In the not too distant future, Earth desperately needs help, hideous aliens called disparagingly "buggers" by the inhabitants...(they do look like bugs but with brains ) on the third planet of the Solar System because we were twice attacked brutally, killing countless from an unknown region of the galaxy...another will probably be fatal unless a Caesar, Alexander or Napoleon can be found, however this type of leader is hard to discover. So the International Fleet recruits children for harsh training on the immense orbiting space station but since some are as young as six this seems sick and it is. Andrew "Ender" Wiggin 6, from a trio of brilliant siblings, gentle sister Valentine 8, and vicious Peter 10, the surprise, the parents John and Theresa are a nondescript American couple, maybe, and again rather ordinary in appearance. This in the age of Starships, faster-than-light travel, requiring captains and admirals, however the older ones though unusually intelligent kids have already been washed out for obvious reasons. Treated like Spartans boys ( a few girls) from ancient Greece but much worse, Ender feels the pain of a lonely existence above the world even hated by the other jealous children because his higher abilities can't be hidden from them. Weightless in parts of the structure for training purposes in the Battle School, still different rooms have gravity because of the spinning wheel. At first fun games but quickly becomes drudgery, the tedious exercises. Colonel Graff in charge here apparently likes to inflict pain, is merciless to everyone and Ender in particular. Major Anderson second-in-command wants to moderate his superior officer but is sadly unsuccessful .The boy misses his sister the only person he really loves , his older scary brother hates him and the feeling is mutual. Year after year with no end in sight the child grows older but happiness will never arrive just suffering and his few friends adroit Alai, little Bean, Petras, very able and only girl in his army, seems an illusion... Day by day he becomes weaker in spirit... hope , a word for others to believe but Ender must believe otherwise ... The struggles will be great the rewards might be too. The novel is quite original in its plot and the main character gives a unique insight into the adolescent mind, though young he is quite perceptive. A sci-fi novel for adults.

I reread Ender’s Game in preparation for writing an Essay to be included in an upcoming collection of Ender Essays. Just wanted to say that the book is as compelling and as brilliant as when I first read it twenty years ago!

Authors, publicists, hi! Since this is the review that has resulted in by far and away the most messages saying "I see you liked Ender's Game - want to try this?", let's take a moment to clarify. I would not like to try this. Some people may love to hear about such things; I am not one of those people, so you're best off saving your time.

I wish you, your friend, your client, and your book, all the best, but if I get any more of those messages I'll know for sure they're spam and react accordingly.

-----

I lent this book to a student of mine. Finally, he has finished reading this, and for the last 45 minutes of our lesson last night we discussed it.

Oh, you guys, if you're bookish sorts, you would just have loved this lesson we had last night. So we spent the first 45 minutes finishing off discussing the gothic elements in Poe's "The Raven" and Browning's "My Last Duchess", and then did a complete about-face and spent the last half in animated discussion over Ender's Game. He didn't love it as much as I loved it, but I have never had such an animated, interesting discussion with a teenager about sci-fi before.

We talked about good and evil, and what counts as torture, and whether you can be as Machiavellian about it as Colonel Graff. We talked about leadership - Ender's and other people's - and how godawful a character Mazer Rackham was. We talked about growing up in a pressurised environment, and the things you get a lot of, and the things you miss. We talked about John Locke, and the Warsaw Pact, and how communism works, and the historical context in which Orson Scott Card was writing.

We talked about how knowing about the writer of a book can cause you to see the events in it differently, about whether Ender is really inclusive and focused on community, or really exclusive and focused on being special and different and better than people. I asked him whether you'd be able to see those different versions of the story anyway, and he said maybe you would and maybe you wouldn't, if you didn't know where to look.

We discussed the structure, how he hadn't been expecting to see Peter and Valentine after the beginning, and how that's a really interesting way to put the rest of the events in context, to stop them being just sterile kids' games on an anonymous spaceship. We disagreed, in fact, in some ways, about the effectiveness of the structure - where I thought the transition from Battle School to Command School ramped up the tension, he thought the tension dissipated because we were just seeing the same events over again. He liked the Peter and Valentine bits best; I liked them, but preferred to be inside Ender's head. He found the inside of Ender's head comparatively boring.

And it was fantastic. He just opened up. He read quite a different book to me, which was fascinating. We'll make a reader of him yet. I teach for this, I swear.

OSC is still a terrible human being, but that's twice now I've got a whole lot out of Ender - once on my own, and once in company. As I mentioned before, Stargate Kid is on to To Kill a Mockingbird now, and I can't WAIT.


PREVIOUSLY:
I bought it second hand, meaning to use it as an introduction to reading for a kid who apparently likes his sci-fi. I read it in three days, in huge breathless gulps.

I've had such trouble reading lately - lack of time, enthusiasm, the stars aligning. Is this really worth five stars? I can't tell, but I do know that it's the first thing I've read compulsively since the beginning of the year. The first thing I've been unable to put down, that's followed me round.

I can't believe it was written by someone like Orson Scott Card. Did he not read back his own writing to himself? I genuinely don't understand.

"This game tells filthy lies."

I first learned about Ender's Game about a year and a half ago, seeing it mentioned in Adam Roberts's history of SF. A few months later, I chanced upon the movie on tv and avidly watched it. Not too long ago, I finally got around to buying the book, but didn't read it immediately. Exactly five days ago, I found that the movie was being broadcast again, and I, of course, watched it again. I started reading the book the next day, and finished it yesterday.

In a sense, it's awfully appropriate that I've been toying with this story, stringing it along, as much as this story has been playing with me. Ender's Game is, in effect, a story about manipulation, about tricks and illusions, impersonation and simulation. After reading the book, I'd still watch the movie with great pleasure (and I did indeed watch it again just a while ago: the same network was rescreening it this afternoon, and once again I found out totally by chance. Can only be fate). I think it's a great action movie, really; but it's not as good as a science fiction movie. Following Ender through Battle School and then Command School was engaging and heart-wrenching in a way I didn't expect. It's been a long time since I've cared for a character so deeply. But you know what the real climax of the novel is? It's when Ender understands--really understands, moving beyond simple theoretical knowledge--that the gruesome battle with the alien species called the "buggers" (later on in the series "Formics") springs from the simple, hardly conceivable fact that they think in a radically different way with respect to humans. In a sense, this story begins only when it ends, when this conceptual and ethical chasm starts yawning beneath the readers' feet. I regret that I'll never be able to put into words the complexity and the painful beauty of this book, or explain how the careful plotting, the matryoshka-like structure of its progress, contributes to its depth of meaning.

Or maybe I don't. Maybe, at its truest, this book transcends its verbal nature and communicates like the Formics do: without words and without delay, as if the book itself was thinking itself into existence through your thoughts. So I'd better say nothing more now.

But. I have a quick note to share with you with regard to the author's well-known homophobia. All you need to know is that it doesn't have any place in this novel, which is simply as heart-wrenchingly, luminously humane as any piece of literature can be. That being said, decide for yourself.

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

While I enjoyed Ender’s Game quite a bit (I think I’ve read it 3 times now), I first read it after reading Ender’s Shadow. This means I already had a take on how things went down at Battle School (and that was from Bean’s rather than Ender’s perspective). That said, I wholeheartedly recommend Ender’s Game not because I think it’s better than Ender’s Shadow (I don’t), but because Ender’s Saga is fantastic (especially the next two books in the series, Speaker for the Dead and Xenocide). The premise of Ender’s Game is interesting (training the brightest minds to fight the war against mankind’s greatest enemy); however, it’s just as interesting to look at the social and cultural changes on Earth. For that, we have the perspective of Ender’s two siblings, Peter and Valentine. I think they are sometimes overlooked, but they are great characters. Overall, I found Ender’s Game to be a fun and entertaining read!

Ender's Game (The Ender Quintet #1), Orson Scott Card

Ender's Game is a 1985 military science fiction novel by American author Orson Scott Card. Set at an unspecified date in Earth's future, the novel presents an imperiled mankind after two conflicts with the Formics, an insectoid alien species which they dub the "buggers".

In preparation for an anticipated third invasion, children, including the novel's protagonist, Ender Wiggin, are trained from a very young age through increasingly difficult games including some in zero gravity, where Ender's tactical genius is revealed.

تاریخ نخستین خوانش: سی ام ماه ژوئن سال 2014میلادی

عنوان: بازی اندر (اِندِرز گیم) - کتاب یک از پرونده پنجگانه؛ نویسنده: اورسن اسکات کارد؛ مترجم: پیمان اسماعیلیان خامنه؛ تهران، نشر قطره، 1390، در453ص؛ شابک 9786001192845؛ موضوع: داستانهای نویسندگان ایالات متحده آمریکا - سده 20م

پس از دوبار یورش بیگانگان، به کره ی زمین؛ که نژاد بشر را، تا آستانه ی نابودی پیش می‌برند، حکومت جهانی، برای تضمین پیروزی نوع بشر در جنگ بعدی، و حفظ یکپارچگی سیاره؛ دست به گزینش و پرورش نوابغ نظامی می‌زند؛ و سپس آنها را در نبردهایی شبیه‌ سازی شده، آموزش می‌دهد؛ تا هنر جنگ را در ذهن نوپا، و تشنه ی دانایی خویش نهادینه کنند؛ نخست آموزش‌ها جنبه «بازی» دارد...؛‏ «اندرو ویگین» حتی میان نوابغ دستچین‌ شده نیز، گل سرسبد، و برتر از برترین‌هاست، ایشان برنده ی همه ی بازیها، و برخلاف خواهر مهرورز خویش «ولنتاین»، و برادر دگرآزارش «پیتر»، دارای تمام شرایط لازم و کافی، برای انجام ماموریت مورد نظر است؛‏ درعین حال او چنان باهوش است، که می‌داند وقت رو به پایان است؛ ولی آیا بقدر کافی باهوش است تا زمین را نجات دهد؟ ...؛

تاریخ بهنگام رسانی 15/09/1399هجری خورشیدی؛ 22/06/1400هجری خورشیدی؛ ا. شربیانی

He disfrutado muchísimo con esta lectura.

Ender se ha convertido en uno de mis personajes favoritos. Sufrí mucho al principio por lo mal que lo trataban, no veo ninguna justificación a eso.
Toda la parte de la sala de batallas, el juego del Gigante y los juegos en Eros me han entretenido mucho. Nunca habría pensado que me lo pasase tan bien leyendo cosas así.

A pesar de que esperaba una gran batalla no me ha decepcionado lo que ha pasado. Ha sido una sorpresa.

Y al final todo ha acabado bien. No me ha gustado que Peter se saliese con la suya, aunque al final lo hiciese bien. Me alegro de que Ender y Valentine acabasen juntos y casi en paz, creo que se lo merecían. Aunque la saga sigue, asique a saber lo que pasará...

Esperaré un poco para seguir con la saga porque no quiero que se me vaya el buen sabor de boca que me ha dejado este libro.

2.5 Stars

I had no intention of picking up Ender’s Game for two reasons – One, I came to know about this book only recently when I happened to see a mini-trailer of the movie and saw a little kid saving Earth, which put me off despite being okay with Harry Potter, really. Two, OSC came into focus by his conservative views on marriage and sexual orientation followed by an outcry demanding to ban EG. But I grew heavily curious if his views explicitly shaped his most famous work, and had to read it.

Honestly, I found the work immensely unbelievable if I kept in mind the fact that the protagonist Ender was between 6 and 10 years old throughout the work. It seemed too implausible for a young mind to attain adulthood so easily, even if he was gifted. Being sharp, intelligent, exceedingly adaptive and perceptive is one thing – and gaining a maturity that is accumulated by years of exposure to experience and an ever-widening world is quite another thing. By half the novel, I was so annoyed I couldn’t enjoy it. But once I stopped forcing myself to see him as a kid and let myself assign him an age I thought was believable to me (mid-late teens in the first half of the book and mid-late twenties in the latter half), I found myself curiously enjoying the story.

Now, this is an interesting story, despite being so clichéd and possessing hardly any novelty. The writing is well-paced, the twists are not forced, and although I didn’t relate myself to any of the characters, it is obvious it would touch some nerve with some bright kids going through that alienation. Also, it is not a literary kind of story, though it had immense potential to be a really good bildungsroman. It is a plain story in plain words, easy on the mind, and possibly more popular than it is worth because it touches a certain group of people not before adequately represented in fiction.

As a military SF work, it is curious and inadequate – it is fit neither for young children, nor for adults – it contains a bit of violence, nearly negligible sexual explicitness and young protagonists, but it is too complex as a piece of psychological work for little kids to understand. And kids’ psychology is the focal point of this novel. I’d rather 6 year olds watch Doraemon/Micky-Minnie-Donald-Scrooge-Tom&Jerry cartoons, even though I don’t find all of them beyond reproach from certain perspectives. For adults, it is too simplistic a piece of fiction to be enjoyable. Perhaps, kids in mid-late teens might appreciate it if they can relate to it and have nowhere else to turn to.

I had hoped for some beautiful observations on growing up, some touching instances of friendship-formation, of emerging from childhood into adolescence in a world where an innocent kid had to grow up too fast – what it meant to be a child, what it would be to lose that innocence and to be flung in a world that afforded no love, no care, no warmth. But, well, OSC misses the mark completely.

n  Can we know the dancer from the dance?n

I’ve been meaning to review this book as objectively as possible – and I wanted to read it precisely because I wanted to see if I could know the dancer from the dance, OSC from EG. I was pretty sure I would be able to pick out some insinuations about his conservative, inflammatory views on homosexuality. Surprisingly, I didn’t.

I did see blatant, overt sexism that could have been easily rendered logical, given its genre of SF. Now, this very sentence in the beginning caught me off-guard, and alerted me to further potential signs of sexism.

n  "A few girls. They often don't pass the tests to get in. Too many centuries of evolution are working against them. None of the will be like Valentine, anyway."n

Now, despite my sincere wishes to see more women, more non-Whites, non-Western, non-strictly-heterosexual settings in SF, I’m quite okay with Men, Whites and Western, Heterosexuals (MWWH now onward) settings as well. The beauty of SF is that with a pseudo-scientific explanation, it is very easy to incorporate strictly MWWH without being offensive to the non-MWWH categories. What bothered me here was that there were no logical explanations for the new world. Or whatever they are, they do not amount to much.

Only two women of consequence are present here – Valentine (Ender’s sister, conceived in order to induct her into the army, but rejected because she was too soft, too conciliatory, and therefore, though it is not explicitly stated, too feminine. Peter, their eldest sibling with his unruly nature only acts as a foil to Valentine and a double assertion of this feminine/manly dichotomy. And another girl is the one with Ender who helps him save the world.

About the quote I cited about ‘few girls passing the tests’, no further explanation is given. What kind of evolutionary process? OSC doesn’t bother to explain, while he spends endless pages of explanations on some things that really didn’t matter to the story at all.

Possibly the only strong female character in the story is the co-fighter with Ender and the sole girl in the BattleSchool, and she plays second-fiddle to Ender (okay, I know she is a minor character), but she is also the only character to fail at the most critical juncture. Alai, the only non-White (presumably African) and non-Christian character too has no role beyond helping Ender, though he is definitely portrayed better than I expected.

Now, I have issues with it because I saw in the HP movies how these obstacles were overcome and could have been done so here too – HP and other characters were kids, but were better specimens of bildungsroman. Hermoine and Ron were as well-rounded, individual characters as Harry himself, and no less important. Harry alone did not defeat Voldemort – the entire wizard world did it with him. Harry is not infallible. Nor are others. And HP, despite having few female characters actively taking part in the series, is far from sexist.

So because it can be done, I found it immensely irritating it wasn’t done. I’m pretty convinced that OSC’s personal beliefs have a lot to do with this portrayal, which comes across to me as a typical White Male Fantasy. His Mormon neo-conservative views might have had a significant bearing on his characters that are dangerously impressionable on young minds. As for the recent furor over his anti-homosexuality views, I could detect no such instances of it in the book, nothing even faintly propaganda-type. Except for the complete erasure of sexuality in a school full of teens.

I was dithering between 2 and 3 stars – it was lucid, well-paced, but ordinary. It is a teenage White Male fantasy with clear anti-Russian leanings. As an SF work, the part about the games is well-delineated, imaginative, but at some critical junctures, scientific explanations are missing. The world-building is haphazard, sloppy, and yet it is overall readable. Or maybe I found it so because I was just done with something nastily heavy as Spivak and needed a real no-brainer controversial lucid book.

I fail to understand how this deeply flawed piece won the Nebula. Hugos, I don’t pay much attention to, because they are voted on by fans. But I’m increasingly being disappointed by some inclusions in Nebula, especially those in the post-1980s.

But ‘nuff said, it was annoying enough not to make me reach for his other books. Solely based on the (de)merits of this one, rather than OSC’s personal whims. Because if the dancer cannot be separated from the dance, I cannot read/enjoy at least a quarter of the wonderful books I’ve read. Unless an author seeps noticeably into his works, there’s no point in doing otherwise. The author must remain in the back of the mind, and not completely obliterated. S/he must be brought to the fore whenever it is necessary and appropriate to do so. But when the author and the work are unrelated, it is best to keep them separate.

I know it's a classic of SF. Didn't work for me. Call me heretic.

If Ender's Game were a piece of modern SF, the cries of "Gary Sue" would be heard all the way across the cosmos. Ender is a hyper-intelligent child, who begins the story as a much reviled outsider, but soon has his peers (often boys much older) eating from his palm, becoming a master battle tactician who single-handedly saves the entire human race from destruction.

This is nerdboy fantasy 101. This is a book for every little boy who got beat up by the jocks, picked on because he was in the chess club, who sat alone in his room with a nose full of snot and his little fists clenched white, vowing one day he would "show them all". And hell, I was that little kid with the face full of snot, so I understand the niche for a book like this. But creating an ultra-child who's simply flawless and perfect at everything, who won without really trying - it just felt plastic and flat. Tell a story about a normal kid who used what little he had to win out? Yeah, that'll work. This? Not so much.

I found Ender to be a singularly unbelievable and unsympathetic character. He spoke like a 30 year old man, even when he was 6. For me, there was no sense of life or light in Ender or his sister (who also speaks like a 30 year old man). The climax of the book, due to the nature of the much-lauded 'twist', just drifts into view and fades out again. In order to pull off his switcheroo, Card keeps readers in the dark about the stakes in play, and with no stakes, I found it hard to care. I was looking at the amount of pages left in the book, thinking "All these simulations are well and good, but this climax better show up soon." And lo and behold, the simulations were the climax, and the MC and the reader just went through the battle to save humanity without even knowing it. The end.

I guess what I'm ultimately saying is, if you want me to be frightened about the gun to my head, you have to let me know it's there.

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!

Full video review here: https://youtu.be/PkA1HaceWqA

Every bit as good as the reputation it has received over the years. While it doesn't quite come close to knocking Dune out of the top spot of my favorite science-fiction novels, it has set up a residence in the same town. Highly recommended, for all ages.

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.