Monday, September 22, 2003

Xenocide...partly...

I am reading the third book of Ender's saga..."Xenocide"...
I can't give review yet since I only started reading...but the funny part of this book is that at the beginning of each chapter...
so bare with me...:p

first chapter...

Today one of the brothers asked me: Is it terrible prison, not to be able to move from the place where you're standing ?
You answered...
I told him that I am now more free than he is. The inability to move frees me from the obligation to act.
You who speak languages, you are such liars

second chapter...

The strangest thing about humans is the way they pair up, males and females. Constantly at war with each other, never content to leave each other alone. They never seem to grasp the idea that males and females are separate species wth completely different needs and desires, forced to come together only to reproduce.
Of course you feel that way. Your mates are nothing but mindless drone, extensions of yourself, without their own identity.
We know our lovers with perfect understanding. Human invent an imaginary lover and put that mask over the face of the body in their bed.
That is the tragedy of language, my friend. Those who know each other only through symbolic representation are forced to imagine each other. And because their imagination is imperfect, they are often wrong.
That is the source of their misery.
And some of their strength, I think. Your people and mine, each for our own evolutionary reasons, mate with vastly unequal partners. Our mates are always, hopelessly, our intelectual inferiors. Humans mate with beings who challenge their supremacy. They have conflict between mates, not because their communication is inferior to ours, but because they commune with each other at all.

Third chapter...

The most unpleasant thing about human beings is that they don't metamorphose. Your people and mine are born as grubs, but we transform ourselves into a higher form before we reproduce. Human beings remain grubs all their lives.
Human beings do metamorphose. They change their identity constantly. However, each new identity thrives on the delusion that it always in posession of the body it has just conquered.
Such changes are superficial. The nature of the organism remains the same. Humans are very proud of their changes, but every imagined transformation turns out to be a new set of excuses for behaving exactly as the individual has always behaved.
You are too different from humans ever to understand them.
You are too similar to humans for you ever to be able to see them clearly.

Chapter four...

So many of your people are becoming Christians. Believing in god these humans brought with them.
You don't believe in God ?
The question never came up. We have always remembered how we began.
You evolved. We were created.
By a virus.
By a virus that God created in order to create us.
So you, too, are a believer.
I understand belief.
No-you desire belief.
I desire it enough to act as if I believed. Maybe that's what faith is.
Or deliberate insanity.

Chapter Five...

Ender says that when the war fleet from Starways Congress reaches us, they plan to destroy this world.
Interesting.
You don't fear death ?
We don't intend to be here when they arrive.


that's as far as I read...