"Ma a quel pensiero non fu capace di immaginare cosa poteva significare per lui soltanto vivere, era un'esperienza che non gli sembrava di aver mai fatto prima, comunque fosse, desiderava farla."

Profondo. Intelligente. Triste. Magnifico.

La Terra è nuovamente in pericolo. Settant'anni fa una razza aliena ha minacciato la nostra vita ma siamo sopravvissuti. Oggi, dopo una selezione rigorosa, vengono scelti e addestrati giovanissimi geni alla Scuola di Guerra e preparati ad affrontare una possibile nuova invasione. Il piccolo Ender è la speranza per il genere umano.

Non mi dilungherò sulla trama in sé e sui tanti temi trattati con maestria e abilità, leggete il romanzo e scopriteli da voi.
Dirò solo che "Ender's Game" mi ha incantato. E' fonte di emozioni destabilizzanti e di profonde riflessioni, in cui tutto gira perfettamente, a volte disturba, a volte esalta, e con un messaggio finale che è tra le cose più belle e allo stesso tempo strazianti che abbia letto.

Pochi romanzi mi hanno lasciato con le emozioni fortemente scosse. Questo ci è riuscito.

-------------------------------------
"But at that thought he was unable to imagine what just living could mean to him, it was an experience that he didn't seem to have ever had before, whatever it was, he wanted to do it."

Deep. Intelligent. Sad. Magnificent.

The human race is in danger again. Seventy years ago an alien race threatened our lives but we survived. Today, after a specialized selection, very young geniuses are chosen and trained at the War School and prepared to face a possible new invasion. Little Ender is the hope for mankind.

I won't dwell on the plot itself and the many themes treated with mastery and skill, read the novel and discover them for yourself.
I'll just say that "Ender's Game" enchanted me. It is a source of destabilizing emotions and profound reflections, in which everything runs perfectly, sometimes disturbing, sometimes exalting, and with a final message that is among the most beautiful and at the same time heartbreaking things I have read.

Few novels have left me with deeply shaken emotions. This he succeeded.

Страховита военна и социална фантастика.

Тази книга дава началото на една от най-интересните и най-добре написаните sci-fi поредици, които съм чел.

Авторът ѝ е сложна, провокативна и силно обсъждана личност, до степен на разпалване на войни в интернет. :)

Героите в тази първа част са деца. Но те са и малки човеци, а това често се забравя от възрастните. Последиците от планирания ксеноцид няма как да бъдат предвидени...

Препоръчвам - всеки прочит ми дава нещо ново, а малко книги са такива!

3.75 stars rounded up! This is my first ever sci-fi book! I loved learning about the state of the world in Ender's game and how much of a GENIUS Ender is. The only thing I disliked is that I wasn't super into the war games/battle parts but other than that such a fun read outside my comfort zone

Not my cup of tea. Considering that the author probably intended the reader to sympathize with the main character, I disliked the main character way too much, right from the start. Also, many people will probably disagree with me but I think this book is rife with the author’s personal prejudices. Off handed comments about women and different nationalities just threw me for a loop, left me wondering why they were included when they offered absolutely nothing towards the story. Additionally, I disliked the dialogue, slang, and boring characterizations.

I read this novel because it was often the favorite novel of students of mine, and I wanted to understand why. I should mention that I love science fiction, and have read it avidly since I was barely more than a child. I'm not by any means some kind of anti-sci-fi snob.

The first thing that bothered me is that the novel sets adults against gifted children in a way that strikes me as bizarre. Adults are essentially evil but teachers especially. The children are inherently excellent, capable of helping each other in trying to figure out just what the adults are hiding, which is, in this case, a vast and secret war they are tricking the children into fighting for them. This was perhaps the hardest to believe of all the things thrown at the reader, and interestingly, it is hidden from you until the very end, though you can guess at it before then.

What disturbed me the most is that the writing is terrible---far too much happens internally, inside the character's head--it's an emo space opera, basically--and one of the most interesting events of the book is nearly buried and the presentation of it is rushed, because it is near the end. There are many points in the battle scenes where it is impossible to understand what's happening. And the penultimate plot event, where it's revealed all of the games were not..games...could have been handled more interestingly. But the novel was overdetermined, things happening only because the writer wants them too and not because they feel inevitable, and so too many of the arrows point in the same direction. By the time Ender meets Mazer, his final teacher, my eyes rolled back into my head at the implausibility of it all.

And it's worth mentioning the thing no one prepared me for was the bizarre homoerotic subtext built into the book as well, a subtext that is sometimes just a plain old supertext, on display, right beside how women in this novel are to be loved distantly and kept from real knowledge, and turned against themselves, so they can then be used to compel others.

It creeped me out and I'm gay.

I'm also a former 'gifted child', and was tested and poked and pushed, all of these things, made to study computer programming when I didn't want to, and I made myself fail out of their program to get away from them. But I found no commonality with the gifted children here, not as I have in other stories about gifted children, say, like Salinger's Glass family. Also, these kids are all jerks.

I do hand it to Card for the ideas in the novel: blogging? Yes. It's in here, well before anyone was doing it, and it ...matters a lot, and in the ways blogging matters. Also the idea of an institution that runs on the manipulation of its populace into a distant war with an implacable foe, as a way of controlling people. And a society that has no privacy at all, not even in dreams. This novel does offer a dark picture of what life is like under these terms. Also, the idea of how a hive-mind would think differently, without language, and the complications of communicating with someone like that, that's brilliant also.

I wish it had been revised--that the battle scenes were clearer, that the movement of the novel's action, the way the 'buggers' are in a race to try and communicate with Ender before he kills them, that this were more obvious to the reader, and not a surprise whipped out at the end, so that it could have lent tension to the scenes of the games and manipulation, which were only boring. And Ender's decision, to be the Speaker for the Dead, that struck me cold, because in the end, the buggers were only trying to do what everyone else in his life were doing to him: poring over what makes him tick and trying to get him to do their bidding.

The novel contains a rant against style at the beginning, added by Card, called 'literary tricks' by him. I think the most interesting thing about it is that given the millions sold, it is proof that story matters more than style, even as convoluted and badly formed as this one is. In the end what matters is the questions the novel raises and the implications of the questions, and that the novel really is about something at its core, behind all of the badly rendered fight scenes. I admire style, don't get me wrong. I love it. But it would appear you can get by without it.

Ender's game is quite an interesting concept, and it's fascinating to read how the author came up with the idea for the story. I thoroughly enjoyed seeing what was going on for Ender and the behind-the-scenes of the people "pulling the strings" of the whole operation.

It almost felt like TOO much of a split as it segued into the post-training section of the book. The flow into the command position was a bit disjointed, and I didn't feel like it pulled together very well for me. It will be interesting to see what happens after the events of this book, and I would like to learn more about the difference in time passing on the station and why it differs so significantly from Earth. I wonder if Ender ever finds out the truth of what happened to some of his classmates, I don't think he would react very well.

Ultimately I will be continuing the story, hopefully with more Valentine.

4 stars for me.

Orson Scott Card's science fiction classic Ender's Game is about the fate of Ender Wiggins, brother of the psychotic but brilliant Peter and the his beloved sister. It is a dystopia in which a child army is raised against the invasion of the "buggers" which are barely described in the book. There are some conventional Mormon views expressed (thinly veiled anti-Semitism, racism, and a bit of sexism) throughout that makes me want to take the review down to a "2" or "3". However, the plot advances once Ender graduates early from Combat school and things get really crazy and interesting.

There is also a side-story where the sister Valentine and the psychotic Peter become newsnet (the internet as such did not yet exist when Card wrote the book in 1985) celebrities Demosthenes and Locke. This was an interesting precursor and warning about social media's nefarious and insidious influence on current events. The phenomenon becomes so huge and surreal that even their parents are quoting them at the dinner table. Perhaps readers in the 80s would have found this idea preposterous, but recent history has proved this to be uncomfortably close to reality. As intelligent as Valentine is, the description of her character is still flawed in that she is unnaturally explicit with her brother about her period and her sexual development - well unnatural outside a Mormon context perhaps. In any case, I felt it was clear that it was a male writer letting a bit of his taboo fantasies seep into his writing when he was talking about Valentine.

Why is it a classic? Well, because it is sort of a modern sci-fi reading of Lord of the Flies combined with a Machievelian reading of 1984. I felt that the second half of the book was far more interesting than the first half. Naturally, I also saw the massive influence this book had on, say, other more recent sci-fi such as Red Rising. Again, I hesitated between three and four stars, but because of the serious moral failings on behalf of the author, I'll stick with 3 stars just like I gave Starship Troopers.

Fino's Enderverse Reviews in internal chronological order (I think):
n  n - https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
n  n - https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
n  n - https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
n  n - https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
n  n - https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
n  n - https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
n  n - https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
n  n - https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
n  n - https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
n  n - https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
n  n - https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

ender's game is pretty awesome, when it's not being boring.

and of course it is just me - in class yesterday the parts i mentioned as being boring TO ME were other people's favorite parts. and this is all due to a design flaw in me: i am physically incapable of visualizing action sequences. in movies, they make it so easy. in books, i frequently have to reread scenes a few times before i can orient myself. throw in zero gravity and weapons that don't actually exist, and i am loster than lost.

but - the parts of this that are good (to me) were very very good. why have i never read this before?? because i thought it was a total little boy book - all outer space and video games. and it is. but it is also about the formative years of a military savant - pushed nearly beyond his endurance into this pit of loneliness and pure strategy and honed into a killing machine. usually i hate precocity, but this was just brilliant. i liked so many of the characters, i loved watching ender progress, i just loved every minute of it. and even the parts i couldn't wrap dumbhead around, they were still fast-paced, even though i couldn't understand "wait, so who is hiding behind the star?? and who has been flashed? and what does that cord attach to??"

and of course, all that it has to say about the role of ethics on the military and about the suppression of the individual in these circumstances is gorgeous.

and if you like this book, be sure to check out o.s.c's many review of snacks and other sundries:


this one is pretty informative

i am sorry this review is crap, but i am supposed to be studying for a midterm. plus, almost everyone has already read this, so it's not like i am discovering anything here.

come to my blog!

Spoiler Alert***

God damn did I hate Ender’s Game. I checked out Amazon and can surely see why I wanted to give it a shot. Talk about a cult following of people absolutely smitten with it. I even read some where that it’s on the required reading list at Quantico. I suppose this book could be some kind of manifesto for misfit nerds who waste their life playing video games or a source of legitimacy for motivating tired Marines sick of drilling (The book rambles on infinitely about the boy genius Ender and his laser tag in a zero gravity vacuum.) I also suppose we could kid ourselves into thinking the novel brings to light the necessity of Machiavellianism in conflict or maybe we could discuss the pathetic New Age garbage the book ended with as our annoying protagonist spreads some half crocked neo-religion amongst space colonies in which you love the enemy you are forced to annihilate. Some sort of cryptic Latter Day Saints plug by the Mormon author?

There were several other things I couldn’t stand about it. First of all, like even the best science fiction, the characters were one dimensional card board cut outs. This starts with the dorky, self absorbed protagonist Ender himself. I can deal with this problem if the plot is cool enough (ala Dune). Dune, too, often times dealt with children geniuses, however it was explained and made sense in the story. We have no idea why Ender and the other children (of which 99.9% were male) are so smart. Speaking of children, did any of you guys pick up any sort of creepy pedophile vibe in this book? How many times were we told of naked little boys? Why were there references to their tiny patches of pubic hair? Why did Ender have to have his big fight naked while lathered with soap in the shower? And the corny Ebonics that the children randomly spoke in? WTF?

The third rate and minuscule insight we were given about the geopolitical conditions on Earth were terribly dated. The Warsaw Pact dominated by Russia? What a cheap rip of Orwell. Lame! The side story about Ender’s genius two siblings also using Machiavellian tactics to achieve their political goals (instead of Ender’s military ones) by blogging on the internet really didn’t add up to beans in plot development if you ask me. Of course, Ender is never beaten at anything he does. I suppose we are to be awed by his victories but, strangely, his greatest triumph was his stoic willingness to use some sort of super weapon to destroy an enemy wholesale via exploding an entire planet. On the cover of my book, it suggests this book is appropriate for 10 year olds. What could a child get out this book? Boo to Ender’s Game!!!!!

This is really a great read. Loved the story and the characters. But if you peel back all of that good stuff, I also found that the way the author endeared the reader to the main character, how that character won over the other kids was a brilliant study in leadership. How to earn respect. (Which, I think is missing more and more in our society today). That underlining leadership theme is really what carries the story. The recruitment, training and battles were just the way the author got that point across.
Highly recommend this book. (Not only for readers but for future leaders as well).
David Putnam Author of The Bruno Johnson series.

As he got into the car that waited silently in the corridor, he heard Valentine’s anguished cry. “Come back to me! I love you forever!”


Most readers of this review who have any interest in SF have certainly known of this book for years. It was published in 1977. I was in my early 30s then, we had our first child, and I had withdrawn from SF several years before that, really since I had left high school. So I have no recollection of the book from those days, and didn’t really become aware of it till maybe five years ago. I’ve had a copy for a few years. Finally started reading it yesterday. Finished it today.

Here’s the backstory, as I absorbed it through my read. (I may not have some of the details right, it doesn’t matter.) Some takes place on earth, but most takes place in special training facilities that have been set up elsewhere in the solar system. Call it sometime in the twenty-first century? Anyway, at a time that humans had conquered space and where exploring the solar system.

Decades prior to the novel’s present an alien life form had been discovered in our system, simply referred to as the “bugs”. There was a lot of fighting between humans and bugs, many lives lost, the bugs repulsed. They returned a couple decades later, and even more fierce fighting occurred, even more lives lost. Again the humans won.

But now the nations of earth have banded together (sort of) in expectation that a third war will occur, when the bugs return they will return in vast numbers. So the story relates how the humans are preparing to meet this invasion: by identifying, through very early childhood, young children who are believed to have a particular ability (postulated from results of the first wars) to command in, and win, the ultimate war.

Children identified are taken to space, to training facilities, starting at ages around five. They leave their families, for years, for this training.

Ender is one of these children. He has an older brother who was tested and found lacking, and a sister between the two brothers, Valentine, also tried and found lacking. The quote above is taken from very early in the book, when it’s decided that Ender has passed the pre-training phase. His parents and he himself have agreed to allow him to be trained off-planet. But it’s a hard parting with his sister, they have supported each other throughout childhood against the rather brutal older sibling.



Well, that’s enough of the spoiler stuff. The novel mostly takes place over the next five-plus years of Ender’s childhood.

Card has written an extremely well-crafted story here. I found it hard to stop reading, always wondering what was going to happen next. Details of the current social realities on earth are revealed slowly, and influence both the telling and the flow of the story in interesting ways. A real page-turner.

It’s also, in some parts, very moving.



The edition I have contains an Introduction that the author wrote in 1991. This was very much worth reading. I read it after I finished reading the story, and that worked well for me.



I have 119 friends who have this book in their libraries on GR. About forty of them have yet to read it. So to those, who I assume did have at least some interest in it, I say do read the novel!

For other friends: if somehow you’ve never heard of it, check it out, read some other reviews. I didn’t look at it as a YA novel (when it was written I don’t think the phrase was in use.) But it is true that it has become apparently a very popular read for young people, a fact that Card addresses in the Introduction.



I didn’t know until I actually read the book that there are three novels that follow it in a series. Whether I read those who knows? But this one was certainly good enough to make me consider it.

A movie came out in 2013. Mixed reviews. Apparently most people thought the book, which won awards in the sci-fi field, was better.



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DNF at 52%


Dear Orson Scott Card,


There are over 3,310,480,700 women in this world.



Sincerely, Women.


Dear Fans of This Book Who Are Probably About To Make An Angry Comment On This Review:

Please leave now if you don't want to get all huffy and insulted and make a comment defending the author or whatever other shit that is this book.
Or, if you want, go ahead. If you're going to comment, at least read the whole review and not just a quarter of it. I'm so sick of repeating myself over and over in the comments.
Yes, I bash the author first, but I do make my points on why I hated the book itself, and not just because of him.

Thank you.

Sincerely, Kat.


First of all, before I get into the book, I'd like to say that Orson Scott Card is one of the biggest dicks on this Earth. For those of who don't know, he is openly homophobic and a hyprocrite (www.salon.com/2013/05/07/sci_fi_icon_... )). He is a Chauvinist (known to believe that women are the weaker sex and were only put on this world to make babies). He is a Mormon that, from what I've heard from people who've read his other books, tries to convert you in his own writing in his novels.

Just for this author's personality, this book deserves one star.

But now onto the actual book, which deserves one star in itself.


The Author's Viewpoints Leak In

It starts out well enough. It's interesting and keeps your attention. But immediately, the sexism shows its ugly face;


"All the boys are organized into armies."
"All boys?"
"A few girls. They don't often pass the tests to get in. Too many centuries of evolution are working against them."

Keep in mind that this book is supposed to take place in the future. There are several things wrong with this sentence.

1. In this day and age, thousands of women are in the military and fighting for their country. They have been for decades now, and longer still. So if this is supposed to be in the future, does Card think that women will give up their ability to fight so easily?



2. Centuries of evolution working against them? On what terms? That we have ovaries? That we can have babies so are therefore unfit to fight or have the mental capacity to pass the tests boys can easily pass?




This is the 21st century, genius. Women work. Women are in the army. Get your head out of your ass and look around, for fuck's sakes.


Characters

I feel that Card made all the characters far too young. Ender is six, Valentine is eight, and Peter is ten. Peter has a fetish for torturing squirrels and threatening to kill his siblings.
Um, okay? Is there any explanation for this strange behavior? No, because according to this book, all our kids in the future are fully functioning psychopaths. (Except the girls, of course. They're too 'mild' for behavior like that.)
In the future, the army is apparently full of kids barely older than six, up to age twelve. To be trained for a war that, as far as I could tell from the point I got to, was already won.

Writing

The writing was atrocious. Card switches from third person perspective to first person constantly. The first person switches are for the character's 'thoughts', but the words aren't italicized or anything so you can never tell.
To me, that's a sign of bad writing. If you can't stick with one kind of perspective, than you should go back to those non-existent creative writing classes.

Plot

Towards the middle of the book, the plot started to seriously drag and get outright ridiculous. Valentine and Peter start planning to 'take over the world' by writing fucking debate columns. Not only is the whole 'let's rule the world' concept highly overused, it's poorly planned out. It's randomly thrown into the story like, "Okay, we need more villains and more things happening, so let's make the ten year old girl and twelve year old murderous boy try to take over the world!......with debate columns."




Sure.


Then, switching back to Ender, who is now nine years old and a commander of his own kid army, we have our main character turning into the bullying idiots that bullied him in the beginning of the book. Has he learned nothing? Oh sure, it makes the kids 'better soldiers'. They're not even seven years old, they are not fucking soldiers. The whole story is a fucked up version of a 'kid military' which is run by controlling adults who don't want the war to end so they can remain in power.
It--just--ugh.

It got so tedious and irritating that I decided to give up on it. I'm not going to waste my time with a book written by a sexist, homophobic, dickwad. I'm not even going to see the movie, which is a real shame because I love Asa Butterfield. I feel bad that he was brought into such a stupid book/movie business.