Xenocide is the Most 'Mormon' Thing I Ever Read
A few thoughts on the Orson Scott Card novel.
For an earlier post in the “religious analysis of popular sci-fi/fantasy works” genre, read my post below:
I read Ender’s Game and Speaker for the Dead years ago as a teenager. I watched the Ender’s Game movie several years late after hearing bad things about it, but while on paternity leave up early with the baby while my wife slept in I had nothing better to do than watch a bunch of movies my wife wouldn’t care to watch. It was better than I expected, actually. Of course it’s not quite the book, but it was an enjoyable adaptation for me. Yes, you miss out on everyone’s favorite chapter in the book where Valentine and Peter take over the world by making pseudonymous blogposts—as a pseudonymous blogger of course I too think this is the best chapter—but let’s face it, while that sets up the world and the sequels a bit more it’s really irrelevant to the story of Ender in Ender’s Game.
But forgetting Ender’s Game, which is an enjoyable sci-fi romp suitable (if violent) for children, Speaker for the Dead is a much more adult work and much more introspective. It’s not about the action of killing aliens, it’s about Ender preparing to hold a memorial service for an abusive husband and father. Hardly something of which they’d make a big-budget motion picture.
Xenocide is the third entry in the series. It’s about xenocide, since there are now (maybe) 4 nonhuman intelligent species in the story and every single one of them is at risk of extinction as the plot progresses. Obviously, from this point on there will be spoilers. Not that I’m going to do a plot summary, you can ask Wikipedia or Claude or anyone for that.
Xenocide is a good science fiction novel, for what it’s worth. It’s got good characters and interesting developments between them and, like most good science fiction novels, it doesn’t sacrifice the “novel” part on the altar of the “science fiction” part. A lot of what happens is really just family drama and petty politics—sure, it’s drama about genetic engineering and whatnot, but the content is really irrelevant from the psychological perspective.
The core science fiction-y concept introduced in this novel is the philote. This is an invented term taking its name from the Greek; the root is basically philia or affection. These are the subatomic particles that have affection for each other, you see, and their interactions give rise to larger structures, quarks, neutrons, atoms, molecules, living things, planets, stars, galaxies, and so on.
They’re also the source of free will, evidently. Not all philotes are equally powerful, the stronger ones basically corral the weaker ones, and one strong philote is basically the soul of a living being and it shepherds all the weaker philotes that make up the parts of a body. The big thing about philotes is the way the rays connecting philotes twine together to create larger structures, and in living beings acts of will and volition can entwine their philotic rays together into friendships, families, etc. And these philotic rays are also what connect distant human colonies by enabling FTL instantaneous data transmission, like quantum entanglement if quantum entanglement could be used for transmitting information.
It’s discovered by the protagonists in the course of the book that philotes come from a timeless, placeless dimension they call Outside. A new philote comes from Outside to possess a particular “pattern” of matter in our world—this is how new life is created, it happens every time a baby is born. Philotes, as the fundamental building block of matter, are indestructible and eternal. They might pass back and forth between Inside and Outside, but they always exist.
Now, Orson Scott Card is very much a Latter-day Saint. He’s got a notable essay on why he thinks the Book of Mormon is real. He doesn’t seem to be a Brandon Sanderson, who while ‘Mormon’ holds liberal rather than mainline positions on social issues.
Not surprising, then, that all of the above is basically a science-fiction exploration of what Joseph Smith’s doctrines on matter and spirit are in the LDS faith.
Man was also in the beginning with God. Intelligence, or the light of truth, was not created or made, neither indeed can be. (Doctrine and Covenants 93:29)
There is no such thing as immaterial matter. All spirit is matter, but it is more fine or pure, and can only be discerned by purer eyes; We cannot see it; but when our bodies are purified we shall see that it is all matter. (Doctrine and Covenants 131:7-8)
Hence we infer that God had materials to organize the world out of chaos—chaotic matter, which is element, and in which dwells all the glory. Element had an existence from the time He had. The pure principles of element are principles which can never be destroyed; they may be organized and re-organized, but not destroyed. They had no beginning and can have no end. (King Follett Sermon)
These passages and others like them paint the ‘Mormon’ cosmological picture: souls are material things that always existed in some form as possessing the glorious divine spark of consciousness. God is a more developed being with all knowledge and immortality but not ontologically distinct from man, and He created man not out of nothing but out of these proto-conscious elements.
This is, of course, just what Card wrote in Xenocide. There’s the added bit in Card that the primal matter has special spiritual connections between elements that endures even at a distance, but the core conceit is all the same.
Card also writes some ‘Mormon’ ideas very explicitly into the book. There’s a multi-page train of thought on one character’s part that if there are gods (and remember, ‘Mormonism’, so plurality of gods is accepted) they could logically have no other end than that of helping inferior beings ascend to their own level. “God and Christ want us to become like them” is an insight straight out of Latter-day Saint Sunday School, and Xenocide reproduces the same.
It’s not heavy-handed, I don’t think. Ender’s Game is much less theologically or philosophically advanced as a novel and it is more direct in noting that one of Ender’s parents is a lapsed ‘Mormon’ while the other was Catholic. There’s no name-dropping in this book, but much more dogma-dropping. But if you didn’t already know all this was Joseph Smith’s theology you probably wouldn’t suspect it just from reading the novel. It’s artistically justified, in other words; ‘Mormonism’ is somehow just particularly fertile soil for sci-fi and fantasy thought. And if what you know works, write what you know.
I’ll read Children of the Mind when the library gives it to me, maybe I’ll write about that too if it’s noteworthy.
I never knew that about Mormonism but it makes sense. It sort of fits right between Gnosticism and Scientology both of which are very compelling fiction.