primeideal (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
primeideal) wrote2021-12-28 10:18 am
primeideal) wrote2021-12-28 10:18 am
Books: "Journey to the Edge of Reason," "The Last Shadow"
I was recently doing some Wikipedia research and learned that when Kurt Gödel left Vienna for the last time in late 1939, he travelled to Princeton the long way, because World War II was already making an Atlantic transit infeasible. He took the Trans-Siberian Railway to Japan, then sailed to San Francisco, and then crossed the US by train!
Fortuitously, I found a new Gödel biography shortly after, although this saga doesn't get much more elaboration. There are, however, too many funny asides about math/philosophy/history to quote. I'll go with this one:
To some extent, the sequels have been engaging in...not retconning per se, but at least inviting you to consider their predecessors as unreliable narrators. So "Ender's Game" gave us Ender leading Dragon Army to victory because of his innate brilliance, but then "Ender's Shadow" says "what if Dragon Army only succeeded because they were handpicked by Bean, who has inhuman levels of intelligence because of Anton's Key?" The "Shadow" follow-ups then explore "well if the 'leguminids' are not completely human, they still should have their own opportunities to grow and thrive and prosper too." When we left off with "Shadows in Flight," Bean was saying to the three kids that went with him, "you're not humans, you shouldn't worry about coming back to humanity, just be your own new thing." With one sister and two brothers, like, okay OSC, thank you for your incestuous hot takes. :/
"Last Shadow" starts a decade or two later; we learn that those kids actually briefly married normal humans and had genius children who were like them, then kidnapped the kids, abandoned their spouses, and went back to their spaceship. Now, they're speculating on how similar or different they actually are to mainstream humanity. One of Bean's kids is like "the Battle School tests probably were useless for predicting military success, nothing predicts military success except maybe 'innate character,' and you can't measure that." So were Ender and Bean just lucky? Who knows.
Meanwhile, there's a situation on Lusitania. I barely remembered what had happened in "Speaker"/"Xenocide"/"Children of the Mind" beyond the general outlines; there's a massive crisis when the pequeninos ("piggies") start murdering a few of their human friends and allies and burying them in the forest, and everyone's just like "oh no not another Formic War." Thankfully, Andrew steps in and is like "wait a minute, this is all a big misunderstanding, it's actually the way that their mature adults move onto the next stage in life, we need to tell them that Humans Don't Work That Way. And we definitely won't go to war on them like we did with the Formics when that jerk Ender wiped out an entire species, haha, what a loser!" Crisis averted. Later, Andrew subconsciously creates clones of Valentine and Peter in hyperspace, but the mental strain of having three bodies takes a toll on him. Jane the AI gets Valentine's body, and after Andrew dies, his spirit or "aiúa" survives in Peter, but he's still in denial about it. Peter winds up getting together with Wang-Mu, who is a genetic anomaly from a different planet, as the only person to have their version of advanced intelligence without debilitating OCD (a reverse Anton's Key?).
So the new "what's up on Lusitania" infodump has a lot of other stuff I'd forgotten, like the "descolada virus." Uh-oh, am I gonna have to reread the others? No, it's fine, it's basically "a terrible virus, and maybe indirectly responsible for why the pequeninos are weird, but dangerous to lots of other species too." Apparently in the other books Lusitania almost got wiped out by the other planets to destroy the virus, but a deus ex machina cured the virus in time, whew. But humans still want to trace where it comes from to see if it was deliberately designed. So the leguminid grandkids, who are genius geneticists in their own right, have to come in to help.
And it's...okay, I guess. The potential "homeworld" of the virus turns out to be a diverse multispecies world in its own right, with Earth ravens and keas having evolved sentience, as well as two factions of humans that left Earth before the Formic Wars--one has genetically engineered themselves to be tree-swingers, good for working outside spaceships or in forests. So between them and Wang-Mu, there's a lot of evidence pointing to "leguminids are genetically weird humans, but they're still humans, they have a future alongside 'normal' humans just like all these other subgroups do." Which sort of resolves the Bean plot in a less-incesty way than was feared, so good job.
I guess the closure I was looking for with the Ender/Lusitania plotline was "does Peter II, as the successor of Ender's aiúa, ever come to terms with it and let Ender have a fulfilling life of his own, not caught up by perceived military or familial duty?" And...he's getting there, although he's still kind of in denial. Wang-Mu is a good influence in his life, and a lot of the original Peter's leadership advice about "fake it till you make it" applies here; Peter II isn't going to default to being the most empathetic or most forgiving all the time, but if he tries to lean into that because that's what he wants to be, he will take steps to get there. Also, the Hive Queen addresses him with the intimacy she used for Ender. But it's a slow kind of progress and I wouldn't say Peter is a main enough character to feel like this plotline was conclusively resolved.
There are plenty of asides about "family is important, whether it's your birth family or otherwise, and we all have to work hard at being good family members!" and it's like...okay, OSC, we get it. There's also a long tangent when an eight-year-old human gets lost on another planet and has to do what bears do in the woods, and is grossed out about it, not being a bear. Which, OSC has the chops to do potty humor well, but this isn't even humor, just "little kid gets embarrassed," and...it's not the most narratively necessary.
The scientists do science and reach a conclusion of "this planet is probably not the homeworld of the virus, but it's probably not genetically engineered and is unlikely to be a malicious threat, this is the best we can do based on the available data." OSC says in an afterword "this might be an unsatisfying conclusion, if so sorry, I wrote the other books to tie up reasonably well on their own because I knew I would never decisively answer where the virus came from." I didn't feel cheated by this, but also, I had completely forgotten that the virus was a thing from Speaker/Xenocide/Children, so I might not be the most reliable source here.
There's also a thing where Jane has to teach a few people to teleport so that they can get from Lusitania to the maybe-homeworld and back. This is a big deal because while the ansible allows for instantaneous communication, travel has so far been relativistic, which explains how Andrew and original Valentine reached age 3000. The upshot of this development is Jane saying "yeah, and once you five die, the teleportation secrets will die with you, I can't be responsible for the entire galaxy somehow having teleportation powers, that's too much craziness." Okay?
Anyway. It could have been better, it could have been worse. I'm glad he got to finish on his own terms.
Fortuitously, I found a new Gödel biography shortly after, although this saga doesn't get much more elaboration. There are, however, too many funny asides about math/philosophy/history to quote. I'll go with this one:
During the Circle's discussions, Neurath would constantly try to enforce discipline by banging his fist furiously on the table and interrupting if anyone dared utter one of the words on his long list of proscribed terms, such as "idea," "ideal," even "reality." He ultimately tried the patience even of the ever-patient Schlick, who would plead, "Dear Neurath, please permit us!" Neurath responded by making a small card with the letter "M" on it which he would silently hold up whenever the discussions strayed into the forbidden area of metaphysics. After several weeks of this he announced, "I can abbreviate the procedure still further if I instead hold up a card with 'non-M' on it when you don't speak metaphysics."
And then I happened across "The Last Shadow," the culmination of the Ender's Game/Ender's Shadow series. I hadn't known that this was published this year, possibly because people in my circles aren't keeping up with new Orson Scott Card releases, possibly because I'm lazy about getting new physical books. Anyway, the last two Ender/Bean books, "Ender in Exile" and "Shadows in Flight," were released in 2008 and 2012 respectively (and "Exile" comes well before "Speaker of the Dead" in IC time), so this has been in the works for a while. (There was also "Children of the Fleet" in 2017 which was "what happened to Battle School after the war," and was...not that great.)To some extent, the sequels have been engaging in...not retconning per se, but at least inviting you to consider their predecessors as unreliable narrators. So "Ender's Game" gave us Ender leading Dragon Army to victory because of his innate brilliance, but then "Ender's Shadow" says "what if Dragon Army only succeeded because they were handpicked by Bean, who has inhuman levels of intelligence because of Anton's Key?" The "Shadow" follow-ups then explore "well if the 'leguminids' are not completely human, they still should have their own opportunities to grow and thrive and prosper too." When we left off with "Shadows in Flight," Bean was saying to the three kids that went with him, "you're not humans, you shouldn't worry about coming back to humanity, just be your own new thing." With one sister and two brothers, like, okay OSC, thank you for your incestuous hot takes. :/
"Last Shadow" starts a decade or two later; we learn that those kids actually briefly married normal humans and had genius children who were like them, then kidnapped the kids, abandoned their spouses, and went back to their spaceship. Now, they're speculating on how similar or different they actually are to mainstream humanity. One of Bean's kids is like "the Battle School tests probably were useless for predicting military success, nothing predicts military success except maybe 'innate character,' and you can't measure that." So were Ender and Bean just lucky? Who knows.
Meanwhile, there's a situation on Lusitania. I barely remembered what had happened in "Speaker"/"Xenocide"/"Children of the Mind" beyond the general outlines; there's a massive crisis when the pequeninos ("piggies") start murdering a few of their human friends and allies and burying them in the forest, and everyone's just like "oh no not another Formic War." Thankfully, Andrew steps in and is like "wait a minute, this is all a big misunderstanding, it's actually the way that their mature adults move onto the next stage in life, we need to tell them that Humans Don't Work That Way. And we definitely won't go to war on them like we did with the Formics when that jerk Ender wiped out an entire species, haha, what a loser!" Crisis averted. Later, Andrew subconsciously creates clones of Valentine and Peter in hyperspace, but the mental strain of having three bodies takes a toll on him. Jane the AI gets Valentine's body, and after Andrew dies, his spirit or "aiúa" survives in Peter, but he's still in denial about it. Peter winds up getting together with Wang-Mu, who is a genetic anomaly from a different planet, as the only person to have their version of advanced intelligence without debilitating OCD (a reverse Anton's Key?).
So the new "what's up on Lusitania" infodump has a lot of other stuff I'd forgotten, like the "descolada virus." Uh-oh, am I gonna have to reread the others? No, it's fine, it's basically "a terrible virus, and maybe indirectly responsible for why the pequeninos are weird, but dangerous to lots of other species too." Apparently in the other books Lusitania almost got wiped out by the other planets to destroy the virus, but a deus ex machina cured the virus in time, whew. But humans still want to trace where it comes from to see if it was deliberately designed. So the leguminid grandkids, who are genius geneticists in their own right, have to come in to help.
And it's...okay, I guess. The potential "homeworld" of the virus turns out to be a diverse multispecies world in its own right, with Earth ravens and keas having evolved sentience, as well as two factions of humans that left Earth before the Formic Wars--one has genetically engineered themselves to be tree-swingers, good for working outside spaceships or in forests. So between them and Wang-Mu, there's a lot of evidence pointing to "leguminids are genetically weird humans, but they're still humans, they have a future alongside 'normal' humans just like all these other subgroups do." Which sort of resolves the Bean plot in a less-incesty way than was feared, so good job.
I guess the closure I was looking for with the Ender/Lusitania plotline was "does Peter II, as the successor of Ender's aiúa, ever come to terms with it and let Ender have a fulfilling life of his own, not caught up by perceived military or familial duty?" And...he's getting there, although he's still kind of in denial. Wang-Mu is a good influence in his life, and a lot of the original Peter's leadership advice about "fake it till you make it" applies here; Peter II isn't going to default to being the most empathetic or most forgiving all the time, but if he tries to lean into that because that's what he wants to be, he will take steps to get there. Also, the Hive Queen addresses him with the intimacy she used for Ender. But it's a slow kind of progress and I wouldn't say Peter is a main enough character to feel like this plotline was conclusively resolved.
There are plenty of asides about "family is important, whether it's your birth family or otherwise, and we all have to work hard at being good family members!" and it's like...okay, OSC, we get it. There's also a long tangent when an eight-year-old human gets lost on another planet and has to do what bears do in the woods, and is grossed out about it, not being a bear. Which, OSC has the chops to do potty humor well, but this isn't even humor, just "little kid gets embarrassed," and...it's not the most narratively necessary.
The scientists do science and reach a conclusion of "this planet is probably not the homeworld of the virus, but it's probably not genetically engineered and is unlikely to be a malicious threat, this is the best we can do based on the available data." OSC says in an afterword "this might be an unsatisfying conclusion, if so sorry, I wrote the other books to tie up reasonably well on their own because I knew I would never decisively answer where the virus came from." I didn't feel cheated by this, but also, I had completely forgotten that the virus was a thing from Speaker/Xenocide/Children, so I might not be the most reliable source here.
There's also a thing where Jane has to teach a few people to teleport so that they can get from Lusitania to the maybe-homeworld and back. This is a big deal because while the ansible allows for instantaneous communication, travel has so far been relativistic, which explains how Andrew and original Valentine reached age 3000. The upshot of this development is Jane saying "yeah, and once you five die, the teleportation secrets will die with you, I can't be responsible for the entire galaxy somehow having teleportation powers, that's too much craziness." Okay?
Anyway. It could have been better, it could have been worse. I'm glad he got to finish on his own terms.