47 pages • 1 hour read
Invitation To The Game
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Chapters 9-10Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 9 Summary: “June 2155. Out of the Egg”
At first, Lisse’s group members don’t accept that they have traveled to a different planet. Then, they remember that the most recent time they went to sleep in the Barton Oaks station, they woke up in a plastic hull that resembled an egg. They go back to where they emerged from the container and find it there, decaying. They notice that the container has parachutes attached to it, indicating they were dropped from space. Rich suggests that the reason they don’t remember being in the egg is because they were hypnotized to forget it.
Trent and Lisse are angry when they realize they are stuck on this new planet for good. Lisse reflects on the past few weeks and notices all the clues they missed: all the animal and plant species are unfamiliar, and they have not seen the moon in the sky. The teens realize they have not bathed or washed in several weeks, so they decide to clean themselves in the river. After washing up, Lisse begins to see the positive side of their situation: There is an entire world for them to explore.
The teens decide they will treat this planet better than humans have treated Earth. They believe The Government has chosen them to start a new society due to their skills, since each of them is an expert in a discipline. They guess that The Government is sending people to other planets as a solution to overpopulation, and they wonder if other unemployed people are also living on their new planet. The group begins to accept their fate. Lisse, however, is confused about why she was chosen to participate in this experiment since she doesn’t know what skill she brings to the group.
Chapter 10 Summary: “June 2157. Prize”
The final chapter opens two years after the events of the rest of the book. Lisse and her friends have developed their own society on the new planet, which they name Prize. The make pottery using clay, and they forge iron, mirroring the development of technology as it occurred on Earth. However, they are determined to not repeat the mistakes humans made on Earth, such as pollution and overpopulation. Lisse and her fellow colonizers believe that The Government has sent them to Prize to create a better society than the one they left on Earth.
The group celebrates the anniversary of their arrival on Prize with a feast. The first year they hold the feast, they climb the mesa and spot other humans from its peak. They set fire to damp kindling to create a smoke signal to draw the other group to them. The two groups hug one another and feast together. They compare stories and realize they probably were transported to Prize by the same spaceship. They speculate on why they were dropped on the planet close to one another, guessing that The Government planned for them to find each other:
It seemed likely, we decided, that our robot carrier had come to Prize only once, scattering our eggs, not evenly across the planet as we had guessed at first, but in clusters, so we might meet […] after we had made some discoveries and inventions but not become so set in our ways that others would have felt like intruders (178).
The members of Lisse’s original group marry members of the new group. Lisse marries a man named Phillip. She becomes pregnant. She prepares for the baby by constructing a crib. She also weaves reeds into paper and creates her own ink so she can write the story of her experiences for her unborn child to read.
Chapters 9-10 Analysis
The revelation that The Government has transported Lisse and the others to a new planet highlights the teens’ continued lack of agency. When they realize where they are, they react with disbelief and anger. Trent voices their complaints: “Nobody asked us if we wanted to leave Earth. Nobody even told us. YOU HAD NO RIGHT!” (158). It’s ironic that the teens become so upset this late in the story about their lack of power when the Government has been controlling their lives throughout the novel. Before, they complained about the unfairness of their treatment as unemployed people, but they accepted their lot. This time, their situation is so dire that it launches them into a “fog of self-pity” (158).
Only when they realize that they still have some power, perhaps even more power than they did when they lived on Earth, do they recover from their despair. Washing themselves in the river reminds them that they have control over how they live at the very least. Lisse’s perspective on their new world also changes from viewing it as an “alien world” where they have been “Abandoned […] Forever. And ever” (158) to a “world of infinite possibilities” (161).
While the Government dropped them off on the planet and organized the forced emigration of unemployed people from Earth, they do not appear to meddle with the societies forming on the new planet or even monitor them. The constant surveillance that the Government subjected its citizens to on Earth is absent from the new planet, as far as Lisse knows. When she grows upset thinking about how The Government has treated them like experimental subjects, she tells herself, “You don’t have to be angry or afraid again. They’re not watching. Not anymore” (163). Instead of being under the Government’s control, ruled by their authoritarian policies, Lisse realizes that she and the colonists have the power to establish a society however they see fit. They decide to view it as an opportunity to create a utopia.
Calling the planet Prize signifies the colonists’ embrace of the planet as a land of plenty. They view it as a tabula rasa, a blank slate, that they can shape into an ideal world. Prize represents a new Garden of Eden that is not spoiled by human corruption and seems like a version of heaven. The novel’s happy ending showing Lisse’s group successfully forging a new society through cooperation instead of competition is idyllic. The harmony on Prize between the different groups of humans who live there suggests that it is a paradisaic place that has transcended humanity’s past mistakes and is filled only with those worthy enough to be admitted.
Furthermore, the teens determine that The Government has chosen each of them to fulfill a particular role in their new community. Only Lisse is uncertain of what unique skill she brings to the group. At the end of the book, Lisse discovers that her calling is to be the storyteller of the group. She has developed from a girl unsure of her purpose in a hostile world to a woman with a strong sense of her own worth. Not only has she put her storytelling skills to use, but she also marries and becomes a mother. Her marriage and pregnancy mark her transition to adulthood. The ending of Invitation to the Game seems strongly influenced by traditional Christian values. In the utopian society of Prize, people have returned to traditional roles. This greatly contrasts the dystopian world that the teens left, where The Government, not families, raised children, and family ties were weak. The focus on Lisse’s development into an adult at the end of the book reveals that the obstacles and challenges Lisse and her friends have experienced as teenagers shape them into strong, capable adults ready to take on the challenge of building a new world on their own.
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