The Great Chaos came for everyone sooner or later. It would come for the whole universe someday. The endermen’s duty was to help it along any way they could.
Fans of the game Minecraft will recognize the Endermen: the tall, shadowy creatures who destroy at random and relentlessly pursue the human players who do something to piss them off like, say, looking at them. Any humans who manage to make it to eternal night of the Enderman’s home dimension of End will have to avoid angry mobs, travel from island-to-island without falling into the endless Void that surrounds them, and then slay the mighty Ender Dragon in order to open up a portal back to the Overworld.
Catherynne Valente’s latest book Minecraft: The End…is not told from the point of view of player characters. The story centers around two 12-year-old Endermen. Brother and sister Fin and Mo live on a ship outside the city of Telos, scavenging treasure (like gold armor and emeralds. Or clay. Or rocks), and basically making a comfortable life for themselves with their friend Kan, their pet shulker Grumpo, and the occasional visit to to see the Ender Dragon.
Then four teenage humans show up. And everything changes.
I wanted to see if this book would appeal to someone who doesn’t know anything about Minecraft, so I deliberately didn’t look up any information about the game beforehand. Coming into this world as a total newbie (just one demo from a friend’s son, and one Zero Punctuation review about eight years ago), I wasn’t sure if there was enough to this game to write an entire book about the bad guys. I mean, Minecraft, that’s the sandbox game where you just build castles out of blocks, right?
Ha. No. This is a much more complex world than that (as I’m sure the longtime players are shouting at their computer screens right now.) There are so many different player modes to choose from: building, crafting, collecting, adventuring, surviving. There are as many ways to play the game as there are players, which basically means there are an infinite number of stories.
This particular angle feels like a labor of love for Valente. In her interview on the Minecraft website she talks about being given the opportunity to write an official Minecraft story – anything she wanted, about any aspect of the game – and deciding to go with her favorite route: Give a voice to the monsters. Because of course that’s the challenge a storyteller would love. We can already understand why humans want to build, or craft, or hunker down in terror that something’s going to pull blocks out of your castle in the middle of the night and dump you out of bed while you sleep. But faced with an enemy race that seems to exist only to kill, destroy, and cause chaos, well, wouldn’t it be interesting to see why they act like that? What if it turns out that from their point of view it’s the humans that are the monsters. Wouldn’t it be cool to see a world where Chaos is a good thing, and it’s Order that kills and destroys everything it touches?
Mo and Fin act as our eyes into Enderman society, oddly enough by being outside it. The brother-and-sister pair were orphaned when their Hubunits (think mother and father, although with a little more parthenogenesis) were killed when they went to the Overworld to sow chaos. In an interesting wrinkle (which I think may have been created by Valente) Endermen are smarter and more stable when “stacked” with their hubunits and siblings to form an End. Except Mo and Fin, who seem to be stable with just the two of them. So the fact that they’re alone and they’re able to be alone means the rest of Enderman society isn’t really comfortable having them around.
One enderman alone is nothing but the shape anger takes when it wants to walk the world.
Their friend Kan has something of the opposite problem, in that he’d love to be separate from his End forever. He’s an Enderman who plays music (shocking!) who has no interest in war-training or killing humans (shameful!) and who has green eyes instead of purple (freak!). His Hubunits think he’s a failure, but every time he runs away they bring him back because they need him to make the entire family smarter. And needing someone who’s different, who runs away from their disapproval instead of doing the sensible thing – stop being different – just makes them hate him more. The book is aimed at a younger audience, and Mo, Fin, and Kan’s dilemma rings very true to that childhood confusion where you want to be allowed to be the individual who’s not like any other individual in the world, but you also want to be just like everyone else and somehow erase all those parts of yourself that make it so hard for anyone to like you.
There are a lot more concepts that are surprisingly dark (and surprisingly appropriate) for young adult readers to mull over. The twisty nature of dogma (“This is what we believe and this is what we will always believe, but we can decide it means something else when it isn’t actually convenient to follow the rules”), the way people react as a group when they’re scared (“We have a terrifying enemy, and that makes us so scared that we’re going to identify some of our own people as enemies so we’ll have someone easier to triumph over”), and the ways we justify cruelty, or justify letting someone else be cruel to us.
…the meanest people are the ones who are occasionally nice. You can never totally hate them, since they really were so kind to you that one time a million years ago. So they can keep on hurting you while you wait for that one nice day to come around again.
The book gives a lot of nods to things that Minecraft players will understand, but they’re tantalizingly unexplained for everyone else (I want to know what the heck “Suspicious Stew” is), and paints an intricate picture of a game where you can dive in and make, do, learn, and yes kill, anything. But it’s not just a gaming companion, it’s also a compelling story. It’s funny, and epic, and there are so many touches I wasn’t expecting: the lonely and unhappy Kan playing his note block after Fin makes their usual treat of inedible popcorn. The way the inside of everyone’s mind looks different for each person. The story of a zombie horse that hit me right in the heart. Even Mo and Fin’s pet shulker kept making me smile (how the heck did Valente manage to make such an endearing character out of someone who’s entire dialog consists of telling everyone how much he hates them?)
Wake up, I hate you. Someone is approaching the ship. I hate them. Make them leave. It’s time for you to make them leave now. I hate them so much. It’s happening again. Make it stop happening.
And most of that is just in the first third of the book. I can’t even go into detail about what happens after the human teenagers arrive in End; I kept thinking I was done being surprised by how everything we know is a lie, and then it would happen again. The plot keeps becoming more and more complex, twisting in on itself and playing with the very idea of what it means to tell a story or play a game. I’m not at all sure I understand exactly everything that happened at the end, in End, but I think that’s very much the point.
At the end of every adventure, you must ask if it was ever really your adventure at all. Perhaps you were only an obstacle in someone else’s quest.