Orson Scott Card, Empire, Ender’s Game, Authorship and Extremism
November 30th, 2006
The latest form Orson Scott Card is getting quite a bit of well deserved mockery from the liberal blogosphere and quite a bit of understandable praise form the right. The book, a story about a leftist Army taking over New York City and precipitating a civil war, is badly written right wing wish fulfillment. In appears to contain every lazy stereotype and fantasy the more deranged on the right harbor about their neighbors on the left. The fact that Instapundit loves it is telling. Brad and Roy have the best takes, as usual, but I have seen more than a few references to the rumor that Card didn’t write his best novel, Ender’s Game. I don’t buy it: Card has always had streak of militarism and “kill em all and let God sort em out” in his writing, even in Ender’s Game.
The best argument for Card not having written Ender’s Game is just how much better it is than almost anything Card has written since. In fact, Card’s technical writing ability seems to have steadily declined. Just take this awful, awful passage from his new book:
You look pissed off,” said Malich.
“Yeah,” said Cole. “The terrorists are crazy and scary, but what really pisses me off is knowing that this will make a whole bunch of European intellectuals very happy.”
“They won’t be so happy when they see where it leads. They’ve already forgotten Sarajevo and the killing fields of Flanders.”
“I bet they’re already ‘advising’ Americans that this is where our military ‘aggression’ inevitably leads, so we should take this as a sign that we need to change our policies and retreat from the world.”
“And maybe we will,” said Malich. “A lot of Americans would love to slam the doors shut and let the rest of the world go hang.”
“And if we did,” said Cole, “who would save Europe then? How long before they find out that negotiations only work if the other guy is scared of the consequences of not negotiating? Everybody hates America till they need us to liberate them.”
“You’re forgetting that nobody cares what Europeans think except a handful of American intellectuals who are every bit as anti-American as the French,” said Malich.
This is representative: chapter two is nothing more than an extended Mary Sue sequence where Card’s alter ego really sticks it to all those liberal, American hating hoity-toity professors. The whole thing almost makes me pity Card. Almost. There is nothing remotely that bad in Ender’s Game. But I don’t take that as evidence for the contention that Card didn’t write Ender’s Game In fact, the sample chapters actually work to tie Empire back to his first work.
Put aside for the moment the stale dialogue, the horrible clichés, and the fantasy about Europeans and “anti-American” liberals. This conversation happens literally a few minutes after a terrorist attack kills most members of the Executive — including the President and the Vice President — and a few moments after the two men involved in this had decided that the Army, and perhaps they themselves, were going to be framed for the attack. And yet what really makes them mad is the fact that European intellectuals will think that this proves they are right about the value of military might in the world. Real people don’t act like this. Real people would be worried about their country, about the possibility of more attacks, about the safety of their friends and family, about the possibility that they were going to be framed for the greatest terrorist attack in the country’s history, about what they should be doing right now to help put things back together again. But Card hasn’t written real people; he has written talking point spewing robots. And Empire is not a real story, it is a polemic to the joys of Might:
“Nothing,” said Reuben immediately. “They respect us now because we have a dangerous military. They adopt our culture because we’re rich. If we were poor and unarmed, they’d peel off American culture like a snake shedding its skin.”
“Yes!” said Torrent. The other students registered as much surprise as Reuben felt, though Reuben did not let it show. Torrent agreed with the soldier?
Remember that — there is nothing good or valuable in American ideals or culture. They only thing that keeps America from being ignored is the power of her military. Might is right, Might is good, Might is all. It is a similar message to at least one of the themes that runs through Ender’s Game.
As a brief synopsis of the relevant portions of Ender’s Game:(and apologies for the lack of quotes — I don’t have the text in front of me) Ender is a child the military raises to be the ultimate strategists and battlefield commander and thus lead the Earth to victory over its alien enemies. Ender accomplishes this by committing genocide on the aliens, genocide that the military has maneuvered him into committing. Before that, however, the military manipulates Ender’s life so that he needlessly kills two boys (though Ender doesn’t know they are dead until long after the fact) and that he is abused and oppressed by others in order to impress upon him the fact that only overwhelming violence is the answer. When Ender is given his first student command, Ender treats his best subordinate in the same fashion in order to get similar results. At no point is any of this played as even morally ambiguous: the torture of Ender is justified, as are the deaths, as is Ender’s own torment of his subordinate as Good and Right and Necessary. Ender is explicitly forgiven his actions several time sin the text — even the genocide, even the murder of one boy where he clearly went farther than was required to take himself out of danger — in part because he was manipulated, but in part because overwhelming, destructive violence is a necessary part of human and human/alien relations. Even the men who manipulated Ender into genocide and murder are exonerated both by the text and the courts of Earth. Might is right, Might is good, even if Might is not yet all. There are other themes in the book, and the question of genocide is dealt with with more complexity than it might seem from this summary, but the
A common thread runs through Ender’s Game and Empire, then, even if it is much more developed in Empire. And that last is the primary difference: Ender’s Game is a story; Empire is not. Ender’s Game tries to be a good story; that is, it tries to build realistic characters and have them react realistically to the situations they find themselves in. It attempts to mirror how real humans behave because it is, like all good stories, interested in telling us something about people. Empire does not have real characters because it is not interested in telling us a story. It is interested in making a political point and it will make that point, realism,. believability, character be damned. The difference between Empire and Ender’s Game are not the result of different authors. They are the results of differences in authorial intent.
Okay, so this is OSC’s entry into neo-con porn, a badly written book that amounts to nothing more than material for the 101st Keyboarders to wank off to. Why spend so much time on it, aside from the unintentionally hilarious prose? Because I believe the distance between Ender’s Game and Empire illustrates one of Dave Neiwart’s points: extremism can be mainstreamed.
In the late eighties, Orson Card was a writer with authoritarian leanings who wrote decent stories. Then came sixteen years of Rush Limbaugh and his ilk’s demonization of the left wing. That demonization only increased after 9/11, turning in some cases to explicitly eliminiationist rhetoric; Dave’s site has the details. And at the end of the time, Orson Card has morphed into full blown right wing lunatic who writes a political polemic flecked with spittle and pours bile on leftists of all stripes. Now, a person’s growth is never as simple as A caused B, and obviously I am not privy to what goes on in Card’s head. But the similarities are so striking as to be compelling. Leftists, in the world of Limbaugh and Coulter and Malkin, are vile things: anti-Military, closed-minded, smug, superior, elitist, anti-American, violent, incapable of reasoned though, practically traitors. Leftists, in Empire, are vile things: anti-Military, closed-minded, smug, superior, elitist, anti-American, violent, incapable of reasoned though, actually traitors. America, in the world of Limbaugh and Coulter and Malkin, is always right (even when it acts as an Empire it’s not really acting as an Empire) and its correct course of action is always to show the world who is boss. America, in Empire, is always right (even when it acts as an Empire it’s not really acting as an Empire) and its correct course of action is always to show the world who is boss.
In just five short chapters, Empire contains almost every vicious strawmen that people like Limbaugh have constructed to represent the Left in their minds and the minds of their followers. Ender’s Game had none that I can think of, and was only tentatively authoritarian. It is possible, of course, that Card came to his conclusions about liberals years after that Limbaugh and his imitators built strawmen that look precisely like those conclusions. But forgive me if I think that the road from Ender’s Game to Empire went through the cesspool that is the world of Limbaugh and Coulter and Malkin.
Categories: Books, Culture, Politics, Terrorism, Writing | 36 Comments
