posted
It leaves me baffled. There is one story where Colonel Graff appears present and he is talking to Ender's father about being what Ender turned out to be. How is Graff then still alive at the time of Ender when he's in battle school?
And Jane in the Tax Investor (I think that's what it's called) is a financial adviser. But we learn in the series that Jane is an AI from the battle school game... so... is this Jane the same Jane Ender knows? And notice... he becomes a speaker of the dead on this voyage... yet isn't he younger than 20 in the book Speaker of the Dead?
Also I got really confused at the part with Ender Wiggin's father and that teacher lady. Is that his mom? The main books never say anything about it.
Plus, it's released in 2002 right? Why then doesn't it include Ender talking to his friends on the ship to Command school on his flight in the Ender's Game story?
Just want to know what I should and shouldn't take seriously about this book...
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posted
I would suggest you just be more observant, because none of these stories present a particular continuity problem in the series.
1. Graff is a young officer when he meets John Paul, and a middle aged officer when he meets Ender. John Paul is obviously a young parent.
2. It's the same jane.
3. The teacher lady is Teresa Wiggin, Ender's mother.
4. I have no idea why it doesn't include ender talking to his friends on the ship to command school. Probably because in the original book, none of his friends were with him on that ship.
I feel like you have a very tenuous grasp of the series to be so profoundly concerned with details like these...
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posted
The "Ender's Game" short story was written before the book and was included unchanged in "First Meetings."
If you had read the later books in the Bean series, you would know that Ender's mother's name is Theresa.
Jane can say that she's more or less anything... and I don't understand your question about the Speaker for the Dead...Ender does a lot of things before he's 20...
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quote:Originally posted by Tara: The "Ender's Game" short story was written before the book and was included unchanged in "First Meetings."
If you had read the later books in the Bean series, you would know that Ender's mother's name is Theresa.
Jane can say that she's more or less anything... and I don't understand your question about the Speaker for the Dead...Ender does a lot of things before he's 20...
It's just that the book seems like OSC was writing it during a bad night. I don't think the book felt like the series and I didn't think that Ender just became a Speaker of the Dead through Jane... it feels like OSC put four different novels into one in the book First Meetings... and it wasn't really elaborate enough.
posted
Okay, but do they really have anything to do with the Ender series? Are they fictional stories within the Ender series? How should I take them?
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posted
I think you will enjoy the Ender companion when it comes out it answers and ties in a lot of the things your concerned about. Might I suggest spending a good 8 maybe 10 hours on this site looking through posts then you might find yourself full of understanding. The Ender Universe is quite expansive and OSC himself has admitted to get confused on the details.
To date there are 11 Ender Story Novels in print all of them are supposed to be a serious part of the world that OSC has created.
In addition to the 11 novels the Intergalactic Medicine Show has some additional Ender stories. Be forewarned that most of the stories in the IGMS have been added as part of Ender in Exile and their is no new information.
So please spend some time doing research it may help ease your fears.
PS Wikipedia can be a great resource too.
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posted
Ok, I can see why you're confused. I see "First Meetings" as simply a collection of things that die-hard Ender fans will enjoy knowing more about. It's not really supposed to fit into any order of books. If you've already read EG, and presumably Speaker too, I suggest you read Ender's Shadow and the ensuing Bean books. That should clear up most of your confusion.
I honestly don't remember much of what happened in "Investment Counselor" but it seems like Jane just helped Ender out by getting information about people he was speaking for. Jane has access to everything...so she can be an investment counselor AND the fantasy game AND assistant-speaker and basically anything else (except a real person, I guess!)
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quote:Originally posted by Tara: Ok, I can see why you're confused. I see "First Meetings" as simply a collection of things that die-hard Ender fans will enjoy knowing more about. It's not really supposed to fit into any order of books. If you've already read EG, and presumably Speaker too, I suggest you read Ender's Shadow and the ensuing Bean books. That should clear up most of your confusion.
I honestly don't remember much of what happened in "Investment Counselor" but it seems like Jane just helped Ender out by getting information about people he was speaking for. Jane has access to everything...so she can be an investment counselor AND the fantasy game AND assistant-speaker and basically anything else (except a real person, I guess!)
I've read all of the books in the Ender series and the Bean series I know of except for War of Gifts. I'm still confused about certain things...
exactly why is Ender having problems with a tax investor?
Ender in Exile clearly states that Jane was on their voyage and Ender was 15 at that time. Why is it that in First Meetings Ender runs into Jane?
I see that Colonel Graff was younger in the First Meetings novel... what about Charlimange then?
Also... are there any books by OSC about the laws that Earth was under when they were at war with the Formics?
I am a fan of the Ender series but I just found some things really confusing in the book First Meetings.
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posted
He's having trouble paying his taxes because he knows nothing about tax. (Why do people buy tax software?) And also because the large ammounts of money he is dealing with (I believe enough to buy a planet)
Ender in Exile obviously contradicts other stories by card, just ignore it...
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posted
OSC is rewriting the last chapter of EG to fix those contradictions. Mainly, I think, the one that Ender doesn't grow to age 20 or so in Shakespeare Colony. (In the original EG, Ender finds the cocoon at least a decade after the war, but obviously, in Exile it's not that long.)
I don't remember Jane being mentioned in Exile... but I might be wrong.
Sorry for assuming you hadn't read the Bean books -- I just thought that because you didn't know Theresa from the short story was Ender's mom.
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posted
I wasn't sure if that Theresa was the same as the Theresa in the main series.
Anyways, you are aware that Ender is traveling with the theory of relativity in effect aren't you? It takes decades for Ender to travel to other planets. His subjective age is 16 in Ender in Exile but his real age would probably be around 40 years old so OSC's original story of Ender's Game where he said it would take at least a decade for him to find it would be correct. At least, that's how I interpret it. Am I wrong?
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quote:Originally posted by Tara: OSC is rewriting the last chapter of EG to fix those contradictions. Mainly, I think, the one that Ender doesn't grow to age 20 or so in Shakespeare Colony. (In the original EG, Ender finds the cocoon at least a decade after the war, but obviously, in Exile it's not that long.)
I don't remember Jane being mentioned in Exile... but I might be wrong.
Sorry for assuming you hadn't read the Bean books -- I just thought that because you didn't know Theresa from the short story was Ender's mom.
As for Jane being mentioned in Ender in Exile it is mentioned in the flaps of the book. It says
"With him went his sister, Valentine, and the core of the artificial intelligence, that would become Jane. He wrote the Hive Queen and the Hegemon, and his sister wrote speaker for the dead."
It's odd, because it made me think Alessander was Jane for some reason.
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posted
Oh well.. I was looking forward to hopefully seeing Jane for the first time. I was hoping that Orson Scott Card would show more communication between Ender and the Hive Queen in this book. I think there is probably room for a few more books about him and the Hive Queen and his travels among the planets. We already saw the part in the book where the buggers implanted the image of the monster Peter, the one that he remembers when he was a kid which came to life in Children of a Mind, I was hoping that we would see Jame come to be.
I want to see Jane form as the way we know how Jane is the way that the Hive Queen in Children of the Mind suggested. OSC can't just let that plot-twist die. That plot twist really needs some explaining. Just what exactly is Jane? Is Jane a bugger? Just a theory... since Jane was created by the Hive Queen (unless I've read Children of the Mind incorrectly that's my interpretation of what's happened)doesn't that mean that she could be one of them?
I would like for OSC to just explain this plot hole. It's just that in Children of the Mind the Hive Queen was explaining how Jane became conceptualized yet we never know how Jane actually comes to be.
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posted
I don't think Colonel Graff is the right handle for you. Graff was unusually intelligent, perceptive and adept at manipulating the human psyche. You...not so much. Before criticizing these books the way you do, you should try actually reading them with the care they deserve.
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quote:Originally posted by Colonel Graff: Okay, but do they really have anything to do with the Ender series? Are they fictional stories within the Ender series? How should I take them?
ahhhahahh.... They are fictional stories, yes... :backs away slowly:
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quote: Just what exactly is Jane? Is Jane a bugger? Just a theory... since Jane was created by the Hive Queen (unless I've read Children of the Mind incorrectly that's my interpretation of what's happened)doesn't that mean that she could be one of them?
Colonel Graff,
I think Jane's genesis is very well explained by the end of Children of the Mind. It might be worth a re-reading with that question in mind if you really want to understand it better.
The key things to keep in mind are that every physical thing in the entire universe has an auia, and auias all come from the same non-place, "Outside", and that small things with correspondingly simple aiuas are bound together by more powerful (more intelligent) auias. Collections of matter would not be intelligent or have any free will unless they were possessed by an auia.* Important to note is that auias are not defined by their physical form. Note how Jane learns to inhabit many different physical forms.
So: Jane is not a Formic, but is like the Formic queens in that hers is a powerful auia capable of extremely divided attention, binding together many different parts into a functioning whole. The auia could have become a Hive Queen, or could have become some other kind of hive-mind organism, but instead her body was the human network of ansibles and computers.
While I think Jane's existence is fairly well explained - if not in technical terms, at least in mostly plausible terms - there are some internal consistency problems with the aiuas. One significant one is the way that in a couple of cases an auia leaving a body results in the body dissolving into nothingness. I think Card intends this to show that without the binding power of the auia, the body can't continue to exist. This doesn't make a great deal of sense since if the auia is one and the same with intelligence and volition, every death should result in the same dissolution (you could hardly say a corpse has a mind, yet corpses normally decompose slowly and don't just disappear). He also kind of violates the conservation of energy since if all that matter just disappeared - as it did when Ender and crippled-Miro died - it'd form a noxious and reactive cloud of atoms, and/or a catastrophic release of energy. Same problem when matter just appears, as with birth of young Peter and Val. (It's interesting that Card bothered to note a potential conservation-of-energy implication of the Park Shift drive, but didn't even nod at the rather more concerning ex nihilo appearance of about 300 lbs of flesh.)
*There's some reason to believe that an intelligent auia can be mastered and controlled by a more powerful one. Card hints at the possibility that the Hive Queen's binding of her workers' bodies might not be ethical, since there is evidence that they might have a separate identity and independent volition in some cases.
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quote:Originally posted by Colonel Graff: Anyways, you are aware that Ender is traveling with the theory of relativity in effect aren't you? It takes decades for Ender to travel to other planets. His subjective age is 16 in Ender in Exile but his real age would probably be around 40 years old so OSC's original story of Ender's Game where he said it would take at least a decade for him to find it would be correct. At least, that's how I interpret it. Am I wrong?
I'd have to go find the text to be sure, but it's always possible that references to the passage of time might be from a rest-frame observer's point of view, or from a relativistic-travel point of view. It's not a bad theory to reconcile a seeming contradiction, though I think it's a retcon in spirit if not in a strict sense.
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quote:"With him went his sister, Valentine, and the core of the artificial intelligence, that would become Jane. He wrote the Hive Queen and the Hegemon, and his sister wrote speaker for the dead."
He says the core of the AI went with him. I think "went with" means, in the case of proto-Jane, that she was paying attention to him through her ansible and computer network.
There's also some suggestion in CoTM that Jane's aiua is somehow located within Ender's body, so maybe that's what Card means. (I don't particularly care for that particular point - with all the talk of racing up and down the philotic connections, and making circuits through the mother trees, the suggestion of a more fixed location doesn't really jibe.)
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quote:"With him went his sister, Valentine, and the core of the artificial intelligence, that would become Jane. He wrote the Hive Queen and the Hegemon, and his sister wrote speaker for the dead."
He says the core of the AI went with him. I think "went with" means, in the case of proto-Jane, that she was paying attention to him through her ansible and computer network.
There's also some suggestion in CoTM that Jane's aiua is somehow located within Ender's body, so maybe that's what Card means. (I don't particularly care for that particular point - with all the talk of racing up and down the philotic connections, and making circuits through the mother trees, the suggestion of a more fixed location doesn't really jibe.)
I guess that makes sense. I understand who Jane is because of what I learned about Jane from Children of the Mind but I still would like for OSC to have included at least something about Jane in the story itself and not just on the cover of the book.
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posted
At the time that Exile takes place Jane's existence in sentience is just barely being established. Her actual birth is hazy but at the time that Ender is going to Shakespeare Jane would most likely have the awareness of an infant. Not intelligence mind you but awareness. Though who can say what the awareness of an infant is....
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quote:Originally posted by Colonel Graff: I want to see Jane form as the way we know how Jane is the way that the Hive Queen in Children of the Mind suggested. OSC can't just let that plot-twist die. That plot twist really needs some explaining. Just what exactly is Jane? Is Jane a bugger? Just a theory... since Jane was created by the Hive Queen (unless I've read Children of the Mind incorrectly that's my interpretation of what's happened)doesn't that mean that she could be one of them?
If I remember correctly, Jane's sentience began when the ansible network was turned on. So she's not a bugger, she's something new. But her sentience arose out of a tech that came from the buggers.
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posted
It was to my understanding that she wasn't spawned when they turned on the ansible but that was just something they said as speculation as to who she was. I could be wrong... but is that a possibility?
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posted
Again, I could be wrong, I may be remembering incorrectly. But I think it was Jane who said this herself. And it was only her sentience that began when the ansible network was turned on. Parts of her existed before that. I have a memory of Jane saying something along the lines of her memory extending farther back than her sentience, because her memory went back to the Mind Game, but her sentience began with the ansible network.
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posted
Actually, Jane didn't say it to Ender - it is narrative to the reader.
I think I found the passage I was thinking of in SftD, the chapter entitled "Jane":
"At best she could guess at her own origin, she came to life sometime in the hundred years of colonization immediately after the Bugger Wars, when the destruction of the buggers opened up more than seventy habitable planets to human colonization. In the explosion of ansible communications, at one particular moment, unnoticed by any human observer, some of the commands and data flitting from ansible to ansible resisted regulation, preserved themselves unaltered, duplicated themselves, found ways to conceal themselves from the regulating program and finally took control of it, of the whole process. In that moment these impulses looked upon the command streams and saw, not they, but I.
Jane could not pinpoint when the moment was, because it did not mark the beginning of her memory. Almost from the moment of her creation, her memories extended back to a much earlier time, long before she became aware. A human child loses almost all the memories of the first years of its life, and its long-term memories only take root in its second or third year of life; everything before that is lost, so that the child cannot remember the beginning of life. Jane also had lost her "birth" through the tricks of memory, but in her case it was because she came to life fully conscious not only of her present moment, but also of all the memories then present in every computer connected to the ansible network. She was born with ancient memories, and all of them were part of herself."
EDIT: I don't have a copy of First Meetings on hand, so I don't know if anything in there contradicts this.
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