Growing up unique

kw: book reviews, science fiction, space opera, child prodigies

Fiction authors frequently write to explore. I first recognized this while reading one of Isaac Asimov's Robot stories, in which stories he explored the boundaries of the Three Laws of Robotics. He had hinted at them in Robbie and first stated them clearly in I, Robot. Years later I realized he was also exploring the boundaries of neurosis. As I learned of his life, including what he wrote in several memoirs, I understood that he was profoundly neurotic and he used his characters—the ever-more-perfect and godlike robots in contrast to the all-too-faulty humans—to work through the ramifications of neurosis in himself.

I have read novels by Orson Scott Card for about thirty years, beginning with Ender's Game. I don't know if I have read all the Ender series books. I did read all of the Homecoming books, and it is more than clear that in those Card is exploring the boundaries of morality and altruism. His character Nafai is pathologically altruistic.

When I read Ender's Game I wasn't ready for it. I was a mere 40-year-old. I took it at face value, as a coming-of-age novel in a space opera setting. Speaker for the Dead and other Ender series books also left me bemused. Now, just this year, more than thirty years later, Children of the Fleet adds another layer to the Ender saga, and I think I am beginning to understand.

The children in this novel, including the protagonist, Dabeet Ochoa, resemble those in earlier books in that they think rather consistently at an adult level, and perform certain adult tasks, though with some limitations because they are, after all, mostly pre-teens. None has yet hit the pubertal growth spurt, so they wear child-sized space suits, for example.

I was forcibly struck in this novel (and in retrospect, in Ender's Game) that Ender and Dabeet are victims of profound child abuse. Each is massively distorted from what he might have been in a more usual environment. Ender completed his mission, one supplied by others without his knowledge, by becoming the "Xenocide", the one responsible for annihilating the Formics, an insectile alien species. Dabeet's mission is only partly concealed, and he initially conceals it from others. In carrying it out, he brings life, not death (except indirectly, to a couple of all-too-human evildoers), and he prevents massive death.

Rather than dig further into the novel, I want to riff on the meaning of intelligence. We all think we know what intelligence is, but if asked to describe it, none can do so. For a few generations, tests of IQ (Intelligence Quotient) were thought to measure it, but they really tend to measure a small collection of cognitive and memory feats that are more machinelike than I care for. I wonder how the supercomputer Watson would fare on a Stanford-Binet test.

Further, the meaning of IQ has changed over the years. Originally, an IQ test was used with children ten years old and under, to compare their performance with sixteen-year-olds. I don't know how the test was normed (normalized), but apparently youngsters of ages between six and sixteen were tested to establish the "normal" performance of each year cohort. Then higher or lower performance could be compared with these norms to establish an IQ score: 100 for "normal for one's age". Based on the scatter displayed within each cohort, a Gaussian distribution was fitted and a standard deviation of 16 (later 15) was applied. So, when I was given an IQ test in third grade, at age 7, and my IQ score was 170, that supposedly meant that, in the memory and cognitive skills that were measured, I was performing at the level of a 12-year-old (11.9 to be precise). All I knew at the time was that, having begun to learn to read on my own when I began first grade as a 5-year-old (I turned 6 three months later), as a third grader I was indeed reading books usually seen in the book bags of seventh graders.

But how do you measure the IQ of an adult? When I was 20 did I have the "smarts" of a 34-year-old? Does such a question even have meaning? I think not. Others who considered cognitive psychology their calling thought about this quite deeply, and re-normed the test, making the standard deviation (σ) meaningful as a measure of scarcity. Thus, in any Gaussian distribution, the p statistic for ±2σ is 0.9545, or about 21/22. With σ = 15 and a mean of 100, the range ±2σ is from 70 to 130. So if you have a "normal" group of 44 people, one is likely to have an IQ of 70 or less, and one is likely to have an IQ of 130 or more.

I can tell you from experience, though, that IQ has little relation to street smarts. As an adult, my IQ has settled to 160, or 4σ above "average", a level achieved by one person in about 31,000. As a pre-teen and early teen, I finally realized I was not very likable. I began to work toward fixing that. I felt that if I did not have good social reactions automatically, as my age-mates did, I would have to observe, learn, and calculate those reactions. I did so. I used to look at that 170-to-160 shift as "giving up 10 IQ points for a better SQ" (Sociability Quotient). Thus, this paragraph found near the end of Children of the Fleet hit me with special resonance:

Maybe making and keeping friends will always require me to think through the steps of it … Maybe it will never be natural for me, never reflexive, never easy. So be it. I can't live without it, can't accomplish anything without it, so I will become adequate at forcing myself, against my inclinations, to be a friend to my friends. If I'm good at it, they'll never guess the effort that it requires.

Dabeet's musings match mine at just about the same age. Now I'll tell you what happened after I was 40. No details, just this: I had occasion to learn, through a personality test, that my "calculated person" was pretty good; but also, because a part of the test elicited reactions that had to be too fast for my calculations, I learned that a "natural" personality was truly there, and it was also pretty good! I came away with a proverb, "You cannot build a tree." I had found out, after a few decades of tree construction and maintenance, that a perfectly adequate tree had grown up beneath my notice and could be relied upon to be a "me" that didn't need all the effort. I am happier and calmer as a result.

If Dabeet is a reflection of Card's view of himself, as I suspect, maybe he is in the midst of learning, or will soon learn, the same thing. Let's see where the next of Card's novels takes us, and him.