7. In short…
Breeding for size used to be important. People needed big, strong children to work the fields, fend off dangerous predators, and beat out the neighboring tribe for healthy spouses and the best land. But now, with the rise of geek and nerd as terms of not just affection but downright approbation, size isn’t nearly as essential. In fact, in a lot of respects it’s quite the opposite, not only inessential but destructive to the planet.
Shorter people have less impact on the environment—we require less food, less air, less water. A 10 percent reduction in height, worldwide, would lead to a commensurate reduction in everything from beef and pork consumption (and their attending methane problems) to highway congestion. And if we keep insisting that taller is better, we may eventually grow ourselves right out of living on the planet, and into six feet under—if we can still fit.
There are a lot of upsides to being small. Short people have a lower center of gravity, which creates greater stability overall. We make good gymnasts, jockeys, car racers, figure skaters—anything that requires speed coupled with dexterity and balance. We’re lower to the ground, which means we don’t have as far to rise when we fall.
We live longer. If you don’t want to bother struggling through all the scientific data I cited, just think about dogs. Small dogs live longer. Everybody knows that.
We’re beneficial to society as a whole. From Harriet Tub-man and Danny DeVito (five feet each) and Mae West (five feet, one inch) to Beethoven, Picasso, and James Madison (all under five feet, four inches), we are everywhere. We’re over-represented in the arts, in politics, in the sciences. We win our wars, both social and political, through cunning and cleverness rather than brute force, just as Ender does. And we happily claim him as one of our own.
While hunting around online for information on size, telomeres, and random DNA mutations, I happened upon various lists teenagers made to express why they felt good about being short. Here are just a few:
You can duck faster.
There’s less chance of being struck by lightning.
You’re always in the front of group pictures.
You can get up faster when you fall down.
You can fit into cool cars.
There’s less chance of being hit by a UFO.
And my personal favorite:
You can fit into places like a locker to hide from bullies. Granted you are also small enough to get stuffed in one, but that’s a chance I am willing to take.
There’s also this quote by boxer Joe Walcott, a quote so true it’s entered into the lexicon:
The bigger they are, the harder they fall.
And that about sums it up.
Janis Ian is a songwriter’s songwriter who began writing songs at twelve years of age and performed onstage at New York’s Village Gate just one year later. Her first record, Society’s Child, was released two years after that. The seminal At Seventeen brought her five of her nine Grammy nominations, and songs like “Jesse” and “Some People’s Lives” have been recorded by artists as diverse as Celine Dion, John Mellencamp, Mel Tormé, Glen Campbell, and Bette Midler. Tina Fey even named a character “Janis Ian” in her movie Mean Girls!
Janis’ energy does not stop at performing. Her autobiography, Society’s Child, a starred Booklist review and Publisher’s Weekly pick (and now also available as an audio book), details her life and career. The audiobook recently brought her ninth Grammy nomination, in the Best Spoken Word category, alongside ex-President Bill Clinton, Michelle Obama, Rachel Maddow, and Ellen Degeneres. Her song “Stars” is also the title of an anthology featuring twenty-four major science fiction writers, all of them “tipping the hat” by writing original stories based on songs Janis wrote that affected their own lives.
Janis runs The Pearl Foundation, named for her mother, and has raised over $700,000 for scholarships for returning students at various universities and colleges.
More information can be found at her website, www.janisian.com.
1 It could also be a reference to Little Boy, the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, named “Little” in contrast to the other two WWII bomb design projects.
2 Bulletin of the World Health Organization, 1992.
3 Andrea B. Maier, Diana van Heemst, and Rudi G. J. Westendorp, “Relation between Body Height & Replicative Capacity of Human Fibroblasts in Nonagenarians,” in the Journal of Gerontology, http://biomedgerontology.oxfordjournals.org/content/63/1/43.full.
4 Dellara F. Terry, Vikki G. Nolan, Stacy L. Andersen, et al., “Association of Longer Telomeres With Better Health in Centenarians,” in the Journal of Gerontology: Biological Sciences, http://www.nia.nih.gov/health/publication/biology-aging.
5 Jesse C. Krakauer MD, Barry Franklin PhD, Michael Kleerekoper MD, Magnus Karlsson MD, PhD, James A. Levine MD, PhD, “Body Composition Profiles Derived From Dual-Energy X-Ray Absorptiometry, Total Body Scan, and Mortality,” in Preventive Cardiology, http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1520037X.2004.3326.x/full.
6 Thomas T. Samaras, Human Body Size & the Laws of Scaling: Physiological, Performance, Growth, Longevity and Ecological Ramifications.
7 Stephen Hall (author of Size Matters: How Height Affects the Health, Happiness, and Success of Boys—and the Men they Become) in a 2010 Talk of the Nation interview.
Q. Did the pilots and soldiers who were a part of the Third Invasion know beforehand that they were led by kids? How did they react initially?
A. This is a question that I did not answer definitively even in my own mind, going back and forth on it while writing both the short story “Ender’s Game” and the novel Ender’s Game. It is hard to remember now which way I decided at the time; what is certain is that I tried to dodge the issue completely in the novel.
The question really came down to this: When Ender’s subordinates—his “jeesh,” as I named them when I wrote Ender’s Shadow—gave orders to the squadrons under their control, were they doing so orally or electronically?
They were certainly not taking command of individual ships, as if they were piloting them in a videogame. The “simulation” they were “playing” was a command simulator, not a combat simulator. This was Command School, so their “training” was in giving orders to groups and individuals who would then carry out the commands.
The children would believe that, in showing them the actions of the squadrons they commanded, the computer was simulating the normal variances in human behavior—commands misunderstood, orders exceeded, or pilots who took individual initiative as the situation developed in unpredicted ways.
If the children gave commands electronically, then the pilots could remain unaware that children were commanding them. The orders would come onto a screen, and their responses would return the same way—rather like texting. The trouble with such a system is how slowly it goes. I could imagine a menu of pretyped orders, rather like a Mcdonald’s cash register—but that would mean that at moments when surprising, unpredictable orders were most urgently needed, such a command system would require that the commander shift to the much slower method of typing.
This gave preference, then, to oral commands. Human speech has evolved to be by far our most convenient communication method. You can speak an order and receive it without removing your visual attention from the screens and gauges you have to keep observing. We know this because we carry on conversations while driving cars; and, unlike actors in movies, we do not turn to look at each other during such conversations. We keep our eyes on the road, because we cannot afford to remove our visual attention from developing situations as we move forward.
It is possible to imagine some kind of voice-disguise system, or a translation from voice to text and then back again. But as I worked with producer Lynn Hendee on my versions of the movie script, we realized that any system that put a filter between the kids and the men they were commanding would be counterproductive. There needed to be at least one-way clarity. That is, the men would need to hear the voices of the children, fo
r the sake of immediacy and quickness of response. Yet the children could never be allowed to hear the voices of the men they commanded, or they would know the game was real.
Thus, in the early development of the movie scripts—and before I wrote Ender’s Shadow—I had to commit to the idea that all the men of the fleet knew they were being commanded by children.
How, then, could they be reconciled with this? Ultimately, this would not be hard. Their voyage took fifty years (though they experienced it as only two years, because of near-lightspeed time contraction and dilation effects). Before they left, they were fully informed that their commander in every battle would be the same person, communicating with them by ansible from IF-COM, the international Fleet headquarters on eros.
They assumed that it would be Mazer Rackham, or, perhaps, a better commander who was trained and discovered after they left. They assumed that if it was not Mazer, who was being kept alive by a closed-loop near-lightspeed voyage of his own, it would be someone born later, probably someone born after they left the solar system. After all, someone born the day they left would be fifty by the time they reached their destinations—all the known formic planets.
When the battlefleets neared their targets, the only possible commander would be twelve years old. The military leaders on Eros had to decide what to tell the pilots, and when. Remember that the years of Ender’s training would seem less than four months to the pilots in the fleet. So if they were to be told that children would, or might, be their commanders, it would be better to give them the news in plenty of time to get used to the idea.
There are scenes in discarded movie scripts in which we see those pilots learning about this, discussing it. But in truth it’s not as if they had a choice, except the choice a soldier of any kind always has: to desert, to mutiny, to refuse to fight. And what then would their sacrifice be worth? For these men had already left behind all their families and communities. If they were victorious, if they ever returned to Earth, it would be a hundred years since their departure. Everyone they knew would long be dead. And if they refused to obey whatever orders they were given, what then? Where would they go? Their fighters could not make interstellar voyages at near-lightspeed. They had nowhere to go.
No, they would accept what they had to accept. But their commanders, not being fools—or at least trying not to be fools, for fools rarely suspect themselves of foolishness—would do all they could to sweeten the situation. They would show the pilots who would be taking orders from these children just how the kids had performed in the battle room, with plenty of videos. These young commanders would be more than names. They would be people.
Of course, this was pure propaganda—they would never show them moments that might cause doubt. But just because the vids were meant to persuade the pilots to accept the children did not mean that the pilots were not being told the truth. These really were impressive kids.
And whatever doubts remained—surely there were still many of them—were dispelled as soon as Ender and his jeesh took command in the first battle. It was an easy victory, with tactics that seemed obvious to Ender Wiggin and the other kids—but there was no reason to think the tactics would have seemed obvious to the pilots. What they would see was: victory, and few losses on the human side. Soldiers appreciate that combination.
—OSC
RETHINKING THE CHILD HERO
AARON JOHNSTON
I once heard Orson Scott Card describe Ender Wiggin as “a short Clint Eastwood.” My first reaction was to laugh. Short Clint Eastwood. Ha! In my mind I envisioned Ender hovering in the Battle Room, leveling his gun at Bonzo, one side of Ender’s lip curled up in a sneer, speaking in his slightly falsetto, prepubescent voice, “Go ahead, punk. Make my day.”
The more I thought about this description of Ender, however, the more I realized it was no joke. Card is right. Ender is a short Clint Eastwood. And although Card didn’t specify which version of Clint Eastwood he meant (i.e., Dirty Harry Clint Eastwood or Spaghetti Western Clint Eastwood or bare-knuckle-fighter-with-an-orangutan-on his-hip Clint Eastwood, as in Every Which Way But Loose), it really doesn’t matter. Clint Eastwood plays himself in all his movies anyway. The only differences between Dirty Harry Clint Eastwood and Spaghetti Western Clint Eastwood are concrete and a bigger gun.
But I digress. The point is, Ender Wiggin is a lot like every character Clint Eastwood has ever played, all of whom seem to live by the same code:
1. Talk little.
2. Observe everything.
3. Know your enemy.
4. Win.
Ender would likely revise number three to “Know and love your enemy,” and we would allow him this edit. His compassion is probably the biggest difference between him and the venerable Mr. Eastwood. Allow me to illustrate.
Picture in your mind the poncho-wearing, Spaghetti Western Clint Eastwood, with his itchy trigger finger ready, and his eyes half-closed in that Mexican standoff stare, and a dead vaquero at his feet, bleeding out in the dirt. If you were to approach Clint and say, “Mr. Eastwood, I know you must feel awful about killing this man. He is the last sweaty vaquero of his kind. Here, I found this silky cocoon. Inside is an infant sweaty vaquero. Take it and find a place for it out in the desert where it can break free of its cocoon and flourish.” Then you would hand the cocoon to Clint East-wood, whereupon he would throw it up into the air and blast it to hell with his six-shooter.
So yes, Clint and Ender have their differences. But that shouldn’t keep us from noting their many similarities. Both are independent. Both are gunslingers. Both are quick to defend the bullied and oppressed. Both are cool as cucumbers and rarely show their emotions. Both are swift and lethal. Both are wanderers—Ender becomes one after being exiled. Both speak only when necessary and say only what needs to be said. And, perhaps most importantly, both are white knights, or killers with hearts of gold. Even Clint Eastwood. In The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, he’s the Good.
And did you notice that Orson Scott Card described Ender as a short Clint Eastwood and not as a young Clint Eastwood? There’s a difference. To call Ender a young Clint Eastwood is to suggest that Ender has the seed of heroism within him, that slowly over time he will grow up and become a true hero. But to say that Ender is a short Clint Eastwood is to say that Ender is a hero now, as he is, as a child. Or in other words, Ender is as much a hero as any adult hero.
That’s significant. In fact, when the short story version of Ender’s Game was first published in 1977, the idea that a child could be equal to an adult in terms of intelligence or talent or capabilities was somewhat revolutionary. Up until then, children in fiction were generally weaker, less intelligent, less introspective, less insightful, and less emotionally complex than adults. As evidence, simply ask yourself: What child in fiction prior to 1977 could be described as a short Clint Eastwood? Or a short Hercules? Or a short General Patton? Or a short anyone? How many child characters displayed the skills and attributes and intelligence of their taller counterparts?
I doubt many characters spring to mind.
However, if I were to ask you that same question about the child heroes in fiction today, I suspect you could name quite a few. Harry Potter, Artemis Fowl, Lyra Belacqua, Percy Jackson, Eragon, and the list goes on and on. These children, like Ender before them, are all heroes in the classical and mythic sense. Rather than stand idly by while the adults solve all the problems and make all the decisions, these modern-day child heroes take the helm, defeat evil, and prove time and again that they have the same capacity for greatness that adults do.
Ender’s Game helped pave that road. Card emphatically declares through young Ender Wiggin that children are people too—capable, intelligent, heroic people. Not bumbling, naïve fairy-tale heroes like Hansel and Gretel, but real heroes. Smart and cunning and unstoppable. Mythic heroes in every sense.
The Mythic Hero
In his book The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell suggests that the adventures of mythic heroes
all follow the same formula, a story structure he calls the monomyth. Pick any hero you like, from Perseus to Luke Skywalker, and you can plug the steps of that hero’s adventure into this mythic structure. It’s not scientific, of course. Not every hero myth is identical. Sometimes the steps may be in a different order or missing from the pattern entirely. Campbell says that’s the point. The monomyth isn’t an architectural blueprint. It’s a skeletal structure that can be skinned a thousand different ways.
Ender’s Game, it turns out, fits the structure quite well. Take a look-see.
Campbell dissects the monomyth into three steps: (1) separation (2) initiation and (3) return. During separation, the hero receives a call to adventure that requires him to leave the ordinary world he knows and enter a world of supernatural wonder. In Ender’s case, this means leaving his family and entering Battle School, a world of zero gravity and games and social structures all completely foreign to Ender.
During initiation, the hero must immerse himself in the new world. He must learn rules, gain allies, confront rivals, and overcome a series of trials. It’s not easy. The hero will be challenged, attacked, and deceived. He will face danger and disgrace. Forces will combine against him. His tasks will require exceptional talent or skill. (Hmm. Sounds like the brochure copy for Battle School, doesn’t it?)
After the hero’s immersion into the world, the hero must enter the figurative inmost cave, face death, and slay a powerful enemy, an event Campbell calls the Supreme Ordeal. This is not the final battle for the hero but rather a precursor to it. The experience forever changes the hero and prepares him for the ultimate confrontation yet to come.
In Ender’s case, the inmost cave is the steaming hot shower, and the enemy is Bonzo. Their battle is a shocking ordeal that crushes Ender emotionally and, ultimately, prepares him for his final showdown with the formics.
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