Science fiction and fantasy often focus on how the follies of humanity will follow them into every alternate universe. The inspection of these inherent faults – pride, rage, obsession, ignorance – attracts readers to these fantastic worlds. However, it is the triumph over these faults that makes novels such as Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game far-reaching.
Moreover, the joy in literature is finding your pain and suffering contorted into etchings on a page. Although you try not to, the author gains an immeasurable amount of respect and awe from you. For a moment, they are the perfect creator. But then something happens, and you remember that this is a human being, made of faults as well. This essay is will discuss the conflict that arises in reading the works of a bigoted author. I have said “you”, but that is misleading. It is as if I am handing out judgement without having participated in the illusion. My author is Orson Scott Card.
Ender’s Game and Speaker for the Dead have resonated deeply within me since I read them – Ender’s Game in March 2020 and Speaker for the Dead in October 2020. I waited six weeks for Speaker for the Dead to arrive because I had to know what happened to Ender. I enjoy reading because it takes me out of my head and into someone else’s life– I just get to see what they see. However, rarely do I feel what they feel; often a quote sticks with me, or a particular scene. But with Ender, I feel his story, much like how the Buggers (the alien race that invades Earth in Ender’s Game) describe what it’s like to be connected to the rest of their race. I saw myself in Ender, and I felt his pain on every page; I felt his guilt in every action he committed.
“In all our life, you are the first person we’ve known who wasn’t ourself. We never had to be understanding because we always understood .” (59, Speaker for the Dead)
However, Ender is not a real person. Rather, he is a creation of Card’s. Card: a man who wove homophobic rhetoric into his other worlds. Card: a man who wrote an essay where Barrack Obama created a dictatorship in America.
So, the question that has been rattling around in my head ever since I read up on him is: how did the same man write both Unlikely Events and Ender’s Game? Perhaps I am an apologist in my reading: I separate reality from fiction – as I have been told is good to do. At the same time, I remember that these characters are not real people, but arbiters of a narrative that a person is trying to tell. It is difficult to reconcile in this situation. How do I completely fathom that the man who wrote in fiction:
‘“I don’t want to beat Peter.”
“Then what do you want?”
“I want him to love me.”’ (244, Ender’s Game)
also wrote in non-fiction:
“[Barrack Obama] needs Brown Shirts – thugs who will do his
bidding without any reference to law.” (Unlikely Events)
Do we stop looking up authors before we read their stories? Or should we know who they are in reality before we pick up their works? This short essay has posed many questions, but unfortunately, it has provided no answers because the author is running in circles as well. At the back of my copy of Dickens’ Great Expectations, a reviewer wrote of the novel that it gives “the sense of a mind speaking to itself with no one to listen.” That is what this essay felt like to write. I have questioned my morals, my principles, and my taste! I have turned every stone over, and still, I am at the same place: I have truly seen myself reflected in a character of Card’s creation, and I am disgusted that I refuse to shatter that mirror.
A Relevant Recommendation: A book
The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories by Ken Liu. Liu blurs the line of fantasy and science fiction, and makes you think what it means to be a person in this constantly changing world. I bought my copy at the Book Lounge, in Cape Town (if you haven't been to it, you absolutely have to) on my birthday last year because of a staff recommendation.
