Ender's Game

 

Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card

Reviewed by Gerti 

My husband read Orson Scott Card’s classic science fiction novel “Ender’s Game” decades ago, and my son a few years ago before the movie of the same name came out. They were both able to scoff when we watched the movie together about how the story was handled by the filmmakers. And while I don’t always trust their taste in literature since it runs more toward science fiction than mine, they were right when it comes to this book. “Ender’s Game” is amazing.

The storyline is dramatic and suspenseful, with a likeable main character, Andrew “Ender” Wiggin, who even though he is not even 10 at the book’s beginning, is nonetheless frightening in his understanding of the world and other people. He is a “Third” child in a world where families are not allowed to have that many children. He has older siblings named Peter and Valentine, and while Peter is a sadist, sister Valentine has always come to Ender’s aid. This is why Ender feels that someone older and wiser will always come to his aid as he goes through his military training, but we learn later that that is not the case.

I don’t want to ruin the plot for you, but let’s just say that Ender kills people. There are two instances where Ender is being bullied by one child in particular, and that child also has a pack of followers. Ender realizes that if he doesn’t decisively win a fight, the bullying will continue and only get worse. So he cleverly defeats his older boy bullies. But what he doesn’t realize until the novel’s end is that he in fact kills those boys, not as Peter would out of cruelty, but out of necessity, as Ender sees it. And while adults are watching, the other boys could just have easily have killed Ender, and no one would have come to his aid.

In incidents like those, Ender proves his strategic intelligence. He is seen as the last hope for humans in a war against alien creatures called “buggers”. He believes he is a student at Battle School, preparing for the coming war against them. He doesn’t realize till the end that each simulation he goes through, he is actually fighting battles against these telepathic creatures. I did, perhaps because I had already seen the movie, but there were enough clues left by the author that Ender has a special connection with the computers at the academy. He was so extraordinary when playing a video game on the school’s machines that his human handlers had not designed the levels on which he was playing.

This book won the Hugo & Nebula awards for writers of science fiction, and the fights between Ender and the other boys, as well as the battle simulations in the special zero gravity rooms, are brilliantly written, so clear and precise in their language that visualizing them was easy even for someone who prefers Regency Romances like myself. My only critique of the book, and apparently it is a common one, is that Ender would be too young to do all this, starting at age 6. I could be wrong, however, as my teenaged son disagrees, and he probably remembers more clearly how young boys think since he’s closer to that age.