Current music:

Absolutely soulless new-age crap by Enya.

Personal update and Ender "trilogy" reflections
It's been a while since my online self has gone and written up one of my usual stream-of-consciousness blunderpieces about my recent experiences, so, being sick for the second week in a row and ejecting kilograms of phlegm onto my keyboard every half-hour, I figured today was a great day to do little-to-no work and feel better by talking about myself.

I've been very busy in the last while, for starters.

For those not 'in the know,' ie. who don't live with me or interact with me on a daily basis, my startup-starting life has taken a turn for the repetitive, as I've gone and co-founded a new shop; EQL Data. Rather, the shop is the same, a room in my house, but the premise is new. Rather than my usual system of yelling loudly about 'the system,' why it sucks, and attempting to disrupt people's habits and way of life, the premise here is to improve and simplify something that they grapple with yet find necessary due to its significant benefits; that mysterious 'something' being Microsoft Access. That's right, that Access, the one that mysteriously shows up in your copy of Office, and that you've either used on a daily basis for the last several years of your life, or have never touched because it's confusing and you like Excel better.

For those latter people, consider Access as Excel's bigger brother, when a single spreadsheet with a number of rows isn't enough, you can switch to multiple spreadsheets all linked to each other. The neat thing about Access is, unlike all of its competing products, you can use it without ever knowing how to program. The significantly less-neat thing is that Access has a lot of downsides, mostly completely unrelated to lack of programming, but annoying to the user nonetheless. Do you like to lose your data if multiple users are poking at your database? Access has that feature covered.

For years now, Microsoft and other entities have been 'solving' this and other shortcomings of Access by suggesting migration paths and tools to move you to other technologies, and then conveniently letting you field the price for this migration. It's expensive, it's time consuming, and it suddenly has people finding that their once-simple database operations need programming expertise.

No longer. EQL Data. Check it out.

---

That mostly summarizes the abstract of what I'm doing. Specifically, at least lately, my part in this fine adventure has been spreading the good word, educating my common man, and implementing a translator and generator for web-viewing Access queries. Check it out: one of the features EQL Data wants to provide is the ability to display your Access database on the web. Throw it into EQL and suddenly it's all there for you to view; want to show inventory information, particular tables, customer data, columns, or query results to friends, business connections, or customers? No problem! One button click and it's all there.

The tricky part is that Access queries are basically formatted as a configuration file with a whole bunch of parameters, and there doesn't exist a parser into some sane format for this, nor a translator from said format to the back-end we've concocted to store data. My work has gone pretty well... though it's taking significantly longer than I expected, I can translate the vast majority of Access query objects I've encountered now. In the process, I've learned some things about tokenizing and parsing, and designed a whole wackload of new datastructures for testing and storing intermediate data. It's been fun. Only a few more things to go.

I've also met with a lot of people to spread the love. Want to hear more? That's what coffee meetups are for my friends.

---

That part said, it isn't why I decided to make this entry. The reason I decided to write this is because I just finished reading the 'original' Ender Series (read; "Ender's Game", "Speaker for the Dead", and "Xenocide"), again, and have drawn new conclusions from my last reading years ago. Since my dear friends skonakov and Katya bought me the entirety of the series (including new books I hadn't even heard of) for my last birthday, I feel compelled to re-read the whole series as a token of my appreciation. That included re-reading the books I had read long ago and had come to forget.

Now, why is this entry important. Well, some years back, I remember having an argument with either Mr. Samir Patel or icedrake, I can't remember who, where I argued that Xenocide is a better book than Ender's Game. I completely disagree with my claim, though I still agree with the arguments I presented, ie. that Xenocide was a far more expansive imagination at work, a more concrete tying together of science-fiction ideas, and generally a more difficult, philosophical novel to grasp.

The problem is that I don't necessarily care about that anymore.

When I made this argument, I must have been 19, maybe 20. Maybe I was even 18... second-year sounds about right. Regardless, I was very young, impetuous, egotistical, and I was still sponging up tons of new ideas to juggle around my brain. I was still forming my ideas of what relationships between humans mean and how they function, and more importantly, I didn't really care, I was entering a stage of life where all relationships seemed transient, and every day that I woke up I felt that my past self was inconsistent with my beliefs and values.

As I write today's entry, I'm 25. Sure, in the scale of human experience, I've just barely entered real adulthood, I've only recently joined the quarter-century club, and I've only just left the coveted 18-24 statistical age group. That said, a lot of things change between 18 to 25. For one, you change far more gradually as a person, every morning that you wake up is not a wild shift of being and personality; it's a slow evolution where any new information you receive only minutely impacts your core tenets. You don't grow drastically, you're not driven purely by hormones, you understand more about long-term goals and how to strive to gradually achieve them. Your life is less a set of jerky motions of a steering wheel to attempt to keep the vehicle going straight instantaneously, it's more looking to the horizon and gently orienting the wheel to point towards it, eventually.

My perspective on relationships has been molded by many more years of varying interactions, by both applied and theoretical understanding of humans, by interactions at soccer games, Starbucks, in markets, on trains, in the emergency aisle on an airplane, sharing laughs and beers, and between the pages of works by Erich Fromm, Robert M. Pirsig, and many others.

My perspective, therefore, on the Ender series, has shifted significantly. The punchline? I think "Speaker for the Dead" was the best book of the series. Here's why, in a lengthy exposition.

"Ender's Game" was a monumental work. Not only for my developing science-fiction mind when I read it, but in general. It centred around a protagonist who, unlike the brazen, teenage heroes present in other works, those striving for personal success at the cost of their own stability, willing to uproot themselves and fight for a goal throughout the galaxy, was merely a child in his formative stages, shaped by others and ultimately, used by them for a goal he never would have reached for himself. Its character development was unique and special, one might wonder if Shinji Ikari of Neon Genesis Evangelion was at all influenced by Ender, the child in question. Like books written by the Strugatsky brothers, the science-fiction components, while brilliant in their own right, served as a backdrop for the wonderful human drama which played out in the book. "Ender's Game" received critical acclaim. It built whole communities of people who could truly identify with the protagonist and the essence of his struggles, who absorbed the book and made it their own. It prompted science-fiction to be better.

What made Ender's Game so amazing to me was that it was merely a precursor, a set-up to Speaker for the Dead. I should be clear; even the first time I read the series, I thought so, I was shocked that something so compelling as Ender's Game could be merely an introduction, a precursor for a work so involved that it needed an entire novel as an introduction. The first time I read Speaker, I thought it was 'good.' It was more conservative, more reserved in its science fiction, and that's why I didn't readily latch on to it, that's why, as an 18-year-old looking for punch and catharsis, it didn't mesh and didn't register in my mind. All these reasons are also exactly why Xenocide did impress me.

But, that was years ago, and the parties with whom I had my verbal spar already know what I said, or have long forgotten.

The point is, this time, as I read Speaker, I was enthralled by how real every single sentence of the book felt, and how it flowed so naturally and subtly that only when you put down the book for another coffee did you, the reader, realize that the book talked about a distant human colony on a planet far out of our solar system, surrounded by a deadly mutating virus and a culture of extraterrestials, in a universe set several thousand years past our own.

The characters were so beautifully done, so human. As I read in an excerpt of Orson Scott Card's after the fact, he himself realizes exactly this. He realized, through some stroke of genius, that what makes characters be truly real is not what they ponder in their internal monologues, it's how they act in relation to others. Speaker centred on several characters; Libo, Pipo, Novinha, Ender, Miro, Ela, Ouanda, Olhaldo, and Grego. And one other boy, whose name I can't immediately recall. I blame Enya, whose music has insidiously creeped onto my playlist. The point is, we've got nine characters here. Let's eliminate the first two, because what I'm about to say concerns primarily the last seven - what Card found is that a character is defined in the mind of the reader by how they bounce off of their relations when surrounded by others. For example, say we have characters A and B. We have only one relationship to describe, with two perspectives; the relationship between A and B, from each of their viewpoints. If we have three characters, A, B, and C, we suddenly get up to four relationships- A & B, B & C, A & C, and all three of them together. As you can see, the number of relations and viewpoints increases exponetially with the number of characters. Seven characters (as those seven were caught interacting frequently) mean a lot of potential relationships and viewpoints to consider, yet, Card did this without hesitation, without trepidation, he wrote this absolutely fantastic novel where the relationships were characters were so fluid that I completely forgot I was reading a work of fiction. That my friends, that is writing genius. That is the level of writing proficiency I would love to achieve one day. To have the interactions between the characters so amazingly natural that the background setting, the flight of fantasy which the author is allowing me to experience, seems like a walk in the park rather than interstellar travel to other planets.

Here, however, is where the fourth wall is broken - Xenocide. While I accept the author's claim that he never really intended to write a trilogy, and that his agent basically asked him to write a third book because she had already sold the "Ender trilogy," it in no way excuses what I consider the absolutely sub-par writing that I was presented with in Xenocide. Let me explain; compared to many other works I've read, the work was brilliant. Visionary. Calculated. Well-argued, fundamentally supported. By all rights, it was genius. However, when it came to the pawns playing out their roles in the Universal framework Xenocide provides, I found that, more often than not, those pawns seemed like caricatures of their former selves in Speaker for the Dead, undeveloped manakins juggled by the hands of a skillful author. Key; I no longer saw them as human beings depicted by the author, I saw them as actors in a play scripted by the author. Perhaps it was the lack of experience, Orson Scott Card is only 57 himself, yet he was writing about adults in their sixties, people who have an outlook and reflection on life which he himself did not yet possess. Truthfully, though, I think even this is an excuse, the characters who were children in Speaker for the Dead are in their twenties and thirties here, and they are just as poorly drawn out as the adults. They are no longer real, their interactions don't seem to match their personalities half of the time, and I find that their descriptions are rushed, unbelievable, and inconsistent with their ages and even internally inconsistent with their prior descriptions. Bricklayers turn out to be philosophical geniuses from tender young ages, siblings who have grown up with each other for 20 years turn out as vile and embittered with each other as young teenage siblings. There is no growth, they seem confined to their childlike characters in perpetuity. Ender himself seems to have experienced stagnation; he seems much the same at 60 as he did at 20, except that less of the book focuses on him, and so glimpses of him almost seem annoying, distracting, as while reading them I remembered the brilliance of Speaker, and was constantly reminded that I am reading a book which is failing to capture the essence of its predecessor. Jane, an entity with so much experience in her memory that a mere 30-40 years could hardly change its personality, is, by contrast, so vastly different from her description in Speaker that I could barely tolerate her portrayal.

I don't know how I failed to see these things the first time I read this trilogy, but the fact that I did fills me with a certain glee and a brooding understanding that, if I ever needed proof that age does indeed change a person's outlook and viewpoints, this is it.

To whomever I made arguments defending Xenocide; I humbly concede the point. You were right. Ender's Game is a better book. If, however, you wish to attempt to convince me that Ender's Game is a better book than Speaker... well. We've got a new argument on our hands :)