Peter Wiggin
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
In the science fiction story Ender's Game and its sequels, Peter Wiggin is Ender's (or Andrew's) older brother. He has appeared in the novels Ender's Game, Shadow of the Hegemon, Shadow Puppets, Shadow of the Giant, Xenocide, and Children of the Mind and in an upcoming short story to be published in Intergalactic Medicine Show. Peter exhibits the most growth of any character in the Enderverse. Over the course of the Shadow series he grows from a cruel, ruthless child into a good, dedicated leader of men.
Contents |
[edit] Childhood
In Ender's Game, Peter is the ambitious and rather ruthless brother of Ender Wiggin. He is considered too aggressive for Battle School but this was later refuted in a discussion in Shadow of the Giant. Battle-schoolers were not denied entry on the basis of excessive aggression. Peter was denied entrance because he lacked the fundamental charisma of a leader - people would follow him out of like-minded goals, but never show him the same devotion and love that Ender could command. He bullies Valentine and Ender, who take it passively. Later, as we find on the Shadow series, his bullying Ender came from accumulated resentment, that comes from -basically- two sources: the fact that he was seen as the child who was rejected from Battle School and Ender was the chosen one; and that Ender seemed to love Valentine more than him. Peter actually admits he loved Ender as a baby and felt very angry when Ender would ignore him in favor of his sister.
After Ender leaves for Battle School, in an effort to calm Peter down, his family moves to North Carolina. This does not calm Peter; his ambition is as strong as ever. He is the most ambitious of all of them, and he ends up being as much of a hero as Ender. Peter unites the world under one government and brings utter peace to earth, via methods that are in equal measure cruel, ambitious, and ruthless. He was fully qualified to attend Battle School for his ambition as well as his intellect, but Colonel Graff (head of Battle School) found him to be better suited for working towards the survival of Earth by remaining on Earth. Ironically, his greatest insecurity was due to being shut out of Battle School because he was supposedly too aggressive, which was in fact a ploy of Graff to make him wise.
In contrast, however, as illustrated in an extended version of the story Ender's Stocking (short story) in Orson Scott Card's InterGalactic Medicine Show, Peter does have a heart. Although this act commonly is used against him, accusing him of being mentally unstable and cruel, he dissected squirrels as a child. But he did this to learn from them, and the process was completely painless towards them, considering he had knocked them out beforehand. He did it three times, though he learned all he needed from the first time. The following two were, essentially, Peter learning the fact that he needed power. He needed control. He needed to lead, to have people under him, with their lives in his hands. However, during the third dissection, the squirrel awoke and apparently screamed. Peter couldn't stand it and accidentally nicked the heart of the squirrel due to his shaking. Instead of leaving it out for Valentine to find like he had the others, Peter buried this squirrel. This clearly demonstrates how he was compassionate; he wasn't cruel, but learning. Valentine concedes to herself that, though he does terrible things (such as dissecting squirrels) when he is alone, he no longer bullies people and becomes friendlier to others, even if it is an intelligent, thought-out process in order to get people to follow him.
At the age of twelve, Peter convinces Valentine to use their parents' network identities, and eventually hidden identities that they have obtained for themselves, to submit writings (in the form of blogs) to the world under the names of Locke for Peter and Demosthenes for Valentine. Demosthenes acts as a fear-monger and a demagogue, stirring up hostility towards governments in the Second Warsaw Pact, especially Russia; meanwhile, Locke takes a more empathic and high-minded role, calling for communication between the great nations. The two Wiggins’ personalities are complete opposites of their alter-egos; this is intentional on Peter's part, both to keep Valentine tied to him, and to ensure no one discovers their true identities. Slowly at first, each of the two writers gain a following. Playing off each other’s writings, the siblings work to manipulate world interests for a long time, helping to control world events and opinions, so that when the Buggers are defeated, the resulting League War (caused by the world’s only common enemy ceasing to exist) is quickly resolved by "Locke's proposal".
Peter sends his brother Ender away after the five-day League War; Valentine, having spent her entire life with the brother she feared, joins Ender, leaving Peter as the only Wiggin child on Earth. For this, Peter would later say it was to protect Ender and he might have been right on that point, since the war that started on Earth after the Formic War was especially cruel on the members of Ender's jeesh.
[edit] Rise to power
In Shadow of the Hegemon, although Bean, the main protagonist, despises Peter (mainly an irrational hatred of Peter for not being Ender), he joins him when Achilles de Flandres captures all the members of Ender's jeesh. Bean decodes a message sent by one of the captured kids and provides Peter with it, which Peter reveals to the world through his Locke persona. Later, Sister Carlotta and Bean convince Peter his path to power requires him to expose himself as the writer behind Locke and Demosthenes and to decline the position of Hegemon because of his age. Peter dislikes being told what to do, but recognizes that this is the only action he can take, as it is only a matter of time before Achilles, now pulling the strings in India, takes action to expose or kill him. He uses his influence to put Bean in a military position in Thailand, which he and Bean perceive to be the target of a future attack by Achilles' India.
Meanwhile, Peter does consultation work in Haiti to show his abilities at governing and to have a nation’s protection from Achilles. Events during Bean's time in Thailand, the way in which India is conducting its war, and information from Peter's contacts reveal to Peter and Bean that Achilles' true goals are to create a massive Chinese empire by betraying both India and Thailand. Bean and Peter disagree over the release of this information to the world.
Peter eventually reports the information to the world, just before Bean rescues a group of Battle School Students from India. The reporting of China’s plans precipitates their betrayal of India and Thailand. Both of these countries are so weakened by their war with each other that China manages a nearly bloodless conquest.
This new conquest of China’s frightens much of the rest of the world, and they vote Peter in as Hegemon in order to try and preserve peace, even as China, now ruling over a third of the world’s population, revokes its recognition of the position. At the end of the novel, Bean turns control of his small battle group over to Hegemon Peter. Afterwards, they argue over Peter’s refusal to report on China’s plans sooner. Peter justifies himself by saying that reporting sooner would have done nothing to stop it, as he would not have been believed; and that even if he was, neither India or Thailand had the capacity to resist the Chinese aggression. By revealing the information when he did, he avoided a much bloodier war, and he cemented his reputation for prescience and as a man for peace. Another reason for that, from the point of view of other characters, is that the information being revealed before wouldn't have been as beneficial to Peter getting the office of Hegemon as it was, even if the office was only nominal in practical terms.
Peter sees himself as the only person capable of bringing peace to the warring world. Peter seems to have played his hand perfectly-- he unites humanity under a single government, due to the way that he analyzed the problem as early as Shadow of the Hegemon when he decides to take action against Achilles, and releases the information that Achilles was to betray the world via Russia (and later India) to China, which is soon taken over by Han Tzu (a Battle school survivor of Ender Wiggin's jeesh). Peter runs world affairs with an articulate eye and open mind.
In Shadow Puppets, Peter invites Achilles to work for him, despite the danger this places Peter in. In the previous novel, Peter was the writer who exposed Achilles and forced him to abandon his plans for conquest. Achilles moves to subvert the Hegemony and forces Peter to go up into space. There, Colonel Graff gets suspicions that Achilles will attempt to kill Peter and his parents when they return to Earth. Graff sends a dummy ship that Achilles blows up; in doing this, Achilles all but seals his doom, since no nation will want to openly associate with him. Peter retakes the Hegemony.
Shadow of the Giant comes back to Peter's conquest to unite the world and shows his diplomatic and political maneuvering. He creates the Free People of Earth, a contract by all people who have ratified it. It begins slowly, but quickens when he uses Bean to swiftly defeat armies. At the very end of the novel, only the United States has not joined, but the world as a whole is united and peaceful. Peter helps Bean's wife Petra Arkanian to raise her five remaining children and later marries her. Together, they have five children.
Ender's and Valentine's trip through space, though short for them, lasts 50 years on Earth. By this time, Peter has united the world under the office of Hegemon and is suffering from a failing heart. As first described in Ender's Game, and later, with more detail, in Shadow of the Giant, he communicates by ansible and tells Ender what he did on Earth, both good and bad. Peter apologizes to Ender for his behavior, and Ender seems to have forgiven him. He says, "I think I can write about you." Based on these conversations, Ender writes The Hegemon and releases it after Peter's death under a pseudonym, Speaker for the Dead. This story, a frank account of Peter Wiggin's life, is later published as a single volume with Ender's The Hive Queen, a small novel about the Formics, or buggers, telling the truth behind the tale. In the end, both Peter and Ender have done great things that changed human history forever. The final irony in both of their legacies is that Peter is remembered for being a caring and peaceful leader even though he was cruel and violent as a child while Ender is remembered for being a ruthless warmonger even though he was kind and gentle as a child.
[edit] A new Peter
In Xenocide, during an experimental trip to the “outside,” Ender accidentally splits his aiúa into three parts: himself, Young Valentine, and Young Peter. Young Peter is more like a caricature of Ender’s childhood perception of Peter; he is angry, sadistic and arrogant. In spite of this, Young Peter carries an OCD cure to the world of Path.
Fragments and parts of Peter's rule of Hegemon are also explored in Xenocide. For instance, all of the Hundred Worlds are settled (or had colony ships going to them) by the time of Peter's death, and Peter's organization, the Free People of Earth, is replaced by Starways Congress. At the end of the novel, Young Peter calls Hegemon "that book of lies" for cleaning the blood on his hands, for "as long as I was alive, I wanted blood there".
In Children of the Mind, he travels to many of the Hundred Worlds with Si Wang-Mu, now made possible due to the experimental ship that created him in Xenocide. Both of them are on a mission to persuade as many leaders as possible that the Evacuation Fleet constitutes a second xenocide. Because of him, orders are sent to the Fleet to prevent the use of the Little Doctor. However, Peter himself is forced to appear on the deck to stop the ship’s captain from taking matters into his own hands, which would have resulted in the use of the Little Doctor anyway. The Fleet is averted. During this process, Ender dies, and his aiúa is passed on to Peter, making him a "self" now. At the end, he falls in love with and marries Wang-Mu.
[edit] Future
Some loose ends have not been rectified, however. In Xenocide, it is revealed that the Free People of Earth disappeared soon after Peter's death and was later replaced by the Starways Congress, so it's left unsaid if it actually collapsed because of the leader's (Peter's) death or simply because it mutated to a universal government due to the expansion of the human race and obvious need of a new constitution for the outer worlds.
| Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game series | |
|---|---|
| Battle School | Petra Arkanian · Bean · Han Tzu · Alai · Achilles de Flandres · Ender's jeesh and other Battle School students |
| Ender's family | Ender Wiggin · John Paul Wiggin · Peter Wiggin · Theresa Wiggin · Valentine Wiggin |
| Other | Han Qing-jao · Si Wang-mu · Jane · The Hive Queen · International Fleet personnel |
| Books · Characters · Concepts | |
