Xenocide
On Lusitania, Ender finds a world where humans and pequeninos and the Hive Queen could all live together. However, Lusitania also harbors the descolada, a virus that kills all humans it infects, but which the pequeninos require in order to become adults. The Starways Congress so fears the effects of the descolada, should it escape from Lusitania, that they have ordered the destruction of the entire planet, and all who live there. With the Fleet on its way, a second xenocide seems inevitable.
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2013–2019years
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What Hacker News says
- For what changed my outlook on life? Xenocide - Orson Scott Card. The 3rd book in the Ender's Game saga, it spend a lot of time exploring how people with fundamentally different perceptions and interpretations of the world around them led them to conduct themselves in ways that conflicted with each other, but were virtuous and the right thing to do according to them.
Was a big help in helping me understand how empathy can help to resolve issues and how fundamentally different we all can think - be it medieval humans or alien beings.
- Surely nothing can top the latter half of Orson Scott Card's Xenocide.
- As a religious person reading Orson Scott Card's Xenocide (Part of the Enders game universe, but not at all like Enders Game) really impacted me.
In it you have a father who is a religious leader and transitions out of the religion to a more atheistic view and his daughter who becomes holds true to their faith in spite of the evidence and her father.
I saw a lot of myself in that girl and it really brought to light the folly of religion when you step outside of the religious framework. I'm still religious but the book made me think.
- Sounds like an Orson Scott Card plot from Xenocide i.e. Descolada.
- You're right, 'tech literacy' isn't really the right words, more like 'cultural literacy' where the correct "frame of reference" in this case is MMORPG banter. Or what the courts might refer to as 'community standards'.
It's been a while since my one and only anthropology course, but the basic idea is actions and language can only be understood through a common perceptual framework between the speaker and the listener. Actions which are otherwise benign, or even loving, can seem violent or insane when the observer lacks the proper 'frame'.
One great example of this, if you're a fan of Orson Scott Card, is the humans struggling to understand the Pequeninos in Xenocide, the 3rd book in the Ender's Game series.
This is why, when I hear the statement was made in the context of a MMORPG, it immediately alters my opinion on whether Justin had mens rea (criminal intent) when he wrote the post. A hundred years ago, if communities didn't exist where this type of dialog was typical, the same words actually take on a different meaning -- one that might actually indicate a need for intervention!
