Speaker for the Dead
May. 17th, 2015 10:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
trickykittyI finished listening to Speaker for the Dead, the sequel to Ender's Game.
About 1/3 of the way through, I had already decided that the topics addressed in this book where much more great in scope and less trivial than the ideas presented in Ender's Game, which is not to trivialize the ideas presented in Ender's Game at all, but to show how much greater I felt these ideas were by comparison. I was glad that the audio book included an interview with Orson Scott Card at the end in which he states that Ender's Game was more or less a lead up to this book, and that this book was actually his goal in regards to that universe.
It's a shame The Hive Queen and Jane couldn't converse. They could have kept each other company during the years that Ender was "asleep" traveling at near-light speed. According to the book, they both felt every moment of the trips, which brought me to wonder about relativity, specifically, perception of it.
Jane already thought of minutes as years, and, in a strange sort of way, they were both to her. Living among the "philotic rays" that created the Ansible, she was simultaneously listening to chatter coming at her at different relativistic time stamps, yet it was all simultaneous to her.
In fact, it would have to be so simultaneous that I wonder if technically she would be timeless, although Card treats her as still only being able to live "in the moment," but that doesn't work either. In which moment is she living? One thing is for certain, Card does not treat her as having the ability to know future events.
I do wonder why he chose to have the Hive Queen be able to also perceive all "3000" of those years. She would have no real frame of reference, as she is physically traveling with Ender, and therefore I would think she would experience the same length of time as he. Jane makes sense, because although she is focused on him, she is not physically traveling with him.
This reminded me of Interstellar as well as an episode of Star Trek TNG, both involving a planet upon which time movesmore quickly differently* than the time moving inside a body/ship orbiting the planet. *In Interstellar, time on the planet was slower, but in Star Trek, time on the planet was faster.
Speaking of Jane, there was a moment when I had to pause the recording and sit for a few minutes. It was the same couple of paragraphs worth of information that included the statement, "For a very long time, almost three seconds, Jane could not understand what had happened to her," which of course was another occurrence in the book in which her relative idea of time is the focus of the narration. In this case, though, the focus changes to describe Jane's perception of input. This section also contains the following:
"Her body, insofar as she had a body, consisted of trillions of such electronic noises, sensors, memory files, terminals. Most of them, like most functions of the human body, simply took care of themselves. ... She didn't notice unless something went massively wrong, or unless she was paying attention. She paid attention to Ender Wiggin. More than he realized, she paid attention to him. ... She knew of every telephone call, every satellite transmission in the Hundred Worlds, but she didn't DO anything about them. Anything not in her top 1000 levels caused her to respond more or less reflexively.
What struck me about this section of narration is how close it comes to the same thing I was playing with recently regarding understanding how we focus our attentions on the myriad of incoming input in order to add quality to data so as to make it stand out from the noise. Although there are no answers in this section of the book, I enjoyed reading how Card describes the end result for the audience.
About 1/3 of the way through, I had already decided that the topics addressed in this book where much more great in scope and less trivial than the ideas presented in Ender's Game, which is not to trivialize the ideas presented in Ender's Game at all, but to show how much greater I felt these ideas were by comparison. I was glad that the audio book included an interview with Orson Scott Card at the end in which he states that Ender's Game was more or less a lead up to this book, and that this book was actually his goal in regards to that universe.
It's a shame The Hive Queen and Jane couldn't converse. They could have kept each other company during the years that Ender was "asleep" traveling at near-light speed. According to the book, they both felt every moment of the trips, which brought me to wonder about relativity, specifically, perception of it.
Jane already thought of minutes as years, and, in a strange sort of way, they were both to her. Living among the "philotic rays" that created the Ansible, she was simultaneously listening to chatter coming at her at different relativistic time stamps, yet it was all simultaneous to her.
In fact, it would have to be so simultaneous that I wonder if technically she would be timeless, although Card treats her as still only being able to live "in the moment," but that doesn't work either. In which moment is she living? One thing is for certain, Card does not treat her as having the ability to know future events.
I do wonder why he chose to have the Hive Queen be able to also perceive all "3000" of those years. She would have no real frame of reference, as she is physically traveling with Ender, and therefore I would think she would experience the same length of time as he. Jane makes sense, because although she is focused on him, she is not physically traveling with him.
This reminded me of Interstellar as well as an episode of Star Trek TNG, both involving a planet upon which time moves
Speaking of Jane, there was a moment when I had to pause the recording and sit for a few minutes. It was the same couple of paragraphs worth of information that included the statement, "For a very long time, almost three seconds, Jane could not understand what had happened to her," which of course was another occurrence in the book in which her relative idea of time is the focus of the narration. In this case, though, the focus changes to describe Jane's perception of input. This section also contains the following:
"Her body, insofar as she had a body, consisted of trillions of such electronic noises, sensors, memory files, terminals. Most of them, like most functions of the human body, simply took care of themselves. ... She didn't notice unless something went massively wrong, or unless she was paying attention. She paid attention to Ender Wiggin. More than he realized, she paid attention to him. ... She knew of every telephone call, every satellite transmission in the Hundred Worlds, but she didn't DO anything about them. Anything not in her top 1000 levels caused her to respond more or less reflexively.
What struck me about this section of narration is how close it comes to the same thing I was playing with recently regarding understanding how we focus our attentions on the myriad of incoming input in order to add quality to data so as to make it stand out from the noise. Although there are no answers in this section of the book, I enjoyed reading how Card describes the end result for the audience.
