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"Opinions are like asses - everyone's got one. Truth is like the sun - you can't hold it in your hand."
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A Special COLUMN...
1. "OK, boys, wipe'em out!"
When I was a kid in Sweden, going through my first frenzied phase of science-fiction reading, I found in the local library the anthology DEN FANTASTISKA ROMANEN 3 (Gummessons Grafiska 1973, ed. Sam J. Lundwall). It was a collection of science fiction from the Victorian era (19th to early 20th century).
In that collection I read a short story: "The Unparalleled Invasion" (1910) by Jack London. It dealt with an imagined total war between the West and China. Jack London cooly argues for the elimination of the Yellow Peril before they out-breed "us":
His tale ends with the victorious West systematically annihilating the entire Chinese race through germ warfare. Not one Chinese is left living:
The story is written in a detached tone - as if the whole hideous proposal was a "rational," inevitable thing. Was it intended as a sick joke, like Swift's "A Modest Proposal"? Nothing indicates so.
A turn-of-the-century cartoon illustrated the story in the anthology: a Greek-looking knight in armor spears a Chinese dragon who has a Mandarin's face and hands. The caption read, in the lettering typical of the time: "WHAT WE OUGHT TO BE DOING IN CHINA." (For other examples of "Kill the Yellow Hordes" fiction, refer to I.C. Clarke's essay.)
Let us talk about the Genocide Fantasy in Science Fiction and Fantasy. Why do people write stories where a whole "race" or "people" (or "species" when it comes to aliens) is wiped out? Why do people read them? What's going on? And why hasn't it stopped?
In M.P.Shiel's novel The Purple Cloud (1901, reprint of the first edition now available from Tartarus Press), all of humanity but two people (a man and a woman) are killed off by a mysterious poison cloud. This might be called the "archetypal" Genocide Fantasy: "I wish everybody else would just go away... except maybe one woman for me, so it wouldn't get TOO lonely." In this primal scenario, the killing itself is done away with quickly and bloodlessly; the emphasis is on the solitude that follows, of having the world all to oneself.
A recent example of this dream is the British 1970s TV series The Survivors, where a flu virus wipes out most of humanity. The series conveniently skips over the carnage and concentrates on life among the few survivors.
It's perhaps unnecessary to point out how demented this scenario is: that everybody in the world except the hero die. At least M.P. Shiel has the good sense to have a woman in his story. The prime "hidden urge" of the scenario is narcissism: "I wish that only I existed." This is an early example, but not the last one. Conan Doyle almost does the same scenario in his novel The Poison Belt (1913), but revives humanity at the end (they were just "asleep").
But science fiction didn't stop there. The idea evolved. It became more detailed, and targeted specific groups: peoples, aliens. And while it did so, large-scale organized genocide evolved in the real world: the British annihilation of the Tasmanians, the Turkish genocide of Kurds, and so on until World War II and onward...
Late 19th- to early 20th-century Europe and North America was full of racist thinking. Adolf Hitler was just one voice of many during that time, who complained about the supposed "lower races" crowding out and polluting the "Aryans," i.e. Anglo-Saxon whites. Scientists gave phony credibility to racism by claiming that Negroes and Asians had smaller brains than Europeans. Colonialism and exploitation of the Third World was justified as the "white man's burden"... a bit like MAD Magazine's headline in the parody "Passionate GUN LOVE - The Magazine for the Devoted Gun Worshipper: "RABBITS ENJOY BEING SHOT!" (Siegel/Davis, "Passionate Gun Love", Mad #131, 1970.)
Early films such as The Birth of a Nation (1915) and The Mask of Fu Manchu (1932) displayed racist caricatures of Blacks and Orientals that would be illegal today. But when humans are likened to beasts (or bugs), the thought of "mercy killings" is never far way; this is a general trend from the 19th century to Rwanda in the 1990s.
When did the idea of genocide as a Darwinist "survival strategy" first gain acceptance? Hard to say. Lynchings and pogroms had existed long before the organized mass slaughters of the 20th century. In fantastic literature, the idea of killing off populations had circulated in written form since at least the late 1800s.
What is truly bizarre is the fact that the theme survived World War II and the Holocaust. Why? While the origins of the idea are easily located in the racial theories and nationalism of the 19th century, the survival of this dark dream in fantastic literature cannot be explained by history and politics alone. The motives must be more personal to the writer/reader than simplistic, conscious racism.
And neither can the writers alone be blamed, least of all in an insular community like SF fandom. Popular stories lead to sequels and imitations. As we will see, the most popular and imitated SF stories of the 20th century are the ones of Xenocide.
The Lord of the Rings(1954-55) has to be included in this context, if only because of its huge, lasting influence and popularity. I won't dwell on J.R.R.Tolkien's conservatism; it's been done to death. And it is irrevelant to this essay: as we shall see, conservatives and liberals alike can write genocide fantasies.
The Lord of the Rings (LOTR)... we enter a "Secondary World" where women hardly exist - except as chaste objects with no active intellects or pesky desires. This all-male world of blissful middle-class peace is threatened by filthy foreign, miscegenated hordes from the East (Orcs, Trolls, Nazguls, Uruk-Hai etc.), who wish to destroy the peaceful West. Allied with the Eastern Hordes are human, but unmistakably non-European hordes of "Southern" peoples.
While manly Aryan "men of the West" slaughter the filthy Eastern and Southern hordes in great numbers on the battlefield, a little barefoot "boy" (i.e. Hobbit) must struggle to destroy the source of the evil power, before it can corrupt him.
The evil power that controls this horde resides in a single Ring.
Now, the Ring in Tolkien's story has multiple meanings, like all fictional "Objects of Power" do. For example it represents industrialism, capitalism and technology, being a manufactured object which induces greed and ambition. Indeed, it is a mass-produced object; the opening verse clearly states so. ("Nine rings to control them," and so on...)
But the Ring also has biological connotations.
Explain to me where the heroes' parents are. Were the heroes of LOTR ever born? Their parents are never mentioned, do not appear in pictures or lockets... and no procreation means no sex. A world without sex is fundamentally absurd, so the story will feature symbols of what is repressed, whether the writer/reader likes it or not.
I want to make the case that the Ring, on the deepest level, is a vagina symbol. You put the wedding ring on your bride's finger, sealing the union of souls and bodies in marriage. You "give someone the finger" and say "f*** you!" You make the age-old symbolic gesture of a circle with one hand, and put the other hand's index-finger through it.
Frodo is forever warned not to put his finger through the Ring. And his desire to do so increases throughout the story. Only the love of his best (male) friend Sam Gamgee stands in the way. What we have here is a sublimated fear of sex with women, in an implicitly homoerotic all-male environment.
So what has all this symbolism got to do with genocide?
Recall that the Eastern hordes in LOTR are described as inherently evil. There is no mistaking them for Westerners: the Orcs, Trolls, Nazguls etc. all look repulsive. Some of them are the result of "forbidden" interbreeding between Elves and the "lower races"; clearly, miscegenation is evil in this universe. All the heroes are "pure-bred" white Anglo-Saxons. And the evil foreign miscegenated hordes are (through the Ring) under the spell of the Eye of Sauron and the Ring.
The deepest layer of metaphor in LOTR - the "eye of the storm" so to speak - is a massive denial and phobia of the female sex, which returns in a monstrously distorted form, yet subtly recognizable. The "hobbits" - childlike in size, behavior and status - are compelled to destroy monstrous symbols of what the writer fears and cannot come to terms with. Namely, desire for the female sex, fear of foreigners, and the threat of change.
Note the logic with which these themes connect: Change means growing older, which means entering puberty, which must mean sex, which means reproduction, and so on... all the things which Frodo must fight, and which are either repressed or demonized.
This conflict is then "resolved" with the utter annihilation of the Ring, the Eye and all those foreign hordes. And yet, a sense of loss and unease lingers on in the novel's extended finale. If the Female and the Foreign really were utterly destroyed, what then? The end of all life? No, such a contemplation must be too horrible. Therefore the fans craved - and they grew up to write - endless series of ever more regressive Tolkien imitations. For if the Quest (i.e. those endless sagas) came to an end, the reader would have to seriously face up to the facts of life which Frodo failed to cope with.
In the land of Generic Fantasy, derived from its source LOTR, there will always be more Objects of Power to destroy or possess, and more Foreign Hordes to slaughter. The genre has even spawned board games and computer games. The true terror in Generic Fantasy is to for a moment stop the incessant fighting and questing, and ask oneself: "What am I really afraid of? What is it I'm trying not to think about?"
An editor has argued with me that LOTR is not a "genocide/xenocide" fantasy in the strict sense: the story does not dwell on the actual extermination of all Orcs, Trolls, Nazguls etc.
So I re-read LOTR's climactic chapters "Mount Doom" and "The Field of Cormallen" thoroughly, and saw how they could be misread: the climax is deliberately written as a diversionary maneuver. Something truly appalling happens in those few pages, but so briefly that the reader might easily miss it. Because Tolkien (who experienced World War I, and knew what slaughter really means) flinches at the last minute.
He sets up the entire ideological and racial justifying apparatus for wiping out the "inhuman" enemy, and offers all the military and natural resources for doing so (including the cataclysmic climax, where Mount Doom blows up and floods the whole region with fire, smoke and lava). We know that the human warrior-heroes are exceptionally skilled at killing the hordes of Orcs, Trolls, Nazguls etc. - this is mostly what they do in the latter part of the book. All is in place... and then Tolkien loses his nerve.
The gigantic Foreign Hordes are destined to die, but Tolkien doesn't want to spell it out. So he does a disappearing trick instead. The book's climax, the destruction of Mount Doom, is the greatest vanishing act ever written in fiction. While our attention is diverted by the confusion, smoke and fire of the collapsing mountain, the evil hordes "disappear":
Note the striking insect analogy: the "hordes" of Mordor are "mindless" insects to be stomped on. (This theme appears again in Starship Troopers and Ender's Game - more on that below.) And what happens to all the "human" enemies, with suggestive names like "Harad, Easterling and Southron"?
We are never told what is done to all the countless, insect-like hordes. Did any enemies survive that "last stand of desperate battle"? In the next page passage we read - briefly - how Gandalf and an ally
In your heart, you know what is being implied and covered up with all that smoke and fire. When Mount Doom goes, the alien hordes - who apparently fled straight in the direction of the exploding volcano - go the same way.
This is Frodo's work: he triggers the cataclysm. Or, if you want to be nitpicky, Gollum is responsible. Both in the book and the movie, Gollum bites off Frodo's finger to get the ring (a symbolic castration and "punishment" for his refusal to destroy the Ring) and conveniently trips and falls into the Crack of Doom. (More strange Freudian symbolism: Gollum's persistent lust for the Ring causes him to fall into a "Crack of Doom"!)
The Lord of the Rings is genocide with cream and a cherry on top, so we can pretend not to see what's going on. Also, the subtext of sexual phobia reaches its peak at the climax. What does the Gollum character represent? Like the Ring, he appears to carry many meanings. And since Gollum also represents deep-seated fears (Gollum was an important, and equally creepy, Ring-fixated character in the "prequel" The Hobbit(1937)), he must also be destroyed.
In LOTR, personal terrors and fear of foreign peoples and races get mixed in a very complex manner: to the critical eye, it reads like Tolkien's own exorcism of all that he fears. But these themes are not overt; they are subtexts, (barely) hidden messages.
In our next examples, there is no such pretense: extinction of aliens is openly on the agenda.
The alien bugs in Robert A. Heinlein's Hugo Award-winning 1959 novel are not just aliens in the genetic sense. Their society is explicitly depicted and labeled as "total communism" (Starship Troopers, Chapter Eleven, p. 131) : a giant hive-mind divided into genetically predetermined classes: Workers, Warriors, Brain Bugs and Queens who breed new Bugs.
The goal of the great war in Starship Troopers (the novel AND the Paul Verhoeven movie) is to wipe out the bugs. Heinlein mixes species with politics in the crudest way possible: in his view, no peace is possible with the "Bugs". It's "us or them" in a war of annihilation. Starship Troopers was such a hit that it spawned a whole genre of imitators, and even a parody: Harry Harrison's Bill, the Galactic Hero (1965).
Each epoch has its own peculiar fears. If M.P. Shiel and J.R.R.Tolkien grew up fearing the Foreign Races and Sex, the big "bogeyman" of Heinlein's time was the Soviet Union.
In Heinlein's novel, the Federation forces are given state-of-the-art weaponry with which to wipe out Bugs: nerve gas, mini-nukes, mobile armored suits for the troops, flame-throwers... and the ominous-sounding "nova bomb" which (it is hinted at) can destroy entire planets. Also, the footsoldiers have a command and communications network which is modern even by today's standards.
Another interesting difference between book and movie is the approach to violence. In both media, the scale of destruction in the War Against the Bugs is enormous: cities are flattened, atomic weapons are tossed around like firecrackers, humans and aliens alike are burned alive, dismembered, slaughtered. Many humans die in boot camp. But how is all this violence - explicit in the movie - depicted in the book?
Heinlein chooses to just hint at the violent goings-on, but skims most of it in an offhand, cursory fashion; there are plenty of euphemisms for death, especially the phrase "he bought the farm." He never dwells on violence - but he always dwells, longingly, on
Indeed, on one level Robert A. Heinlein's novel is a love letter
to the military life and its discipline. This love even takes on "peculiar" aspects - the hero shaves his head bald (as do the female soldiers). He and other soldiers wear a single skull-and-crossbones earring (and some personal jewelry).
The soldiers talk about sex, but never have it. Women are gawked at, but never kissed. (Where are the brothels? Are the soldiers drugged to deaden their sex drive? This is never explained.) There is a rather cloying pre-adolescent tone to the relations between the sexes - almost as if women are a distraction from the writer's true love: the hierarchic structure of the military.
The cheerfully libertarian Heinlein does allow women into his ideal army of the future. For it is not women or sex he personally fears, but Soviet Communism - the perceived big threat against individual liberty and America in the 1950s. Fair enough - Soviet Russia was an oppressive superpower locked in the life-and-death Cold War struggle with the USA. However, by reducing "them" to mindless insects, one makes it too easy to justify wholesale slaughter.
We instinctively feel repulsed by insects; the species has really gotten a bad rep in SF. (Someone ought to start a protest against the genre's anti-insect bias.) During the 1993 genocide in Rwanda, when the Hutu population slaughtered the Tutsi population, state-controlled radio and television labeled the Tutsis as "cockroaches" (Oliver Thomson, Easily Led: A History of Propaganda, Sutton Publiching 1999). Genocide is always preceded by using words to dehumanize the target. Humans are re-defined as "insects;" this works in reality as well as in fiction.
To his credit, Heinlein allows that the other side might win: in fact, the odds are clearly stacked against humanity:
Also, it becomes evident to the reader that the Federation's volunteer structure cannot possibly produce fighting men (and women) quickly enough and in large enough numbers. If you read between the lines, the message is clear: unless those "nova bombs" are used against the alien planets, the Bugs are going to win. We never get to see the conflict end, so that's left to the imagination.
In the following quote alone, Starship Troopers' Darwinist undertone veers perversely close to nihilism:
It seems the scriptwriters of Paul Verhoeven's 1997 movie version took a useful cue from this quote: that humans and Bugs are, in a sense, equal players. By the end of Starship Troopers the movie, the human characters have turned into insects - a mindless, milling horde of killing machines.
However, the movie does not nearly take itself as seriously as does Heinlein. In the 1997 movie version, the novel's xenocidal impulse is exaggerated to the point of parody (a propaganda film shows children stomping on cockroaches while a woman hysterically cheers them on). The screenwriters and director Paul Verhoeven, trying to have it both ways, both cheer and mock the xenocidal "heroes." This approach doesn't really work; the tone of the movie wobbles between gory heroism and absurd send-up.
One must admit the movie is consistent with the novel in one respect: the story relentlessly pushes the necessity of "total war," and the few who question this (a journalist and Johnny Rico's father, respectively) are soon killed by the aliens. In the novel, Rico's father joins the army and "sees the light;" perhaps the screenwriters chose to simplify the plot.
But Paul Verhoeven wasn't first in sending up the inherent (or explicit) fascism in SF. That medal should go the writer of The Iron Dream - the darkest science-fiction satire ever written.
In 1974, Adolf Hitler's famous science-fiction novel Lord of the Swastika appeared in paperback reprint, to critical acclaim:
MICHAEL MOORCOCK: "To compare this novel with the works of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S.Lewis, G.K. Chesterton and Sir Oswald Mosley is not, I feel, saying too much... this exciting and tense fantasy adventure... is the very quintessence of sword and sorcery. It is bound to earn Hitler the credit he so richly deserves!"
Don't worry: Moorcock is not a Nazi, he's only joking. What's really going on here is a satire so dark and disturbing, the reader's laughter must choke in his or her throat.
Norman Spinrad's book The Iron Dream is set in an alternate timeline where World War II never happened. In this alternate history, Adolf Hitler emigrated to America and ended his life as a modestly successful, syphilitic - American - hack SF writer. And his novel Lord of the Swastika - "By Adolf Hitler" - is the book-within-the-book of The Iron Dream.
Spinrad succeeds with his conceit "What If Hitler Wrote SF?" The style and content of Lord of the Swastika reads like the fever dream of a fanatically racist madman, and the author's level of obsession escalates with each chapter, until it becomes quite difficult to stomach. The story is, in essence, the alternate-universe Hitler's fantasy version of what the real-life Hitler aspired to.
His alter ego, Feric Jaggar, is a blond and blue-eyed super-fascist who bludgeons, shoots, massacres and marches his way to genocidal victory over the "Empire of Zind" (those Eastern Hordes again) and the outwardly human-looking race of "Dominators" (stand-ins for the Jews). The phallic symbolism and barely suppressed homoeroticism of the story are so overblown as to be ridiculous - and confirm certain suspicions about the fascist mindset.
Feric does not have sex. He does not have a girlfriend, nor do women interest him other than as racially pure ("true human") specimens. He has a faithful male deputy who follows him along everywhere.
Feric Jaggar is a very, very violent man. When he doesn't make speeches about racial purity, virtually all he does is incite murder, order murder, or commit murder - mostly using his magical phallic baton, the Steel Commander, a.k.a. the Great Truncheon of Held:
It gets worse later on; the quote needs no explanation. (Words fail.)
The punchline of The Iron Dream is the fictional afterword to Lord of the Swastika, by "Homer Whipple." Whipple tells us that such a morbid, xenophobic, war-mongering tyrant "hero" could of course never seize power in the real world. Surely no people would ever follow a leader who wiped out entire peoples and enforced a relentless policy of "racial purity"?
Books about genocidal warfare are not just the obscure and reviled products of hacks. They are the best-sellers, the award-winning and widely imitated classics of fantastic literature throughout the 20th century.
There exists a psychological link between fascist fantasies and personal immaturity. The escapist appeal of SF and Fantasy has a dark side. In certain books and films, the young male "fan" finds escape from adult life in ever more violent fantasies: of having immense power, destruction of "monsters" who symbolize what he fears, and denial of the existence of women - after all, what can be more crushing to an insecure young man's ego than female rejection?
Also of interest is the link between fascism, militarism and repressed homoeroticism, which Spinrad parodies in The Iron Dream. I'm no psychiatrist, but the link is evident in Starship Troopers... and in another acclaimed future-war novel, which we shall deal with next.
(A side note: there are of course many female readers of SF/Fantasy. The genres may offer crowd-pleasing escapist fantasies also to women - such as the female-dominated societies of Marion Zimmer Bradley's books, or romance novels in thin SF disguise. But generally speaking, women writers and readers seem much less interested in genocidal power fantasies.)
I have already mentioned the essential childishness and narcissism of wishing the rest of the world to "go away." This fantasy is the result of an inability to cope with external reality.
With Orson Scott Card's novel Ender's Game (Tor Books, 1985), the fantasy is taken to its logical extreme: a little boy pushes a button and incinerates a whole planetful of aliens. And this boy is the focus of the world's attention: the boy is a war hero in the interstellar conflict with the alien "Buggers", a them-or-us war very similar to Starship Troopers.
Ender Wiggin is recruited as a child, is trained with other children to become a commander of military spaceships - and finally controls the space fleet in the war itself, from the training academy back on Earth.
Sigmund Freud would've had a field day with this book. There is the implicit eroticism of the Arab boy kissing Ender, of the shower fights in the training camp (in a prison atmosphere, no less), the simple fact that the aliens are called "Buggers" ("buggering" being the old slang word for sodomy)... and that the aliens are controlled by a single female "queen."
Add to this the fact that all the principal characters are children, who routinely brutalize each other (naked in the shower, for instance, or in the bedroom when Ender's brother threatens to kill him).
The subtext spreads pretty wide, allowing the alien Buggers to stand in for:
B) A female-run alien society - i.e. a threat to the male-run Earth society and its "masculinity."
C) Homosexuality - i.e. the tendency that's subtly promoted AND repressed in the protagonist's life. (To quote Zippy the Pinhead: "Gender Confusion Boosts Sales.")
D) Something within the hero's own mind - when the Bugger Queen starts communicating telepathically with Ender.
It is important to note that aliens, monsters, "Buggers", Orcs, Nazguls etc. can have multiple "hidden meanings" in the minds of readers and writers. The way a reader interprets a symbolic monster ranges from the deeply personal to the overtly political.
Occasionally, the political and the personal merge. A recent development has convinced me that the "hidden theme" in Ender's Game is just that.
In 1990, Orson Scott Card published a controversial essay in the Mormon Sunstone Magazine, "The Hypocrites of Homosexuality", (quoted in its entirety at http://www.nauvoo.com/library/card-hypocrites.html), in which he argues quite vehemently against homosexuality as such. More recently in 2004, he has been outspoken against gay marriage, in "Homosexual 'Marriage' and Civilization". Judging by these texts, gay issues are very much on Card's mind.
I am not out to be an activist in the debate (for the record: I'm undecided on the marriage issue), and this essay is not meant to be a character assassination. But when Orson Scott Card goes to such lengths in both fiction and non-fiction to voice hostility to homosexuals, while at the same time dropping numerous hints about pre-pubescent homosexuality in Ender Wiggin, then Card might possibly, perhaps, conceivably, have unresolved issues.
That the "Buggers" are straw men for Communist Russians is fairly obvious (the "hive-mind insect aliens" are so close to Heinlein's "Bugs" as to resemble a swipe)... but maybe they also represent something that frightens and attracts the writer (and readers) on a more personal level? Let us sum up all the strange subtext in the plot:
1. A little boy, Ender Wiggin, is pursued by other boys who brutalize and beat him up for being "different" - a "Third", an extra child that normally would not be allowed in school. The idea of "two children" birth quotas during a great war is historically absurd. In real wars, mothers are positively urged to replenish the supply of future soldiers, and they don't need much encouragement either - remember the "baby boom" of World War II? So "Third" must hint at something else.
2. They force him to wear a "bugger mask" during a cruel "You're It" playground game. (That word again, encompassing both "insect" and... the other meaning.)
3. In the training academy, he befriends and is kissed by another, Arab boy. (Note the unsubtle ethnic stereotype.)
4. He kills an entire species of female-dominated "Buggers." And to relieve the boy of guilt for his deed, we are then told that the adults "tricked" him into pushing the button. All the power and none of the responsibility.
5. And the "Bugger Queen" communicates telepathically with Ender - that is, she is inside his mind, as if she was part of his own thoughts. Therefore, killing off the Bugger Queen means killing something inside Ender Wiggin's mind, which is portrayed as the "enemy" of the human race.
But wait: no adult humans are actively involved in the "dubious" parts of the story. Only children, boys to be specific. Is something else going on between the lines? Consider this quote:
Other quotes from the novel invokes worship of the hero and his awesome might - to a degree which, frankly, makes me cringe with embarrassment:
"So it was from the buggers, not the humans, that Ender learned strategy. He felt ashamed and afraid of learning from them, since they were the most terrible enemy, ugly and murderous and loathsome. But they were also very good at what they did. To a point..." (Ender's Game, Reprint Edition, Tor Science Fiction 1994)
What is going on here? Desire of a boy, worship of a boy, kissing of a boy, a boy learning from and eventually mind-melding with "Buggers"... it is murky, to be sure, but something is "going on."
Someone suggested to me that Card's novel is an indictment of videogames, the great youth craze of the 1980s. The training academy's space-combat simulator does bear thematic similarities to the video-arcade/mall, with gangs of kids competing to get the "top highscore". (In the film The Last Starfighter (1984), a young videogame "ace" is recruited by aliens to fight a space war. A possible inspiration?) Is the message simply that adults are manipulating children with videogames?
But to interpret the story as a criticism of videogames clashes with the one thing we are repeatedly told by the adults who control the training academy: Ender is a child genius. While the Earth is at war with another civilization, and the entire world's population is mobilized in the effort, the brightest kid of all is unable to imagine that he's part of it? In a military training academy?
This is rather too inconsistent to make sense. Children can deceive themselves, and the plot stresses that Ender is exhausted... but if he is too exhausted to think clearly, then he is also unfit as a commander of Earth's space forces and the adults would likely relieve him of control. Leaving the fate of humanity in the hands of an exhausted child makes even less strategic sense.
Come to think of it, the climax falls apart on a closer inspection. The adult leaders thank Ender for pushing the button, because "only he" could make that decision:
He was crying. He was out of control. "Of course we tricked you into it. That's the whole point," said Graff. "It has to be a trick or you couldn't have done it. It's the bind we were in. We had to have a commander with so much empathy that he would think like the buggers, understand them and anticipate them. So much compassion that he could win the love of his underlings and work with them like a perfect machine, as perfect as the buggers. But somebody with that much compassion could never be the killer we needed. Could never go into battle willing to win at all costs. If you knew, you couldn't do it. If you were the kind of person who would do it even if you knew, you could never have understood the buggers well enough."
"And it had to be a child, Ender," said Mazer. "You were faster than me. Better than me. I was too old and cautious. Any decent person who knows what warfare is can never go into battle with a whole heart. But you didn't know. We made sure you didn't know. You were reckless and brilliant and young. It's what you were born for..."
"You never asked me! You never told me the truth about anything!"
Humanity's future ultimately may depend on a simple decision: push a button to blow up the enemy planet. (Literally. At the very last battle, all that remains is to give the attack order.) And the adult military leaders do not have the stomach to do it, and reason that "this decision is so important, we have to let a kid do it for us."
The hero is too stupid to see he's being played, yet a "brilliant" commander of strategy. Also, history shows that adult men in military command do not hesitate to order slaughter. The novel's setup is for everyone to either admire and worship Ender (if they are Good) - or lust for his destruction (if they are Bad). The reader is expected to identify with this simultaneously powerful and victimized boy.
That is not a condemnation of videogames. That is videogaming turned into ego masturbation.
People who read an early draft of this essay, pointed out to me that the sequels to Ender's Game have also dealt with issues of xenocide, and in a more nuanced manner, where aliens are not seen as unambiguously evil.
I have not read the sequels (only plot summaries), but I maintain that those novels are nothing more than post-scriptums to the Main Event. The most popular novel in the series remains the first one, and the success of the sequels is made possible by what made the first book a hit: it delivers. Fans on Internet newsgroups repeatedly make the same comment about Ender sequels: "Not as good as the first book."
It is the execution of genocide/xenocide - not the promise of it - that is the "money shot". Ask yourself if the series would have been so popular, if Ender had pulled back at the last moment - and told his adult supervisors: "No. I see now why this game is so important to you. It's for real. And I won't be your patsy. If you want to kill billions, do it yourselves. I refuse."
Starship Troopers(1959) won the Hugo award, and so did Ender's Game (1985). The people has spoken: We want the money shot.
These are the Iron Dreams of fantastic literature.
They begin as the angry, selfish child's hatred of everybody else: "I wish everybody else was dead."
They then evolve into the fantasy of The Boy Who Killed The Monster: "I wish I could destroy the thing I fear."
Festering into puberty, the iron dreams are then projected onto a thinly disguised real-life group: "I wish I could wipe out all those filthy aliens/Others/Commies/homosexuals/women."
The fear of the trinity Women / the Other / Sex, and compensatory worship of Manliness / the Self / Strength, becomes a fetish. Desire is consistently aimed towards the Self (with homosexual desire both repressed and hinted at).
And underneath these fantasies runs the same desperate yearning: "I wish I could stay a child. I wish I could do all these great things as a child, and not have to grow up."
Some part of the young male readers wants to be Frodo, to be Ender Wiggin, to be Johnny Rico - to be, perhaps, Feric Jaggar. To be childlike, virginal and without adult responsibility, and yet a immensely powerful destroyer of worlds and peoples. And the editors, writers and publishers make a living off this urge. What, then, is a mature reader to make of all these mass slaughters, all these little boys with limitless power, all these suppressed fears and urges? Accept it, or demand a change? Are we to shrug and say, "Boys will be boys"?
In his brilliant essay "Judgment At Jonbar" (1964), Brian Aldiss pointed out that for much too long, SF has clumsily attempted to potter about with fear without mastering it: "Behind all these displays of knowledge and bold speeches is the insecure whining; inside every superman is a little boy begging to get out." (Translated from Swedish, in the anthology Tema: Tid, Delta 1985, ed. Sam J. Lundwall.)
The ultimate consequence of unreconciled, immature fear is genocide: the ritual killing of a scapegoat people. (Darwinism's "Survival of the Fittest" is no valid excuse - the true strength of the human race is the ability to cooperate, share knowledge and plan ahead.) The fans, the writers, and the industry are all complicit. Fans read escapist war fantasies, grow up to write such fantasies, and the cycle repeats.
I'm not saying all fantasies are bad. Fantasies can serve as catharsis, play, and therapy. At their best, fairytales are psychodramas which prepare children for adulthood. But when the fantasy turns regressive, when the dream fails to bring insight or maturity, it can become destructive.
The worst form of fantasy refuses to admit the true conflict inside the reader (such as: "I'm changing, the world is changing, and it confuses me" or: "I don't understand women") and offers up a symbolic "monster" to be ritually slaughtered.
The fear of the "Other" - outside or within oneself - will probably never go away. Not as long as the ultimate bogeyman - death - remains among us. However, it will get increasingly difficult to dehumanize other people in our modern world, much thanks to global communications and the accelerated blending of cultures and ethnic groups, "reality TV" and cell-phone cameras.
We simply know too much about each other to allow ourselves to think that "they" aren't human. What was Ender Wiggin to do after the Cold War ended and those Commie "buggers" turned out to be just like us? It was not that long ago - not long ago at all - that perfectly ordinary people said that AIDS was "God's punishment on homosexuals" and made crude jokes about it. We, the willing readers, must deep down feel a bit guilty... accomplices to xenocide.
Does the reality influence the fantasies, or is it the other way around?
The carnage in The Lord of the Rings may have been influenced by the mass slaughters of the World Wars. On the other hand, Jack London and his contemporaries wrote genocide stories which preceded both World Wars and the Holocaust - and what came after. With this in mind, one can't help but wonder if all these fictional "xenocides" are, on some level, intended as dress-rehearsals for the real thing.
Fantasies can have real-life consequences. Many scientists have confessed that reading the genre, seeing the films - even watching Star Trek - inspired them to become scientists. So what aspirations do we inspire in the young by serving them aliens as ritual scapegoats to be wiped out - while space probes on Mars are on the brink of discovering extraterrestrial life?
And yet, the fantasy of being an all-powerful child, able to destroy worlds and races with the push of a button, able to escape both responsibility and adulthood, is irresistible. And so, driven by the yin-yang impulses of fear and guilt, we won't allow Ender Wiggin and his kind to go away. Readers demand ever more sequels, in which Ender (and the readers, vicariously) forever seeks the elusive redemption for a fictional crime...
...that is, until we find us some real aliens to kill. When genocide is falling out of fashion, xenocide might become the only option.
The writer acknowledges the helpful input and advice from Claude Lalumiere, Thomas M. Disch, and the entire staff of The Internet Review of Science Fiction.Thanks, all.
FURTHER READING:
1. When I wrote this essay, I was unaware that the American writer and teacher John Kessel had previously written an essay on ENDER'S GAME. I wholeheartedly recommend it for deeper study of the novel:
2. In 1987, a controversial essay by Elaine Radford, about ENDER'S GAME and its sequel SPEAKER FOR THE DEAD, was printed in Fantasy Review. I have not found Orson Scott Card's reply, which was also printed in that magazine.
However... in 2007, Elaine Radford has been kind enough to transcribe her entire 1987 essay onto her homepage. It can be read here:
3. Also read Umberto Eco's short essay
For a completely different take on the Genocide theme in SF, read Thomas M. Disch's acclaimed novel
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