The Metal Buggers of ‘Ender’s Game’
The xenobiology of the Enderverse is off-the-walls insane, and I love it.
Since the inception of Ender’s Game in 1985, the sci-fi franchise has spawned an entire universe (literally) of lore: fifteen novels, thirteen short stories, one subpar film adaptation, and two of the most ingenious and awe-inspiring examples of speculative biology I’ve ever come across in either film or literature.
And today, I’m starting where the universe began: the formics.
The “buggers” (as they were first called, rather harshly) were the villains of the first Enderverse novel before quickly becoming a [spoilers] sympathetic ally in Ender’s deep-space adventure saga. And the deeper into the franchise you read, the more amazing this species becomes. Author Orson Scott Card manages to create a completely alien species which, unlike many others in science-fiction, actually feels complete. Their anatomy, behavior, and culture all seem to intertwine organically — but there’s one extremely specific aspect of formic bioengineering that stood out to me as exceptionally captivating. Metallurgy.
I’ll be honest: formic mining is practically a footnote in the series. Still, that’s no reason to treat it lightly. Out of all formic anatomy and behavior, this actually carries the most mind-blowing connections to real-world biological phenomena…which amazingly wasn’t discovered until after the source material was released. Freakin’ fantastic.
That source material is a single, brief passage from Ender In Exile. Released in 2008, Exile is…a prequel to the sequel of Ender’s Game, I suppose? Don’t make me explain this can-of-worms franchise structure. It’s a mess to navigate, but that doesn’t mean the xenobiology can’t be on point.
In the novel, upon finding an abandoned formic outpost, the characters Po and Sel discover a collection of dead bugger-hybrids. Naturally, as we all would in that same situation, they begin theorizing about how the species evolved. Or, rather…
“Not evolved, bred.”
“For what?”
“For mining,” said Po. He rolled the thing over onto its belly. It was very heavy; it took several tries. But now they could see much better what it was that caught the light. The thing’s back was a solid sheet of gold. As smooth as a beetle’s carapace, but so thick with gold that the thing must weigh ten kilos at least.
Twenty-five, maybe thirty centimeters long, thick and stubby. And its entire exoskeleton thinly gilt, with the back heavily armored in gold.
The passage only lasts a page or two, but as a young sci-fi reader this managed to strike a rather unexpected chord. As larvae, these massive insects are implanted into cavities within ore-rich minerals — as they mature, the animals slowly masticate ore from the surrounding rock and develop an exoskeleton of refined metal.
It’s the biological motherlode.
“Organic mining,” said Sel. “The formics bred these things specifically to extract gold.”
“But what for? It’s not like the formics used money. Gold is just a soft metal to them.”
“A useful one. What’s to say they didn’t have bugs just like these, only bred to extract iron, platinum, aluminum, copper, whatever they wanted?”
“So they didn’t need tools to mine.”
“No, Po — these are the tools.
GAH! I love it.
I remember reading this in probably 2009 and thinking how unfathomably alien it sounded. Then I started studying biology. Just because an adaptation seems alien, Mother Nature can still be checking it out from across the room, ready to take it home for the night. Evolution gets freaky.
First an appetizer: the caddisfly. In its natural streambed environment, this aquatic larvae comes pre-programmed to craft a protective cocoon using any pebbles, twigs, or any other debris it’s able to get its tiny little bugger hands on. In the early 1980s, artist Hubert Duprat took this phenomenon in a brilliant new direction — give the caddisfly some treasure.
After just a few days surrounded by metal flakes and precious gems, the caddisfly crafts a completely metal cocoon ready for (in Duprat’s case) display in a fancy museum. But the caddisfly doesn’t seek out metal evolutionarily—but lucky for us, there’s an even better animal to get into the spotlight. Time for the main course.
This is the Scaly-Foot Gastropod.
Deep in the ocean, the scaly-foot gastropod incorporates iron from nearby hydrothermal vents to form a protective shell of iron-sulfides — the only known case of an extant animal incorporating a metallic compound directly into its anatomy.
Most of this iron is sequestered as sclerites (a hardened, scaly organ common to many invertebrates) but the outer layer of the shell also grows black as the snail reaches adulthood and accumulates an outer iron-sulfide coating. The species was first discovered in 2001, but it wasn’t until 2010 that the iron-rich armor was fully studied and officially deemed “…the only metazoan known to employ iron sulfide as a skeletal material,” (Yao et al, Proc Natl Acad Sci USA).
And to flush out the rest of this timeline, I first read about the scaly-foot gastropod last week. Hence my ranting and raving today.
But even if this particular gastropod had never been discovered, or had never evolved to begin with, the framework outlined in Ender in Exile is still worth the praise. The idea of formic metallurgy is an impressive creation; a perfect, precarious blend of unreal biology yet plausible evolutionary mechanisms. This is a juncture that makes alien species seem truly alien, and yet still grounded by the laws and rules of evolution we can actually observe.
But did Orson Scott Card predict this breakthrough? Hardly.
It’s easy as a writer to pinpoint where fiction reaches or exceeds the limits of what’s scientifically possible. And it’s challenging — albeit quite fun — to scour through that fiction and pinpoint the rare, but awe-inspiring, overlaps where the two spheres coincide.
What I’d like to instead encourage, however, is to acknowledge that science fact and science fiction are organic, ever-evolving worlds, often completely independent and yet somehow inexorably linked. Sure, they can exist separately, but appreciating the symbiosis between the two helps add enjoyment and value to both.
When an alien universe is built around a framework of actual biological laws (however loose the correlations may seem) we should not be taken aback when scientific research continues to move in a parallel direction. I don’t give science fiction authors credit for predicting scientific breakthroughs, but I do fully appreciate when fiction and fact seem so wonderfully intertwined that the causality becomes blurry.
Ender’s Game is a perfect example. Beyond the buggers, though, things do start getting harder to justify…
But who knows, maybe I’ll write about the Piggies next. Now we’re getting into some really freaky stuff.
