Xenocide

After Speaker for the Dead, we do not take another 3,000 year jump before the next sequel, only a 20-or-so year jump.

Why that long?

Because that’s how long it takes for the fleet of planetkilling starships to reach Lusitania at sub-light speeds.

Oh, yeah . . . Speaker for the Dead ended with a fleet of starships on their way to Lusitania with a planetkilling weapon.

That’s kind of a big, unresolved plot point.

Orson Scott Card has a tendency to leave major plot points unresolved at the end of his books. Sometimes it happens because his books get too long and he needs to cut them in half, but some of the time it is because the plot point deals with a question that just isn’t a priority for him.

As he explains in a commentary at the end of the audio book version of Children of the Mind, the last book of the Ender fork, where he leaves a similar big plot point unresolved, he just doesn’t feel that answering the question is that important. Either the answer is A or B, but the interesting part to him is the drama of the characters living with the tension of not knowing if it will be A or B. It would be kind of anticlimactic to reveal it, he essentially says.

I strongly disagree with this Sopranos-like school of storytelling. I think that if you’ve spent time setting up a major question in the story then you have implicitly promised the readers that you will give them an answer to this question. You may not owe them answers to every tiny issue that arises, but if you’ve staked major dramatic investment in something then you either owe them an answer in the current book or you owe them a sequel that answers it. Readers feel cheated if major elements of the story are left unresolved.

And eventually Card does get around to answering the question of whether the planetkilling fleet does or does not destroy Lusitania.

But not in this book.

That’s right. The planetkilling fleet that is out in space at the beginning of the novel is still out in space at the end of the novel.

In this case the thread is left hanging because the book got too long for Card and he had to cut it in half, but it still lessens the reading satisfaction that you get when the major threat driving the overall plot is still unresolved at the end of the book.

I thus think that Xenocide is a step down from Speaker for the Dead, which was itself a step down from Ender’s Game.

I don’t just feel this because the main driver of the plot is unresolved at the end. There are also other reasons.

For one, the story starts to get really talky. Card is an introspective writer (meaning: he spends a lot of time exploring characters feelings and motivations), and when he lets this tendency go too far it starts causing the plot to drag.

That starts happening in this book.

Basically, the characters are focused on three things: (1) Now that the Uber Prime Directive has been overthrown, can Humans and Piggies live together successfully, (2) How can we create faster-than-light travel to start evacuating the planet in case we can’t stop the planetkilling fleet, and (3) How can we stop a horrible virus that is too dangerous to be taken off Lusitania and that could devastate the biospheres of any planets that it is taken to as part of the evacuation?

Also, we get to meet characters on a Chinese-colonized world named Path and learn about their culture.

The first of the things that the characters are focused on is the most interesting dramatically (more on that in a moment). The questions of how to do FTL and how to stop the virus are kinda interesting, but the solutions to these questions more or less come out of the blue.

The characters in the story have Eureka moments after going down false paths, but they come across somewhat like when  in a Star Trek episode the characters are trying this and that and then somebody hauls off and says, "Oh! I get it! We just need to reverse the polarity!"

There is also a HUGE plot twist  right at the end of the book that just comes out of left field.

There are two kinds of plot twists: One in which, when it happens, you go, "Oh, yeah! That makes total sense! All of a sudden the earlier pieces now fit together!" The ending of The Sixth Sense is like that. It’s a twist that, while surprising, feels natural.

Then there is the "Where did that come from?" kind of plot twist–one that, while it may relate to things set up earlier in the story, does not seem to flow naturally from them but feels forced or arbitrary.

That’s the kind of plot point we get right before the end of the book.

I won’t spoil it; I’ll just note it as something that, again, diminishes the literary value of the book by asking the reader to make a big suspension of disbelief right at the climax.

So how does religion get handled in this book?

Well, we get a good bit about the religion of Path, which seems to be a development of Taoism. While he doesn’t go a lot into the doctrine of this religion–it’s a basic "honor the gods and ancestors" religion–it’s actually quite interesting because there is a certain class of people on path, known as the "godspoken," who are treated as holy people because they receive messages from the gods.

As soon as Card started describing how the godspoken receive their messages, a chill went up my spine because it was instantly clear that those to whom the gods "speak" are in fact sufferers of obsessive-compulsive disorder.

The "gods" give them feelings of profound unworthiness or uncleanliness (obsessions) and to relieve the anxiety these generate, they must perform ritualistic behaviors (compulsions), such as washing their hands over and over or tapping out rhythmic patterns with their foot or getting down on their hands and knees and visually tracing lines in the wood that the floor is made of.

I don’t know how I’d feel about this if I were a Taoist, but I find the idea of OCD sufferers being treated as holy people to whom the gods communicate is intriguing. That’s not what OCD is, but one can see how a real-world Human culture might have treated it as such. Later events in the story also make it clear that Card does not intend the role of OCD sufferers to be a slap at traditional Chinese religion.

He treats the religion of Path with respect, and one of the characters in the story ends up, after death, actually being worshipped as a god by the people of Path.

Back on Lusitania, the presentation of Catholicism continues to be problematic. Two devout characters get really good moments, and the community as a whole gets one really bad moment.

We have, in essence, a martyrdom, a pogrom, and the aftermath of the pogrom.

When one character is martyred for the faith, it is a very moving moment, and Card is really trying to do it right, even noting that the multi-hour debate that this character engaged in while being martyred was worthy of the disputations of the early Church Fathers.

The pogrom is much less successful dramatically. Oh, sure, it’s tragic when it happens, and you feel for the people who are getting hurt by it, but it just feels too much like cliches about torch-bearing Medieval fanatics willing to exterminate at the drop of a hat in the name of Christ, with people in the story actually brandishing torches, setting fire to things, and shouting that they’re doing this "For Christ!"

In the wake of the pogrom, the bishop of Lusitania gets his finest and basically his only fully-sympathetic moment as the previously stuffy and petty ecclesiastic reads the riot act to those who perpetrated the pogrom. He shames them profoundly and then announces a very moving public form of penance that the whole community will participate in, himself included, to atone for the events of the pogrom.

While Card is still trying to give the Catholic faith a fair shake, and while it’s nice to see the prickly old bishop finally (even though it is his last major scene in the novels) have a good moment, I still don’t think Card is fully successful.

Part of the reason is that it is in this novel that he starts working Mormon metaphysics into the story.

Up to now, he hasn’t done anything with the story that would imply the truth or falsity of any particular religion. He doesn’t tell us one way or the other whether the gods of Path are real or whether the Catholic God is real. Those are open questions that the characters in the story debate, but there are no definitive answers given by the author.

I’m comfortable with that.

But then he starts bringing Mormon metaphysics into things and it undercuts the religious neutrality he’s had heretofore.

Here’s how that works: Mormons believe in an endless series of finite gods who rule different worlds, often conceived of today as different universes. These beings reproduce, so there are new gods coming into existence through a process of development from unformed, uncreated eternal intelligences. One step in the process–for us at least–is being a human on the way to godhood. Mormons also believe that matter and spirit are essentially the same thing; spirit is just a more refined or subtle form of matter.

So here’s how that gets presented in the book: It turns out that all matter is made of tiny particles called philotes, which are bound together in various ways. These philotes have existed for all eternity, never having been created, in another realm called the "Outside," where they exist in a formless state, yearning (they’re at least all primitively conscious, so mind and matter are the same thing) to enter into relationships and exist in our world as part of physical objects.

Philotes come in different strengths, and inside each physical object is a master philote which is capable of holding all the others together so that the object doesn’t disintegrate. The strength of a philote needed to hold together a stone or a flower is less than the strength of the philote needed to hold together a human being. This master philote is called an aiua (eye-you-ah), but it could also be called a soul. Thus the souls of all humans have existed from all eternity in an unformed state and have grown and progressed by becoming incarnate with a bunch of other hylozoic pieces of matter.

And they can progress farther. We learn of one character who, it turns out, has a soul so powerful that he can not only animate one human body (his own) but simultaneously animate two other living human bodies as well. And one character (not the one from Path who ends up worshipped as a god) is even more powerful, having an aiua so strong that it is openly speculated that this character could be regarded as a god.

Perhaps this character could even one day bud off a new universe, because–it is speculated–there have been an infinite number of universes budded off by aiuas that got sufficiently strong in the previous universes, so there is an endless chain of universes stretching back in time with no beginning, just as there is no beginning to the philotes.

Sound familiar?

I don’t have a problem with Orson Scott Card exploring these ideas or writing a book that presents Mormon metaphysics in an imaginative form. Writers from any religious perspective can be expected to do that.

But what I don’t like is the fact that this starts forming an implicit anti-Catholic apologetic on the part of the novels, and that diminishes them artistically.

Mark Twain is alleged to have said that literature should never preach overtly but should constantly preach covertly. Card seems to be trying to follow that dictum, but he’s preaching so loudly that the art of the books suffers.

First, we have a largely unsympathetic Catholic culture, where all of the sympathetic Catholics hold their faith in a nuanced, attenuated way or are doubters or flat-out unreligious. Then we put this Catholic culture alongside a polytheistic one, with equal openness to the idea of multiple gods and the Christian God being real (compatible with the Mormon view). Then we get Mormon metaphysics thrown in and these metaphysics turn out to be true, because they provide the solution to the questions of faster-than-light travel and curing the killer virus that must be stopped.

So a Mormon writes a book that assumes Mormonism is true and Catholicism is false. What’s wrong with that?

Nothing.

But the art suffers. Card may be trying to give Catholics a fair shake–at least to a significant extent. though the fact that the series is now turning into a crypto-apologetic for Mormonism is starting to call that into question–but the art still suffers.

Here’s why: Suppose you’re a faithful Catholic on a planet in the year 5200 (approximately) and you start discovering that Mormon metaphysics is true, that we’ve all existed as unformed intelligences for all eternity, and that there is likely an eternity of universes, each created by a finite being, with no beginning and no first Creator to the whole series.

Do you:

a) Accept all this without question as the story rolls along, not noticing any problem? or

b) Sit down and have a major crisis of faith as you realize that the core of your religious beliefs appear to be false?

The second is what would happen in the real world. The first is what happens in Card’s book.

And that’s implausible, so the art suffers.

Card can’t let his characters have a crisis of faith without making it explicit that he’s having Mormonism trump Christianity, and that would violate Twain’s dictum about not overtly preaching because it diminishes the art. And it would diminish the art if the characters suddenly realized "Oh, wow, we’ve all got to become Mormons."

He can’t go there, so instead he leaves a planet-sized implausibility in how the characters deal–or rather fail to deal–with the implications that their discoveries have for their core beliefs about the world.

He may not be explicitly endorsing Mormonism in the book, but he’s implying it so strongly that the reactions of the characters become really implausible, harming the art.

Just as the book ends.

By the way . . . notice how I’ve managed to get almost to the end of a review of an Ender book without mentioning Ender?

That’s because, though Ender is in this book, he has progressively less and less to do.

The burden of moving the plot forward shifts to the rest of the cast, which consists principally of a family that Ender has married into.

And what a family it is! Everybody is either a genius physicist or a genius biologist or a genius xenologer or a genius without portfolio. Coupled with Ender’s own genius, we’ve got a lot of geniuses running around.

I could understand that in the first novel, where Ender was put in a school meant specifically for potential military geniuses, but by this point in the series the plot has become dominated by geniuses all over the place (including three more on the world of Path).

I suppose that Card might say, "Well, it’s the really intelligent people who end up being the most influential in world affairs, and geniuses tend to marry other geniuses, who already have children who are geniuses."

Maybe.

But it just feels a little . . . odd . . . literarily when absolutely all of the major characters in book after book turn out to be geniuses.

NEXT: Children of the Mind.

Author: Jimmy Akin

Jimmy was born in Texas, grew up nominally Protestant, but at age 20 experienced a profound conversion to Christ. Planning on becoming a Protestant seminary professor, he started an intensive study of the Bible. But the more he immersed himself in Scripture the more he found to support the Catholic faith, and in 1992 he entered the Catholic Church. His conversion story, "A Triumph and a Tragedy," is published in Surprised by Truth. Besides being an author, Jimmy is the Senior Apologist at Catholic Answers, a contributing editor to Catholic Answers Magazine, and a weekly guest on "Catholic Answers Live."

14 thoughts on “Xenocide”

  1. A little off topic, Card also wrote a Sci-Fi story called The Worthing Chronicle*. As far as I can tell, the major theme of that book was dealing with the problem of pain. It has a pretty interesting perspective on that. I just wanted to share.
    *The last time The Worthing Chronicle was published, it was as part of a collection called The Worthing Saga, but the Chronicle was the only thing worth reading, IMO.

  2. I remember hearing a quote once that it was ok to ask a reader to accept the impossible, but when you started asking him to accept the improbably then you lost him.
    I wish I could remember where I heard that quote, but it seems that it would apply well to this book.

  3. I guess it is sounding more and more to me like this series might be intended as something like a Mormon Chronicles of Narnia, in which case it would seem to me not so much to be artistically inferior or whatnot, but to actually be immoral.

  4. Jimmy
    Talking about “Off Topic”, I wonder whether Card’s novelization of James Cameron’s The Abyss is better or worse than the movie. While reading this post I went to Wikipedia, just out of curiosity to find out more details about Card’s presence here in my country, and realized that he wrote that book, which I came across in a bookstore some years ago but really didn’t have any interest in reading. I used to like the movie very much and regard it as Cameron’s best (I haven’t seen it again for some time, but I’m sure it’s better than Titanic).

  5. The Path parts of the book are built up from an earlier short story, and I think this is in part why they tend to work very well — Card has always been better at short stories than novels. But I always felt that Xenocide reads like several storylines put together in a way that’s just not very well-integrated. The storylines cross, but they do it suddenly and without much development, and the rest of the time just proceed on their own. We don’t really get a novel, we just get several stories put together in a half-hearted way.

  6. I remember hearing a quote once that it was ok to ask a reader to accept the impossible, but when you started asking him to accept the improbably then you lost him.
    It’s from Aristotle’s Poetics. I’ve heard it in various translations, but here’s one:
    “With respect to the requirements of art, a probable impossibility is to be preferred to a thing improbable and yet possible.”

  7. Actually, Card has written a series that is essentially the Mormon Narnia, but it isn’t the Ender books. The Homecoming Saga is a science fiction retelling of the Book of Mormon set forty million years in the future. They are interesting books, but kooky to an extent.

  8. And Stargate:SG1 deals with Mormonism from the other side. The System Lords are the false gods. 🙂

  9. Huh. All that aiua stuff is Mormon metaphysics. Something about it always felt…wrong to me, but I could never quite put my finger on it. I was neither conversant in metaphysics nor Mormonism at the time I read the book.
    I have not really read Xenocide or Children of the Mind again in the years since I first read them. I’ve tried, but I always have to stop during Xenocide, even before the book becomes physical and metaphysical conversations about aiua. One of the characters from the world of Path–the one whose name translates into English as “Gloriously Bright,” if I remember correctly–absolutely infuriates me. I can read Ender’s Game over and over again. I don’t hate Speaker for the Dead, but I cannot get through Xenocide again.
    The Bean fork is a lot more interesting. Action packed and full of interesting moral dilemmas and geopolitical events. I am anticipating your reviews.

  10. It’s been years since I read Xenocide, but Jimmy Akin’s comments hit the mark. The bizarre metaphysics are bad enough, but the characters’ discovery of it was so implausible that it shook me out of the story. As I recall, the eternal, uncreated nature of the “philotes” and “aiuas” was proved as follows: if God or a god had created them, then they would be under His/his control without free will of their own; but in fact souls have free will; therefore souls are uncreated.
    Now that’s a logical argument of sorts, but the characters gloss over as self-evident the highly controversial major premise, that God cannot make beings who have free will–flatly contradicted not only by Christianity but by almost every religion on earth. As a reader, am I supposed to believe that *none* of these genius characters, some of whom are Catholic, stops to think, “Maybe we should justify this dubious major premise of ours?”
    The art suffers so much that my suspended disbelief crashed to the ground, not at Mormon metaphysics but at the unbelievable dialogue.

  11. All that aiua stuff is Mormon metaphysics. Something about it always felt…wrong to me, but I could never quite put my finger on it. I was neither conversant in metaphysics nor Mormonism at the time I read the book.

    One should clarify this. It’s an expansion of a speculative theological notion of an early LDS apostle named Orson Pratt. But it’s anything but Mormon metaphysics. Pratt’s ideas were very influential on Card. You can see elements of them in Treason (which was a significant rewrite of an earlier novel A Planet Called Treason) and also in The Worthing Chronicle (which I think has been rewritten as a new novel at least three times with a different name each time plus an original short story)

  12. BTW – the metaphysics of the philotes and so forth was there in the first novel. He expands on the idea but it’s definitely there. (It’s also prominent in his Alvin Maker series which has two amazingly strong books and then quickly tapers off in quality) It’s a constant theme in his books and I’d say that in the Ender series it’s a prominent subtheme in all the books. (Not in the Bean books though)

  13. I’m coming to this discussion way late, but I am a believing Mormon and thought how curious it was that Card basically made no effort to hide LDS metaphysics going into Xenocide. So i Googled philotes and mormon and found this review. His implementing mormon philosophy is not covert at all. I realize the negative commentary on this is people being extremely bothered by Card implementing his beliefs into fiction. Maybe it is preachy, maybe he gets to the concepts too fast and too conveniently, but I still think the books far surpass almost any other contemparary work of sci fi/fantasy, and certainly blow most formula fiction right out of the water, even with the flaws.
    I’ve noticed that a lot of series’ get utterly crap as the the authors choose to add more and more volumes, and while Card may have lost it slightly, the imagination is still there and it still causes me to think a lot more than other novels I’ve gone through.

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