Peter Wiggin
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In the science fiction story Ender's Game and its sequels, Peter Wiggin is Ender's (or Andrew's) older brother. They and their sister, Valentine, are extremely intelligent and precocious. The three siblings represent ideals; Peter is ruthless and cruel, Valentine is empathic and kind, and in Ender, the traits are balanced.
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[edit] Ender Quartet
[edit] Ender's Game
In Ender's Game, Peter is the ambitious and rather ruthless brother of Ender Wiggin. He is considered too aggressive for Battle School, and resents Ender for the amount of time the latter wore his monitor. He bullies Valentine and Ender, who take it passively.
After Ender leaves for Battle School, in an effort to calm Peter down, his family moves to North Carolina. Valentine concedes to herself that, though he does terrible things (such as torturing squirrels) when he is alone, he no longer bullies people and becomes friendlier to others. At the age of twelve, Peter convinces Valentine to use their parents' network identities (and eventually identities that they have obtained for themselves) to submit to the world writings under the names of Locke (Peter) and Demosthenes (Valentine). Demosthenes acts as a fear-monger, stirring up hostility towards governments in the Second Warsaw Pact, especially Russia; meanwhile, Locke takes a more empathic or political role, calling for communication between the great nations. This is ironic in itself, for the two Wiggins’ personalities are complete opposites of their alter-egos. Slowly at first, each of the two writers gains a following. Playing off each other’s writings, the siblings work to manipulate world interest 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 Peter.
Peter sends his brother Ender away after the five-day League War; Valentine, having spent her entire life with the brother she hated, joins Ender, leaving Peter the only Wiggin child left on Earth. 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. He communicates by ansible and tells Ender what he did on Earth, both good and bad. Based off of these conversations, Ender writes The Hegemon and releases it after Peters death under Ender’s 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. The truth is that Peter and Ender are both equally heroic in the final toll of greatness. The main difference in their greatness is that Peter is honored and Ender is vilified.
[edit] Xenocide
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 a caricature of Ender’s unhappy experiences than of the real Peter Wiggin; he is angry, sadistic and arrogant. Despite 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".
[edit] Children of the Mind
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. At the end, he falls in love with Wang-mu.
[edit] Shadow Quartet
[edit] Shadow of the Hegemon
Beginning with Shadow of the Hegemon, Orson Scott Card begins writing the back story to Peter's rise to power. Although Bean, the main protagonist, despises Peter, 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 and to have a nation’s protection from Achilles. Events during Bean's time in Thailand, the way in which India is conducting it's 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 the Chinese 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. 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 Bchool survivor of Ender Wiggin's jeesh). Peter runs world afffairs with an articulate eye and open mind.
[edit] Shadow Puppets
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.
[edit] Shadow of the Giant
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 raise her five remaining children and later marries her. Together, they have five children. As previously shown in Ender's Game, Peter talks to Ender one last time before his death. This depiction is much more detailed; Peter apologizes to Ender for his behavior, and Ender seems to have forgiven him. He says, "I think I can write about you," and writes Hegemon.
[edit] Future
Some loose ends have not been rectified, however. In Xenocide, it is revealed that the Free People of Earth collapsed soon after Peter's death and was later replaced by the Starways Congress.
| Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game series | |
|---|---|
| International Fleet | Admiral Chamrajnagar | Hyrum Graff | Mazer Rackham |
| Battle School | Petra Arkanian | Bean | Achilles de Flandres | Bonzo Madrid | Ender's Jeesh | Virlomi |
| Ender's family | Ender Wiggin | John Paul Wiggin | Peter Wiggin | Theresa Wiggin | Valentine Wiggin |
| Other | Han Qing-jao | Si Wang-mu | Jane |
| Books | Characters | Concepts | |
