I was reading Children of the Mind again because of Flaming Toad's "man who saw the god" thread, and this story intrigued me. He spoke of the creatures whose roots reach down into the earth being animals and the creatures who are connected to the sun (and growing, wanting to be something bigger) as the people.
Later Miro speculates that the descoladores are sending molecular communcations because "maybe this is how they communicate with Animals". I think it is not an accident, being the chapter title and all. I wonder of all the creatures Malu spoke with are humans, but he is making a distinction that some reach backward or inward for identity while some reach up and out. And perhaps this plays into the definition of Raman and Varelse. A Raman reaches out to understand, where a Varelse is just for defending the status quo.
Now we've had a lot of discussions where Varelse was equated with monster, like in Alien. I'd like to steer this toward where Valentine [cough OSC] got the terms from, which was from the Icelandic language terms for differing foreign-ness of people.
Then there is the long arguments I had with a Jehovah's Witness friend about the definitions of the sons of God in the Bible, and the Nephelim (sp?) who were the children of the daughters of men by these sons of God. They felt there was an inherent difference between the two, where I thought the difference was a matter of belief and becoming a child of God through covenant. I don't know why they might have been giants or how that is defined. I tend toward the idea that giant = stately but within the range of normal.
I also found it odd that in the afterward Card mentions his abandonment of a book called Genesis, and I believe he's said that he thinks that Pastwatch: Eden will be the last book of his career for the reason that it will offend everyone at the same time.
Posted by Orson Scott Card (Member # 209) on :
I did work on Genesis (but it had nothing to do with the Book of Genesis) for a while; Pastwatch: Eden will be a lot of fun and incorporate some of my favorite ideas from that abandoned work.
The Varelse has nothing to do with 'status quo' and everything to do with devouring or destroying our species and being impossible to reason with or negotiate with.
I use the narrow definition of human: i.e., homo sapiens. so none of these creatures are humans. But they might be sentient/intelligent, in their own terms, and think of themselves as the "people" and all other species as "animals."
Posted by Flaming Toad on a Stick (Member # 9302) on :
As if you needed another reason to read CotM
Posted by Survivor (Member # 233) on :
By the way, this is one of the many things I love about Card. He uses the narrow definition of "human", and he understands just how narrow that definition is.
Posted by pooka (Member # 5003) on :
quote:The Varelse has nothing to do with 'status quo' and everything to do with devouring or destroying our species and being impossible to reason with or negotiate with.
I'm not sure why I latched onto the status quo. I guess I was trying to illustrate a difference between a being that wants to serve in heaven versus one that wants to rule their little square meter of hell. I tend to believe, at least, that as the explanation for destructive behavior in the actual moral universe. My assumption is that while the Enderverse might have different physics from ours, the moral universals are the same. Which is not to say we necessarily know what all of them are.