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A review by mburnamfink
Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card
5.0
Ender's Game is a lightning bolt, a burning bush of a science fiction novel about war, about personal greatness, and about the price of doing what is necessary. A few centuries in the future, mankind is locked in a war against the insect-like buggers. Humanity survived the first two invasions by the barest margins. To win the third, the International Fleet is training a cadre of military geniuses. Young children forced through an intensive regime to become the very best.
Ender Wiggin is the best of them, Earth's last hope. At six years old, he is plucked away from his family, distant parents, loving sister, monstrous brother, and brought to the Battle School. Battle School is a continual test centered around the Game: zero-gravity laser tag between teams of 40 children. Ender is separated from his peers by his teachers, particularly the enigmatic Colonel Graff, because his fulfillment as a leader requires that he be absolutely alone, unable to rely on anybody else. Ender faces down his demons and his enemies, whom he destroys utterly even as he wants them to love him. He's rushed through Battle School at double pace, because {SPOILERS} the Third Invasion is the human attack against the buggers, and Ender needs to lead the fleet. He thinks that it's one last game, a holographic video game, but it's all real, and Ender turns a weapon of mass destruction against the bugger homeworld and destroys them, utterly.
There is so much to love about this book. The writing is clear like a glacial lake, perfectly readable on the surface but full of subtext that rewards rereading. The setting, as dribbled through details and extrapolations, is wonderful: Strict population control, dueling superpowers held together by a half-believed bugger threat. The International Fleet as a force unto itself, using arcane super-technology. The B plot, where Ender's earthbound siblings plot world domination by clever blog posts, seems unrealistic today, but it shows a better understanding of the power of computer networks than last year's winner Neuromancer.
Where this book shines in its character study of Ender. He is intelligent, moral, decisive, but ultimately empathetic. He understands his enemies, fighting dispassionately and without false mercy. He even begins to understand the alien bugger. He wants to do something good, but is being shaped into a weapon of terrible purpose by men who believe that only total war can ensure survival for humanity. Ender doesn’t want to be a murder, but his skill and training towards total victory lead him to kill his bullies, twice. And then at the end of a brutal course of training, burnt out and bone tired, Ender makes a terrible choice. “The enemy’s gate is down”, as the book says, and seeing it as an escape from the rules of the military game that has trapped him, Ender directs what he believes to be a simulation to destroy the enemy’s home world, committing a crime on an interstellar scale. The book ends with a dream-like coda of Ender trying atone for what he’s done in the new human galaxy.
It’s impossible not to like Ender, even when he becomes monstrous or saintly. I think his story of alienation, of being set apart from the crowd, has a lot of resonance for scifi fans. The tiredness, the bone dead tiredness of having to run a rat race over and over and find meaning in something meaningless, also has wide appeal. I read Ender’s Game to pieces as a teenager. It’s a book that means almost as much to me as Dune. But looking back at it with adult eyes, it’s a fantasy that because you’re a little smarter and different from the people around you, that you’re better than them. It might be a necessary defense mechanism, but it’s also the worst kind of nerd elitism.
Military history is another hobby of mine, and I both love and hate how Battle School is presented. Card’s introduction talks about leadership as the key element between a victorious army and a defeated mob. Future wars in space will require new leaders, and new forms of training. Compared to Starship Troopers, which takes a very Citizen Soldier approach to elite infantry, Ender’s Game sifts for the future Alexander or Napoleon. But I want to see the chain of reasoning that lead to ‘and now children will command the battlefleet’.
And on the final word, these days it impossible to talk about Card without mentioning his descent into deep homophobic bigotry and right-wing extremism. People have psychoanalyzed Ender’s Game for closeted homosexuality and weird fascist tendencies. But regardless of what Card has become, Ender’s Game is a wonderful, humane, and humanistic book, and I prefer remember the young man who wrote a true masterpiece.
Ender Wiggin is the best of them, Earth's last hope. At six years old, he is plucked away from his family, distant parents, loving sister, monstrous brother, and brought to the Battle School. Battle School is a continual test centered around the Game: zero-gravity laser tag between teams of 40 children. Ender is separated from his peers by his teachers, particularly the enigmatic Colonel Graff, because his fulfillment as a leader requires that he be absolutely alone, unable to rely on anybody else. Ender faces down his demons and his enemies, whom he destroys utterly even as he wants them to love him. He's rushed through Battle School at double pace, because {SPOILERS} the Third Invasion is the human attack against the buggers, and Ender needs to lead the fleet. He thinks that it's one last game, a holographic video game, but it's all real, and Ender turns a weapon of mass destruction against the bugger homeworld and destroys them, utterly.
There is so much to love about this book. The writing is clear like a glacial lake, perfectly readable on the surface but full of subtext that rewards rereading. The setting, as dribbled through details and extrapolations, is wonderful: Strict population control, dueling superpowers held together by a half-believed bugger threat. The International Fleet as a force unto itself, using arcane super-technology. The B plot, where Ender's earthbound siblings plot world domination by clever blog posts, seems unrealistic today, but it shows a better understanding of the power of computer networks than last year's winner Neuromancer.
Where this book shines in its character study of Ender. He is intelligent, moral, decisive, but ultimately empathetic. He understands his enemies, fighting dispassionately and without false mercy. He even begins to understand the alien bugger. He wants to do something good, but is being shaped into a weapon of terrible purpose by men who believe that only total war can ensure survival for humanity. Ender doesn’t want to be a murder, but his skill and training towards total victory lead him to kill his bullies, twice. And then at the end of a brutal course of training, burnt out and bone tired, Ender makes a terrible choice. “The enemy’s gate is down”, as the book says, and seeing it as an escape from the rules of the military game that has trapped him, Ender directs what he believes to be a simulation to destroy the enemy’s home world, committing a crime on an interstellar scale. The book ends with a dream-like coda of Ender trying atone for what he’s done in the new human galaxy.
It’s impossible not to like Ender, even when he becomes monstrous or saintly. I think his story of alienation, of being set apart from the crowd, has a lot of resonance for scifi fans. The tiredness, the bone dead tiredness of having to run a rat race over and over and find meaning in something meaningless, also has wide appeal. I read Ender’s Game to pieces as a teenager. It’s a book that means almost as much to me as Dune. But looking back at it with adult eyes, it’s a fantasy that because you’re a little smarter and different from the people around you, that you’re better than them. It might be a necessary defense mechanism, but it’s also the worst kind of nerd elitism.
Military history is another hobby of mine, and I both love and hate how Battle School is presented. Card’s introduction talks about leadership as the key element between a victorious army and a defeated mob. Future wars in space will require new leaders, and new forms of training. Compared to Starship Troopers, which takes a very Citizen Soldier approach to elite infantry, Ender’s Game sifts for the future Alexander or Napoleon. But I want to see the chain of reasoning that lead to ‘and now children will command the battlefleet’.
And on the final word, these days it impossible to talk about Card without mentioning his descent into deep homophobic bigotry and right-wing extremism. People have psychoanalyzed Ender’s Game for closeted homosexuality and weird fascist tendencies. But regardless of what Card has become, Ender’s Game is a wonderful, humane, and humanistic book, and I prefer remember the young man who wrote a true masterpiece.