Ender’s Game.
Finished reading Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card today. This is my second time reading this book – I read the rest of the series more or less as they came out the first time around, but not sure if i’ll get to that this time. But wanted to reread this again as I found a short story ‘prequel’ (Mazer In Prison) recently in the Federations anthology and reminded me what a good book this is.
it’s also kind of funny because if you walk around with this book in your hand (was reading it on the bus yesterday afternoon) people will always speak up and say what a good book it is – even though those speaking don’t usually look like sci-fi fans – last time it was some old women touting it when they saw me in downtown Salt Lake City carrying the book (where I lived then). Kinda weird.
The book holds up well on a second read – despite being a person who likes to reread books, lately I have noticed on re-reads things I didn’t earlier (Heinlein’s Friday being a noteworthy example – far too many descriptions of eating huge meals in far too much detail – last time I checked, this was sci-fi, not Food Network?) that lower the book’s interest for me somewhat. Here, not so. While I still sometimes get annoyed about the ‘kids language’ used from time to time in the book – it is a book about a little kid being turned into a star-fleet commanding killer, after all – otherwise the writing works well at getting inside Ender’s head as well as a few key other players around him (not all, to be sure – but that’s what at least some of the later books try to do). I think his inner struggle between what he knows they are doing to him vs. how he regrets a lot of it by the end of the book could have been made stronger, but again, he’s a little kid and likely couldn’t have completely understood it at that stage anyway.
And while this book is about space opera to a degree – it’s much, much more about the way humans use one another to achieve their own ends (for better or worse, in positive, neutral or negative ways). Peter, Ender’s older brother, certainly represents both ends of the spectrum on this point, depending how you look at him and what part of the book you are reading. And how you look at him through Ender’s perspective.
In a nutshell, Ender is a gifted child who takes many of the qualities of his older (also gifted) brother and is trained to maximize them for the purposes of fighting an interstellar war – essentially commanding the fleet by remote control. The book mostly covers his experiences and development in Battle School and how he is trained ultimately to think he can only rely on himself, while the rest of humanity may have to ultimately rely on him for survival. His sister enters the scene early on, then later, acting somewhat as his conscience as his humanity is in many ways removed by his military training over time.
Highly recommended, if you like military-style sci-fi. Certainly influential in its own way, but harder to duplicate (IMHO) than say, Starship Troopers, which lately seems to have spawned many series of military sci-fi on its own (or taken together with The Forever War). I think it’s fairly certain that any book post-Ender that tries to have children fighting remote-control space battles, coupled with themes of ‘growing up too soon’ or ‘lost/never had a childhood’ – would be deemed derivative and a copy fairly soon after it appeared.
candybowl