Lavie Tidhar: sf story about the way that sf stories see aliens

Lavie Tidhar sez, "As soon as I wrote this story I realised I would most likely have to self-publish it. To my delighted surprise, though, an editor at one of the big online [SF] magazines offered me, shortly after, to publish it. Two days later, however, the publisher of the same magazine declined the story, not wanting to deal with any potential fallout. I then showed it -- unofficially -- to a handful of people, and got a potential offer to publish it in another big magazine, if only I were to change some of the references in the story. I decided, instead, to publish it here."

There had been another boy at the school, called Ender, but he'd attacked and seriously hurt and in at least one case we knew of killed one of the other boys, and they finally had to put him down, though he kept protesting, the day they came for him, that it wasn't his fault.
No-one wanted to be put down at the school. They bred us very carefully, lines of genetic lineage, great-great-grandparents and parents all down the generations selected by the board and certified and mated to produce us. If we were an aberration we were put down and our progenitors were mated again, to try and create a better version.
My earliest memory is of white men in white coats holding clipboards, examining me. They measured my skull and prodded me with thick pink fingers and made careful notes. There was a war coming, they kept saying, and we had to be prepared.
Because of aliens.

The Story They Wouldn't Publish (Thanks, Lavie!)

I write books. My latest is a YA science fiction novel called Homeland (it's the sequel to Little Brother). More books: Rapture of the Nerds (a novel, with Charlie Stross); With a Little Help (short stories); and The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow (novella and nonfic). I speak all over the place and I tweet and tumble, too.

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Anonymous

Reminds me of (award winning SF author etc etc) John Kessel’s examination of Ender’s Game:

http://www4.ncsu.edu/~tenshi/Killer_000.htm

EG really is awful. Really it is. I know the space combat is cool, and geeks all twig onto stories about ubermensch kids being oh so bullied and misunderstood, but it’s awful. And a little bit evil.
shadowfirebird

The man has serious imagination. But he’s committed a primary sin of storytelling: “Don’t tell, show.”

We have a short short in which a character tells us about his world. What would really make it worth reading is if were were shown it, instead.

My 10p, anyway.
- Anonymous
  
  Thiz ‘show, don’t tell’ thing – it’s not an immutable law of storytelling and indeed I think a lot of writers, starting out, get hamstrung by trying to show everything. Nobody complains about Dickens telling us it was the best of times and the worst of times.
  
  The trick is to know when to show and when to tell.
Anonymous

Weird. I’ve been reading sci fi for nearly 30 years, and I didn’t get any of the references, except I know the Ender thing is popular with slashdot people.

Guess I didn’t miss much!
vette

Even though he decided to self publish, he should have had someone edit his story before publishing it. The idea is good, the way he presents this idea isn’t.
Kimmo

I reckon it went alright…

Should prolly be in comic form though
paul

I feel these postulates are a little unfair to E.E. Smith, who had most of them long before the modern authors. And the pornographic descriptions of people being killed in war too.
JoshuaZ

Eh, it started off well and then got very heavy handed very quickly.
Anonymous

Some of the comments on the Tidhar story remind me of Mailer writing that objecting to William Burrough’s language was like criticising the clothing choice of the man who came to tell you that your house was on fire.
nr

This is a neat idea, but there’s no plot. I’m not convinced it even qualifies as a story. It’s more of a setting + a POV rant.

Lavie posted it as “The story they wouldn’t publish”. Sounds exciting, right? Then you read his comments and find out he sent it to exactly 2 markets, and rejected the editor’s comments from the second one. Oh.
- Cassandra
  
  Then you read his comments and find out he sent it to exactly 2 markets, and rejected the editor’s comments from the second one. Oh.
  
  I think there’s a time and place for rejecting an editor’s comments and publishing a fictional work yourself because you know it’s good. And I thought the “buggery” conflation was a little spark of genius, actually.
  
  But as far as I can tell this is basically original character fanfic set in a pre-existing universe, and a universe with a very litigious and homophobic and rich creator at that.
  
  The title, IMO, is the most dramatic thing about this story, because it makes you read the rest of the story looking for the answer to the question, “why didn’t they publish this?” And then you finish it, and start to think, “well…maybe this is why,” not, “my God, those editors were fools!”
Anonymous

I think “Ender’s Game” leads to exactly these kinds of questions — which is kind of a downer because you spend that whole book rooting for the underdog and then it turns out to be a setup for genocide.

But “Ender’s Shadow” does a better job of describing the society that could/would do this kind of thing in story terms.
Mike Allen

I’m amused people keep calling this piece “fanfic.” Does no one remember words like “satire” or “parody”?
- Laroquod
  
  No, those ancient words are from the days when it would have been considered unconscionable for a major publisher (Apple) to refuse to publish any ‘ridicule of public figures’. You know, the days when copyright didn’t rule people’s conception of the function of art, the days when you could watch an artist riff off and build on something another artist did, without the sneering words ‘derivative work’ ever occurring to either artist.
  
  Those days are long gone.
- Avram / Moderator
  
  Are those exclusive categories?
  - Anonymous
    
    I never said they were — though certainly the law views them differently in some instances.
    
    I suppose if you consider “Bored of the Rings” to be a fanfic of “Lord of the Rings” then you could call Lavie’s story a fanfic of “Ender’s Game.” But I personally wouldn’t use that term for either.
Nadreck

Well, by using outdated, politically-incorrect phrases like “aliens” it’s no wonder it didn’t see print. They prefer the term “Space-Americans”.
Anonymous

Somewhat interesting idea, hamfistedly realized – I’d expect more from Cory, in general! But perhaps it’s a line of thought worth exploring by people doing a more thorough job and not just over lunch. Or perhaps, sometimes a story is just a story.
Bruce Arthurs

Tidhar sent the story to a whole TWO markets before giving up?

Oh, my fainting heart. Try a story that’s had 45 rejections, with about half those rejections including an editor’s note along the lines of “This is a good story. I don’t want to publish it.”
justawriter

Well, I wouldn’t publish it because it isn’t very good. At best, I agree with nr. It is a mildly promising scene from a story. Otherwise it is an undeveloped rant.
Chaos Engineer

Since Earth is a planet in Outer Space, technically human beings are aliens, too. Instead of getting involved in these petty arguments over who evolved in which biosphere, we should be working together to fight against the Nameless Horrors that Lurk in the Spaces Between.

That said, I thought the story was heavy-handed and incoherent. It’s told much better in Norman Spinrad’s novel “The Iron Dream”.

(The premise is that there’s a parallel Earth where Hitler was a science-fiction writer, and he wrote a book which is basically a heavily-mythologized history of the Nazi party in our own world. The point is that if you ignore the subtext, you’ve got a standard-issue “noble humans vs. filthy mutants” pulp adventure novel, no different from dozens of others that are actually on the shelves.)
wookiedingleberry

Great concept. I’d love to see it expanded to other genres so we can have a handy tool to pick apart the techniques writers use to make us cheer for the slaughter of the ‘bad’ guys.
Ingmar

Well, the references *are* none too subtle, I am afraid.
Anonymous

Whenever I think of enders game and ender’s siblings, I always think of the xkcd strip – http://xkcd.com/635/

Also, I think that while Orson Scott Card’s viewpoint comes through in his work (seriously, pretty heavy Mormon subtext throughout the whole enders game series), I think the whole point of the book – which to me is the last couple of chapters – gets lost. Its not a story about the poor picked on outcast who triumphs and is really a great battle leader, its the story about xenecide and how a person could come to live with themselves after they commit a horrific atrocity at a young age. I also think its about how being an outcast combined with societal and military shaping led to the ability to commit a horrific crime. I think the second book is the most crucial one of the series.
sumoS

Baaaaaaaaaaad. (white man bad)
- Anonymous
  
  long story short: yeah basically.
eeyore

I’m not sure I understand the whole “controversy” here. SF is frequently ( almost always?) a vehicle to explore issues of human interaction that attempts to bypass normal cultural biases.

I get it that understanding the worldviews of the authors can permanently color your perception of their works. It’s the reason that I can no longer stand to read anything by Orson Scott Card, even things I previously enjoyed. But is it really that ground breaking to realize that authors like to use BEM’s as a stand in for whatever they consider to be “other” in society?
Brainspore

Has there EVER been a science fiction story which couldn’t be construed as an allegory for contemporary social issues?
- Anonymous
  
  Of course not, there’s never been one that wasn’t.
  
  Some are just more immediate than others.
Nemo1

I would suggest submitting that first sentence in the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction contest. You may have a winner!
- SamSam
  
  Seconded. My brain just edited that sentence when I first read it, but then I went back and tried to read it carefully.
  
  @dripgrind: you know, I always knew that OSC was homophobic, and I always new the alien race in Ender was called the Buggers, and yet somehow I never put two and two together…
  - Antinous / Moderator
    
    I always new the alien race in Ender was called the Buggers, and yet somehow I never put two and two together…
    
    Oh, honey! Ender (like that isn’t subtext enough) gets bashed in public toilets. Twice! Then he kills off the Buggers. But ultimately, he ends up spending his life traveling the universe with his sister and taking advice from a wise, old queen. Then he dates a woman without a body. Then he marries a woman who demands to join a religious order and be celibate. Nothing to see here, folks. Keep it moving.
    
    If you read the later books, one of the Bean books has a gay scientist. The author stops the book so that the gay scientist can make a completely off-the-wall speech about the sterility of homosexual life.
Rayonic

Everything is an allegory for racism and man is the real monster. I call it the Lavie Tidhar Axiom.
- Moriarty
  
  http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/HumansAreBastards
dw_funk

I have nothing nice to say, other than the fact that Mr. Tidhar has the beginnings of a really excellent Ender’s Game fanfic.
- Anonymous
  
  After reading it, I now can say I think that’s an insult to fanfic.
dripgrind

Not exactly subtle, but then the one David Weber book I’ve read *was* just a thinly-disguised account of colonial warfare, where the superior humans gun down technically backwards aliens on their home planet for no good reason. I don’t know what’s wrong with people who would read that kind of shit for pleasure, but sublimated white supremacism is probably part of it.

And let’s face it, Orson Scott Card is a homophobic toolbag.
- rebdav
  
  homophobic toolbag, I need to remember that one!
- PathogenAntifreeze
  
  Which Weber book/story?
- billstewart
  
  If it was one of Weber’s Honor Harrington books (basically, she’s Horatio Hornblower, in Space!), the colonialists killing the natives are the Bad Guys, and it’s there to show that The Bad Guys are Bad, as well as genre conformance. (If it was one of his other books, I haven’t read them.)
  Aside from other aspects of Ender’s Game, it was rather prescient about the need for good spam filtering and blog comment karma systems, before that had become a problem, but of course it’s much easier to make those work well in Science Fiction than in practice.