Ender's Game

Full review now posted!

Some books define different aspects and periods of your life. Ender’s Game for me represents the loneliness of childhood when you’re different. I first read this book when I was 9 years old and just starting the 4th grade. I was the only kid in my small class in the Gifted program at that point, which set me apart. I was an odd child, athletically challenged and socially inept and physically awkward. I had teeth too big for my head, ears too far large for my face, and hair that pencils could get lost in. My only true friends at this stage in my life were family members and books.

“Because never in my entire childhood did I feel like a child. I felt like a person all along―the same person that I am today.”

So when I came across Ender’s Shadow and Ender’s Game, I felt understood (by someone unrelated to me) for the first time in my life. Here were kids who were different, who were often hated and belittled by other children because of those differences, but who discovered that those differences were actually their strengths. That was an incredibly inspirational possibility that I clung to for years after reading the books for the first time, and that I still cling to when I feel like I don’t fit in somewhere.

“I think it's impossible to really understand somebody, what they want, what they believe, and not love them the way they love themselves.”

My copy of this book is tattered. Pieces of the cover are missing. The spine is broken. The pages are yellow. And I won’t trade it for a newer copy until it falls completely to pieces. I just read this book for the 8th time. I read it in elementary and junior high and high school, once every couple of years, just to remind myself that what made me weird could make me strong. I read it in college when I got married younger than most people and wasn’t living on campus, and was viewed as an odd duck by my classmates. I pushed it into the hands of kids I could see myself in when I became a teacher.

“Humanity does not ask us to be happy. It merely asks us to be brilliant on its behalf.”

I lead a small monthly bookclub for teenagers at my local library, and was thrilled when they chose Ender’s Game as October’s book. I hadn’t read it in about five years, so I was a bit nervous that it wouldn’t hold up to yet another reread, but I dove in anyway. Never have I been happier to be wrong. This book packs just as much punch for me 19 years later as it did the first time I cracked it open.

“Perhaps it's impossible to wear an identity without becoming what you pretend to be.”

Ender Wiggin is a genius, wise beyond his years, and he is thrust into impossible situation after impossible situation. Adults are the enemy, seeking to isolate him and push him to his breaking point. But he will not be broken. He adapts and overcomes, making friends in spite of the establishment’s best efforts. However, a time comes when he has to put the mission above his relationships, and has to stand alone. His empathy and drive and monstrous intellect are awe-inspiring, but are they enough to keep him from finally shattering beneath a weight too large for his small shoulders to bear?

“There are times when the world is rearranging itself, and at times like that, the right words can change the world.”

This is not a children’s book, but never in my childhood did I read another book that I related to more than this one and Ender’s Shadow. I honestly feel that this book is appropriate for all ages. If you know anyone who is different, who just can’t seem to become part of the crowd and always seems to stand out and stand alone, please find a way to get this book into their hands. Be they child or adult, this book will make them feel less alone. And if you yourself are different, if you march to the beat of your own drum even when the world demands your silence, read this book and feel understood.

Original review can be found at Booknest.

7.5/10

Mixed emotions with this but overall I enjoyed it. This is a classic sci-fi story which has divided my Goodreads friends down the middle with some loathing it, some loving it, some being indifferent but still enjoying it for what it is. I guess I fall in the latter.

It was easy enough to read with plenty going on to keep the pages turning but never did you get a sense of character development and only a few extra characters were fleshed out to be recognised beyond standard back fill. There’s little empathy going on towards Ender, he’s not very likeable and elevated to Messiah like status from pretty early on but it was enjoyable at times to see him getting out of tricky battles (even if I wasn’t sure what was going on half the time) against the odds.

Whilst not being blown away I think I will give the follow up novel a try even though the reviews on that are even more polarizing than this.

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 read this story decades back with no special expectations. Like most books I read it just happened to be lying around the house.

I read it, was hugely entertained, and went on to read three or four of the sequels.

I've heard since all manner of 'stuff' about the author but what's true and what isn't I don't know and I'm not here to critique the man behind the keyboard. All I can do is report on the contents of the book and those I can thoroughly recommend you check out.

The main character, Ender Wiggin, through whose eyes we see the story unfold, is a child genius. If you're one of those people who wants your protagonist to be an average member of society, typical of his/her age and gender... step away. Ender's story is told because he is very far from ordinary.

OSC employs a bunch of fairly standard story-telling tricks. Our hero is underestimated at every turn, he exceeds expectations, we know he's got it in him and we're frustrated by the stoopid people who just won't see it. There's a bully/nemesis and nobody else but us sees just how nasty he is... However, OSC manages to bake an irresistible cake using those standard ingredients and once he starts sprinkling on originality as well, you've just got to eat it all.

This is sci-fi, not hard sci-fi, not soft sci-fi... let's say 'chewy'. It has a slightly old school EE Doc Smith feel to it, and you expect someone to pull out a monkey-wrench whenever the computer starts smoking, but none of that worried me.

Given the date it was written there's some quite prescient stuff about the internet here, although shall we say ... optimistic ... about the ends to which it's put. Card foresaw rather more reasoned political/philosophical debate that swayed public opinion more effectively than rhetoric and demagoguery. And rather less hard core porn.

Additionally the inclusion of female and Muslim characters whilst not front and centre was fairly progressive for 1985 (not ground breaking but certainly ahead of the curve).

This is actually a book with good messages (for the time) about equality, and one which poses interesting philosophical questions about what happens when races with orthogonal thought processes come into contact, and how far one can or should go in such situations.

There definitely is some characterisation going on. We're not talking Asimov's Foundation here where brilliant ideas invite you to forgive cardboard characters. The people here are decently drawn and Ender has his own angst (involving genius psychopathic siblings) that is quite engaging. However, it's the stuff that goes on that drives the story. The war games in preparation for battling the aliens, the unfortunately named 'Buggers'. These war games and Ender's brilliance in overcoming increasingly dire odds are a major theme and I loved them.

And then there's the twist. I'll say no more on that except that I was too engaged with the story to see it coming, and when it hit me ... well, I'd give the book 6* just for that moment. It doesn't work for everyone but it did for me!

EDIT: I have now seen the film - which I enjoyed. The film skips a lot that's important to the book, but I found it entertaining.

EDIT 2: Orson Scott Card reviewed *my* first trilogy. That's pretty damn cool!

(scroll down the article)
http://www.hatrack.com/osc/reviews/ev...


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...

Do the ends justify the means?

What if the only way to save your planet from certain annihilation is to ruthlessly manipulate a young child into becoming a solder who is skilled enough to destroy billions of your enemy, to make him into a killer?

With Ender's Game, the reader gets to ponder this question. I had many thoughts as I read this story. I didn't always understand what was going on. Like Ender, I questioned where the game ended and reality began. Children in the environment of this book don't get to be kids for long at all, especially when they are genius children. Instead, they become soldiers, training day in and day out to be the best, to win, to conquer their enemies. All for the purpose of defeating the alien race that Earth views as a deadly enemy (called Buggers) in the coming war. I questioned how a six-year-old kid could even grasp this. Even a genius child. As I read, I questioned the ruthlessness of adults who would put a child through these experiences. It takes a certain personality, a particular mindset to able to justify one's actions. It's hard not to judge, but then, I'm not in the same situation. And I was grateful for that.

I just wanted Ender to have some peace and be able to just be a child. I cheered for him to find his way past the many mazes he was manipulated through. I didn't ever lose faith in him, because he had proven himself worthy of my faith. Even though I wondered what was the whole point of everything, I didn't stop believing in Ender. I was glad that Ender managed to find that light that kept him moving forward. Sometimes it was in the form of his beloved sister, Valentine, and other times, it was his fellow students, and sometimes it was the determination not to let them see him sweat. Whatever it was, this kid didn't break. I liked that about the book.

Some things didn't sit well with me as I read. I couldn't always visualize the game setup at Battle School as clearly as I would have liked. Instead of letting this throw me out of the read, I just managed to fill in the blanks around my lack of understanding and keep reading. Maybe Card meant it that way, but it was interesting how warfare became an experience that felt more like playing a video game than a face to face meeting of enemies. I wondered where that was going, but I soon found out, and I was like, "Are you serious?" I don't care much for mind games and boy was there some serious mind-screwing going on in this book. Perhaps his point was that as technology advances, warfare becomes more and more dehumanized, and it takes away the immediacy of the moral questions of taking a life, and using soldiers like pawns on a board to do so. As above expressed, the ruthless treatment of children and its effects hit me hard. They did not make for easy reading for me. On one level, I understand that a lot of psychology goes into training soldiers, and I know that some of it is necessary. I just wonder where the line gets drawn. The aspects of Peter and Valentine's political experiment left me a bit cold. I wasn't sure what Card was trying to get across here. Is the political arena just a big elaborate game in and of itself, a game that has the potential to have very disastrous and wide-reaching effects? Or was he trying to say that age is just a number? Kids aren't really kids, depending on the society and the situation that the child inhabits. Still not sure about either of those conclusions I drew. As close as I can get, anyway. Lastly, the ending got a bit strange. While I appreciated the aspects about Ender gaining an appreciation for the mind (the human-like aspects) of the Bugger civilizations, things got a bit weird and abstract when Ender's empathy with the Buggers became a philosophy that turned into a religion. It felt disconnected from the story to me, and added to a certain lack of satisfaction I felt overall. I appreciate the fact that he examined how war, differing philosophies, external differences, what have you, can separate entities in a way that if we strip down all the differences, there is a lot more alike than we think.

Final Thoughts:

Ender's Game is a well-written work of science fiction that has a lot to say about subjects that can make for hairy discussion. Subjects that I tend to avoid discussing with a ten-foot pole. War is as old as mankind. Literature is a good sounding board to explore those questions of war and humanity. Overall, I think that this novel does a good job of staying in the story and not just acting as a soundboard for the author's opinion. I am sure that others may disagree. For myself, I didn't necessarily feel that it was a preachy work. If it was, I think both sides of the questions were adequately presented in such a manner as for me to feel that this was a book with a story that had some themes that could get a reader thinking. Not mere propaganda for espousing one person's beliefs.

I liked this book a lot, but I felt the ending took it down from a five star rating for me. Also, my sense of disconnection at not quite getting some of the gaming aspects. I'm sure that others better versed in gaming or military strategy, or better read in science fiction might have visualized and understood those elements better than this reader. For what it was, this was a good book, and I can say that I gained a lot from reading it. I still have some philosophical questions running through my head now, and I feel that I have yet to make up my mind about those things, as there are always two sides to every story. So for me, that's a good experience, getting a good story and something to think about in the end.

I can't believe it took me forever to finally read this. I chose to watch the movie first last year, because I remember not having the physical copy of the book yet. That was the biggest mistake of my reading life.

The book is way better than the movie. I know you've probably seen that phrase a million times, but I can't fully express how it truly applies to Ender's Game. I can't find a flaw even if I wanted to. Everything seems perfectly written and constructed. I'm going to be honest and say that I hated most of the overhyped books here on goodreads, but the hype that Ender's Game received's truly deserving. It lived up to my expectations, and continued to amaze me as every page went by.

The character development in this novel's truly astounding. It's really nothing like the way the movie introduced the characters. Everyone in the novel felt important, and their transformation had a huge impact to me. Valentine and Peter were both very much established, and their life journey [as children] was somewhat different, but completely interesting and amusing at the same time. If I remember correctly, the movie didn't even show that both of them became Demosthenes and Locke. That part of their story truly amazed me. This novel showed that age doesn't matter in making a difference. It's all about courage and knowledge to truly express what's inside your head. I didn't like Peter in the moral sense, but his violence and bullying led to Ender and Valentine's positive growth. It may have affected Ender in a bad way, but if you look at the overall change that Ender exuded, it's remarkable how violence led to success.

I think I'm going to retract my statement that I can't think of any flaws. I believe the author was too harsh with his characters, too harsh in a sense that it became a bit unbelievable. Unbelievable in the sense that I haven't really encountered a child who was pushed too much that he's capable of murder. I'm not talking about Ender, because despite everything he did, his humanity was still very much evident. I'm talking about Bonzo. How could he be capable of murder, and not have any guilt afterwards. If the author presented a violent past, then maybe I could still digest the fact that he became evil , but he was just evil like that. He expressed his anger by raging on Ender, without a concrete and well-explained reason why. That's the only problem I could think of, and it's not even really a problem to be honest. It's so minor that the magnificence of the novel can easily cover up this personal opinion of mine. It's not even bothering me, I just wanted to present a slight flaw so that this review wouldn't seem to kiss the novel's ass so much, even though I think it is.

n  n    I've lived too long with pain. I won't know who I am without it n  n

Yeah, that line in the near end says it all. Ender's a changed man, call me sadistic, but I believe it changed him for the better. He's become the strong young man he's supposed to be.

The plot and character development were both amazing, as I repeat. It's original [for me at least] and the ending truly depicts that the author's not done trying to destroy Ender's humanity. I can't wait to read the succeeding novels, even the Shadow series after. This series made it to my top favorite, alongside A Song of Ice and Fire, or maybe I could just say that this is my favorite Sci-Fi book, and possibly series. If you really read the review, then it's obvious that I'm giving this the highest possible recommendation to anyone. The hype might make you cautious, but seriously, this is novel is amazing.

5/5 stars, truly remarkable.

Homoerotic Bildungsroman from the homophobic mind of Orson Scott Card.

Weirdly good and weirdly bad.

n  n
Following the resounding success of my Locus Quest, I faced a dilemma: which reading list to follow it up with? Variety is the spice of life, so I’ve decided to diversify and pursue six different lists simultaneously. This book falls into my HUGO WINNERS list.

This is the reading list that follows the old adage, "if it ain't broke, don't fix it". I loved reading the Locus Sci-Fi Award winners so I'm going to crack on with the Hugo winners next (but only the post-1980 winners, I'll follow up with pre-1980 another time).

According to Goodreads, n  n    Ender’s Gamen  n is the book most frequently shelved as ‘science-fiction’ or ‘sci-fi’. Since I joined Goodreads, n  n    Ender’s Gamen  n is the book most frequently recommended to me by friends here. Thank-you, Goodreads and co, for your part in introducing me to n  n    Ender’s Gamen  n; we got along splendidly.

You know that feeling: when a book just feels right? When you instantly feel at home in this world? When you get annoyed with the real world for introducing upon your time together? When you want to start all over again the moment you hit ‘the end’? When you want to bounce up and press the book into someone else’s hands so they might feel the way you do? Yeah? Like that.

Oddly enough, I started with book two in Ender’s Saga – n  Speaker for the Deadn – which is a very, very different book. I’ve given them both 5-stars, and I’m pretty excited to see what other twists and turns the story takes. I’ve seen some complaints that the series gets weaker as it goes along, but I’ve also seen people complain about the first two, and for me they were flawless victories – so I’m disregarding all naysayers and holding strong to my own opinion as shameless fanboy so far.

Quite simply, Ender is awesome. The scenario he faces is awesome. The challenges he overcomes are awesome. The climax is awesome. The fallout is awesome. The only thing that wasn’t awesome was the slightly contrived way the Hive Queen is delivered to Ender – that felt clunky – but by then there was so much momentum on this wave of awesome-sauce that I was in a forgiving mood.

I don’t have much to say in terms of critical discussion – I totally threw my analytical hat away about three pages into n  n    Ender’s Gamen  n and just immersed myself in the story. And I had a great time! It’s... extremely accessibly sci-fi. Super-smart, heart-of-gold kid, smacks down the bullies, teaches himself to be a military genius, shoulders the pressure and responsibility of the world, then saves mankind by kicking-ass at videogames. Hell yeah!

The zero-gee battle games (which make up a big part of the story) are a bit a childhood fantasy for me. It’s basically zero-gee laser-quest. It talks directly to my ten-year-old inner child. I had dodgy knees as a child and struggled to run in team games – but I dreamt about zero-gee. This next sentence should be written in giant, flashing capital letters but I’m going to exercise all the restraint I have: I want to play!

I understand that Orson Scott Card has publicly said some reprehensible things and that’s massively pissed some people off. Fine: the guy is a douche and I won’t recommend him as a dinner-party guest. But his work is superb and I would whole-heartedly recommend n  n    Ender’s Gamen  n to anyone with any interest (at all) in sci-fi!

Wiggin FTW! Woo!

After this I read: Sanctus