Sunday, October 13, 2013

Ender's Game, chapter fourteen, part one, in which Mazer Rackham doesn't replace Graff soon enough

This is the big one, the penultimate chapter in which all secrets begin to be revealed and all of the hell we've gone through up to now pays off.  As a depressing side-note, we are suddenly faced with the realisation that Graff is not only the worst person ever, but that narratively there is someone who could have filled his role so, so much better.

(Content: violence, discrimination based on fertility.  Fun content: sweet abs, Greek history.)

Ender's Game: p. 255--273
Chapter Fourteen: Ender's Teacher

We actually get both names in the first Scene of Faceless Unnarrated Dialogue--Graff and Admiral Chamrajnagar of the interstellar fleet--and it has some lampshaded poetic moments (Chamrajnagar gets mystical about the majesty of spaceflight, Graff snarks) but is otherwise pure filler.  Graff has no interest in influencing Ender's curriculum; he is "only here because I know Ender".  Funny how you keep needing other people to fix Ender for you, then.

Ender gives us some establishing SF about living on Eros--the cramped hallways cut through the stone, the weak gravity and permanent slope of the corridors, etc.  He makes no new friends, partly because he never stays in any classes for long: he attends a lecture or two, then gets some private tutoring, then immediately moves on.  For the first time in half a book, we get a sense of what he's studying: astrogation, military history ('Oh my god, 1910s Germany stole my ideas!'), abstract mathematics that he has a hard time consciously understanding but intuits easily.

The new game is the simulator, "the most perfect videogame he had ever played", which basically means an RTS.  Ender starts out playing a single starfighter, but then they scale up to squadron-versus-squadron, and the computer learns quickly from his new techniques.  With very little fanfare or acknowledgement, Ender loses quite a few games as he re-learns the same lessons he's learned twice in this book already: use all your troops in concert and give general orders instead of micromanaging.  I'm not sure how this runs into Ender's total phobia of losing games--he's realised that the simulator is Command School's equivalent of the battleroom, but apparently losing to the computer doesn't count.

After a year at Eros, he's back to winning every time, and he asks Graff if it isn't going to get harder again.  Graff shrugs it off, and the next day Ender wakes up to find an old man apparently meditating on the floor in his bedroom.
Ender got up and showered and dressed, content to let the man keep his silence if he wanted.  He had long since learned that when something unusual was going on, something that was part of someone else's plan and not his own, he would find out more information by waiting than by asking.  Adults almost always lost their patience before Ender did.
I am struggling to figure out what this could refer to.  The last time he stayed quiet and tried to watch someone else's plan in action to get the upper hand, he ended up in a deathmatch in the showers.  This only makes sense if they've continued to randomly screw with Ender's head over the course of the year he's been on Eros, which is on the one hand predictable but on the other weird that we haven't heard details.

Ender studies the old man--sixtyish, staring at him with total apathy--and asks him why the door is locked, with no response.
Ender didn't like games where the rules could be anything and the objective was known to them alone.
Which is a weirdly accurate description of the human-formic war.

So he starts exercising around the room, self-defence techniques and forms, and when he gets near the man, a hand snaps out, yanks him off-balance, and Ender tumbles to the ground, but when he looks up again the man is back in position, perfectly still.

This whole scene is such an obvious play on the enigmatic martial arts master testing a new student that I'm not sure what to say, except that it doesn't become any less stupid and orientalist when you whitewash it.  (Mazer Rackham is half-Maori, and since his other half is undefined we can probably assume it's white, but he's still not an Okinawan raising an army to repel the invaders.)
Ender stood poised to fight, but the other's immobility made it impossible for Ender to attack.  What, kick the old man's head off?  And then explain it to Graff--oh, the old man kicked me, and I had to get even.
As much as I approve of Ender's long-awaited grasp of self-control, he's still operating on the fantasythat his previous two kills (or 'fights', in his mind) were purely driven by self-defence, conveniently forgetting that in both cases he kept on attacking even once Stilson and Bonzo were incapacitated on the floor.  That's how he murdered Stilson--in Bonzo's case, it's likely that the mortal injury had already been dealt, but that didn't stop him from continuing with the kicking.  Self-defence does not include killing the incapacitated--nor do I think it can only apply when someone is actively trying to kill you.  Ender could, for example, knot up his sheets and try to bind the stranger until he can be safely detained--that might require force, but as long as it was only the force Ender needed to be assured that he wasn't going to be attacked again, rather than Ender's normal default-to-lethal, I'd have no problem with it.  Why are Ender's only settings Kill and Angst?

Wait, no, I forgot a setting: Uncomfortable Homoerotic Subtext.  It's been hours, Ender is exhausted and frustrated, so he heads back to his bed to work on his desk, and as soon as he bends over, the strange old man lunges in behind him, grabs him by the hair and the crotch, and throws him down to pin him face-first into the floor.  That's how that goes.
"I surprised you once, Ender Wiggin.  Why didn't you destroy me immediately afterward?  Just because I looked peaceful?  You turned your back on me.  Stupid.  You have learned nothing.  You have never had a teacher." 
Ender was angry now, and made no attempt to control or conceal it.  "I've had too many teachers, how was I supposed to know you'd turn out to be a--" 
"An enemy, Ender Wiggin [....] the first one you've ever had who was smarter than you."
There's an extended reflection on how the enemy is the only real teacher--nothing that folks who have been reading along can't predict, although it's got a nice rhythm.  This teacher/enemy/Shaolin master lets ender up, and Ender responds by attacking in a frenzy that ends with him against the door and the stranger sitting cross-legged on the floor again.  Dude approves, and says that he will now be in charge of Ender's simulator training, and thus things are, once again, about to get still more real.
"In this school, it has always been the practice for a young student to be chosen by an older student.  The two become companions, and the old boy teaches the younger one everything he knows.  Always they fight, always they compete, always they are together.  I have chosen you."
Dammit, Card, there are only so many times I can try to find alternative explanations for you.  That time has ended.  You brought this on yourself with your inexplicable fixation on the ancient Greek military.  You're on your own now.  If it happens again, I'm just going to link to art from Free!.

As the teacher leaves, Ender attacks him yet again, delivers a solid kick to the back before getting thrown across the room, and they both do that 'smiling while bleeding from fresh injuries because this is how men bond' thing, and Ender asks what to call his teacher, and it is revelation time: "Mazer Rackham".

The explanation is straightforward enough as to how the hero of a war seventy years ago could still be around--they put him in a ship, sped it up near lightspeed, and brought him back again for the sequel.  From his perspective, he spent twenty years confined to Eros because he knew too much, then eight years in flight equivalent to fifty on Earth.  This creates a really interesting dynamic which the book unfortunately doesn't get into at all.  When the campaign comes, the soldiers fighting it will be people Mazer Rackham knew and fought beside, but from their perspective it's only been five years versus his twenty-eight.  He's not just going to watch friends die in battle, but friends who exist exactly as he remembers them from decades ago.  Not just colleagues, but the living memories of them as they were in the days of glory that they shared.  That is a psychology and a tension that would be worth telling.  Not in this book, though!  (Or any that I know of.)

In the days that follow, Ender and Mazer bond over videos of human fleets fighting formic ships, contiguous videos instead of the patchwork ones that Ender constructed, and Ender is delighted to find that Mazer is pointing out things even he hadn't noticed: "For the first time, Ender had found a living mind he could admire."  We could read this as Ender being a total jackwagon about basically everyone he's ever heard of, but I am trying to be positive, so I instead take it as a tragic commentary on how the warped course of Ender's life has caused him to lose all awareness of or interest in people in any discipline other than military theory.  Art, science, medicine, history, whatever--plebes.

Ender finally asks to see how Mazer won the Second Invasion, after he describes himself as "the only person who had ever defeated the buggers by intelligence rather than luck".  Ender describes what he knows of the final battle: the enormous formic fleet versus the tiny human strike force, Mazer's reckless charge, a single shot, and then nothing of the battle.  Mazer rolls his eyes at what passes for secrecy and shows Ender the proper video, which shows exactly the same, except that there simply is no battle.  Mazer destroys a single enemy ship and the entire formic fleet goes dead.  Mazer fast-forwards through three hours of footage as the humans boggle.

Because we haven't complained about how geniuses are hated by lesser geniuses in a while, Mazer explains that all the xenobiologists told him he wasn't qualified to have an opinion on what happened, despite having won the battle based on his theory--that the formics are a purely hivemind race, with sentient queens but all the drones merely very complicated telepathically-controlled limbs.  Mazer identified and killed the queen, and the invading fleet died en masse.  Mazer shows Ender the videos of the formic fleet destroying the humans further outside the solar system, and Ender quickly identifies the same ship as the "I" of the fleet, which OBVIOUSLY no one else in seven decades has been able to do.

You know, Ender would be a more interesting character if his defining trait wasn't supposed to be 'empathy' but 'empathy with the formics'--if he were human on the outside, 'alien' on the inside, unsuited to normal society but serendipitously perfect for fighting an aggressive hivemind.

There's a whole lot more SF about formic psychology--why they thought nothing of killing human crews (which they assumed were mindless drones) but left mechanical transmitters running in captured ships, how they used Eros as their own base for the Second Invasion and humans scavenged gravity control and such when they took it back.  It's neat enough, but narratively whatever.  Let's talk about why Graff shouldn't have existed in the first place.

Graff's problem as a character is that he has no history.  He's supposed to be a teacher, but we never see him teach, and he definitely doesn't develop curricula.  His job mostly seems to consist of psychological analysis, except that he's not very good at that, either--he keeps relying on reports and unaccountable computer spasms and such.  His whole thing is that he somehow knows that he has to make Ender's life a living hell in order to make him a good commander, in spite of all intuition and theory and history, but we don't know where he got these ideas or why he is convinced that they will work when they never have before.  Who could have the justification for this?

Mazer Rackham.  Graff should have been Mazer--'Hyrum Graff' was a pseudonym that he could use to administrate the Battle School, only to reveal his true identity to Ender when they arrived on Eros.  Mazer Rackham does have special qualifications no one else has: based on near-to-nothing, he was able to extrapolate the nature of the formic hivemind and successfully use it against them.  For reasons they never explain (said to have something to do with 'psychology', presumably because he'd be too emotionally involved?) he can't command the Third Invasion, so he's got to replicate himself.  Whether the military had found Ender or not, Mazer was going to be around for the end of the war--that's just a fact of the way his near-lightspeed time-travel trip worked.  And then because he's a genius he quickly spots Ender and is all 'This kid is the one' and the military is all 'Whatever, loser' and Mazer is all 'Fine, you train your favourites as well but I'm going to focus on this one until you bring me one you can prove is better'.

Mazer could pull all of the ridiculous mind-torturing stunts that Graff pulls, but instead of being explained by his having attended Franz Kafka's Military Academy, they would be 'justified' by Mazer trying to inflict all the same twists that created him on Ender.  It would be a fantastic commentary on the way people often replicate the abuses that are done to them against others.  Instead of just assuming that Graff knows what he's doing and he's following some textbook, people would have much more obvious and legitimate grounds to demand Mazer explain himself, which would fit even better with the book's overall theme of 'the commoners are stupid and will try to stop geniuses because they don't understand what's good for them', which is a terrible theme but at least he could try to execute it well.

Ultimately, what does Graff bring to the story as a result of his character rather than his role?  I'm coming up with nothing.  Whereas Mazer brings a whole host of psychological questions and implications that we never get to spend any time exploring.

Where were we?  Is Mazer still talking?  Goddammit, he is.
"They probably thought they were routinely shutting down our communications by turning off the workers running the tug.  Not murdering living, sentient beings with an independent genetic future.  Murder's no big deal to them.  Only queen-killing, really, is murder, because only queen-killing closes off a genetic path."
There are a couple of reasons this bit is spectacularly stupid, the first and lesser of which is that this 'genetic path' definition of murder is a very strange position for Mazer Rackham to hold--it's kind of got to be Mazer acting as Card's mouthpiece.  But more importantly: who the fuck defines personhood based on the ability to reproduce?!  If this is taken literally, then murder ceases to be murder once a) a person has already reproduced, b) a person physically incapable of reproducing, and possibly even c) a person chooses not to reproduce.  So: post-menopause women, anyone infertile (including, for example, anyone who undergoes SRS), and all those damnable queers.  Totally not murder, because they can't have kids!  I can at this point confirm that I have found the maximum possible scorn I can have for a sci-fi author, because I cannot scorn any author more than I do Orson Scott Card.  What a tool.

Lastly for this week, Mazer lists humanity's advantages against the formic fleets: first, of course, our indomitable human spirit of creativity, allowing each one of us to be independently more brilliant than expected, while the formics rely on mass numbers and coordination of simple strategies.  Second, and substantially more impressive, is Doctor Device: the M.D. Device, Molecular Detachment, which focuses a pair of beams (they are extremely specific about this, it's a pair of beams) on matter to create an expanding field in which electrons get interrupted and all matter falls apart.  Whenever the field hits more matter, it creates a new expanding field, potentially allowing for a chain reaction that leaps from ship to ship to wipe out an entire fleet.  Bonus points to anyone who can guess how the final battle at the formic homeworld will go!

Next week: the return of everyone, ever, including that one guy, you know, the one who did the thing.

29 comments:

  1. "who the fuck defines personhood based on the ability to reproduce?!"

    coming from an LDS family (one side) I have to say I am totally not surprised. After my medically necessary hysterectomy, I basically became a non person to several family members. Apparently when you don't have kids yourself you are permitted to be treated like a perpetual child, ie not seriously.

    on a related note I'm running out of paper to write stuff that won't dare make it into the movie, anyone got any spare I can use?

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  2. Don't the scope and power of Doctor Device pretty much eliminate the need for The Greatest General of All Time? If you spend a whole novel training up a Spartan warrior, and then hand him a nuke to defend Thermopylae (hope I got the references right - apologies if not) ... what was the point of the training, again?

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  3. The way Mazer phrases it is that they need the general to get the weapon into a place to fire most effectively--the scale of things in space is such that it's not too difficult for a fleet to stay out of range of being shredded by each others' MD explosions, once they know what they're doing. So after the very first battle it won't really matter again until the final battle, because you can't maneuver a planet. Doctor Device is screamingly obviously made to be a planet-buster, although everyone pretends that no one would ever use it for such a purpose.

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  4. That really sucks, and yet in some distant way I'm not surprised that such people exist. The phrasing always bothered me in the book, long before I had anything like the knowledge of reproductive privilege and coercion that I do now.

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  5. It would be rude to call it "genocide", after all.

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  6. So Mazer Rackham is also a goddamn villain, who got put on a bus until needed. I can't say that I'm pleased with him, at all. He's trying to teach Ender the same way Graff and the Battle School did, just with less Mind Game and more actual strategy.

    Also, IF is very incompetent if they can't analyze their own footage and interview the commander to find out how he won. And if they were able to reverse-engineer Formic technology, someone has to be brilliant enough to derive the right tactics that won the war.

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  7. Forget using it as a planet buster. There are probably ships in orbit that could conceivably intercept an attack. It's a sun buster. Or a galaxy buster. Or... really, as written there's pretty much nothing it can't destroy. If you have a weapon that can one shot a planet, why on earth would use manned ships instead of a swarm of small missiles targeting the Formic's home sun? They won't last very long without that. But hey, send a second wave to hit the planet too, and with some drones for mop up.


    Though... I seem to recall that it was a projectile, or is it something that can be directed?

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  8. "There are a couple of reasons this bit is spectacularly stupid, the first and lesser of which is that this 'genetic path' definition of murder is a very strange position for Mazer Rackham to hold--it's kind of got to be Mazer acting as Card's mouthpiece. But more importantly: who the fuck defines personhood based on the ability to reproduce?! "
    It actually does sort of make sense as the human's explanation of personhood - or at least how they'd imagine the Formics define it. I mean, look at them, they're obsessed with eugenics. The more obvious reason, that, uh... only the queens are actually intelligent, drones are basically just extensions of them, doesn't necessarily occur to them.


    Also, wait, the Command School is on Eros? Doesn't that mean they'd have to be moving cadets there pretty regularly? So why is it necessary to commandeer a random shuttle? Why?


    And why is everyone a total ass?

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  9. Like I said in the post: it "focuses a pair of beams (they are extremely specific about this, it's a pair of beams)", and they SF for quite some time about the missile-proof Ecstatic Shield which humanity invented and which the formics have since adapted from us. Ender even says "so it's not a missile, I can't shoot around corners". It could not be more explicit, which won't stop Card from saying it's a missile in Ender's Shadow. Cracks me up.


    The full potential of Doctor Device depends on what its maximum range is--it's a system buster if the sphere projected from firing it on a sun were large enough to consume all the planets, but that doesn't appear to be the case. It definitely doesn't project far enough to cross the distance from star to star. But, as we say in the horrifying speculation business, that's just an engineering problem.

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  10. Command School is on Eros?


    I know, right? What the hell. Graff's commandeering can maybe be handwaved by saying that cadets only go to Command School every year or two, so they might have had to wait months to get a regular transport. But putting the School on Eros to begin with is just inexplicably stupid. Students start showing up at 16, but they're considered a security risk until 25 at best (forever, if they know any of the big secrets), which means once a kid arrives, they're not leaving for at least NINE YEARS, even if they have a complete emotional breakdown on their second day and get scrubbed from the program. All so they have access to... well, as we've noted before, there's basically nothing on Eros that any student or commander really needs. I guess they just didn't want to go to the trouble of building a second secret base? (Who skips the opportunity to build a secret moon base?!)

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  11. "who the f*ck defines personhood based on the ability to reproduce?!"



    Evo-psych is notoriously packed with BS, and this is no exception. However, Card was on the brink of producing a reasonably plausible psychology for a hive-mind. He invented the formics in such a way that the drones are not only sterile, but in fact completely non-sentient. Only the queen is even self-aware. Such a creature would consider its appendages expendable in roughly the same way that we take minor injuries for granted. And it would presumably assume that it's dealing with non-sentient drones of some unseen queen in some other species.


    Linking this to reproduction is not too far removed from Dawkins's own attempt at evo-psych. Dawkins suggests that "altruism" arises as a generalized survival instinct, because your siblings, nieces and nephews, cousins, etc., carry many of your own genes, and helping them survive has a comparable benefit to yourself bearing live offspring. We may experience this as "love" or "compassion," but Dawkins suggests that natural selection favors the appearance of "love" and "compassion" because loving, compassionate creatures have each others' backs, and collectively ensure the survival of their loving, compassionate genes.


    Not to say that Card isn't a completely contemptible, hate-filled individual. But this particular riff of his sounds no different than any other attempt to explain things like love and morality as products of natural selection.

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  12. the book's overall theme of 'the commoners are stupid and will try to
    stop geniuses because they don't understand what's good for them', which
    is a terrible theme



    Isn't that the theme of all of Ayn Rand's books, as well?

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  13. The major disconnect that I see between Dawkins' theory of altruism and Card's theory of reproductive personhood is that people who are incapable of reproduction are still completely capable of all other forms of altruism, and of having relatives, including relatives in generations subsequent to their own. That is to say, a non-reproductive person can still provide their family/society all the other benefits of someone who does spawn, so I can't see a logical leap from that to reproductivity-derived personhood. If anything, they seem completely opposed.

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  14. It could not be more explicit, which won't stop Card from saying it's a missile in Ender's Shadow. Cracks me up.



    Yeah, I initially thought it was a projectile, but, uh... you could always mount an emitter on a missile?

    It probably wouldn't, it may only affect solids, or at least very dense materials. A star isn't a solid, but it is hyper-dense. But you don't actually need it to consume the whole system to use it that way. Destroy the star, and the whole system will first freeze and then fall apart from the lack of a gravitational center.


    Though... getting into how the hell the thing is supposed to work... it just stops electrons from working. With two beams. I think, even by sci-fi standards, that's pretty bizarre. Presumably, it works in one of two ways - they've found some way to turn off electromagnetism, which is terrifying, but should result in the target collapsing into a pile of denatured fermions and/or a singularity as the strong force crushes it together, not breaking apart. Alternatively, it could prevent electron bonds from forming, which sounds more likely - the 'two beams' seems to suggest this, perhaps they've found some way to harness the weak force and synchronize the spin of electron pairs, which would basically... well, honestly it would not make sense, but effectively disjuncting them is one possibility. The problem would be getting this interaction to propagate beyond the inital target. And the fact that it'd result in ionizing the target, but not actually destroy it. And getting around the Heisenberg principle to aim it... You could *conceivably* use the energy of the liberated bonds to power it, but entropy and chaos would seem to wither away any effect rather quickly. Especially against highly stable molecules where breaking the bonds would be energy-negative. Which would also suggest they've broken Conservation of Energy. Sheesh, it should pretty much affect anything that actually has chemical bonds...


    Oddly enough, Star Trek's disruptors/phasers (which are just phase-synchronized disruptors) apparently work something like that, by breaking down molecular bonds by causing particles to decay into neutrinos. Of course, since they don't have God Mode turned on, its chain reaction effect requires enormous amounts of energy and isn't self perpetuating...

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  15. once a kid arrives, they're not leaving for at least NINE YEARS, even if they have a complete emotional breakdown on their second day and get scrubbed from the program.
    Given what we've seen of these guys so far, I'm guessing that if you get scrubbed from the program, you're leaving through the nearest airlock immediately.

    I guess they just didn't want to go to the trouble of building a second secret base?
    Why the base even needs to be secret in the first place is also a good question...

    Evo-psych is notoriously packed with BS, and this is no exception. However, Card was on the brink of producing a reasonably plausible psychology for a hive-mind. He invented the formics in such a way that the drones are not only sterile, but in fact completely non-sentient. Only the queen is even self-aware. Such a creature would consider its appendages expendable in roughly the same way that we take minor injuries for granted. And it would presumably assume that it's dealing with non-sentient drones of some unseen queen in some other species.

    That would pretty much require *every* species on their homeworld to be such a hivemind. Although, given that the colonies are probably relatively solitary... there's likely more of a chance of kerfuffle with one mind than several.

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  16. The in-book answer is that the focal point of the beams spreads a spherical field in which 'electrons cannot be shared'. For covalent bonding, that's obviously a big deal; for ionic, I would think less so, although I haven't studied physics in years and I couldn't tell one shell from another. The science is very fiction in this bit. I'm just not sure how anyone was able to pretend this was a ship-to-ship weapon with a straight face.


    The rest of the logistics (range, size of the emitter) are ignored, save that we know it's possible to hit a planet from its upper atmosphere (so at least a few kilometres, but that's like stabbing range in space) and they can be mounted on whatever passes for single-pilot fighters.

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  17. That would pretty much require *every* species on their homeworld to be such a hivemind.


    Given the infinite capability of humans to anthropomorphize anything and everything, I don't see why this need be the case.

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  18. And yet, here in Enderland, humans are completely unwilling to believe Mazer's theory that the formics are drones operated by sentient queens, because that's just silly--all individual bodies must have individual consciousnesses, obvs--so in counterpart, it sort of becomes reasonable-by-author-fiat that the formics did the same. (The possibility or relevance of other life on the formic worlds never comes up.) We eventually learn that the formics did figure it out, which is why they didn't invade again.

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  19. "Also, wait, the Command School is on Eros? Doesn't that mean they'd
    have to be moving cadets there pretty regularly? So why is it necessary
    to commandeer a random shuttle? Why?
    "Because this shuttle is for Ender and Ender is Special. (Just my guess. Poke holes at will.)"That would pretty much require *every* species on their homeworld to be such a hivemind."It would require that every sentient species on their homeworld be a hivemind, and my guess (again) is that there's only one sentient species on the Formics' homeworld (theirs) or that if there is more than one it too is "communal" rather than "capitalistic".

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  20. "We eventually learn that the formics did figure it out, which is why they didn't invade again."Maybe because there were organisms on their homeworld without what we'd call "sentience" and without a hivemind, but which were still pretty clever, about the equivalent of a badger or raccoon. The Formics observed the behavior of these creatures and concluded that there was no reason a race or species comprised of individual consciousnesses couldn't rise to the level of sentience, even though they themselves had never run into one that had. Their "oh gosh no" moment came when they realized that humans fit this description almost exactly.

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  21. That would work if Formics were like ants, bees, and other insectoid fictional aliens, but I don't see how formicopomorphizing works when the Formic drones are mindless. The only way Formics, as Card wrote them, could possibly not realize that there were non-hiveminded creatures is if everything on their planet worked just like them. (Well, or bekabot's theory that they thought hivemindeness was necessary for sapience...that's still possible.)


    Formics, like humans, might only be able to guess at what goes on in another creature's mind, but they'd sure as hell notice if they were studying a creature/pack of creatures and the entire pack didn't stop when the leader died.

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  22. Wow. Everything about this is perfect.

    Dammit, Card, there are only so many times I can try to find alternative explanations for you. That time has ended. You brought this on yourself with your inexplicable fixation on the ancient Greek military. You're on your own now. If it happens again, I'm just going to link to art from Free!.


    LOVE.


    And LOVE the idea of Mazer = Graff for all the really wonderful reasons you tease out. That makes... a stunning amount of sense.


    And the end... and reproduction... *low whistle* Hello, Nu-Texas, as I know you know, Will. *shivers*

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  23. It would be rude to call it "genocide", after all.


    This.

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  24. Oh my god, 1910s Germany stole my ideas!

    Okay, I missed this the first time around, but now I think I understand how this works, and I hate it.

    Apparently, as I understand it, the Laser Tag School is for weeding out the kids who are capable of coming up with historical tactics on their own, and the winners who reinvent phalanxes and blitzkrieg on their own are competent enough to graduate and learn the historical impact of their tactics in Eros School. It's about finding Caesars and Napoleons and then making them better with the value of hindsight.

    I HATE THIS because it plays into the mentality I've run into in my career that Good Engineers are NOT competent or hard-working our

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  25. (god, I hate Disqus), or skilled at taking direction or good at doing things BETTER. No, what makes a Good Engineer, according to the conventional wisdom, is a person who invents/does everything perfectly from scratch.

    So, in practice, you get this weird idea where the Best Team is a group of Alphas who do things their own way, work poorly with others, and don't coordinate efforts or improve on existing designs because they do things from scratch. Yes, totally efficient and genius.

    In my experience, it would be WAY BETTER to teach the kids tactics first and them see which of them figures out how to improve things, rather than pick the kids who invent phalanxes from scratch, which, you know, WE ALREADY HAVE.

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  26. Yup. I'm doing the introduction now and amused to see Card being so deeply proud of reading military history and identifying/'inventing' the basic philosophy that they taught my brother in his first year as an army officer.

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  27. I'd be horrified that I broke the code, except I've been steeped in this for SO LONG.

    Did you ever see the movie... dammit, it was either SWAT or GI JOE, where they tell the New Recruit Hero that the ENTIRE TEAM is composed of Alphas recruited from other teams. I said to Husband, "I don't see how this could possibly go wrong!!"

    As someone who doesn't Do Things so much as Do Things Better, I hate this pernicious trope.

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  28. It's worse than that. In order to have the stated effects (causing the thing aimed at to explode) it either has to pump energy into the system in considerable quantities (there's a *lot* of negative gravitational potential energy in a planetary mass at the bottom of its own gravity well), or do something truly horrifying to the local laws of physics. Turning off the charge on the electron would be a good start: you'd get a lot of positive charges all really really wanting to get apart. However, that's not enough: you can't throw something into orbit around an earthlike planet by positively charging it. So they have to turn off gravity as well, whereupon everything drifts apart quite fast, except for the uncharged electrons, and *they* drift apart quite fast when you turn the beam off, having only 1/1822th of the mass of the original planet.


    Changing the laws of physics locally suggests that they *must* have a way to violate conservation of momentum, since the two are connected via Noether's theorem: this is clearly true, given that the planet doesn't recollapse once you turn the beam off: conservation of momentum has been violated on a grand scale (probably the same trick that's used for their magic starship drives -- which are themselves also a straight rip out of Le Guin's Ekumen universe). Doing it for a short amount of time (as opposed to forever) suggests that they can violate conservation of energy too. But analyzing this universe using modern physics in this depth is clearly pointless given that the ansible exists: simultaneity is meaningful outside your light cone and relativity is clearly a huge pile of wrong from top to bottom.


    There is still no explanation for why a society with near-lightspeed travel and gravity control needs to take months to get from Earth to an Earth-crossing asteroid, even in secret. It doesn't take much physics knowledge to figure out half a dozen ways you could parlay the technology shown into starship drives that would both be highly efficient and also (thanks to violating the heck out of conservation of momentum) dark, thus letting them get to their mysteriously secret Eros base wtihout lighting up like a torch so everyone can see them.


    btw, I suspect the reason two beams were needed is simply because this is the way the device's apparent spiritual ancestor, Niven's wonderfully-named Wunderland Treatymaker, worked. Of course, that didn't blow up planets, it merely magically suppressed the charge on the electron with one beam and the proton with the other.

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  29. In fact, a non-reproducing person can be extremely valuable to the continuation of a group, because they aren't distracted by their own children. A childless uncle (in an ideal family) will take as much care of his nieces and nephews as he would have his own children, so the kids basically get three parental figures instead of two. More adults=better survivability.

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