posted
I'm new to the forums here. I've been a long-time reader of the Ender books and I just discovered and finished Ender in Exile.
It was nice to jump back into that universe for a while.
I've been plagued by one thing while reading this book, though. The central motivation for Ender in this novel is that he wants to answer this question about why the hive queens let him destroy all of them. They knew his tactics and they knew his weaponry, yet they all gathered where they could be destroyed.
Am I missing something, or does the book never really explicitly answer this question?
He finds the Hive Queen pupa, and declares that he's found the answer, but I do not recall any answer to why exactly the hive queens behaved as they did. I read through the book hoping that there would be a bit more of a mental conversation between Ender and the Hive Queen where he would ask that question and get an answer.
That same question has plagued me ever since reading Ender's Game the first time. Why did the Hive Queens abandon the colonies? Without queens those colonies would quickly go extinct, would they not? I get the distinct impression that the Queen lays all the eggs and the formic drones don't reproduce at all by themselves. If the queens left only drones on the planets they would die out eventually.
Is this covered in another of the ender books and I'm just not remembering it? Ender's Game I've read several times, but I only read through the sequels once. and I know that material isn't really covered at all in the Shadow series.
I always just kind of assumed it was a convenience thing for the author. A way of having an instant end to the war and a horrifying psychological blow to ender at having destroyed an entire species, which then sets up the next three books, but it never quite seemed logical.
I thought that finally in Ender in Exile there would be an explanation, something about Hive Queen psychology that made them gather under a threat, or perhaps the idea that they were sort of sacrificing themselves knowingly, so that someday somebody would find the Hive Queen pupa and ressurect them now that they knew how to communicate with humans.
Anyone have any insights or know where I missed out on some details? I liked the book, I just feel like it's promising to provide answers that never appear.
Posts: 2 | Registered: Nov 2009
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quote:I always just kind of assumed it was a convenience thing for the author. A way of having an instant end to the war and a horrifying psychological blow to ender at having destroyed an entire species, which then sets up the next three books, but it never quite seemed logical.
posted
Well if that's all it was, then it's a little cruel of him to seemingly promise a real answer in Exile but then have Ender declare "I have the answer" and then never reveal it to the reader.
I mean I feel his pain here...that's not an easy plot hole to patch up with a satisfying answer, but he could have easily explained it away by saying the hive queens have a genetic instinct to group together for mutual defense when under attack.
Maybe physical proximity strengthens their intelligence. Maybe they amassed all their ships to create an irresistable force.
I just find it strange that in a series of books that so loves to explain the motives and reasoning of all of its characters that this one was left completely hanging for reader interpretation.
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posted
I have not read Ender in Exile but my memory of Ender's game is that this was why Ender was chosen.
Sure, Ender might think that the Hive Queens knew his weapons and his strategy, but that is a lot of after-thought and assuming that they worked on Ender's level of brilliance.
Remember the war room. Ender always won. How? All the other groups were better prepared, better rested, better trained. The answer is that they were so well trained that they became experts on their tactics, formations, and maneuvers. Ender just had one expertise--that of keeping his eye on the goal. While they were lining their troops up in clusters and formations, he was diving for the enemy gate--the goal.
The Enemy's Gate is Down.
Even the name--Ender--hints that his military genius is to go straight for what will end the war--no matter how bloody or permanent that end has to be.
The enemy queens retreated to their homeworld, leaving drones not out of some sort of sacrificial drive, but because they saw that as the safest strategy. The home world was the most well protected. The colony worlds were not so well protected. On any map a drive to the Homeworld would leave army unites engulfed and trapped. So no right thinking military man will attack the home world until the surrounding worlds would be cleared of troops. You leave the expendable troops to fight off the aliens on your colony worlds while your queens head to the safest place they know--home.
Ender predicted that was what they would do, so was able to defeat them. It is not the bugs mental quirks that lead them to bunker down on the hive world. It is Ender's mental quirks that lead him to dive straight to that ultimate enemy gate and win.
Posts: 1941 | Registered: Feb 2003
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posted
It's pretty clear in my mind that the colonies wouldn't die from lack of a queen, just lack of a -living- queen. Instantaneous communication between hive members (including queens) means that it doesn't matter where they are physically. If you add to that the fact that only dead queens are actually dead sentient beings, then it makes a sort of sense that the queens came together to their most intensely-guarded planet to last out the war while the other hive members (who are essentially throw-aways) do all the dangerous fighting. The fatal flaw is that they underestimate Ender: first by not expecting him to make it to the home world to begin with, and then by not realizing that he would actually throw away his final troops by using the MD on a planet with no escape route.
That's the logic of Ender's Game (and the Shadow series), anyway.
The rest of the Ender series hints that the queens "knew" Ender's mind through their attempts to make him part of the hive by hijacking the mind game (Jane is presumably the result of this hive queen experiment). And that rather than a fatal miscalculation, they admired Ender's brilliance so much that they KNEW he would outwit them somehow, and planned a way to send a message to him (by constructing the Giant's Corpse) and pass their collective consciousness and genetic future into the hands of their destroyer.
Posts: 368 | Registered: Dec 2005
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quote:The rest of the Ender series hints that the queens "knew" Ender's mind through their attempts to make him part of the hive by hijacking the mind game (Jane is presumably the result of this hive queen experiment). And that rather than a fatal miscalculation, they admired Ender's brilliance so much that they KNEW he would outwit them somehow, and planned a way to send a message to him (by constructing the Giant's Corpse) and pass their collective consciousness and genetic future into the hands of their destroyer.
This is an idea I like as long as I don't think about it too much - it's the emotional impact of having the fantasy game scenes suddenly become part of real life that I like. That the queens would actually put all their hopes on such a remote chance-dependent plan seems rather far fetched, though.
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posted
I agree. scifibum. Card's stated that the author's words are less important than the story the author and reader create together as those words are read, so, in true Card-ian fashion, I choose to believe that the story REALLY goes thusly:
The hive queens knew before the human fleet was sent that it would, inevitably, be sent, and planned their defense strategy, which included sending all the really useful, important members of society to the home world (otherwise, how did they have time for the trip, since only thought is instantaneous. Travel is a poky old near-light-speed). After settling in on the home world, they enacted the plan of finding the enemy "queen" (Ender) and enslaving its will, but all they were ultimately able to do was be sure that Ender was an unknown quantity, and they therefore established an emergency backup plan--dispatching a larval queen to be entombed in a message to the only enemy queen they knew well enough to communicate with. *nods earnestly* and that's how it -really- happened.
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