“And came down in Paris: “

"Whatever your gravity is when you get to the door, remember -- the enemy's gate is down.”

“The Brief Life Burns Brightly broke out of the fleet. We were chasing down a Ghost cruiser, and we were closing.”

In all 3 stories the point of estrangement occurs in the first sentences: from then onward, you know you are reading science fiction.

In Childhood's End, Karellen said that the stars are not for man. According to these three stories, the human beings who do go into space must change both physically and psychologically, and this change must start early in life.

All three of our stories for last week deal with very young people. All three deal with the plight of the individual who is both changed and used by society to fulfill a purpose seen, rightly or wrongly, as necessary. None of the three protagonists had any choice in how they would be used.

“Aye, and Gomorrah,” by Samuel Delany
Spacers are conditioned, neutered when the testers confirm that their sexual responses will remain “hopelessly retarded at puberty” in order to create a species that can survive the radiation in space and to siphon off part of the population to offset the population explosion. Spacers, who come out of training school at 16 and go on to do mining jobs in the solar system, are capable of free fall – they can “step from land to land.” (Exactly how they can do this is never explained. This is not hard SF.) Even though they are without sexual desire, they still feel “that old longing.” They have a certain camaraderie with each other but, still, on leave to earth they are lonely, longing for some kind of love.

As a new form of sexual object, they have attracted their share of groupies, the frelks, people defined as having a “free-fall-sexual-displacement complex,” who cannot love and whose sexual predilections verge on necrophilia (sexual desire for dead bodies, in case you didn’t know). The frelk the narrator goes home with believes that frelks are “the sexually retarded ones they [the testers] miss” who spend their “dull, circled lives, bound in gravity, worshiping" spacers. Like the spacers, the frelks also don’t choose to be who they are: because of their sexual immaturity or their fear of love, they seek those who cannot love them in return. The relation between the two groups is complex – the spacers boast derisively of what they do to frelks (what this is,again, we are never told other than putting them through “changes”). The the spacers seem to crave frelks’ company, for which they are paid by the frelks. “I want something," I said. "That's why I came. I'm lonely. Maybe I want to find out how far it goes. I don't know yet." Money becomes an ugly source of argument here as it is in all transactions where someone pays for favors from another.

Society has created a caste of spacers who can never live comfortably on earth but whose time in space gives them experiences -- their “glorious, soaring life” -- forbidden to “normal” people. Delany has said that the story is about “a future perversion, clearly an analogue of homosexuality.” (Samuel Delany, Shorter Views, Weslyan University Press, 1999.) Gay himself, he has written a story in which the “deviant” enjoys greater pleasures than “normal” people, but pays the price of loneliness.

As for the title, we have discussed the Biblical story of Sodom and Gomorrah, the two destroyed cities which have gone down in legend as the repositories of unimaginable (and imaginable) evil. We know what Sodomy means. Gomorrah didn’t turn into a word denoting any kind of forbidden pleasure, but we know it means “ruined heap,” which is an apt image of Spacer sexuality. I imagine the title as part of a dialogue: “Isn’t it interesting how diverse human sexuality is?” “Yes! For instance, there’s Sodom.” “Aye, and Gomorrah.”

“Ender’s Game” by Orson Scott Card
Chosen even earlier than the spacers in Delany’s story, Ender and his fellow soldiers have gone through a well-defined training program which had become their life—-Battle School, Tactical School, Command School and before that Preschool, where boys are trained, among other things, never to cry: Bean “remembered how his first teacher, when he was three, would have been upset to see his lip quivering and his eyes full of tears.”

The adults in charge of Ender’s training, Lieutenant Anderson and Captain Graff, have determined that he is “the one” who will save humanity, but Graff has scruples: “These are children, Anderson. Ender’s army is nine years old. Are we going to put them through hell?” He sees the possibility that Ender will become “completely useless, worn down, a failure, because he was pushed farther than he or any living person could go.”

But Graff says the situation is desperate: “there’s a war on, and our best talent is gone, and the biggest battles are ahead.” They are so desperate, they have resorted to children. He reminds Anderson of the children they have seen outside their facility: “kids who get up in the morning when their mothers call them and they go to school and then in the afternoons they go to Beaman Park and play. They’re happy, they smile a lot, they laugh, they have fun”. This, of course, is not Ender, who is “not a child. He’s barely a person.” But he, as the Lieutenant says “is making it possible for the others of his age to be playing in the park,” as we see at the end of the story.

American SF of the 1950s was roundly criticized for reducing the possible complexities of the alien encounter to a simplistic “kill or be killed.” The motives for the war in “Ender’s Game,” a story of the 70's, are unclear (much more clearly defined in the excellent novel Card made from his story). But the motives are apparently not entirely to the credit of humanity: it is not a case of good humans at war with evil aliens. The enemy has not attacked gratuitously; instead “he had good reason to attack us.” However, this war, whatever its causes, is now a do-or-die situation that has decimated generations of young men.

And there is yet another reason for using children, as Maezr tells Ender after the war is won: “ When a commander knows that he's killing people, he becomes cautious or insane, and neither of those help him do well. [. . . .] So we trained children, who didn't know anything but the game, and never knew when it would become real. That was the theory, and you proved that the theory worked.” Ender has spent his short life anticipating the day when he will be in command of a human ship fighting a physical battle in space. But this is not to be. His battle is fought in computer-game style near earth; Ender, urged on by Bean, remembers an old strategy he devised at combat school and completely destroys his opponent, only then to be told that this was not a game. He has not been fighting his crusty teacher Maezr Rackham in a computer simulation. Instead he has won the war. He has destroyed all the aliens as well as their home planet, breaking the game rule Maezr gives him as the commanders hoped he would – there are no rules in wartime. Ironically when he breaks the rules, he is half frightened that he will be punished but also hopes this will make the games stop. He is right on both counts – the games which were not games stop forever and he is punished by the realization of what he has done.

At the end of the story, though the officers rejoice, Ender is not happy. He has been tricked and lied to. He knows he has been merely a tool, a weapon, and he asks: “’So tell me …how many people lived on that planet that I destroyed.’
“They didn't answer him. They waited awhile in silence, and then Graff spoke. ‘Weapons don't need to understand what they're pointed at, Ender. We did the pointing, and so we're responsible. You just did your job.’
“Maezr smiled. ‘Of course, Ender, you'll be taken care of. The government will never forget you. You served us all very well.’”
But later as Ender talks with Bean, the question arises: "What will we do now that the war's over?"

The story ends as Lt Anderson and Captain Graff watch the children playing war games in the park they had spoken of earlier. Ender, now a disillusioned old man of twelve, will never be one of those children.

“On the Orion Line” by Stephen Baxter
Set thousands of years in the future, this story deals with similar issues. By a UK author known for hard SF, it is one of a series of stories he set in its created universe. It was written more than 20 years after “Ender’s Game” and perhaps reflects increasing anxiety about the future of humankind as well as social changes – you notice that while Ender’s world was entirely male, women are combatants in this future war, swearing, fighting, and dying alongside men.

Case, the young tar (slang for sailor), is fifteen, and also did not choose to join the war effort. He tells Jeru he was drafted, but that he feels he is doing something “useful” by being in the war. He, like Ender, has been indoctrinated – as the academician Pael says, “You people are monsters…. Even such a child as this. You embrace death.”

Young Case himself is a believable and useful narrator. His youth and lack of education give Pael the chance to educate not only Case but the reader in this, the hardest SF we have read to date. Pael describes their enemy the Ghosts as a non-competitive species who “seem to be motivated – not by expansion and the acquisition of territory for its own sake, as we are – but by a desire to understand the fine-tuning of the universe. Why are we here? You see, young tar, there is only a narrow range of the constants of physics within which life of any sort is possible. We think the Ghosts are studying this question by pushing at the boundaries – by tinkering with the laws which sustain and contain us all.” This makes the situation complex: in spite of their peacefulness and admirable desire for knowledge, the Ghosts are a danger to life in the universe .

Indeed the Ghosts seem to embody another side to humanity, our inquisitiveness, our desire to open every possible Pandora’s box. LINK http://www.wfs.org/revreesso03.htm Contemporary physics has reached a state where some fear that human “tinkering” could end life in the universe: “Already, particle accelerators can, inside a very small area, generate heat and pressure conditions approaching those of the original Big Bang. […which] could have a number of unintended consequences. ….[E]xtreme conditions inside a giant particle accelerator might locally warp the fabric of space itself, creating a bubble of altered reality that would expand outward in all directions at the speed of light and destroy our planet, our solar system, and eventually everything in the universe.” But the Ghosts represent more than an admirable if dangerous side of ourselves – they are The Other, The Enemy against whom we show no mercy. It was not always so. The two species had lived without conflict for millennia. The real cause of the war according to the Commissary Jeru is the human desire for expansion into more and more of the galaxy, expansion that went on unimpeded until a thousand years ago. She personifies the expansionist ethic when she kills a ghost, saying: "It was in our way. That is sufficient reason for destroying it.” But she also reveals that the stalling of expansion is in itself dangerous for humanity: "We are already choking. There have already been wars, young Case: humans fighting human, as the inner systems starve. All the Ghosts have to do is wait for us to destroy ourselves.”

The first hand-to-hand combat between Ghost and human, the killing of the Ghost is described in grisly detail, though Case says that because of his training, he feels no empathy, only hatred: “I felt an unreasonable loathing rise up in me. Maybe you could think of them as a family banding together to protect their young. I didn't care; a lifetime's carefully designed hatred isn't thrown off so easily. I went at my work with a will.” Still, humane impulses rise up and disturb him: “I tried not to think about whatever emotions churned within those silvered carapaces, what despairing debates might chatter on invisible wavelengths. I was, after all, trying to complete a mission.” Though like Ender and the Spacer, he still possesses some humanity, he has been well-trained.

Ironically, having destroyed the young in the Ghost nursery, both Jeru and Pael give their lives in order to save Case. Their brief lives also burn brightly: “ our lives are short enough; we should preserve the young,” the academician says, in spite of all his negative criticism of humanity, opting as the Ghosts did to try to save the species’ young -- as he pushes Case’s solar-sailed craft away from the Ghost ship and goes to his death in the explosion of the Ghost’s fortress star.

Unlike Ender, Case is undeterred by his experience and signs up for more battle, choosing to lead a short heroic life which he is willing to give for humanity. Like Ender and the spacer, he is a young victim of a social system that gave him no choice.

The stories reflect our present and past society – its materialistic expansionism and its wars, its sacrifice of young people, as well as our fears of present and future manipulation of minds, hearts, and the universe itself.

Week of Mon. Oct. 30:
Read Ursula K. Le Guin The Left Hand of Darkness, through p. 129 (end of Chapter 9).

Far in the future, the planet Gethan has no word for war. The first chapter sets the scene – at least part of it. The only two names you really need to know are Genly Ai, the narrator, and Estraven, though a nodding acquaintance with Lord Tibe won’t hurt. You will meet all three characters in the first chapter. The novel is set in two major areas of the planet, Karhide and Orgoreyn. You already know what an ansible is; other neologisms will be defined in context – the way we almost always learn new words.

Le Guin is concerned not only with cultures and personal relationships, but with systems of government. Like many major SF authors she has created not only a world, but a universe with its own future history, appearing in a number of her books known as the Hainish novels. This history will be revealed gradually in this book, and is one of the fascinations of its backgrounded information. In the foreground is a human story dealing with cultural difference and the mysteries of gender.