Ender's World

by Orson Scott Card

  Forget rental cars; those seats are designed for the Los Angeles Lakers. Forget seatbelts, for that matter. I can never decide whether I’d rather risk being thrown through the car window in an accident, or having my trachea crushed by a seatbelt designed for someone at least a foot above my height.

  And that’s just the physical aspect. Let’s talk perception.

  When someone comments, “He’s really tall!” it summons up images of power, masculinity, success. The equating of size with dominance is consistent throughout the known world. And lack of stature is associated with lack of intelligence and competence, leading people to treat someone my height as though he or she were, in fact, a large child rather than a tiny adult. I am often patted on the head by new acquaintances, who seem to regard me as a benign sheepdog, but without the drool.

  In David Henry Hwang’s marvelous play M. Butterfly, a diplomat called Rene Gallimard is posted to China. A typical colonialist, he refuses to learn anything about the culture and, because of that, is easily blind-sided by the cultural differences between East and West.

  One night, he attends the Peking Opera, where he is completely enraptured by Song Liling, an actress with the company. They meet, at his insistence, and spend time together. In his eyes, the petite Song is tentative and shy, longing to be conquered. Or rather, to be dominated.

  To Gallimard, the East—so backward, so barbaric, so filled with miniature people who can’t really be serious about politics or diplomacy—secretly longs to be conquered by the West. And as is always the case, arrogance and ignorance combine to create a huge blind spot, which plays right into Song’s hands. She parlays his paternalism into an affair, gaining access to state secrets in the process.

  The spineless, colorless Gallimard is close to the bottom of his profession. However, as the affair with Song Liling continues, his ascendancy over her provokes a heady sense of power. He becomes more “manlike,” more forceful, more demanding in the other areas of his life, and that empowerment actually enables him to begin rising through the ranks of the diplomatic service.

  Onstage, Song is small, especially when standing next to Gallimard. As an audience, we equate her size with fragility and weakness. She uses her size to cultivate an air of simpering incompetence whenever Gallimard is near. She seems unable to make choices for herself; she asks his help constantly. She needs a man like Gallimard, a big man, one who will protect her and make decisions for her.

  Midway through M. Butterfly, there is an intermission. Those of us who remain seated watch Song as she seats herself at a makeup table facing the audience. The table’s “mirror” is empty space, allowing us to watch as she removes first her makeup, then her wig, then her kimono, and finally, her very gender.

  We discover in that moment that Song is, in fact, male.

  In the original Broadway production I saw, B. D. Wong played Song and John Lithgow was Gallimard. The difference in height was striking. For the entire first half of the play, we watched as Lithgow towered over the fragile and feminine Wong, who swayed and sashayed and seduced as we willingly went along with the caricature of femininity.

  Inevitably, Song Liling is exposed as a spy and Gallimard as her willing dupe. He is put on trial, but even as the evidence mounts, he refuses to believe she is male. Never mind the question of hidden homosexuality here—that’s not the point. Gallimard cannot believe that someone so delicate, so perceptive, so adoring, could possibly share his genital makeup. She made him feel like a giant, and he cannot let go of that without returning to his former barren state.

  As Song says, addressing the court: “The West thinks of itself as masculine—big guns, big industry, big money—so the East is feminine—weak, delicate, poor…but good at art, and full of inscrutable wisdom—the feminine mystique…The West believes the East, deep down, wants to be dominated—because a woman can’t think for herself.”

  Early in the play, Gallimard’s refusal to learn about Chinese culture, the arrogance of insisting he knows, spills over into a disastrous conversation with his ambassador, who asks Gallimard’s opinion about China’s involvement in Viet Nam. Flush with a lover’s courage, Gallimard insists the Orient will always bow to a superior force, so the Americans must continue to show strength. This is his brilliant political analysis. Western victory over the East is inevitable because the East isn’t really serious, can’t really be a threat. He makes the mistake of assuming physical size is congruent with mental, and emotional, size.

  So it is with us and children.

  3. Size is in the eye of the beholder

  We underestimate children. Their lack of stature leads us to assume they’re innocent, although there’s really no reason to believe that. If anything, they are often more vicious, and more cunning, than adults. It’s difficult for a child to see the big picture, especially a six-year-old child. No matter how bright, he lacks the life experience of spending time with many different people, of different backgrounds and ages, in dissimilar situations.

  Children know very little of long-term consequence. They don’t think that far ahead. The boy who, having seen the Roadrunner cartoon a zillion times, pushes his small friend off a cliff, fully expecting the friend to bounce back, doesn’t have the experience to make the leap from cartoon to reality. And Ender, who does normally think days and weeks and years ahead of everyone else, is too exhausted and broken apart when he’s made to play the final “game” to understand that all this time, it’s been no game at all, that his commands have sent real men and women to their deaths.

  A writer I know insists that the across-the-board, age-defiant success of Ender’s Game is because the publisher has marketed it so cleverly. He says once the book “lost its legs” in the adult science fiction market, its clever publisher somehow turned it into a young adult novel, then managed to insinuate it into thousands of required high school reading lists.

  Balderdash. The reason Ender’s Game succeeds with all age groups, outside of the obvious something-for-everyone, is that it shatters assumptions. From the first, we know that Ender and his siblings are incredibly bright. When he enters Battle School, we meet a nation of children so smart that we’d find their intelligence level impossible to accept—except Card also makes them incredibly young, and for the most part (particularly in Ender’s case), very, very small.

  That their exceptional intelligence is what makes them good soldiers is a lot easier to swallow than the idea that their age or size makes them more capable of fighting, and winning, a war than we adults are. The contrast between their age and their capabilities assists us in a massive suspension of disbelief; the children’s intelligence almost seems credible by comparison.

  What does that do to us as readers?

  We are used to thinking of words like up and tall as associated with good things. Academics are expected to speak an elevated tongue. Phrases like small-minded and short-tempered are used to denigrate.

  We look down on someone we disapprove of, and we look up to someone we admire. We have lofty ideas, and walk tall when we’re proud of ourselves. Up is always better than down, and the sky’s the limit sounds much more poetic to us than the core of the Earth’s the limit!

  Even Amazon.com uses height to denote safety and trustworthiness. They’ve done a wonderful job of convincing people like my partner, normally a hard-nosed defense attorney, that their data is safely stored somewhere in the stratosphere. They call it The Cloud, and by calling it that instead of a bunch of servers somewhere off the coast of Greenland, they make us into linguistic fools. Think of the images cloud brings to mind: Sweet dreams. Soft pillows. Gentle light. Angels, wings outstretched, playing harps while floating gently above a billowy cloud. And above all that, heaven. The place where God himself chooses to live.

  Surely my data will be safe there, up on high!

  With Ender’s Game, Card insists we throw the concepts of high and low out the window. He forces our relationship with these undersized young humans into a quid pro quo between equal
s. No, not even between equals, because none of the adults can do what Ender and his compatriots can do—the children are the heroes of the tale. The adults are merely guides, and occasional torturers, who manage to spend a great deal of their time getting in Ender’s way and almost ruining everything.

  When Ender says, “The enemy’s gate is down,” we enter an alternate universe, where up is relative and down is where you must go to win the game. Up and down become malleable concepts in Ender’s Game, as does size. Being short is only a problem relative to the bigger kid who might want to beat you up because he may have an arm’s length advantage. But even then, being short gives you speed and the element of surprise.

  What a reversal!

  4. Size in Ender’s Game and Ender’s Shadow

  In the original book, Ender is described as small twenty-eight times. When I added the adjective little to my search, only when used as a height descriptor, it made for a total of seventy-two references to Ender’s diminutive stature.

  That’s a lot of short.

  Ender isn’t the only short one. All the Battle School launchies are. Of course they are! They’re five, six, seven years old. Even Stilson, the bully Ender kills, “wasn’t bigger than most other kids, but he was bigger than Ender.” (Later in the book, Card writes, “He dreamed that night of Stilson, only he saw now how small Stilson was, only six years old, how ridiculous his tough-guy posturing was…” Even Ender, as he grows out of childhood, begins to see their size as absurd.)

  Card constantly reminds us of Ender’s short stature. He even shows us, through Ender’s encounter with his first desk, how awful it must be to reach full size:

  Ender spread his hands over the child-size keyboard near the edge of the desk and wondered what it would feel like to have hands as large as a grownup’s. They must feel so big and awkward, thick stubby fingers and beefy palms. Of course, they had bigger keyboards—but how could their thick fingers draw a fine line, the way Ender could, a thin line so precise that he could make it spiral seventy-nine times from the center to the edge of the desk without the lines ever touching or overlapping.

  In Ender’s Game, maturing, attaining your full size, means you’re out of the game.

  Though Ender is tiny, Bean, who becomes the closest thing to a best friend Ender will have, is still tinier: “Ender was still small for a commander. His feet didn’t come near the end of the bunk. There was plenty of room for Bean to curl up at the foot of the bed. So he climbed up and then lay still, so as not to disturb Ender’s sleep” (Ender’s Shadow).

  For Bean, raised on the streets, left to live by his own wits from the first, his size is an asset. He survived the attack on the laboratory where he was born only because he was small enough to hide in a toilet tank. Later, he’s still small enough to fit into the air vents that run through the Battle School, small enough to move through them silently. He worries about the day when he’ll be too big to fit, unable to overhear conversations or see passwords as teachers enter them on their private keyboards. Again, maturity, attaining full size, moves you out of the power position and into the unknown.

  Throughout the series, the formics are referred to as buggers. What an interesting play on words! Bugs are small, annoying insects. They dart in and out, stinging and biting and mostly causing us to itch—not exactly a death threat. It’s a rare (visible) bug that causes life-threatening damage.

  The formics tower over their human counterparts. Calling them buggers at once negates their size and renders them harmless. Sort of like changing Chinese to Chink, which is a small crack in a wall that can easily be fixed with a little cement.

  Interestingly enough, the weapon that ends the Formic War is called the Little Doctor. It’s a horrific weapon of mass destruction. It feeds on the energy of that which it destroys, creating a ping-pong effect, and eventually obliterates not just formics and ships but entire planets. There is nothing left of them.

  The Little Doctor doesn’t only destroy the formic race; it wipes out their history, their cultural record. It removes them from the memory of the universe, denying them any chance ever to speak for themselves. It destroys their past and, therefore, their future.

  What a terrible device.

  Ender wonders at the name, and Mazer Rackham explains the derivation. He tells Ender that the device was originally known as a Molecular Detachment Device—M.D. device—Dr. device. Ender doesn’t quite get the joke. Destruction on that scale isn’t funny to him, and he isn’t old enough to see the black humor of it, or that it’s a way of whistling in the dark.

  Even though Rackham clarifies Doctor, the term Little is never explained. Is it part of the description just because soldiers like to name their weapons?1 Because something so big must be made small before the human mind can cope with its existence, let alone its usage? We’re never told. We are left instead to assume that the description Little Doctor is not so much illustrative as affectionate. The bomb as friend and ally, cut down to size.

  5. Where gratitude comes in

  If it weren’t for this article, I would never have researched size. And if it weren’t for my research, I would not be convinced, as I am now, that I will live much longer than most of the tall people I’ve envied all my life.

  It’s those darned telomeres.

  Telomeres are little tails at the end of our chromosomes that keep them from unraveling. Our cells have to refresh themselves constantly by duplicating, so the old cell can die and the new one can take over its duties. Each time a cell duplicates itself, the telomeres at the end of the chromosomes get shorter. When they get too short, the cell loses its ability to duplicate.

  You’ve heard how, every seven years, all the cells in your body are replaced and brand new? Well, sooner or later all good things must come to an end. The reason the functional capacity of vital organs declines as we get older is that those damaged cells can’t be replaced.

  Many years ago, a fellow named Hayflick showed that most human cells have only a limited capacity for duplication. Larger people need a larger number of duplications to replace defective or dead cells as they age.2 In theory, the fewer times a cell has to duplicate itself, the longer the body can last.

  Statistically, shorter ninety-year-olds have longer telomeres and better survival rates.3 Studies of healthy centenarians show that they have longer telomeres than centenarians in poor health.4 In a study of geriatric Swedes, shorter humans were shown to have a lower mortality rate. In fact, the study showed a loss of 0.52 years per centimeter of height increase.5 (If it’s true that we lose almost half a year of life for every extra centimeter of growth, it would go a long way toward explaining why women seem to outlive men no matter what other factors come into play.)

  Our various organs are pretty much the same size from human to human. At four feet, ten inches my heart is about as big as that of a person who is six feet, five inches. But his heart is going to have to work a lot harder than mine to pump blood through his frame, keep him upright and moving, even help him take a deep breath. The longer and harder you use a pump, the sooner it wears out.

  But wait! There’s more!

  Shorter people are less likely to require surgery for herniated spinal disks, less likely to break a hip from falling, less likely to die in auto crashes.6

  And it’s not just about length of life or health—it’s about the planet. A decrease of just ten pounds in the average weight of a US citizen would decrease airline fuel consumption by 350 million gallons yearly!

  So if you think about it, I’m really doing the rest of you a favor by being this short. Even if, nowadays, they give children like me hormones to make sure we don’t stay this way.

  6. Psyche and substance

  In his new book, Short: Walking Tall When You Are Not Tall At All, Jonathan Schwartz (five feet, three inches tall) of the New York Times argues forcefully that it is drug companies marketing growth hormones who insist being short is somehow a disadvantage. To hear the hormone-pushers tell it, allowing your less-
than-average-height children to remain that way will ruin their future. This attitude has become pervasive as the world continues to connect height with quality.

  Schwartz argues that, rather than being a drawback, shortness builds character. His thought is further backed up by author Stephen Hall, who said in a recent interview:

  One of Darwin’s most astonishing evolutionary insights is the suggestion that humans, precisely because they were smaller and weaker than their primate cousins, evolved the skills of social cooperation that have made us the successful species we are today.7

  In other words, being short, especially during the teen years, may force a child to become perceptive, aware, and socially intelligent. Certainly, this is true of Ender Wiggin. His intelligence and will to succeed make him an obvious target for bullies and fools. But his size gives him an edge they can’t duplicate, emotionally and physiologically.

  Over and over again, being the runt forces Ender to find ways in and out of situations using his brain and his wit, rather than bludgeoning his way through. Of all the commanders, only Ender sees that allowing those under him to make their own decisions in battle is the only way for him to win all the time. Ender is the only commander capable of completely setting ego aside in order to become part of the social cooperative. Had he been normally sized, able to use brawn instead of brain to get his way, it would have been very different. He might have had an outsized ego instead, and that ego would never have allowed him to form his toons into “separate but equal” groups.

  Ender is exceptional, not in spite of his size but because of it. And because Card is kind enough not to assign a specific height to Ender at any future point, we can continue to see him in our mind’s eye as small, lithe, quick on his feet, and incredibly perceptive and honorable to boot—things he might not have had to become if he’d always been average.