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Wyrms (novel)
Encyclopedia
Wyrms is a science fiction
novel by American writer Orson Scott Card
. The story examines desire, wisdom, and human will. Card describes a version of the tri-partite soul, similar to that articulated by Plato
in The Republic.
in the story is Patience, a fifteen-year-old girl who is the only daughter of the rightful king (the Heptarch). Her father, Peace, willingly lives as a slave
to the usurper King Oruc, serving him as a faithful diplomat
and assassin
. Despite his genuine belief that King Oruc is "the best Heptarch the world could hope for at this time", Peace ensures that Patience learns the skills she will need as future Heptarch through the stern lessons of her tutor Angel. From an early age, Patience is fluent in dozens of languages, trained in diplomatic protocols and assassination techniques, and taught to be guarded and watchful at all times.
When she is thirteen, Patience learns of an ancient prophecy
that - as the seventh seventh seventh daughter of the Starship Captain, the first human to set foot on Imakulata - she is destined to give birth to Kristos, who will bring either eternal salvation or eternal destruction to the world. An entire religion has been constructed around the legends of the Starship Captain and his descendants. Thousands of people, called Vigilants, stand ready to aid Patience in reclaiming the Heptarchy and fulfilling the prophecy at the center of their religion.
Only moments after Peace dies, King Oruc sends an assassin after Patience. She easily dispatches him and leaves the castle, stopping to visit her father's preserved head in Slaves' Hall, where the heads of the wisest people are kept alive by headworms. Since the heads are coerced to speak only the truth, Patience forces her father to divulge his darkest secrets. Peace reveals that since Patience's birth, he had been fighting a powerful compulsion to bring her to Cranwater, home of the geblings. The "Cranning Call," as it was known, drew the world's greatest thinkers and achievers to make a pilgrimage to Cranwater, never to be seen or heard from again. Peace says the source of the Call is the Unwyrm, attempting to summon Patience to his lair.
Outside the castle, Patience feels the Cranning Call and decides she will go to Cranwater to challenge the Unwyrm. Even as the Cranning Call becomes stronger and more urgent, she chooses her own routes towards the city in defiance of the Unwyrm's power. Patience, joined by Angel and a massive river woman named Sken, eventually meets Ruin and Reck, twin brother and sister geblings who are together the king of the geblings. All their lives, Ruin and Reck had been repelled from Cranwater by the Unwyrm, but the Cranning Call surrounding Patience cancels the repulsion and allows them to travel with her. Will, the silent but strong human who had lived as Reck's slave, joins their party.
They stop by a house advertising simply ANSWERS. The owner, a dwelf named Heffiji, gives them a crash course in the strange genetics of Imakulata, in which every native plant or animal derives from a single originating species: a black segmented insect, or wyrm. Heffiji also explains that the scepter Patience had retrieved from her father's shoulder was the mindstone of the gebling king, stolen 300 generations ago by the Heptarch. Surgically implanted, it transfers the memories of the previous owners to the current host while absorbing new memories. Ruin - a skilled surgeon - agrees to insert the crystal into Patience's brain.
Patience spends the next 40 days half-crazy, processing the memories of previous Heptarchs and the alien minds of gebling kings. She relives the moment when the Starship Captain, lured through lust to the surface, mates with the Wyrm in its lair beneath a glacier that would later become Cranwater. The Wyrm gave birth to the geblings, dwelfs and gaunts - and then finally to a giant wyrm-like child called Unwyrm. Finally, Patience understands the Cranning Call is summoning her to mate with the Unwyrm, so that he can impregnate her with Kristos, a superior human race. This improved species would outcompete humans as well as the dwelf, gebling, and gaunt variants produced by the first-generation mating between the Wyrm and the Starship Captain, eventually becoming the dominant form of life on Imakulata.
Even as her lust for Unwyrm grows, Patience knows she must kill him or the world will be doomed. She explains it all to the rest of her companions, and they continue their journey to meet and hopefully kill Unwyrm before he is able to bring his dark plans to fruition. When it is all over Patience hopes to take her place as Heptarch and unite all of the planet's species together in peace.
for producing hard metal
is rare on Imakulata, having been destroyed by the Starship Captain - the first human to set foot on the new world - while his ship was in orbit.
The genetic code of species on Imakulata is malleable, displaying dramatic evolutionary changes in only a few generations. As one character notes, "every creature's genetic molecule, which is the mirror of the will, obeys the slighest command to change."
and near-perfect powers of recollection. Physically, they resemble furry, stunted humans with long, forked, mobile tongues. They are always born as twins. Geblings' brains contain a crystal globe called the mindstone, which stores important memories and thoughts. Children eat their dead parent's mindstones, so that they can absorb their ancestors' most cherished memories.
As one gaunt explains it, "[Our will] drys up like old cake and crumbles away whenever a human or a gebling or even, disgusting as it is, a dwelf desires something of us."
. It looks at, among other things, the desires of the flesh, and how succumbing to them is dangerous.
The story bears some similarities to other books by Orson Scott Card. A Planet Called Treason
also took place on a planet without ore. Patience is a child turned savior, similar to other protagonists in Card's works like Ender Wiggin
, Alvin Maker
and Lanik Mueller. The semi-conscious self-modifying organism native to Imakulata (which becomes, eventually, Unwyrm) resembles the Descolada from Speaker for the Dead
.
Science fiction
Science fiction is a genre of fiction dealing with imaginary but more or less plausible content such as future settings, futuristic science and technology, space travel, aliens, and paranormal abilities...
novel by American writer Orson Scott Card
Orson Scott Card
Orson Scott Card is an American author, critic, public speaker, essayist, columnist, and political activist. He writes in several genres, but is primarily known for his science fiction. His novel Ender's Game and its sequel Speaker for the Dead both won Hugo and Nebula Awards, making Card the...
. The story examines desire, wisdom, and human will. Card describes a version of the tri-partite soul, similar to that articulated by Plato
Plato
Plato , was a Classical Greek philosopher, mathematician, student of Socrates, writer of philosophical dialogues, and founder of the Academy in Athens, the first institution of higher learning in the Western world. Along with his mentor, Socrates, and his student, Aristotle, Plato helped to lay the...
in The Republic.
Plot introduction
The primary protagonistProtagonist
A protagonist is the main character of a literary, theatrical, cinematic, or musical narrative, around whom the events of the narrative's plot revolve and with whom the audience is intended to most identify...
in the story is Patience, a fifteen-year-old girl who is the only daughter of the rightful king (the Heptarch). Her father, Peace, willingly lives as a slave
Slavery
Slavery is a system under which people are treated as property to be bought and sold, and are forced to work. Slaves can be held against their will from the time of their capture, purchase or birth, and deprived of the right to leave, to refuse to work, or to demand compensation...
to the usurper King Oruc, serving him as a faithful diplomat
Diplomat
A diplomat is a person appointed by a state to conduct diplomacy with another state or international organization. The main functions of diplomats revolve around the representation and protection of the interests and nationals of the sending state, as well as the promotion of information and...
and assassin
Assassination
To carry out an assassination is "to murder by a sudden and/or secret attack, often for political reasons." Alternatively, assassination may be defined as "the act of deliberately killing someone, especially a public figure, usually for hire or for political reasons."An assassination may be...
. Despite his genuine belief that King Oruc is "the best Heptarch the world could hope for at this time", Peace ensures that Patience learns the skills she will need as future Heptarch through the stern lessons of her tutor Angel. From an early age, Patience is fluent in dozens of languages, trained in diplomatic protocols and assassination techniques, and taught to be guarded and watchful at all times.
When she is thirteen, Patience learns of an ancient prophecy
Prophecy
Prophecy is a process in which one or more messages that have been communicated to a prophet are then communicated to others. Such messages typically involve divine inspiration, interpretation, or revelation of conditioned events to come as well as testimonies or repeated revelations that the...
that - as the seventh seventh seventh daughter of the Starship Captain, the first human to set foot on Imakulata - she is destined to give birth to Kristos, who will bring either eternal salvation or eternal destruction to the world. An entire religion has been constructed around the legends of the Starship Captain and his descendants. Thousands of people, called Vigilants, stand ready to aid Patience in reclaiming the Heptarchy and fulfilling the prophecy at the center of their religion.
Plot summary
King Oruc, fearing Patience or Peace could be a danger to his reign, keeps them under control by allowing only one of them to leave the castle at a time. However, this delicate hostage situation falls apart when Peace becomes ill. Before he dies, Peace cuts into his shoulder to retrieve a crystal globe hidden under his skin. "The scepter of the Heptarchs," he says. "Never let a gebling know you have it."Only moments after Peace dies, King Oruc sends an assassin after Patience. She easily dispatches him and leaves the castle, stopping to visit her father's preserved head in Slaves' Hall, where the heads of the wisest people are kept alive by headworms. Since the heads are coerced to speak only the truth, Patience forces her father to divulge his darkest secrets. Peace reveals that since Patience's birth, he had been fighting a powerful compulsion to bring her to Cranwater, home of the geblings. The "Cranning Call," as it was known, drew the world's greatest thinkers and achievers to make a pilgrimage to Cranwater, never to be seen or heard from again. Peace says the source of the Call is the Unwyrm, attempting to summon Patience to his lair.
Outside the castle, Patience feels the Cranning Call and decides she will go to Cranwater to challenge the Unwyrm. Even as the Cranning Call becomes stronger and more urgent, she chooses her own routes towards the city in defiance of the Unwyrm's power. Patience, joined by Angel and a massive river woman named Sken, eventually meets Ruin and Reck, twin brother and sister geblings who are together the king of the geblings. All their lives, Ruin and Reck had been repelled from Cranwater by the Unwyrm, but the Cranning Call surrounding Patience cancels the repulsion and allows them to travel with her. Will, the silent but strong human who had lived as Reck's slave, joins their party.
They stop by a house advertising simply ANSWERS. The owner, a dwelf named Heffiji, gives them a crash course in the strange genetics of Imakulata, in which every native plant or animal derives from a single originating species: a black segmented insect, or wyrm. Heffiji also explains that the scepter Patience had retrieved from her father's shoulder was the mindstone of the gebling king, stolen 300 generations ago by the Heptarch. Surgically implanted, it transfers the memories of the previous owners to the current host while absorbing new memories. Ruin - a skilled surgeon - agrees to insert the crystal into Patience's brain.
Patience spends the next 40 days half-crazy, processing the memories of previous Heptarchs and the alien minds of gebling kings. She relives the moment when the Starship Captain, lured through lust to the surface, mates with the Wyrm in its lair beneath a glacier that would later become Cranwater. The Wyrm gave birth to the geblings, dwelfs and gaunts - and then finally to a giant wyrm-like child called Unwyrm. Finally, Patience understands the Cranning Call is summoning her to mate with the Unwyrm, so that he can impregnate her with Kristos, a superior human race. This improved species would outcompete humans as well as the dwelf, gebling, and gaunt variants produced by the first-generation mating between the Wyrm and the Starship Captain, eventually becoming the dominant form of life on Imakulata.
Even as her lust for Unwyrm grows, Patience knows she must kill him or the world will be doomed. She explains it all to the rest of her companions, and they continue their journey to meet and hopefully kill Unwyrm before he is able to bring his dark plans to fruition. When it is all over Patience hopes to take her place as Heptarch and unite all of the planet's species together in peace.
The fictional world of Wyrms
Wyrms is set on Imakulata, a far-future planet that was colonized by humans thousands of years before the book begins. OreOre
An ore is a type of rock that contains minerals with important elements including metals. The ores are extracted through mining; these are then refined to extract the valuable element....
for producing hard metal
Metal
A metal , is an element, compound, or alloy that is a good conductor of both electricity and heat. Metals are usually malleable and shiny, that is they reflect most of incident light...
is rare on Imakulata, having been destroyed by the Starship Captain - the first human to set foot on the new world - while his ship was in orbit.
The genetic code of species on Imakulata is malleable, displaying dramatic evolutionary changes in only a few generations. As one character notes, "every creature's genetic molecule, which is the mirror of the will, obeys the slighest command to change."
Geblings
Called "goblins" by humans, the geblings are an intelligent species who have the ability to communicate with each other telepathicallyTelepathy
Telepathy , is the induction of mental states from one mind to another. The term was coined in 1882 by the classical scholar Fredric W. H. Myers, a founder of the Society for Psychical Research, and has remained more popular than the more-correct expression thought-transference...
and near-perfect powers of recollection. Physically, they resemble furry, stunted humans with long, forked, mobile tongues. They are always born as twins. Geblings' brains contain a crystal globe called the mindstone, which stores important memories and thoughts. Children eat their dead parent's mindstones, so that they can absorb their ancestors' most cherished memories.
Dwelfs
Smaller than the geblings, with half-size heads and tiny brains, dwelfs have an extremely poor short-term memory and the mental capacity of a child.Gaunts
Gaunts resemble lithe, beautiful humans. They have no will of their own. They respond telepathically to the desires of those around them and attempt to satisfy whatever desire is strongest. For that reason they are often employed as prostitutes.As one gaunt explains it, "[Our will] drys up like old cake and crumbles away whenever a human or a gebling or even, disgusting as it is, a dwelf desires something of us."
Comparison to other works
Like many of Card's works, this story is a metaphorMetaphor
A metaphor is a literary figure of speech that uses an image, story or tangible thing to represent a less tangible thing or some intangible quality or idea; e.g., "Her eyes were glistening jewels." Metaphor may also be used for any rhetorical figures of speech that achieve their effects via...
. It looks at, among other things, the desires of the flesh, and how succumbing to them is dangerous.
The story bears some similarities to other books by Orson Scott Card. A Planet Called Treason
A Planet Called Treason
A Planet Called Treason is a science fiction novel by Orson Scott Card. It was originally published by St Martin's Press and Dell Publishing Co. After being heavily revised, the book was republished under the title Treason by St...
also took place on a planet without ore. Patience is a child turned savior, similar to other protagonists in Card's works like Ender Wiggin
Ender Wiggin
Andrew "Ender" Wiggin is a fictional character from Orson Scott Card's science fiction story Ender's Game and its sequels , as well as in the first part of the spin-off series, Ender's Shadow...
, Alvin Maker
The Tales of Alvin Maker
The Tales of Alvin Maker is a series of novels by Orson Scott Card that revolve around the experiences of a young man, Alvin Miller, who discovers he has incredible powers for creating and shaping things around him...
and Lanik Mueller. The semi-conscious self-modifying organism native to Imakulata (which becomes, eventually, Unwyrm) resembles the Descolada from Speaker for the Dead
Speaker for the Dead
Speaker for the Dead is a science fiction novel by Orson Scott Card and an indirect sequel to the novel Ender's Game. This book takes place around the year 5270, some 3,000 years after the events in Ender's Game...
.
See also
- Wyrms (comics)Wyrms (comics)Wyrms is a six-issue comic book mini-series by Orson Scott Card and Jake Black, based on the novel Wyrms by author Orson Scott Card. Publication started in April 2006 by Dabel Brothers Productions and was finished in February 2008 by Marvel Comics....
- List of works by Orson Scott Card
- Orson Scott CardOrson Scott CardOrson Scott Card is an American author, critic, public speaker, essayist, columnist, and political activist. He writes in several genres, but is primarily known for his science fiction. His novel Ender's Game and its sequel Speaker for the Dead both won Hugo and Nebula Awards, making Card the...
External links
- Chapter one, from Card's site