Ender’s World

The moment we turn works of literature into puzzles, into clever and tricky essays that readers are supposed to sleuth through in order to find clues that reveal the true meaning—in that moment, the work dies. Oh sure, there are things to learn. But they are the things you learn from a cadaver, not the things you experience with a living soul.

For too long the discussion of literature has focused on meaning: on concepts, puzzles, symbols, themes, and ideas. On “what do you make of that?” I refuse to do that here with Ender’s Game. I refuse to kill that story and everyone in it.

Because I prize the people I’ve met, the insights I’ve gleaned, the places I’ve been. I prize the experience. That’s why I go to literature.

I don’t watch Fiddler on the Roof about once every other year because of what it means. I don’t watch the 1995 BBC production of Pride and Prejudice (the one starring Colin Firth) with my daughters with the same regularity because it’s an exploration of views on women and class in the landed gentry of early-nineteenth-century England. I rewatch these stories because the people and situations in them delight me: they make me laugh, cry, and think. They change my heart.

I believe most readers go to fiction for the same reason. It’s the experience we’re after—the laughter, the delight, the poignancy, the loss, the longing, the triumph, the suspense, the insight. And so that’s what I’m going to share with you here. I’ll start by summarizing the process of literary experience and then discuss three parts of my joyful and poignant experience with Ender.

A few years ago, my wife, four daughters, and I lived in a nine-hundred-square-foot home that my wife’s grandmother had homesteaded up in the Rocky Mountains of northern Utah. It is made of rough-hewn logs that have been covered up with fading green aluminum siding on the outside and modern-day drywall inside. It has sloping floors, which means the oven slopes, resulting in cakes that are thick on one end and thin on the other. It also has one bathroom right off the kitchen with a trick door that will, now and again, open of its own accord, so that anyone sitting on the toilet can say hello to the visitors at the kitchen table (such a thoughtful door).

Because the house is in the mountains at the rural edge of the wilderness and a mile from the nearest neighbor, we had many wild visitors. Many in this area do. Moose, elk, eagles, badgers, rattlers, tourists wearing alarming summer wear—you name it; it’s bound to show up in your yard eventually. For example, one of our neighbors was about to open her back door one day and saw a skunk hightailing it out of her yard. She wondered what was scaring it, then looked down at her dog’s food bowl and saw two cougar kittens enjoying Fido’s food, which is very cute until mamma cougar spots big-human-dinner and decides to drag it away by the neck.

At that time, my office was in a souped-up cow shed behind the house. One summer day, I came out of my shed, walked around the side of the house, and stepped on something slithering through the grass. Alarm immediately raced through me. I jerked back; my heart began to palpitate; I focused on the snake. It was long. Real long! It stretched at least twenty feet through the shaggy lawn. Then my reality meter went bong—a twenty-foot snake?!? I looked closer. It wasn’t a snake—it was the garden hose! I laughed, my heart began to slow, and the adrenaline washed out of me. I continued on, probably to visit with said bathroom.

There are three parts to emotional experience as illustrated by that snake in the grass.

(1) Some sensory stimuli triggers a super-fast, rough, pre-cognitive appraisal that something in our environment is likely to affect our wants, interests, goals, values, etc., or those of someone we care about. In my case, my brain appraised that I’d stepped on a “bad slither.” Fangs in your leg is kind of a big deal, especially when they may inject large quantities of hemotoxic venom (yes, the kind that is real nifty for inducing heart failure).

(2) This pre-cognitive appraisal triggers physiological changes that help us focus attention on the situation, prepare us to respond, and communicate the situation to others. A lot of this physiological response is what we describe as emotion. For example, the feeling of romantic love is produced by a delightful cocktail of chemicals rushing to various parts of our bodies. The same goes for fear, rage, mirth, etc.

This physical response also affects subsequent appraisals. This occurs, in part, because of the focus I mentioned before, which is sometimes called the orienting reflex. When you see someone who may become the love of your life or someone intent on murdering you, it’s helpful if you don’t get distracted. The orienting reflex helps you keep your eye on both murderers and potential mates alike. However, if we’re focusing on some things, that means we can’t focus on or sometimes even see others. It also means new stimuli are fitted into the framework created by our initial appraisal.

For example, when you’re alone in a dark house and already spooked, your physical response fixes your attention on threats. And so you will appraise the sound of something falling downstairs differently than when you’re full of mirth or thinking about the fact that Johnny has been downstairs for a while and has been unusually quiet.

The effect of selective attention can be a great help—it filters out things that would otherwise be a distraction, at times when we can’t afford to be distracted—but also can sometimes lead to damaging distortions. One of the central aspects of cognitive behavioral therapy when treating depression or phobia is to help the subject break out of the confines of their selective attention and see the details that lead them to appraise their situation in a more accurate manner.

With the snake, my brain focused, and ordered up some adrenaline and an increased heart rate to help me run; it also ordered up a flinch, and wrote alarm all over my face, which would draw the attention of others, who might help or flee.

(3) After the pre-cognitive appraisal and initial physiological response, which happens in less than the blink of an eye, we cognitively appraise the situation. This is the conscious thought part. In my case, I looked closer and thought, “It’s a garden hose, you dope!” This new appraisal totally changed the nature of the situation. It triggered a different physiological response, including a new mix of emotion.

So we have these parts that feed into the process of emotion: cues in the environment, pre-cognitive appraisals of the situation, cognitive appraisals, and physiological responses. But what do these parts have to do with Ender’s Game? Everything. Because we react in this way to more than sensory stimuli—we also react this way to our thoughts, including thoughts evoked by words on the page.

It’s possible because our pre-cognitive appraisals do not distinguish between real and imagined scenarios.¹ The precognitive system takes whatever input is given—sensory or imagined—and appraises it. And that appraisal triggers the physical response.

This is why we can weep or laugh upon recalling some past event. We’re not just remembering the event, we’re reliving it, reappraising it. This is also why listening to a friend tell us a story about a terrible accident can make us cringe. Or listening to that same friend tell us about his toddler eating dog poo can make us cringe even harder. Even though we weren’t present when the actual events occurred, we still witness the events in our minds, and our pre-cognitive system appraises them. This lack of distinction between sensory and imagined stimuli is why people with phobic fear of snakes not only fear real, live snakes but also have powerful reactions when simply imagining or reading about them.

You might think that our cognitive (conscious) appraisal system would come to the rescue with some reason. After all, didn’t it point out that my snake was a garden hose? Won’t it point out that our thoughts aren’t real and, with regard to fiction, that the people and places we’re reading about are all made up?

It can if something in the story is so unbelievable that our reality meters start to sound like mine did when I noticed the snake’s length. But when the author presents plausible situations, our reality meters don’t make a peep. They don’t constantly remind us it’s made up because our conscious thought is limited to the capacity of our working memory, and that capacity is small. Studies have shown that our working memory has room to hold only five to nine chunks of information at the same time. What constitutes a chunk can vary, but if you want to test this (as my fourteen-year-old did), have someone read you a list of ten to fourteen random names or numbers, then try to repeat those names or numbers back. You just can’t hold more than five to nine things in your working memory at one time. But it gets worse. When we want to do anything with those chunks besides recall them (like manipulate them in a math problem or identify correlations between them), our capacity drops to two to four chunks.

Bottom line: our pipes for conscious thought aren’t very fat. And so when what we’re imagining completely maxes out that bandwidth, there is no room to think about the fact that it’s just our imagination or just a work of fiction. We simply react to the imagined stimuli as if they were real and in front of us.

For fiction to provide an experience then, all it needs to do is present the situational cues to us that will automatically trigger our appraisals and physiological responses. This doesn’t mean fiction must show us the situation. In fact, despite the often-repeated eleventh writing commandment, “Show, don’t tell,” the truth of the matter is that a text never shows a reader anything except marks on a page—it never presents the raw situational data through our senses. Movies and plays can show. They can also provide raw auditory input. But a book never shows us anything. It’s all tell, tell, tell. The trick is to tell in a way that allows the reader to imagine the situation with enough clarity and realism that the imagined situation triggers the response. Of course, the situation itself (characters, motives, events, setting, etc.) needs to be ripe with potential in the first place, but developing that situation and helping the reader imagine it are two different things.

An author can guide a reader through a great variety of experiences—sympathy, suspense, poignancy, wonder, awe, mirth, dread, romantic love, etc. Orson Scott Card, in Ender’s Game, guides us through a number of them. What I want to do now is explore part of that experience by doing what we all do when we quote lines from our favorite movies or books to each other: enjoy the experience all over again and, in the process, perhaps deepen it.

When we read a book and feel as if we’ve been transported to another place, we often assume it’s because the author has provided lots of setting detail. However, Card demonstrates that’s not necessary. And, consequently, that what a writer is really doing is not “showing” but telling in a way that invites a reader to bring his or her own imagination to bear.

Let’s look at the opening of Ender’s Game as an example. We start off with two disembodied voices with zero setting nouns. As a result, I didn’t see (imagine) any setting during that portion. But then we move into the scene where Ender’s monitor is removed. That scene is 767 words long. How much of that is setting?

I’m sure you imagined it very clearly. I did. I saw (imagined) Ender in a doctor’s office and a kind of operating room. It wasn’t super-detailed, but I saw the examination table with white paper on it. I saw a male doctor, nurse, and another woman in white uniforms. I saw vague chrome shapes representing medical equipment surrounding them. I saw a syringe. I saw bright light from overhead and more subdued lighting in the corners. I even felt a little cold.

But the text never mentions uniforms or white. It never mentions paper on the table or chrome. It never describes the syringe or the lighting. In fact, it says almost nothing. Card provides a whopping six setting nouns for his description: monitor lady, horrible monitor, examining table, doctor, nurse, needle.

It’s possible because this is text and Card isn’t creating a setting. He’s helping us imagine one. He doesn’t need to tell us about everything in detail for us to build the image in our minds. That wouldn’t work anyway because of our working memory limitations. All he has to do is provide a few key words, and we pull up into working memory other constructs that we associate with those words.

This isn’t a one-for-one relationship: Card’s six descriptive terms won’t prompt each reader to imagine exactly the same thing. For example, if you’ve never been in an operating room, there’s no reason for you to have felt cold. And so I suspect what some of you imagined didn’t include that. But I’ve been in plenty, and so that came with it. Of course, Card never said operating room, did he? He said examination table, which means this could be a warm room in a doctor’s office. For whatever reason, I saw this as a more official procedure. You may have seen something slightly different.

But it really wouldn’t have mattered, would it? Because the key thing Card is doing here is not transporting us to an exact place. It’s transporting us to a character and a threat to his well-being. Who cares if you saw a small doctor’s office and I saw an operating room? We both saw Ender almost become a vegetable. We both heard his interesting internal response to the statement that the removal wouldn’t hurt a bit. We both learned that Ender’s brother hated him, and that Ender just wanted not to be hated.

I’m not saying this is the optimal amount of setting stories should have. I’m simply saying that it doesn’t take much to prompt a reader’s mind to imagine a world. Furthermore, by limiting the time spent on setting, Card is able to spend more time helping the reader imagine the characters—their thoughts, motives, actions, and speech—and on the threats other characters pose to those we’re rooting for. In movie terms, the vast majority of the scenes I imagined were simple medium and close-up shots, uncluttered by atmosphere. By nature, such shots are designed to focus on the characters. This focus is one of the hallmarks of Card’s style—transporting us not so much to the place as the mind and heart.

Card’s decision to focus on character over setting isn’t simply a stylistic choice du jour. If you think about novels as the result of authors finding and inventing cool things to share with readers, then it’s clear that Card delights in sharing the inner workings of his characters. He delights in sharing motives and reactions that are not always what’s expected at first blush. Or as simple.

Stage time is precious, and Card spends a huge portion of his telling us why Ender does what he does. He also transports us to the motives of others. The disembodied voices at the beginning of each chapter discuss their motives. Valentine constantly guesses at Peter’s motives. Ender constantly appraises why the people around him do what they do. His special insight is one of his larger-than-life gifts. For example, it’s not enough to know that Bonzo Madrid feels compelled to attack Ender because Ender undercut him. Ender digs deeper, appraising how his culture and role as commander of the Salamander Army plays into the situation.

But it’s not just the characters that are appraising the situations they face. Card is guiding us in our appraisals of those same situations. Sometimes our appraisal matches the character’s. Sometimes we have privileged information that leads to a different view. And sometimes it’s the character who has surprising special insight that alters our perceptions. Card likes to dig below the surface, and this allows him to guide us into a series of appraisals that sometimes change our response as dramatically as my response was changed when I realized what I’d stepped on was a hose, not a snake.

The crowning scene of Ender’s Game, its last gift, is all about going beyond the surface to know why someone does a thing and how knowing the why can completely change our appraisal of that person. Ender becomes the Speaker for the Dead, but it’s in the scene with the hive queen that the reader experiences what such a speaking means.

Through most of the story, our knowledge of the formics is limited. We know that they look like bugs, don’t communicate with us, and slaughter us without provocation or remorse. It’s us or this plague of horrible insects. But at the end, after Ender has destroyed the formics and gone to live on another planet, he finds the playground the formic queen built for him. He finds the egg. And we are guided into an experience that alters our view of the formics forever. In this scene, Card presents to us a snake, and then transforms it into something entirely different.

Ender describes the egg and the mating, the males shuddering in ecstasy and dying, dropping to the floor to shrivel. It’s a bit disgusting, like something you might see in one of those uncouth nature programs. And, having witnessed the mating, our pre-cognitive appraisal leads to the same response we have when watching the nature programs—ick! Our first experience with the formics tags them as alien and repulsive. Clearly not one of us.

But then our view of them starts to change. Instead of focusing on things insectly grotesque, we are told to imagine the queen as majestic, clothed in shimmering wings. Then we’re told she “kisses” her child, her daughter. Card then has us imagine her realization that all her children were going to die in the attack of the third wave, and that she was unable to do anything to avoid it. Notice that he prompts us to imagine her offspring as “children,” not insects.

Then Card takes this all another step further. “They did not forgive us,” the hive queen says. “We will surely die.” We imagine a mother who feels enough remorse to want forgiveness.

We respond in sympathy to others when we see (1) a basically good, deserving person (2) suffering some form of hardship. Card has led us to imagine things that not only anthropomorphize the queen and her children but also show her goodness and hardship. In the space of a few lines, I was suddenly appraising things from her point of view. Did you not feel the same change as you read?

We’re next guided to imagine the strange requirements for the hatching of the egg and a “small and fragile queen” emerging from it. And even though the hatching clearly reminds us that the hive queen is other, nothing here is grotesque. Furthermore, we are led directly into imagining the grief the queen feels at killing the humans. We know finally why the formics didn’t come in another wave—they “did not mean to murder.” They didn’t even know, couldn’t imagine, that we were thinking beings. We were bugs to them. Their final desperate cry rings in our ears: “Believe us, believe us, believe us.” Please don’t kill my last child, our last sister.

Card has led us from imagining the antecedents that trigger fear and revulsion to imagining those that completely reverse our appraisal. And we respond accordingly. By this point, I had tears in my eyes. I had sympathy for the helpless babe and the sorrowing mother as she faces death, trying to give her child a chance. I felt an anxious desire for the humans to hear their cry, which was “our” cry because I was on their side. The formics were good “people” who meant no harm, who had simply made a terrible mistake. The same one, in fact, that the humans make: Ender is as much the monster to them as they are to us. Then Ender writes his book, and the hive queen speaks with such forgiveness and magnanimity, it’s impossible not to be slightly in awe of her goodness. She is different, but she is one of the best of us.

The loss, the poignancy, the sympathy for this supposed enemy—all of that is added into the experience of the book so that it’s not just an adventure; it’s not just a story about space or how to lead; it’s not just about military games or trying to survive bullies and psychopaths who are trying to kill you. It’s also about “making us human in each other’s eyes.” And Card doesn’t just tell us that—he guides us so that it goes down into our bones, so that it’s not just an idea but is stamped in our hearts.

One might think we would feel this same sympathy for Peter, whom, we are told, Ender speaks for as well. But Card does not present any of the content, and so we do not experience a change of heart like we did for the hive queen. It’s true that Valentine tells Ender at the lake in chapter thirteen that “Peter’s changed.” But the fact is that I was never led to imagine what was necessary to feel or believe it.

We start in chapter one knowing that Peter hates Ender for having the monitor longer than he did. Then in chapter two we are led through one of the most frightening scenes of the book. Peter threatens Ender into playing formics and astronauts and in short order has him on his back and begins to suffocate him. Ender thinks Peter might not mean to kill him, might simply be trying to hurt him like he has in the past, but Peter, reading his mind, tells him, “I do mean it. Whatever you think, I mean it.” Only Valentine’s quick thinking saves Ender.

There was no doubt in my mind Peter wanted to kill Ender. I’d already been primed with Stilson to see what people in this culture thought about Thirds. And even though Peter relents when he sees he can’t get away with murder at this time, he vows to kill Ender by lulling both him and Valentine into a false sense of security. My anxiety for Ender at that point was extremely high. Ender then explicitly tells us how to appraise the situation so we make no mistake. Peter may fool the adults, but “Peter was a murderer at heart, and nobody knew it but Valentine and Ender.”

What a first impression. Yes, Peter comes into Ender’s room later that night (Ender thinking maybe Peter has come to kill him) and tells Ender he’s sorry, that he loves him. But isn’t that what Peter promised to do—lull Ender into believing he won’t kill him?

We see Peter next in chapter nine. It opens with the voices of those who monitored the thoughts of Peter, telling us “he’s one of the worst human beings we’ve laid hands on.” This is the judgment of those who supposedly know Peter inside and out. We are not led to imagine anything that would contradict this appraisal, so there’s no reason to question them.

Valentine tells us that the Wiggins move to North Carolina, hoping nature will soften Peter. She says that Peter has fooled all the adults, but she knows different. Then she describes the squirrels Peter flays alive. She suspects this was a way for Peter to satisfy his need to kill, but the first words out of Peter’s mouth when he comes onstage again show us he’s as dangerous as ever. He says to Valentine, “I’ve been deciding whether to kill you or what.”

And I believe him. I feel danger every time that boy comes onstage. And why shouldn’t I? To this point, we haven’t been led to imagine anything that would lead to any other response.

Peter explains he wants her help. He doesn’t want to destroy anyone. He admits he was cruel. He says he loved both her and Ender and that it was all because “I just had to be—had to have control, do you understand that?” He tells her control is the most important thing for him. It’s his gift to see the weak points in things. And now he wants to “save mankind from self-destruction.”

But Valentine doesn’t buy it. She confronts him about killing the squirrels, saying, “You did it because you love to do it.” Peter weeps. “It’s what I’m most afraid of,” he says. “That I really am a monster. I don’t want to be a killer but I just can’t help it.” Valentine thinks while he might be telling the truth, it’s only to manipulate her. Then he asks her to be his partner in everything so she can keep him from becoming “like the bad ones.”

Here’s our chance to revise our appraisal of Peter, but he’s so full of lies and manipulation we can’t trust it. Any hopes we might have had for him are discarded a few pages later when Valentine is asked if Peter is a bad person, and she responds by saying he’s “the worst person I know.” Indeed, he’s the worst we know in the book as well.

In chapter thirteen, when we return to Valentine’s point of view, the voices at the beginning of the chapter reaffirm that Peter “has the soul of a jackal.” Furthermore, Valentine tells us that Peter still frightens her. She tells Ender he’s changed, but we’re given nothing that would help us imagine another person. Time after time after time, we are only led to imagine a psychopath.

At the end of the lake chapter, Graff and Ender discuss the fact that they can’t communicate with the formics. Graff concludes, “If the other fellow can’t tell you his story, you can never be sure he isn’t trying to kill you.” Perhaps Peter has told us his story; perhaps what he says to Valentine is an accurate reflection of his thoughts. But it’s clear we need more to trust the story is true. We need more to even understand what Peter’s need for control means. In the end, Card never guides us into imagining anything that would allow us to trust Peter. And so all we can conclude is that Peter has some new scheme, one that doesn’t require he murder Valentine, yet.

Throughout the story, Ender fears he’ll become a monster, a murderer like Peter. But as a reader, I could not share that fear because any action someone might take is only part of what we use to appraise the morality of a situation. The other part is revealed in chapter three when Ender’s mother sarcastically asks Colonel Graff if he’d have given Ender a medal if he’d killed Stilson. Graff replies, “It isn’t what he did, Mrs. Wiggin. It’s why.”

Indeed, if there’s anything the experience of Ender’s Game teaches us, it’s that the why matters. Peter is a monster not because he does things that cause others pain but because of the why behind them. He is only motivated by a desire to control. The hive queen slaughtered great numbers of humans, but the why of her actions transforms that act from evil to tragic ignorance. In all his altercations with Stilson, Peter, Bernard, and Bonzo, Ender only fights to secure his safety. He kills two boys and wipes out a whole species, but we don’t condemn him for it because he is never acting to hurt someone else, only to defend. And so we end up rooting for him instead.

The why is a vital part of our appraisal of any situation and, therefore, has a direct effect on our response.

Although Peter can only see people as tools in his schemes, Ender is filled with a desire to be kind. In fact, in the surprising discussion with Valentine at the lake, Ender reveals to her that he doesn’t want to beat Peter. He only wants Peter to love him. Someone might read that as Stockholm syndrome, except we’ve been given Ender’s mind and heart, and there’s no evidence of that. Ultimately, Ender goes back to fight the formics to save Valentine, the one who loved him, who was his anchor, “even if she loved Peter more.”

My eyes stung and my heart swelled when Ender revealed he thought Valentine loved Peter more. This is not the heart of a monster. Ender, who can read the motives of others so well, can’t seem to see the difference between Peter’s motives and his own. Nor is he able to see clearly, in this instance, the motives of Valentine, the one who loves him so very much. Ender never needed to fear he was becoming Peter.

On the other hand, perhaps the quality of his heart is precisely what led him to worry. Perhaps that is part of what defines who is a good guy and who is not—the good guys realize they are as corruptible as any, and so they watch themselves, making sure both their actions and motives are as right as they can make them.

Did you notice the progression of appraisals I made above? Card presented the scene that triggered my initial tears for Ender. And then my cognitive appraisals kicked in, modifying my response, making it even more complex. Yes, it’s sad Ender can’t see he’s not like Peter at all, nor how much Valentine loves him. But upon reflection, the new thought and cognitive appraisal about what motivates “good guys” adds admiration to that sadness and transforms it into a more poignant experience. It also demonstrates something else.

Ender’s Game guides us through many moments of science fictional awe, fearful suspense, and triumph. A number of these experiences depend on Card guiding us into surprising appraisals of the situations we witness—appraisals that focus not on the externals but on the motives of the characters we meet. But it’s not only what Card has us imagine that forms our experience. It’s also what we imagine ourselves. We add our own imaginings to what Card presents us in the text and react to them with just as much power.

For example, the second time I read the last battle between the humans and the formics, I knew it wasn’t just a game but real humans sacrificing themselves. A brief image flickered into my mind of a group of people on a bridge in one of those ships looking at each other just before the end.

My heart swelled, and my experience of Ender’s Game was changed and deepened yet again. Truly, the experience of a book isn’t a fixed thing but something that changes over time. And changes outside the text.

Another even more poignant change came after I closed the book and began to develop my ideas for the very essay you’re reading. Going back through all my experiences with Peter, I suddenly had another thought and cognitive appraisal. Despite all the awful things we see him do, one might argue that Peter is the greatest hero of this book because he struggles against greater obstacles than anyone else—his psychopathy is in his DNA. He can’t help but want to kill, and yet he uses his hurtful instincts to work for world peace.

Is it possible? Did Peter have a heart that could love? We are never led, in the book, to imagine the antecedents that would trigger that assessment. It is only by adding my own imagination—a flash of a little boy struggling in dismay—and subsequent cognitive appraisals that I can feel deep sympathy for his plight as well as a mixture of awe and admiration at his struggle.

Did Card show us the hearts of three monsters, and show them all to be good? Could Peter actually be a hero?

But that thought, that prick of sympathy for that terrible boy, struggling against huge odds to do what’s right, is now part of my Ender’s Game experience.

Ultimately, even if Peter isn’t a hero, my time with Ender led me to think at least about the possibility. And perhaps, of all the wonderful gifts Ender’s Game has to give, this might be one of the finest. To help me remember—through hours of thrilling, heartbreaking, and ultimately triumphant experience—that although there are indeed a variety of monsters in life that must be dealt with, not all are necessarily what they seem. And to help me, if only a little, yearn for a more Ender-, and perhaps Peter-, and hive queen–like heart.

John Brown is an award-winning novelist and short story writer. Servant of a Dark God is the first in his epic fantasy series published by Tor Books. Brown currently lives with his wife and four daughters in the hinterlands of Utah, where one encounters much fresh air, many good-hearted ranchers, and an occasional wolf.

¹ See Jenefer Robinson’s marvelous Deeper than Reason for an introduction to emotion and literature. Then read the delightful Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman to explore the ramifications of the two appraisal systems in a variety of other situations.

Q. Why is Ender ashamed of being a Third?

A. Ender learned early in life that he was taunted by some kids, and resented or shunned by others, because he was a third child. Long before he understood the legal restrictions on family size, he knew that it was socially unacceptable to be a third child. Later, he would learn that his birth came about because of reasons that redounded positively on his siblings and that his existence was neither illegal nor shameful, but it’s very hard to overcome the visceral experience of community rejection that he underwent from earliest childhood.

—OSC

Q. Is the Wiggin predisposition to military genius a natural genetic one, or was it altered in some artificial way?

When authorizing Ender to be born, did the IF use genetic manipulation or genetic screening, assuming they were choosing from a pool of zygotes? How could the IF be sure that Ender would be the perfect mix of Peter and Valentine?

A. The IF was not sure Ender would work out well. Peter and Valentine came so close, and were so off-the-charts excellent on some vital measures, that the IF thought the odds were very good that a third child from the same parents would be suitable for command.

The only genetic manipulation was that the IF suggested Ender’s parents time the conception in ways that increase the prevalence of Y rather than X spermatozoa, because a male child would be more likely to have the aggressiveness that Valentine lacked.

—OSC

Q. How was Peter too cruel or crazy to not be allowed into Battle School? Isn’t that what the military wanted, a person that would utterly destroy the formics? I believe that Peter would have destroyed them with the Little Doctor without hesitating or regretting it, like Ender.

A. It isn’t enough to be eager to defeat the enemy. You also have to be able to inspire the loyalty, trust, and obedience of underlings and superiors within your own organization. As the Shadow books chronicle, Peter spent much of his life trying to learn things that came naturally to Ender, in order to be able to inspire people to follow his leadership politically. He would not have been able to do so within the time limits already looming over the project.

Soldiers will not willingly follow a commander who is so gung-ho that they believe he does not care about their wellbeing. It was Ender’s palpable love and concern for other soldiers, training them as assiduously as he trained himself, that inspired love and loyalty. Peter wouldn’t even have thought of behaving toward other soldiers as Ender did.

—OSC