Author Archives: Evan Brown '22

Green Hand Book: Speaker for the Dead (Orson Scott Card, 1986)

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Card, O. S. (1986). Speaker for the Dead. Tor Books.

I had very fond memories of reading Card’s Ender’s Game as a pre-teen, so I was very excited to dive into the sequel, which also won the Nebula Award (1986) and the Hugo Award (1987). For those of you who’ve read Ender’s Game, this sequel is set about 3,000 years after a human starfleet under Ender’s direction essentially wiped out an advanced ant-like race of aliens known as the “Buggers” (more on that later). Humans have spread out across the galaxy in colonies, and Ender himself is only middle-aged because of frequent near-light speed travel between these colonies. Among most humans, he is now reviled throughout the galaxy as “Ender the Xenocide,” though few know that he is still alive and is also the founder of a popular religious movement which emphasizes candidly and empathetically speaking about those who have died. He is called to Lusitania, a Portugese Catholic colony planet, to “speak the deaths” of two Xenologists who have been inexplicably murdered by the “Piggies,” an otherwise amicable pig-like intelligent alien species native to the planet. Unlike Ender’s Game, this book is much more interested in questions of  xenobiology and religion than those of conquest or war. It ends up reading a bit like a detective story as Ender unravels the secrets of complex social and biological networks which Card has cleverly designed.
I’ve read online that Card, a Mormon, has a long history of homophobic remarks. While I don’t doubt these charges, I must admit that I find them hard to square with the compassion that exudes from this novel. Ender, the clear hero of this story, redeems himself from his near-genocide by restarting a community of the “Buggers” on Lusitania. He is at his best as he adeptly breaks through the skeptical walls of everyone from Catholic priests to Piggies to the ansible-distributed AI whom he considers his best friend. This is sophisticated science fiction written with a loving and wise touch. While its author is certainly flawed, I’d still strongly recommend this book, particularly if you enjoyed Ender’s Game.

1984 in 2022

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There is a rich history of science fictional novums crossing into the real world, though we’re still waiting on time travel.

I read this article in the Atlantic (https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/09/china-ai-surveillance/614197/) as part of a Government seminar paper I’m writing on the fusion of AI and authoritarianism, and I couldn’t help but remark at Orwellian-ness of this vision that Xi’s pursuing.  Consider this passage: “[Xi] wants to build an all-seeing digital system of social control, patrolled by precog algorithms that identify potential dissenters in real time.” To Orwell, the idea that smart cameras could constantly monitor even slight displays of dissent was mostly a convenient allegory for Stalinist surveillance regimes. Yet with “hundreds of millions of surveillance cameras in place” already and facial recognition AI that claims to identify emotions, the future seems to be here already. There’s also pervasive surveillance of the internet, financial transactions, and even “Spy Bird” drones that look like doves swooping over cities! China hasn’t fully integrated all of these data streams yet, but there seem to be no major boundaries in their way to doing so, as China’s fusion of a productive tech sector and legal disregard for personal privacy make it a fertile ground for these kind of developments (particularly in Xinjiang as part of the genocide against the Uighur people). Is the the future of autocracy? Can it be countered? Perhaps we should all re-read 1984 or rewatch Black Mirror for some guidance.

P.S. I love the original gifs and artwork by Jonathan Djob Nkondo that accompanies this piece in the Atlantic. I attached one above, but I recommend that everyone checks all of them out!