But most important, Ender’s Game gives us Ender Wiggin, who, to those of us who discovered him in our youth, is more than a character on a page or even a kindred spirit. Ender is an epiphany. He is the realization that maybe, just maybe, we can do great things too.
Back in the desert ghost town, two figures stand facing each other across a wide stretch of dirt in the middle of the street. One is tall and lean and dusty, with one corner of his poncho folded back to give him easy access to his gun. The other figure is much shorter. A boy. His flashsuit is tight but unfrozen, his helmet secure. The tip of his weapon is already bright with a dot of light. They stare each other down, neither flinching. A shrill music breaks the silence. Whaawhaa-whaa. There are whispers that these two are evenly matched, that neither of them will come out alive.
I disagree.
My money’s on the boy.
Aaron Johnston is a New York Times bestselling author. He and Orson Scott Card wrote Earth Unaware, which is the first of a series of prequel novels to Ender’s Game. The second novel, Earth Afire, will be released by TOR in summer 2013. Aaron also adapted Orson Scott Card’s Ender in Exile and Speaker for the Dead for Marvel Comics. Other comics credits within the Ender universe include League War, Mazer in Prison, and Formic Wars. He and Orson Scott Card are also the co-authors of the novel Invasive Procedures. Follow him at aaronwjohnston.com or on Twitter @AaronWJohnston.
A TEENLESS WORLD
METTE IVIE HARRISON
I was at a bar following a SFF convention a few years ago, chatting up an editor I had hoped to interest in a new adult fantasy novel of mine. The conversation turned to my previously published YA novels, among them The Princess and the Hound. The adult genre editor, not surprisingly, had never heard of the title. I mentioned that it had been given a good review by Orson Scott Card, and the editor’s interest seemed to perk up. But it wasn’t my book he was interested in. Instead, he asked me point blank, “Why is Orson Scott Card so interested in torturing children?” Ender’s Game was at the top of his list of proofs for his assertion. I goggled at him, but he wouldn’t let it go as a rhetorical question. He wanted me to defend child torture in Ender’s Game, it seemed.
I tried to say that, as far as I knew, Orson Scott Card was not a sadist or a child-hater. His books showed characters who faced difficult things, and it seemed to me that one of the reasons many readers fell in love with his books was that he didn’t take it easy on younger characters, whether children or teenagers. Because life doesn’t take it easy on the young, and books that coddle them in the way that parents sometimes seem to want may be comforting, but they are not the books that seem real and lead readers to feel intimately attached to them. In short, Ender’s Game is a book that younger readers read precisely because it treats them and the characters their age as people, no different really than adults. And that is something teens in particular desperately crave, to be seen not as children who need to be sheltered but as people who are capable of determining their own futures, for good or ill.
The very idea of teenager is a modern concept developed in the twentieth century as part of the fight for child labor laws and the development of the federal school system. (The first appearance of the word teenage is in the Reader’s Digest in 1941, but it appears to have been in common use by then.) It was originally coined as a way of describing those who were fully grown physically and had been considered ready for adult jobs in earlier centuries, but to whom the government now extended its protection because it no longer considered them to be adults.
What is the age of adulthood? One might argue that it is the age at which military service is allowed, which would be only seventeen. Or that it is the age at which teens are legally allowed to drop out of high school and begin full-time work. This age has recently been changed to eighteen from sixteen in about half the states, in order to encourage teens to stay in school. Driver’s license privileges are also part of our traditional definition of adulthood. They begin in many states at fifteen or sixteen, but full privileges are withheld until eighteen or even later. Other adult privileges are also withheld until a certain age. Tobacco use is allowed by most states at age eighteen (nineteen in Utah and a handful of others). Voting privileges begin at age eighteen. But the very fact that we have different state laws on many of these passages to adulthood would suggest that there is a great deal of debate on what it means. If we say eighteen is the age of adulthood, it is certainly provisional. For instance, we have extended the age of drinking to twenty-one in most states, which implies that we still consider those between eighteen and twenty-one too juvenile to make their own choices about alcohol use.
I think it might be more useful to define adulthood as the age at which many children stop being financially dependent on or living with parents or guardians. By this reasoning, many children are pushing back full adulthood until well into their twenties. In fact, the new health care laws seem to imply that before age twenty-six, most people are still children and should expect parental support financially. The idea that parents are expected to pay for a college education, and that until this is finished a parent’s job is not, also extends the teen years far later than they once were. Even in publishing, the term young adult has begun to include the college years, when at one time in the past, it was assumed that adulthood had already been achieved. Why are we as a society postponing the years of adulthood? Is it because we are only now getting scientific proof about when the development of the brain reaches its zenith? I don’t think so.
My belief is that this is about technology, the changes that technology has made to our world, and the length of time it takes to learn the skills necessary to contribute to a technologically advanced world. Yes, many children seem more adept on computers, cell phones, and other technologies than adults are. Many children are learning to read at a younger age than the previous generation and doing more complex math by the end of high school. Nonetheless, a high school graduate cannot expect to earn a decent living. Earnings from a full-time minimum wage job are no longer sufficient for raising a family. Even an undergraduate degree may not be enough to be truly competitive in the world of future technological advancements. So it makes sense to give children more time in which to develop the skills they need to become adults, to extend those years during which children look like adults but are not expected to work as adults do.
But with this extension of childhood comes an extension of parental guidance, of teenage rebellion and disdain for adults who stifle real talent and creativity in their attempt to protect. Ender’s Game shows us a different world, in which those who might in our world be called children or teenagers and be allowed time to develop are instead recruited to fight a war. In fact, child, teenage, and adult are not useful categories in a world on the edge of destruction, only effective and ineffective. Because of the exigent circumstances of the war against the formics, as soon as children are capable of acting in adult ways, they are allowed—in fact required—to be placed in adult roles. This is the sheerest meritocracy that is imaginable, free of age-based biases. And it isn’t a horror story to teens. It is the kind of world teens go back to read about again and again, and if they are frightened by it, they also seem empowered, far more than the adults who watch teens reading Ender’s Game are sometimes comfortable with. They seem to want teens to be disgusted, to confirm the adults’ ideas that the world of Ender’s Game is too grown up for teens to relate to. But that is far from the truth.
Ender’s Game begins when Ender is six years old and the climax of the book is when he is only ten years old. The first thing we as readers hear from Ender is his thoughts when an adult tells him that his monitor coming off “won’t hurt a bit.” He thinks, “It was a lie, of course, that it wouldn’t hurt a bit. But since adults always said it when it was going to hurt, he could count on that as an accurate prediction of the future. Sometimes lies were more dependable than the truth.” The complaint that adults are hypocrites, that they say one thing and do something comple
tely different, that they declare a set of morality rules for children but break those rules themselves again and again, is common among teens in our world. Ender’s understanding of this at the age of six certainly shows his precocity.
Ender does not think of himself as a teenager, of course. Nor does the text ever suggest that he has the other attributes we normally associate with teenagers. He is not whiny, abrasive, rude to parents or other adults. He does not demand responsibility that he does not deserve. He doesn’t show irresponsible behavior or talk back. Ender has the thinking capacity of an adult, and he treats adults as equals, criticizing them when he sees that they are wrong. He has the tone of a soldier who tells a superior officer precisely what is wrong with the system. You can compare his complaints to Graff with those of David Weber’s Honor Harrington or Lois McMaster Bujold’s Aral Vorkosigan—adult characters in popular military science fiction worlds. And this is precisely what is appealing about Ender’s Game to teens, in my view. They are imagining a future in which they might be valued and judged as adults are, based on their merits and usefulness to society, and not dismissed out of hand because of their age. Ender’s Game is not at all disturbing to teens. Ender has what teens want, which is the adult world given to them, fully, right now.
When Ender first enters Battle School, he is told, “You won’t have a normal childhood.” In fact, what they mean is that his childhood, such as it has been, is over. He won’t have any childhood at all. He is now an adult, entering the army. The conversations between Ender and the other boys in Battle School aren’t childlike at all. Ender demands to be called sir and he calls his team gentlemen. The laughing and jokes here are actually more adult than childlike, despite the occasional references to farting. Rat Army commander Rose the Nose tells newly conscripted Ender, “You ain’t nothing but a pinheaded prick of a goy,” and then there follows a long discussion of what goy means, on an adult level. Rose tells Ender that Dink Meeker is God. Ender asks Rose who Rose is and is given the answer “the personnel officer who hired God.” Later, when the other, older boys are trying to intimidate Ender, Alai asks him, “They scare you, too? They slap you up in the bathroom? Stick you head in the pissah? Somebody gots a gun up you bung?” Pretty strong stuff.
In fact, this is the kind of language that my editor in YA would steer me clear of. I’ve been asked not to use the word piss, let alone suggest sodomy. The parents who patrol the internet for their children of all ages and who post reviews for “clean books” as if that is a shiny sticker of approval would never accept language like this in a YA novel. I suspect it would be difficult to avoid parental complaints when teaching Ender’s Game in a high school—unless perhaps the parents have read the book themselves and felt how powerfully it speaks to teens. The strong language and content is part of the reason that the book continues to have more success published as an adult book rather than a teen book, though the protagonist is the traditional age of a middle grade novel’s, even younger than a YA novel’s protagonist. (The label and the shelf placement in bookstores and libraries hasn’t stopped kids of differing ages from picking up and loving Ender’s Game, though. Nor from feeling as though this is the book that first spoke to them, that first invited them into the adult world. It is the book that they remember as one of the finest novels of science fiction ever.)
Card’s genius is that he puts such harsh, adult words in the mouths of children and makes them believable. Not just because these kids are super-smart, though they are. The dialogue is believable because these kids are filling the adult roles that make their words necessary. And these kids are capable of filling these roles precisely because they are allowed to be, forced to be. Teens who read Ender’s Game love it because they can imagine themselves to be Ender or Petra or Bean. They can imagine that adults take them seriously, too.
The null grav suit that all the children of Battle School put on can be read as a symbolic costume of adulthood. They need to wear it in order to become soldiers in space, but it isn’t all fun and games. Ender says null gravity is “frightening, disorienting.” The suits are confining: “It was harder to make precise movements, since the suits bent just a bit slower, resisted a bit more than any clothing they had ever worn before.” For children becoming adults too soon, the expectations of adulthood would feel this way. But Ender figures out immediately the right way to see the world with a suit on. He moves past the feeling of discomfort and finds out that, with this adult suit on, value systems change. Down and up become malleable concepts and require him, as a real adult, to see the world in its full-color complexity.
In this context, in which the survival of the human race depends on its soldiers’ ability to not just see this complexity but also use it to take advantage of the ever-changing battleground of space, Ender’s age is actually an asset because it makes him more flexible. But in our world, many children have this flexibility and are not praised for it. To the contrary, when they express their new vision of the world, they are often beaten down, told to show respect to authority, to the way things have always been. Sometimes they give up and simply follow the rules instead of reinventing them, pretending that this is accepting adulthood. Ender, in the book, is in a unique and enviable position because the adults around him are desperate enough that they actually listen to his crazy ideas and let him see what happens when he relies on them. Teens in our world are rarely given this chance.
Still, Ender does face adult censure at times. He just deals with it in a way that isn’t very teen. He doesn’t rebel. He simply ignores it and does what he wants anyway. For instance, when the adults who are behind the scenes of Battle School decide to start making it impossible for Ender and his toon to win and changing the rules of the battles the children play, Ender could react with anger and depression as Dink does. “It’s the teachers. They’re the enemy,” says Dink. They’ve tried to promote him, but he refuses and keeps going back to his place in his toon. Dink continues:
They get us to fight each other, to hate each other. The game is everything. Win win win. It amounts to nothing. We kill ourselves, go crazy trying to beat each other and all the time the old bastards are watching us, studying us, discovering our weak points, deciding whether we’re good enough or not. Well, good enough for what?
Here at last we have typical teenage rebelliousness, but notice that Ender rejects it. He has no interest in being a teenager, in being helpless and complaining about adults manipulating him. In fact, Ender’s careful use of the mind game makes the reader begin to wonder who is manipulating whom. Are the adults doing the manipulating or is Ender? I think teen readers may be subtly shown that Dink’s way is easier, but Ender’s way is the way to really be successful. To refuse to rebel but to find a way to make the game of adulthood your own—that is the way to find power in the adult world, and that is what teens ultimately want.
That teens are as capable as adults when it comes to understanding the world, and more capable of changing it, is reinforced when we hear what Peter and Valentine are doing on Earth while Ender is at Battle School. They are two years older than Ender, which makes them eight and ten when he starts Battle School and twelve and fourteen when he defeats the formics—classic teen years. And yet what do Peter and Valentine do that is teenlike? They talk about troop movements in Russia, about world politics, things that teens are supposed to be completely uninterested in. “They call us children and treat us like mice,” says Valentine of the adults around them. This is a fairly typical teenage complaint, but Valentine and Peter take it to the next logical step and begin to write essays on two sides of the political spectrum in an attempt to remake the world.
With the internet (which Scott imagined clearly years before it was widely used) children are able to act like adults. No one knows their age, and so they can become whatever it is that their ideas and abilities mean they can become. Peter says, “We don’t have to wait until we’re grown up and safely put away in some career,” a line that could easily be put in the mouth of a b
ratty teenager and dismissed. But Card doesn’t dismiss it. He never dismisses Valentine and Peter’s grand schemes. Instead, he shows them coming about exactly as a teen might imagine it happening. They want to be adults, they find a way to be seen as adults, and they are perfectly capable of being adults. They move directly from childhood to adulthood without any stage in between. They don’t need coddling. They don’t need the guidance of adults. They don’t need college or an internship or a few years still at home with Mom and Dad helping them pay back student loans and get a car paid off. This makes one wonder who the long extension of teenage-hood in our modern times is really serving. Is it really for the sake of the children, who need the help of the adults? Or is it the adults who need to be needed, need to live in a world in which they have the most power, in which a child’s years are extended and extended again to keep any power out of their reach?
“Ender Wiggin must believe that no matter what happens, no adult will ever, ever step in to help him in any way. He must believe that to the core of his soul, that he can only do what he and the other children work out for themselves. If he does not believe that, then he will never reach the peak of his abilities,” says Graff. This push off the cliff into adulthood is precisely what adults in our world now think they are saving teens from. They keep giving them safety nets, but the truth that Ender’s Game seems to argue is that teens will never reach the peak of their abilities until the safety nets are taken away and children are allowed to design their own wings in ways adults have never thought possible before, as Ender reinvents the null grav suit. He uses the same materials, but it becomes something utterly different in his hands. What are we adults who hold back adulthood from our children depriving the world of? What inventions are we shrugging our shoulders at, patting the heads of children and telling them that when they are “safely put away in a career,” they will be able to try something moderately innovative, so long as it is innovative in the same ways that other successful inventors have been innovative?
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