I didn't think I liked Sci Fi. Maybe I still don't... but you have to be on mind-altering drugs not to LOVE this book. Actually, mind-altering drugs might make it better. Hmm.

Lots of people have already read this book, and it's pretty much universally acclaimed, so it probably doesn't really need another review. So I just want to point out one thing that bothered me both times I read it (with a decade at least in-between at that):

Isn't it weird how much time the kids in this book spend naked? The entire time Ender is at Battle School, Card constantly tells us how everyone is always sleeping naked, or walking around the barracks naked or jogging naked. And one of the major fight sequences happens in the shower, and Ender's opponent strips down beforehand so they can both be naked. And did I mention that the genders are mixed (if mostly male) and the oldest character in the book is 12?

I don't know, maybe it's just me. It's not like I'm offended, it's just odd and a little distracting. Don't kids have shame in the future?

This review brought to you by the word "naked."

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Oh and I also meant to put in something about how this book predicted so much of the way politics and the internet would evolve and intertwine, and the emergence of blogging as a platform where any one person can rise to international attention through a democratized communications forum. But it didn't fit the naked theme.

I believe it was A. E. Van Vogt who said, "The Golden Age of Science Fiction is 14." And in fact, much of the classic science fiction of Heinlein and others feed into the mind of the adolescent boy. The protagonist Ender is an adolescent's dream. He is alone, alienated and feels he is not appreciated for how special he is. In other words, he is the average teen male or at least how the average teen male sees himself. Add on the naive and egotistical worldview envisioned by Heinlein and it is no wonder why adolescents flocked to the science fiction pulps of the 50s. In fact it can be argued that the teen sci-fi fan of the 50s was not all that different from the Emos of our generation.

Ender's Game was written in 1986. Yet it reads very much like a Heinlein novel and the plot and themes are not all that different from Starship Troopers. Card was smart enough to add in video games and the internet as waves of the future but the old Cold War mentality and the "might is right" philosophy hangs on. This is why this somewhat sadistic journey of a six year old child to his role as sci-fi messiah is so disturbing. Ender is brilliant but it is his habit of extreme violence that attracts him to his superiors. This appears to be a virtue in the author's eyes. In fact, one of Ender's teachers spell it out in no uncertain terms.

"The power to cause pain is the only power that matters, the power to kill and destroy, because if you can't kill then you are subject to those who can, and nothing and no one will ever save you."

Keep in mind this is being said to a six year old boy.

This is the basic theme of the novel. Violence is never extreme enough if it is for a good cause. This idea is never really questioned by Ender or anyone. At the end there is a twist that appears to lay doubt. However is not the basic moral issue in question but the assumption that sets the means to the end in play

This is why I cannot give this novel anything more than two stars. Card isn't a bad writer although some of his action scenes are muddled and he had an annoying habit of changing to third to first person and back for no reason. This was his first novel but I've never read anything else by him so I don't know if he developed any better habits. But this kind of philosophy in any story, especially one that appeals to teens, is disturbing to me. I'm OK with the idea of a young boy with talent being challenged and persecuted. It is a stalwart of YA literature. Harry Potter is an excellent example. But Card seems to preach "If you can't beat them, join them but just be a better fascist than they are."

While we are on the subject, Orson Scott Card is also known for his rather conservative social and religious viewpoints. One of those is his opposition to gay marriage and his basic revulsion to homosexuals in general. So why does his book have so many scenes of young boys running around and wrestling in the nude? Not to mention that the aliens are nicknamed "Buggers". I see some major issues here. Mr. Card, please seek help.

Recommended to me by my friends over the years, I kept on putting it out of my schedule. That was a mistake.

The book deals with politics, science, young boy's achievements and bravery.

"In the moment when I truly understand my enemy, understand him well enough to defeat him, then in that very moment I also love him. I think it's impossible to really understand somebody, what they want, what they believe, and not love them the way they love themselves."

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!!!!!

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.

Este fue el primer o segundo libro de Ciencia Ficción que leí y por cosas de la vida después de casi 20 años todavía no he continuado con la saga. Así que he vuelto a leer esta historia y las sensaciones han sido las mismas: una magnifica historia que se lee en un suspiro y que ahora puedo apreciar mucho mejor. Ahora puedo ver la influencia que ha tenido esta historia en libros de otros autores y cómo el mensaje de Scott Card sigue siendo vigente hoy en día (algo desactualizado porque hace mucha referencia al Pacto de Varsovia, la URSS, etc. Pero si cambias los nombres por algo actual sigue funcionando).

Un clásico de este género que puedes recomendar tanto a pequeños como a mayores.

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.

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.

Le doy un 3,5 porque la historia está muy bien
escrita. Es un libro juvenil y no es una ciencia ficción dura, para pensar y recapacitar dígase desde el punto de vista científico. En mi caso particular, tampoco me ha dejado con la sensación de que seré mejor escritor por haber leído este libro. De todas maneras y como acostumbro a decir, estos puntos son solo parte de mis sensaciones sobre mi “viaje” a lo largo de su historia.
Es fácil de leer y el trasfondo se centra principalmente en las características y particularidades tácticas y estratégicas de los videojuegos. Estuve a punto de dejarlo a un lado, pero insistí, como deber hacerse, y te has gastado el dinero en ello

I first read Ender's Game the same year it was published; I was a marginally successful junior in a US Service Academy at the time, and well on my way to forming my current negative opinion about how such works. What ever other critiques readers might have about Card's story here, IMHO he nailed the military training environment, complete with psychological manipulation and Machiavellian intrigue. I am not surprised to hear rumors that Ender's Game might even be promoted by the military training establishment. Even before this book was published, my training cadre made no secret of how they were using 'significant emotional events' to reshape our personalities to conform to the expected standard ... Much like Graft attempts to manipulate encounters for Ender at the Battle School. This was made slightly more difficult after hazing became illegal; it didn't actually eliminate it, just moved it into the shadows. Needless to say, my first encounter with the book evoked a very strong affinity with the protagonist. First cut gets 5 stars.

Another significant concept Card presented in the story was that such a system inevitably fails ... As in it doesn't predictably (limited correlation) create your top military commanders during war time and can in fact hinder their development. Unfortunately I don't believe Card's solution is very realistic. Throwing away the rulebook in order to foster social isolation and constant exposure to violence at an early age does not create individuals who are strong, independent leaders ... It creates sociopaths. Fortunately Card seems to have a knack for knowing when he may have pushed too hard, as Ender immediately becomes overwhelmed with angst about his actions. About the only benefit I get from these rather irritating episodes is an opportunity to expose ethical talking points (which I took advantage of when I re-read the book with my preteen). Several critics seem to believe that they know which side Card comes down on these issues (e.g. Is Xenocide always evil? ... Is it ever necessary?) ... Strangely enough, there is little unanimity among them (I actually think Card leaves it up in the air for each reader to think about). There are other areas in the story that I could pick apart, in fact an army of critics have already done so (and to some extent they have valid points); however, I still find the over all story to be an excellent starting point for talking about how we go about determining ethical behavior, both within our society and in response to a potential foreign encounter.

I decided to reread Ender’s Game before tackling the rest of the series. My feelings about it are more complicated than on my first reading. There’s some religious stereotyping and homophobia that haven’t aged well at all. And there’s not just an absence of women in the story. Women are actively disrespected by the men, who explain their almost total lack of representation by stating “too many centuries of evolution are working against them.” Gross.

Ender Wiggin, however, remains a fascinating character. His calculated use of violence—winning one fight to prevent all other fights—is both logical and chilling. He is believable as a potential Napoleon, even if his consistent positioning as a form of Goldilocks between his hyper-violent brother Peter and his pacifist sister Valentine is a bit too convenient.

The story, moreover, remains a really interesting exploration of certain philosophies, as well as interpersonal and military strategies:

There is no teacher but the enemy. No one but the enemy will tell you what the enemy is going to do. No one but the enemy will ever teach you how to destroy and conquer. Only the enemy shows you where you are weak. Only the enemy tells you where he is strong.

In the moment when I truly understand my enemy, understand him well enough to defeat him, then in that very moment I also love him. I think it’s impossible to really understand somebody, what they want, what they believe, and not love them the way they love themselves. And then, in that very moment when I love them.... I destroy them.

There is quite a bit of subtle foreshadowing that is apparent on a reread: “The adults are the enemy, not the other armies. They do not tell us the truth.” Still, even knowing the ending does not dilute the story’s power, or its anti-war message.

Ender’s Game is not a perfect book, but even if some of its views are regressive, many are not. Above all, it is an entertaining read, for young and old. Highly recommended.

P.S. When asked the difference between science fiction and fantasy, Mr. Card once said you can forget all the other explanations you hear. The difference is “science fiction has rivets; fantasy has trees.” A perfect explanation that I wanted to preserve for posterity, and this review was as good a place as any.

Buddy read with Meg (2024).