was
actually communicating with him before he wiped out the rest of her kind, without him knowing it at the time. And he
makes himself a pariah by ensuring that the story of his xenocide is spread far
and wide
Card’s critics are legion, but they seem to have overlooked
the obvious in some regards.. There was an attack on Ender’s Game in 1987 by Elaine Radford (“Ender and Hitler:
Sympathy for the Superman”) that accused Card of basing his character
admiringly on Adolf Hitler. In 2004, with “Creating the Innocent Killer,” John
Kessel rejected that interpretation, but considered the novel a sham,
masquerading as a story of redemption when it was really feeding into the sick
fantasy of abused children: “Your mistreatment is the evidence of your
gifts. You are morally superior. Your turn will come, and then you may
severely punish others, yet remain blameless. You are the hero.”[iv]
Kessel found Card’s argument about judging characters by their “intentions”
rather than their acts to be an evasion of any foundation of morality. But while
he gave a lot of attention to Ender’s having been bullied as a child, by his
older brother Peter and then by older children at the Battle School, he seems
to have been at a loss on one issue: “One of the unaddressed questions of Ender’s
Game is how did the Wiggin family produce a
psychopath like Peter? The book gives no hint of an explanation for his
behavior; it’s possible I suppose that Card believes simply that 'some people
are just born bad' but I find no clear indications of a source for what seems
to be Peter’s motiveless evil.”[v]
Only, what jumped out at me early on was that the Wiggins
are a totally dysfunctional family. We learn next to nothing about the parents,
but it’s hard to believe they could have ever loved their children. This is
strange, as Mormons are supposed to be big on family values; and Card writes a
lot elsewhere about the importance of loving families. Yet neither in Ender’s
Game nor in Speaker for the Dead and Xenocide (both 1991) is there a single example of a family that isn’t
dysfunctional – except for that of Ender’s
younger sister Valentine, and we actually see very little of her and her husband
and children. As for other issues that concerned Radford and Kessel, Card has
Valentine compare Peter to Hitler,[vi] And the man in charge of manipulating
Ender at the Battle School admits that he has “as much chance of being a
monster as a military genius.”[vii]
Ender is and remains a very conflicted man in the first three books of the
series; he has trouble connecting with anybody (except an artificial intelligence named Jane), and can’t seem to learn basic
social skills. I can imagine that the 100,000 to 200,000 people a year who were
buying Ender’s Game when Kessel
wrote his essay might sympathize with him, but I can’t imagine them wanting to be him.
But there are other issues that seem to have been
overlooked. Card admits that he came late to reading sf; when he wrote about
psionics in The Worthing Saga, he “had no idea this was a sci-fi cliché at the
time.”[viii]
When he conceived “Ender’s Game” as a short story, he may likewise had no idea
that nasty insectoid aliens were also a cliché. (Calling them “buggers” has
been called into question; surely he must have known then that the word was an
epithet for gays; yet in the novel, Ender’s tormentors call him a bugger, and it was common long before that for
bullies to use that and other epithets of the kind for boys they considered
sissies.). By the time he wrote the novel, he was better read in sf, adopting
Ursula K. Le Guin’s “ansible” as an instantaneous message communicator. Of
course, he comes up with his own imagined “science” to explain how it works,
having to do with elementary particles called “philotes.”
Science fiction writers do this sort of thing all the time,
warp drives and wormhole jumps and the like are used only to explain how people
traverse interstellar distances. Ansibles have likewise been adopted by
Elizabeth Moon and others for their original purpose, and any explanations have
to do only with that purpose. But in Xenocide, Card turns philotes into practically a religion: it seems that
they’re not only the basis of all matter and all life but even the basis of
immortal souls. In one scene, Ender explains to the hive queen he’d rescued at
the end of Ender’s Game and found
a refuge for on Lusitania that in producing a new hive queen “this philote that
you call out of the non-place … takes on that identity and possesses the body
and becomes the self of that body—”[ix]
As if that weren’t enough, when the plot calls for a faster-than-light drive
(For some reason, nobody’s been able to devise one for 3,000 years!), a
neophyte manages to invent one on the spot. Only besides traveling to wherever,
Ender miraculously creates avatars of Peter and Valentine – not the older
Valentine, who still lives – plus a healed edition of a Miro, a stepson who had
been crippled as a young man. The Force, the Force!
This is the most cockamamie stuff I’ve ever seen from a
major sf writer. But bringing Peter back reminds me of another Peter: the Peter
Principle. We’ve seen it before in science fiction, when a writer has gone
beyond his level of competence – the most obvious example is Robert A.
Heinlein. With Stranger in a Strange Land,
he imagined himself as a guru, and his philosophizing there and in most of what
he wrote after The Moon is a Marsh Mistress (1965) can only be called embarrassing. Of course,
there had already been the galactic social Darwinism of Starship
Troopers (1959), which many find offensive;
but it still served a good story. “Novels” like The Number of the
Beast (1980) were just silly. The thing
about Card is that his encounter with the Peter Principle came a lot earlier.
I haven’t read Children of the Mind (1996) yet, but from the Wikipedia entry, it seems
to be even sillier, with Peter (actually Ender’s soul downloaded into his body
– so that’s what Peter was really
good for! Though he has somehow played a positive political role in the meantime.) and Jane (her computer mind is likewise downloaded into young
Valentine’s body) finding wedded bliss. This is apparently intended as apotheosis,
but strikes me as just the opposite – the young Peter and Valentine are
evidently treated as nothing but vessels for their “betters.” I haven’t seen
such arrogance in Card’s other novels that I’ve read; maybe he got over that
sort of thing – before he got into paranoia.
What he didn’t get over, I think, was that his imagination
is more that of sci-fi movies and TV shows than of literary genre sf. That
shows not only in the business of philotes, but in other aspects of his
invention, such as the pequeninos (piggies), the natives of the planet called
Lusitania, where there is a small human colony of dark-skinned Catholics from Brazil. They
have a bizarre life cycle, being born from trees and eventually turning back into trees – all native life forms go
through similar life cycles. This seems to be guided by a virus called the
descolada, which has also infected the human settlers. The humans take
anti-virals to keep from being similarly transformed themselves, but the virus itself keeps
mutating – and anyone leaving the planet (human, pequenino or formic) could spread
it elsewhere. That’s why the Starways Congress has sent a fleet to sterilize
the planet, even as Ender once sterilized the homeworld of the formics
(buggers). One can easily imagine James Cameron coming up with this sort of
scenario.
The exasperating thing is that there are both good and bad
things in the Ender saga. The just-the-facts eulogy Ender gives for Marcão
in Speaker for the Dead is eloquent, and
honest, if also very painful to those who hear it (He has made a career of such truth-telling eulogies, although we are never given any other examples.). But the circumstances are
hard to take. The plot has manipulated Libo, who has been studying the pequeninos, into becoming the father of two
different families, and his son Miro falls in love with his half sister Ouanda –
finding out the truth almost too late: contrived tragedy is no better than
contrived happiness. Miro’s mother Novinha had married Marcão, but never had
any children by him; after he dies, she marries Ender – but he isn’t really
much of a stepfather, for all his seeming show of concern. Meanwhile on Path, a
distant world populated by Chinese who supposedly hear the gods but in fact are
genetically engineered to have an obsessive compulsive disorder that makes them
think they do that, there is yet
another dysfunctional family that plays a role in the saga.
But most of the action is on Lusitania. For some reason, a
lot of pequeninos embrace Catholicism. That seems illogical to begin with, and
Card has fun with the idea of Father Estavão, who also goes by the pequenino name of
Quim, trying to find “a meaningful way to perform [marriage] between a fathertree
and the blind, mindless slugs who were mated with them.”[x] But a distant pequenino community comes
up with a novel heresy that descoladas are the incarnation of the Holy Ghost,
and Quim sets out to bring them back
to the True Faith. He dies at their hands, and Ender seems to take him
seriously as a martyr – although he is no more a Catholic than Card himself
(What Card does and doesn’t take seriously as religion is a continuing bizarre
element.).
Yet in a powerful scene right after that, a mob of crazed
Catholics attacks the nearest pequenino community – which had nothing whatever
to do with what happened to Quim. Yet they scream “For Quim and Christ!” and
“Die, pigs, die!”[xi] They
slaughter their alien neighbors and torch the mothertrees and fathertrees.
Grego, another of Ender’s stepsons, takes part in the pogrom although he
repents at the end, and the Bishop imposes a harsh penance afterwards, ordering
his people to tear stones from their homes and every other building in town,
leaving them shattered – while using the stones to build a new chapel, where:
“We will pray for Christ to include our terrible sin in his atonement, so we
will not have to spend eternity in hell.”[xii]
That scene is full of passion, and outrage at the kind of
crimes committed in the name of religion. And yet, in the name of religion,
Card himself has since resorted to shameful hate speech. As I said at the
outset, I can’t understand why. From his Wikipedia entry, Card’s shifting
political allegiances don’t make a lot of sense, except for the fact that he
was offended at Mitt Romney being attacked as a Mormon. And after the Supreme
Court ruled in favor of gay marriage (but before his attack on Obama), he gave
up the fight on the marriage issue, but pleaded for tolerance from its proponents – and
couldn’t seem to figure out what anyone had against him.[xiii]
One thing for sure: you can’t make this stuff up.
[i] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/02/11/dc-comics-orson-scott-card_n_2663591.html
[ii] http://www.vice.com/read/orson-scott-card-is-officially-the-most-racist-sci-fi-author
[iii] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/America_%28short_story%29
[iv] http://www4.ncsu.edu/~tenshi/Killer_000.htm
[v] Ibid.
[vi] Orson Scott
Card, Ender’s Game, TOR 1991, p. 93
[vii] Ibid., p.
41
[viii] Ibid., p.
xv
[ix] Card, Xenocide, TOR 1991, p. 313
[x] Ibid., p.
109
[xi] Ibid., p.
226
[xii] Ibid., p.
233
[xiii] http://insidemovies.ew.com/2013/07/08/enders-game-orson-scott-card-statement/
