Ender's World
Page 22
Some fantasies die hard.
Lesson Two: Your pain has a purpose. Your suffering and loneliness are the keys to your greatness.
There’s something about Ender’s particular brand of isolated, vaguely superior loneliness that is almost impossible not to identify with. It’s not an accident that the book is so popular with gifted kids who have discovered that being good at school doesn’t necessarily make them popular. Ender spends a lot of his time feeling small, powerless, ashamed, bullied, even evil—but his trials invariably make him better. This was an important one for me. I was not a particularly unhappy teenager, at least as teenagers go. But I was a nerd, with the alienation and angst of the nerd. There was the occasional bully. I worked really hard in school, and it was exhausting sometimes. When I entered the working world, my first jobs were intense and difficult and depressing.
Through it all, though, I had Ender. I knew that, although I might not understand precisely what my current suffering was for, it was going to be useful someday. It would make me stronger. Eventually, I would be called upon to save the world—or something very close to it—and I would be ready. My reaction to that kid who used to push me around in P.E. class was Very, Very Important. It was a test, a critical waypoint on my path to…wherever I was going. My cool self-control might, to the untrained eye, have looked a lot like sullen, fearful resentment, but I knew better. It was a mark of greatness.
It may sound like pretentious self-delusion, and in some ways it was. But I think people underestimate the importance of pretentious self-delusion—or, at least, of using fantasy to help yourself through hard times. As we experience it, most suffering is pretty banal. Some kid pushes you around in P.E., and you stare at the floor in silent fury. You could be a humiliated fifteen-year-old who didn’t stand up for himself in the locker room after gym class…or you could be Ender, learning important lessons by dealing with Peter, the young psychopath.
This wasn’t just helpful when I was young and preparing for life. Humiliations and challenges, surprisingly enough, didn’t end when I left school. In my first full-time job, I was making terrible money working for a talent agent who liked to call me names and hurl things in my direction when he got frustrated. It sucked. I considered leaving the entertainment industry entirely, but…there was always Ender. Was answering phones and making copies at a mid-level Hollywood talent agency really worse than Battle School? Perhaps the Screaming Agent was my own personal Bonzo Madrid. I would learn from his mistakes. I would be forged in the crucible of that agency and emerge stronger. Maybe I would even get to kill him someday.
It was a comforting thought, and it kept me at my desk, working hard through a misery that, on its face, wasn’t particularly ennobling. But staying at that sorry desk was one of the most important decisions I ever made. It led me to a life, a family, and a career that I love.
At the same time, I’ve realized that my early understanding of this particular lesson was…not wrong exactly but incomplete. Suffering, by itself, is just suffering. A guy throwing a script at you because the fax machine is broken isn’t really a lesson, any more than Ender’s torment at Bonzo’s hands was. Lessons are only lessons if you choose to see them that way. In some ways, wasn’t that really Ender’s greatest skill—his ability to learn from his torment? I mean, his greatest skill besides being a super-genius at age six with incredibly quick reflexes, a natural athleticism, and an effortless understanding of military strategy? You get the point.
Lesson Three: At the end of the day, the only thing anyone cares about is whether you won.
There’s something wonderfully straightforward about an interstellar war against a horde of merciless, unknowable aliens. Certainly, it has its disadvantages—the senseless deaths, the blood and treasure poured into the void of space—but it does brings a certain focus to everything, doesn’t it? Ender has to defeat the formics. Everything must be in service to that single goal, and in the end nothing much matters except which side is dead.
I never had a Formic War to fight in (tragically), but I was pretty enchanted with this philosophy nonetheless. As far as I was concerned, Ender’s Game made it pretty clear that the ends justified the means. Ender did real damage to people, but he had to. He bent rules and did away with civilized norms of behavior in the Battle Room, but that was the key to his victory. At the end of the book, when the only way to win was by violating the ultimate taboo against destroying an entire species, well…he did what he had to do. He’s hailed as a hero, and nobody worries too much about broken taboos.
It’s a seductive philosophy when you’re fifteen years old. It’s a great justification for cheating on a French test, anyway. I had Very Important Things to do with my life, and if I had to break a few rules to get the grades that would get me into the best college and launch me on my way, so be it! Millions of lives might be at stake!
Fortunately, I didn’t have the stomach to adopt this mindset wholeheartedly. I felt guilty when I wrote the answers to my French vocabulary quizzes on the desk, even though Madame Stillman didn’t notice. Also, there was the issue of not really knowing what rules to break in order to facilitate my rise to greatness and crush my enemies. Ender had these awesome flashes of brilliance, but it came a little harder for me. I’d stand on the basketball court at lunchtime, racking my brain for some stroke of tactical genius that would allow me to destroy the other team. I never came up with much, and while I was thinking, the other team was usually scoring.
Still, I kept this lesson close to my heart. In his last battle, Ender thinks, “I don’t care if I follow your rules. If you can cheat, so can I. I won’t let you beat me unfairly—I’ll beat you unfairly first.” I knew that at some point I, too, was going to have to get ruthless. I would have to break some arms. I would leave bodies in my wake. It might not be pretty, but at the end of the day, after some unspecified victory, all would be forgiven, as it had been for Ender. I conveniently ignored the obvious flaw in my thinking, which was that Ender thought he was playing a game in that battle, while I was imagining this as a roadmap for life.
Here’s the other problem: Ender’s victory over the formics isn’t the end of the book, even if it felt that way at fifteen. At a time in my life when the approval of others seemed like pretty much the only thing that mattered, being hailed as a hero by all mankind seemed like a good gig, no matter what it took to get there. But as the book takes pains to make clear, that’s not necessarily the case. Ender, the tool of Graff and Mazer Rackham, is wracked with guilt. Ender, the miracle-worker, can never go home again. Ender, the legend, can never have a real life. He has to live in the future, as the Speaker for the Dead, dealing with the moral implications of his actions. So…oops.
Still, there is a yet deeper truth here, one that has been an important part of my life and career. At the end of the day, you have to deliver the goods, and people don’t much care how you feel about it. Ender suffers for all of his victories. He feels guilt for the people he hurt. He feels terrible about sacrificing his teammates. He regrets exterminating the formics. He had a job to do, he had choices to make, and he had to live with his choices for the rest of his life. We all do.
In my current career in television, there’s a cold calculation at work. If your audience numbers are high enough, you stay on the air, and if they aren’t, you’re out. It doesn’t matter how you feel about it, whether you played by the rules, or how nice you were to people along the way. They count the eyeballs and they make a decision.
In the war for eyeballs, I’ve won and I’ve lost. In victory, everybody makes money, and you are hailed as a hero. In defeat, well…there’s nothing quite like seeing something with your name on it being rejected by millions of people. The stakes may be slightly lower than they are in an interstellar war against hostile aliens, but they’re high enough. Under such circumstances, you have to make hard choices, choices that will sometimes cause pain. Unfortunately, not making the choices will cause pain too. So there. You want to be in charge? D
eal with it.
And so, at this point in my life, I find myself drawing a modified, and somewhat more painful, version of this lesson from the book. The ends don’t justify the means. Nothing justifies anything. There’s just what you do, and whether you can live with it. It may be true that the only thing anyone else cares about is whether you won, but that doesn’t mean it’s the only thing that matters.
And so, Madame Stillman, wherever you are, I’m sorry I cheated on that French test. It was my fault, not Ender’s.
Lesson Four: Your people are out there. You may feel alone now, but be patient, and you will find them.
For most of the novel, Ender Wiggin is a pretty isolated fellow. He’s got Valentine, and some intermittent friendships, but with Colonel Graff rearranging things at Battle School, he isn’t able to make many close pals. He’s lonely, and that loneliness only deepens over the course of the book.
And yet…I remember how it felt, reading about Battle School for the first time. I remember how profoundly I longed to be there. Yes, Ender was lonely, but he’d found his people—he was in a place where he was appreciated, and known. He had his squad, he had his army, and in the later books, his jeesh. The closest I could get to that was the other dorks in the theater club. They were my friends, sure, but would they die for me?
Ender gave me faith that things would change. I would find my people too. Tragically, I had been born too early to find them in Battle School, but…maybe somewhere? In college? Or at work?
The reality was disappointing. I had a little luck finding my people in an academic summer camp I attended, but it was all too brief. College was UCLA—a great school, but it’s hard for twenty-two thousand undergraduates to cohere into a band of brothers. As for the workplace, well…apparently corporations are primarily interested in making money, not in fostering a deep camaraderie among the employees.
But this one was a hard dream to give up. So hard, in fact, that I didn’t give it up, even in the face of quite a bit of evidence that it was just a juvenile fantasy. And for a long time, it stayed that way.
Over time, though, a funny thing happened. “My people” started showing up. The more I dedicated myself to the things I really cared about, the more I ran into kindred spirits. These were the people who really would fight alongside me. It has been one of the great joys of my life that I have found a career where I can surround myself with extremely talented people who are all devoted to a common goal. I found my army—and it turned out to be filled with a lot of—guess what?—theater dorks. So far, no one has died for me, but then again, I haven’t asked.
Interestingly, my life has also turned out to be filled with other Ender’s Game fans. Over the years, I have learned to recognize my brothers and sisters. You know what I’m talking about: you meet someone, and without even asking the question, you just know you’ve found a fellow fan. I have more than one brother-in-arms who I found because of the book that sold me on the idea of having brothers-in-arms. Which is kind of awesome, in my opinion.
Through these people, I’ve also learned I wasn’t alone in looking to Ender’s Game as a guide. I’ve seen how their own understanding of the book has evolved. That’s as it should be, I think—there are lessons to be learned in Ender’s Game, but they are learned less from the book than with it. You keep your dog-eared copy as you move through life, thumbing through it at key moments, finding new things. The text becomes part of you, while the book itself binds you to all the others making their way through life with their dog-eared copies of Ender’s Game.
For me, the deepest validation of this lesson came some years ago, when I chanced upon a review of my show Burn Notice that had been written by none other than Orson Scott Card. I immediately told a member of my writing staff, with whom I had connected largely because he had read Ender’s Game more than a hundred times. He immediately told his writing partner, whom he had met in college, when they bonded over a mutual love of…Ender’s Game.
I wrote to Orson, and he wrote back. We stayed in touch, and I met him earlier this year. It was a profound experience for me, and confirmed the role of the novel in my life the way that nothing else could have. Orson Scott Card wrote a book that helped to inspire my life and career and guided me to a place that led me all the way back to Orson Scott Card.
And if that’s not finding your people, I don’t know what is.
Matt Nix is the creator and executive producer of the one-hour action drama Burn Notice, currently in its sixth season on the USA Network. He also created the action-comedy The Good Guys for the Fox Network. He is the author of several feature film scripts currently languishing in various states of development at major studios. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife, three children, and dog.
ABOUT THE EDITOR
Orson Scott Card is the author of the novels Ender’s Game, Ender’s Shadow, and Speaker for the Dead, which are widely read by adults and younger readers, and are increasingly used in schools.
His most recent series, the young adult Pathfinder series (Pathfinder, Ruins) and the fantasy Mithermages series (Lost Gate, Gate Thief) are taking readers in new directions. Besides these and other science fiction novels, Card writes contemporary fantasy (Magic Street, Enchantment, Lost Boys), biblical novels (Stone Tables, Rachel and Leah), the American frontier fantasy series The Tales of Alvin Maker (beginning with Seventh Son), poetry (An Open Book), and many plays and scripts, including his “freshened” Shakespeare scripts for Romeo and Juliet, The Taming of the Shrew, and The Merchant of Venice.
Card was born in Washington and grew up in California, Arizona, and Utah. He served a mission for the LDS Church in Brazil in the early 1970s. Besides his writing, he teaches occasional classes and workshops and directs plays. He frequently teaches writing and literature courses at Southern Virginia University.
Card currently lives in Greensboro, North Carolina, with his wife, Kristine Allen Card, where his primary activity is feeding birds, squirrels, chipmunks, possums, and raccoons.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The publisher extends their sincerest thank you to all the Ender fans who submitted their thoughtful questions for the Q&As in this book, especially:
3dcivilwar
acanofdietorangeslice
achillesdeponies
Angel Co
internet-haze
for-bittenlove
Brian Johnson
melissakohler
Jason R. Morales
mpolluxork
Carlos Ramirez
Reginald Linsao
Elizabeth C. Spencer
Jonathan Tillman
and
Czhorat
diamond-standard
easternwu
Enderspeaker
freefoodatpenn
Declan M. Garrett
Paul Graham
Megan Grazman
hikaruchord
James Kamlet
McDermott
Bryan Morrison
Nathan Neufeld
Orion
Iván Preuss
Ruthie
Gudrún Saga
Danion Sisler
Ssmith
Tblondin
theawkwardchild
Emily Thorpe
unlockthesecret
Many thanks, also, to the Ender fansites that helped us get the word out, all great sources of Ender book and movie news:
EndersAnsible.com
EnderNews.com
EnderWiggin.net