This week I continue the topic Action by deviating slightly from the norm, by examining a science fiction instead of fantasy novel. Last week in Tolkien’s scene, we saw great attention to setup for the fight with Shelob, but not a lot of blow by blow. I wanted to pick a book that did a great job with its blow by blow and with blocking its sequences. With that in mind I picked the battle room from Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card.
I don’t think there are many fans of Ender’s Game who didn’t immediately fall in love with the battle room game. Played essentially in a box with floating obstacles called stars, the game is a mock battle between two teams, played out in zero-g with a goal on opposite ends. Throughout the story, numerous games are played in this room with these variables essentially unchanging, but Card manages to masterfully engage his audience by making each battle unique, challenging Ender in new and interesting ways. The battle I want to talk about in particular is Ender’s first as Dragon Army commander.
Blocking is key to the poignancy of this and other battles. Indeed, it might be the most crucial structural element in all of Ender’s Game. Because all the action sequences occur in zero-g, Card must take extra pains to describe the physics of the situation. If you were to explain a football game for instance, you wouldn’t need to say that the players run on flat ground or that they don’t float away when they jump. The audience inherently knows how physics work on Earth. That is not the case for an audience trying to grasp the physics of a bunch of kids floating in a box with guns. No one has ever experienced such a thing before, and Card describes the phenomenon when Ender steps into battle for the first time. “Abruptly he felt himself reorient, as he had in the shuttle. What had been down was now up, and now sideways. In nullo, there was no reason to stay oriented the way he had been in the corridor…The enemy’s gate [is] down.” (89) This line becomes a mantra for Ender’s army. Movement, direction, and orientation are critical for success in the battle room, and they are areas of expertise in which Ender quickly becomes unmatched.
Dragon Army first faces Rabbit Army in battle. When it begins, Ender stands at the gate to plan his attack. “…he and all his men were only thinking of ways to slip around past the formation, control the stars and the corners of the room, and then break the enemy formation into meaningless chunks that didn’t know what they were doing.” (178) Card blocks out Ender’s first battle beautifully. At no time do we not know each of the five toons’ location, and what actions they take:
“C toon slipped along the wall, coasting with their bent knees facing the enemy…Rabbit Army was able to drive back C toon’s attack, but not until Crazy Tom and his boys had carved them up…” (178) At the same time D toon’s leader suggests an idea to bounce off the north wall. “’Do it,’ Ender said. ‘I’ll take B south to get behind them.’ Then he shouted, ‘A and E slow on the walls!’” (178) The attack is set. C revealed the locations, weakening the numbers, and Dragon Army commences a four-point attack along each wall. “[Ender] slid footward along the star, hooked his feet on the lip, and flipped himself up to the top wall, then rebounded down to E toon’s star. In a moment he was leading them down against the south wall. They rebounded in near perfect unison and came up behind the two stars that Carn Carby’s soldiers were defending. It was like cutting butter with a hot knife.” (179)
Quick and efficient, the battle takes less than two pages. We grasp Ender’s precision in attack yet flexibility, exhibited by granting autonomy to each toon to act within his predetermined battle plan. The beautiful thing about this battle and Ender’s others in the zero-g room is that they mirror the real battles he faces at the end of the book. In this way, Card blocks out not only each battle, but also the entire book. In his first battle game as a commander, Ender wins in a flash of brilliance. As the story progresses at battle school, the games get longer and longer, more and more complex; the teachers throw increasingly numerous and difficult obstacles in Ender’s way to make him fail. But he succeeds every time, devising strategies on the fly. At the end of the book, Ender finds himself commanding real battles, which in turn progressively grow in complexity and length. I said last week that good action comes from setup and execution. By increasing the complexity and changing the rules, Card uses each battle as a setup for the next, slowly introducing new ideas to the audience. Card’s execution of the battle room endears his audience to the game, and it is the reason so many people remember Ender’s Game so fondly.