In Orson Scott Card’s science-fiction novel Ender’s Game, we meet Ender Wiggins, a talented little boy who has the fate of the world on his shoulders.

After an extensive period of monitoring, Ender attends a school for gifted children, training to learn the techniques to battle the buggers, an alien lifeform.

When I started my career, I worked at an automotive company where I can only describe the environment as ideal. Our leader, we will call him King Arthur, was always looking out for his team. If you were only there for two weeks, he would come by your desk and let you know he thought of you for this amazing assignment.

When lunch came around, the entire group would make eye contact and go down to lunch together. No one forced us. We genuinely enjoyed each other’s company. In fact, one gentleman even won the lottery and came back to work!

Now, a few years later, I returned to work for this company. King Arthur had retired, and in his place was The Witch. The Witch required that you worked until 4 am. She would not work during the day (instead went to the gym) so she worked late at night, expecting everyone else to work the day and night. She would call meetings and then just never show up for them, wasting an entire roomful of people’s time without so much as an “I’m sorry.”

If anything was wrong, The Witch would blame you. If the work product was great, The Witch took the credit for herself.

So what makes these leaders? Open Ender’s Game.

The brilliance of Ender’s Game is not necessarily the plot but the emotional intelligence and the symbolism. If you have worked in Corporate America, you know that life isn’t always fair. Some people are out to get you. But what can you say to motivate your team? Does your team need breaks to thrive? Open Ender’s Game.

This book also brilliantly captured what it is like being at the top. Do you feel like quitting at times? You bet. Are things changing rapidly? Certainly.

And Ender’s Game depicts how the most talented are also working harder than most. When Ender had secret techniques, he “told them freely, confident that few of them would know how to train their soldiers and toon leaders to duplicate what his could do.”

Last, but certainly not least, the science fiction aspect of this book is a little unsettling. Portions of Ender’s Game were initially published in 1977. In the book, Ender and his team have a messaging system that sounds incredibly similar to today’s email or Team messaging.

Overall, this book is well worth the read. I would say that it felt like a mashup of Dune and Ready Player One. Highly recommend.

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JantA Town Like Alice
FebtBirdsong
MartCaptain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Berniere
AprtWar and Peace
MaytThe Woman in White
JuntAtonement
JultThe Shadow of the Wind
AugtJude the Obscure
SeptUlysses
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NovtA Fine Balance
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If history has taught us anything, its that no one turns out for the better when the government experiments on them. There's no way Ender doesn't end up killing himself, becoming a raging alcoholic, or maybe addicted to some futuristic space drug. There's no way he turns out normal. Maybe the future has some kind of cure for massive childhood trauma and PTSD caused by government experimentation on childeren....let's hope that's the case.

Governmental overreach for the "greater good." Breeding super childered to fight battles for you. Winning at all costs. Damn the torpedoes. It's 1984 meets Starship Troppers and War of the worlds.

The writing left a little to be disired, its simplistic, dialog driven, and repetitive.  There's next to zero character development. Everyone is pretty one dimensiononal. It's predictable and kinda weird. Don't get me wrong, I liked it, I mean, it's good guys verse bad guys, in space, with a child prodigy and aliens.

It was simple and didn't require too much attention or investment, but sometimes that's what you need in a read.

Hmmm, I find it hard to understand the level of following this particular book gets.

Ender's Game is the type of sci-fi that doesn't interest me much. 225 pages about a boy playing video games, battling in zero gravity, and learning about how military works? I can work up some interest for these things, but there has to be some characters I care about. However, how exactly am I supposed to find compassion for a boy who goes from one task to another never failing and always being the best at EVERYTHING, and not because he works hard to achieve his greatness, but because he was genetically engineered to be the best? Where is the conflict and character growth here I wonder? And then the kids. I wish even one of the characters actually acted like a kid, or a human being at least. I personally only saw cardboard in every direction.

I suppose there are some interesting ideas about military training, manipulation, and leadership, but I admit, I mostly found myself bored to death by numerous battles, which I couldn't visualize, and it's-so-hard-to-be-the-bestest-ever-genius whining.

Listening to the author's speech at the end of my audio book didn't endear me to him personally either. He is just not a very sophisticated person, but he surely knows his audience of prepubescent boys and gamers well. Plus I have very little respect for writers who create not because they have something important to say about our society and human condition, but because they are paid 5 cents per word to do it.

I think I will stick with Ursula K. Le Guin for now, whenever I am in a mood for some alien action, and resign myself to the fact that Ender's Game's cult classic status is something I will never be able to understand.

P.S. I did have a blast reading reviews about the author's obsession with naked, soap-lathered little boys. How they came up with this pedohomoerotic BS, I have no idea. Did we read the same book?

P.P.S. I also had a blast reading Card's raging homophobic "essays."

After finishing this "classic" of science fiction, I find myself most intrigued by the large following it seems to inspire. My next step in regards to Ender's Game is not to read the next installation, but to explore the favorable reviews.

But first I have to get my own frustration off my chest...
The writing is atrocious and heavy handed. Apparently, in the future, the earth is threatened by bug like aliens who are going to kill all the humans, so the international federation, for some reason not clearly explained, takes really smart little kids (instead of say, an adult) to a battle school where they play battle games, video games, etc. I guess the big kicker in the end is that the final video game little Ender plays was actually real, and he defeated a billion bugs and yay the world is saved. I guess he's eleven at this point. One of the intermittent subplots is that Ender's sister and brother are influencing political culture back home through the internet.

Now, I'm sure some great speculative fiction could fill in the blanks for us, as to why only children can save the world - but basically the assumption is just granted here that these here kids are really smart.

Two more quick complaints - all the interesting stuff is shoved in at the end. I had to sit through 300 frickin pages of detailed "battles' between little kids in anti-gravity suits, and then at the end we hear about how the alien bugs have a collective mind, the ability to penetrate Enders' dreams, earth colonists taking over the bugs homes - its all very interesting for 10 PAGES and then its over. Secondly, this author is just tremendously sexist - all the women play manipulative, petulant characters bent on controlling lil Ender.

Okay so my review is this book sucks except for the last 10 pages.

[I have a new website where I review awesome books & more! http://unlearner.com]

I wanted to like Ender's Game. I really did. It's a wonder that even after more than halfway into the book, I still clung on to the foolishly optimistic notion that the book would somehow redeem itself. That it would end up justifying the tedious, repetitive, drearily dull chapters I trundled through over the course of several days (which is unusual, since I'm generally a fast reader).

It pains me to say it, as a hardcore fangirl of science fiction, that one of sci-fi's most beloved and highly regarded novels did not do it for me. Actually, that is understating it. While I'm at it, I'll just duck and blurt it out: I loathed Ender's Game.

Deep breaths. Let that sink in. Let the hate flow through you. Good, strike me down...I am unarmed.

Okay. Now let's get to it.

Was it because the expectations I had in my mind were unreasonably high and thus were responsible for ruining the book for me? No way. I make no bones about the fact that Ender's Game, regardless of the respect and popularity it commands in sci-fi circles, is an inherently bad novel.

Why, though, you might ask. Why such vitriol for the book? Here you are, then.

1) Bad plotting: It didn't take me long to realise that after I was past Ender's arrival at the Battle School, every - literally every chapter thereon until his return to Earth - was more or less the same thing. Battle games, beating the shit out of kids, battle games, switching back and forth to Armies, battle games. It was so repetitive that I was exhausted at the end of every.single.chapter. Page after page after page of six year old, seven year old, eight year old Ender and his buddies zooming about in ships trying to freeze one another's socks off. Wheeee!

2) Lack of characterisation: There are no personalities. There are no motivations. You never learn anything about the characters except that they are the good guys or the bad guys. Ender is brilliant at everything. He NEVER loses. Not once. Bernard, Stilson and Co. are the bad guys. They're evil baddies cause dey r jealuz of ender's brilliance omg!!! That's it. No background, no depth, no internal conflicts. No motivation. Words cannot express how two-dimensional and woefully lacking in personality the characters are.

3) Demosthenes and Locke. What the heck was that all about? I appreciate Card's prescience about the 'Nets' and blogging before it was around, but come on, this is pushing it a bit too far. How, I beg you, how are we supposed to take the idea that a pair of kids end up taking the world by posting in online forums and blogging?

As if we people of the internet didn't have enough delusions of grandeur already. ;)

4) Now, this really gets my goat:I had to wait for the last 20 pages to get information that was of any worth to the story at all. I'm talking about Mazer's Rackham explaning the buggger's communications system to Ender. As for the 'twist ending': I honestly, and I mean, honestly did not find that riveting. It was predictable and, worse, did not justify all that I had to read to make my way to the end.

5)Also: It was hard to feel for Ender. I say this as a high-school nerd in my own day, as the reviled and hated and made-fun-of socially awkward kid who wanted to be good at whatever they did. But that doesn't make me any more sympathetic to Ender. Honestly, I fail to see what's so great about Ender anyway. I am so infuriated at Card for this. Apart from Ender's claim to intelligence (which is never completely explained, by the way) there is nothing, NOTHING, that is worth justifying him as the protagonist of one of scifi's supposedly best books ever. Yes, he loves his sister Valentine. Yes, he doesn't want to hurt people. Yes, he goes ahead and does it anyway. Again and again. (Ending up murdering two school boys in the process. Uhm, major wtf there.)

I am rarely so caustic about the books I read, but this time I feel I am justified in doing so. I had such hopes for this book. Not impossibly high or anything. At the very least, I had expected to like it, you know? I remember, as I worked my way past chapters 4,5,7,10,14...I expected it to get better. I expected myself to be mistaken at the initial dissatisfaction, then incredulity, then mild annoyance and then a string of sad sighs and resignation to dislike. Alas, I wasn't mistaken. I felt betrayed. I thought this book was right up there with those 'kindred ones', you know? The sort of books you can come back to again and again. Instead, what I got was a bad plotline, progressively unrealistic plot developments, and a cast of flat, lifeless, unpleasant characters to boot. Ender's Game, how I wish I had loved you. Why did you forsake me thus.

I'm not giving any of my money to a man that wrote this, and who regularly donates money that he's earned from his books towards anti-gay rights outlets.

Re-Read 2/18/22:

This must be my 6th time reading this and I cried like a baby at certain parts all over again as if it was my first.

More importantly, I read it with my daughter, so it WAS her first time.

Say what you will about the author, he wrote a fantastically empathetic book that works on so many damn levels. And this time, my daughter and I both bawled our eyes out together.

I'm so glad I can introduce her to a true love of SF. :)



Original review:

So nice to read it again. I suppose I can point to this book as being one of the very first to open my eyes to just how much can be accomplished in SF.

I mean, sure, I first read Chriton's Sphere right after King's Tommyknockers so I was feeling the love already, but Ender's Game set a new standard in readability, emotional impact, and sheer cussed F***ed-up-ness.

Since then, I've read over twenty novels that shared echoes of this novel. And yet, I keep coming back to this and its companion, Speaker for the Dead, glorying in the wonder of all these little pieces coming together in plots both interesting, tragic, and wonderful.

This is one of those rare cases where popularity is not unfounded. A great tale meets great acclaim.

I can rank this up near Dune as one of my most beloved novels of all time. No question about it.

Do I pity Ender? Hell, yes. But more than that:

I admire him.

This was the first book I picked up and read all the way through in one sitting. Technically, it's not a difficult read but conceptually it's rich and engaging.

"They have a word for people our age. They call us children and they treat us like mice."

If you can't understand that statement, you probably won't like this book. It's about intelligent children. Not miniature adults- their motivations, understanding, and some-times naivete clearly mark them as children. But at the same time their intelligence and inner strength define them clearly as people. Their personalities are fully developed, even if their bodies are not.

The book is about war. About leadership. And about the qualities that make some one a powerful or admirable individual (not always the same thing). In this book children are both kind and cruel to each other as only children know how to be. It is not an easy book for anyone who understands childhood to be a happy time of innocence. Even still, the characters retain a certain amount of innocence.

The questions posed by the war, by the handling of the war, are relevant today, as they were when the book was written, and as they have been since the dawning of the atomic age. Foremost is the question of what makes someone or something a monster. It is an easy read, but not always a comfortable one.

I'd recommend this book for intelligent children. The sort that resent being talked down to and treated like kids. Here is a book that does not talk down to them, but understands and empathizes with them. Also I recommend it for adults who used to be that kind of child, even if science fiction is not your usual interest. More pure science fiction fans will find it interesting, as will those who enjoy exploring the philosophies of human nature and war.

This book sets out to make you think.

This is a novel that blows past conventional ideas like "disbelief." Apparently humanity, a species whose only real claim to fame is war, now stinks at war, and can only be saved by a child genius who is one part prophecy, one part bad science, and one part wish-fulfillment. Thanks to this plan, we are treated to a gaggle of super-intelligent children who seldom appear particularly clever (in fact many behave with adult maturity rather than abnormal intellect) and achieve greatness not through any great effort that we follow (rather you'll read recaps of their successful efforts), but because the author wants them to achieve these things. In this, the definitive edition of Ender's Game, there is almost nothing earned within the plot.

It's a decent story, but for a book with so many events there is very little consequence or risk, and the character development is so linear and stale. That last quality is particularly cloying considering that, prodigies or not, most of the characters are children and at least one of them should develop in an unexpected way. Instead the unexpected developments we get are humorlessly absurd, like two prodigies fooling the world with a fake op-ed column that earns them political power. The ending is predictable and deliberately anti-climactic, robbing the novel of its one true punch. The trade-off is, instead of getting the thing the book was building to, you get the opportunity for sequels and spin-offs. If you liked the infallible, mostly emotionless and paper-thin protagonist, then that's a good thing. If you were hoping to have the hours you put into the book validated with some real emotion at the end, well, neither this author's definitive edition nor any other is going to help you.

This has to be, hands down, one of the best science fiction books written. Ender's Game is set in a disarmingly straightfoward sci-fi setting: a near future earth threatened by a hostile alien species with superior technology that seems determined to destroy the human race. The story centers on a young boy who is drafted into an all-consuming military training program at the age of 6. The program he's inducted into seeks to forge a new generation of military commanders out of gifted children, and it's sole purpose is to break them at any cost, until they finally discover someone who can't be broken. What follows is an emotionally complex and at times painfully familiar story of children struggling to accept their inner demons. Ender in particular is cursed with a brutal combination of profound empathy for others, and an overwhelming survival instinct that drives him to win no matter what the cost. It is this combination of gifts that may make him the commander the fleet needs in it's war against the alien invaders, but only if Ender can find a way to survive the burden of understanding his enemy so thoroughly that he can no longer see them as "the other," but as a reflection of himself.
The story is fast-paced, and Card's signature style of simple, plain language and streamlined descriptiveness serves to bring the characters front and center at all times. This book is infused with a very real sense of psychological and spiritual dislocation, and treats it's young protagonists as fully realized, intelligent, 3 dimensional characters struggling with very adult questions. Card's other signature: creating drama through ethical dilemmas, is also a central element of the story, and he does a very good job of challenging the reader to find some semblance of moral high ground anywhere. The conflicts between characters are made all the more powerful by the almost total lack of mystery: motivations and intent are laid out very clearly in most cases, and it is the reader's ability to empathize with everyone's point of view that makes the story less about winning and loosing and more about living with the consequences of either.
This book is thought provoking, emotionally complex, and ethically challenging. It's a powerful examination of conflict and violence, military necessity, family roles, and the ways in which we use the idea of "the other" to justify all manner of savagery.

I don’t care. I just don’t like it

Once upon a time, there was a tiny 6-year old boy who all the other kids picked on. Little did they know that he was very special and all the adults secretly loved him even though they didn't stop anyone from picking on him, and also he knew karate and he didn't want to hurt them but he would if he had to, and it just so happens that he has to. Often. Also he spoke and thought not like a 6-year old boy but as a smug 30-year old man with a fair amount of unresolved bitterness toward his childhood.

I finished this book very quickly, not because I am a misunderstood supergenius toddler, but because if I lost any momentum at all, I'd put this book down and never again be able to screw up the energy to deal with the pretentious little prick known as Ender Wiggin.

I really wanted to like the book. The basic outline of the story is fine and even appealing to me: kids being trained with video games from an early age to join a war effort. But the writing was, at times, excruciating. To be fair, had I read it when I was a (fairly average, I'm sure) 12-year old, I probably would have found it more enjoyable. But as an (average, again) adult, I found it to be about 100 pages too long and filled with long passages during which I developed a loathing of the main character at precisely the moment when the author clearly wanted me to admire his cleverness, strength of character, and bold moral wrestling. "Ooh, how deftly he wins the admiration of his peers by suggesting that bully is gay! Aah, the psychological pain he endures at being the best at strategy and physical combat! Oh, the bravery of joking with the black boy about how he's a n****r! Oh why can't he find a teacher who can teach him something he doesn't already know!"

I was also continuously distracted by sentences like, "They pushed his face backward into the door." What does that mean? If they're pushing his face backward, does that mean his head hit the door? His face can't hit the door if it's not facing it.

Anyway. The final act started off well enough and brought everything to a satisfactory conclusion, and then the book continued on for another 25 pages that should be considered by nerds to be as unconscionable as the final episode of Battlestar Gallactica, where all reason and logic are dispensed with in favor of some weird fantasy that pretends to wrap up everything in a nice and neat bow.

It's interesting to compare this to Dune, which I read last month. Dune does a similar thing (young adult-style writing about a young boy with great powers who will save the world) but does it without making the main character insufferable. Unlike Dune, I don't think I'll bother reading any other books about Ender, the universe's tiniest supergenius.