Science fiction at its best

I am Orson Scott Card's newest fan. I don't know why it took me so long to find these amazing novels; but I am glad I did. I just finished the second novel in the Ender Wiggins saga called Speaker for the Dead.

But if you are going to read Card, start with the first: Ender's Game. I could not believe what an interesting and compelling novel this was. Sci-fi is panned by most readers of "serious fiction" because it tends to be scenario driven, rather than character driven. But truly great sci fi does both. It puts compelling characters into scenarios that force them to act in especially revelatory ways. Good sci fi reveals something about how what it means to be human is always going to be pressed against, depending upon the circumstance. And in Ender's Game, the circumstance is the conviction that the world is about to come to an end at the hand of the "buggers" an alien life form that looks like insects but are a lot more advanced than humans. I will say this: if this one line is all that I had heard about the novel, I would have thought that there was no way I could like it. It sounds about as trite as it comes. But then you open to the first page and you realize what a good writer can do with that scenario. He can put a child prodigy into it, a child who is the hope of his race, a child who is as deep emotionally as he is intellectually. Suddenly there's a story--and this one even has a great twist at the end. Read it. It's great.

Personhood

I am very interested in theological accounts of personhood that force us to rethink our individualistic orientation. That is why I picked up McFadyen's book. With the doctrine of the trinity as a foundation, he makes the case for the person as socially constituted, but not determined. “Human being is a relational structure (ontological aspect), and we are defined by the form our relationships, and thereby our individualities, take (ethical aspect)” (40). There is no stable essence to the human person; the person is known in relationship.
In general, I subscribe to this point of view, but McFadyen’s argument showed me some new problems. First, his identifying the person with communication in social relationships (which he defines as information processing of some sort), sounds too much like what N. Katherine Hayles reminds us is the definition of the posthuman—as that which is defined by information patterns. This way of thinking about the person is inherently disembodied, because the body does not really matter, except as it communicates more information. McFadyen would disagree with this, and spends several pages talking about the body, but his argumentation is not overly convincing. He makes a lot of assertions, not solid arguments. Second, if you define a person by communication within relationships, as a gift of society, then what of people who cannot communicate because of disability? This argument may not hold up, because it doesn’t mean that others are not related to the disabled person in a way that forms each of them. “Persons are a manifestation of their relations, formed through though not simply reducible to them” (40). Third, I have significant problems with the following statement: “The lone Adam is not truly human: life becomes human only when he greets and accepts Eve. Humanity is therefore equated with neither lone individuality nor masculinity. Adam and Eve become human only in relation to each other. Humanity is fully in the image of God only where it is a lived dialogical encounter” (32). Obviously, this argumentation borrows from Barth, but he still needs to prove this statement. Adam is not truly human? Just because God said it was not good for Adam to be alone? (as he goes on to suggest). This argument is not strong enough for me, but I don’t quite know how to keep the strong thesis of the relatedness of persons and not go down that path. I think we need to.