Ender's Game - Orson Scott Card

   1985; 324 pages. Book One of the “Ender’s Game” series.  New Author? : Yes.  Genre : Dystopian Fiction; Military Sci-Fi.  Laurels : Nebula Award – Best Novel (1985); Hugo Award – Best Novel (1986); NY Times Bestseller – Mass Market Paperback (2013); Publishers Weekly Bestselling Science Fiction Novel (2012); and a bunch of readers polls.  Overall Rating : 8*/10.

    You could call it a “Goldilocks” situation.

    All of the kids in the family showed promise.  The military tested the oldest son first, Peter.  He had talent, but unfortunately was pathologically too mean.  He’d kill too many people, or they'd kill him, before he could be fully trained to be a leader.

    So next they tested the middle child, Valentine.  She was equal in talent, but simply too nice.  She’d be friends with everyone else in a group, and we all know a good commander can't be pals with the soldiers under him/her.

    In desperation, they tested the youngest son, Andrew.  Just six years old, he’s a little young to be giving orders to a fleet of starships, while the fate of humankind rides on his performance.  Yet all the monitoring shows that he’s their best choice – a happy medium between the psychological profiles of his two older siblings.  Not too mean; not too nice; he’s just right.

    It’s a pity then, that in order to mold him into the perfect leader, the military's going to have to crush him, both mentally and emotionally.

What’s To Like...

    Ender’s Game is an insanely popular sci-fi book from the mid-1980’s.  It garnered all sorts of awards when it came (some are listed above in the header), then did it all over again in 2013 when the movie came out.

    The book chronicles the life of Andrew Ender from age 6 to 20, as he undergoes grueling military training.  The main plotline is, of course, saving the universe, but Orson Scott Card also offers some interesting insight about bullying, screwing with people’s minds, problem-solving, leadership qualities, the importance of family, and the risks involved in any “first contact” scenario.

    The majority of the book involves Ender playing war games, at first on a computer, and then for an extended time excelling in what I can only describe as “Laser Tag in Zero Gravity”.  This may seem ho-hum, but it was cutting-edge technology back in the 1980’s.  I’ve played Laser Tag once or twice, and personally, I think it would be a fascinating endeavor to try it in a weightless atmosphere.

    Ender’s Game is a quick read, but not an easy one, due mainly to all the tactics that Ender has to come up with for his team to keep winning against increasingly stacked odds.  There are 15 chapters covering 324 pages, plus a 26-page (!) introduction by the author, which I skipped.  Each chapter starts with a dialogue by the military manipulators, discussing how they’re molding and warping Ender’s fragile mindset.  There is some cussing, which surprised me, but no sex, booze, or drugs.  I liked the childhood game of “Buggers & Astronauts”; it reminded me of a similar game we played as kids reenacting the battle of the Alamo.  For the record, I always chose to play on the “Mexican” side.

    The recruitment portion of the story reminds me of John Scalzi’s fantastic novel, Old Man’s War, which is reviewed here, except here kids are pressed into service, whereas Scalzi's story used geezers.  I also liked the “Locke/Demosthenes” thread; it is eerily applicable to our present-day problem with Talking Heads on the internet using Fake News to fleece uninformed listeners.

    A word to the wise – if you find the storyline starts to drag because game-playing is not your shtick, stick it out.  The ending has a couple of twists that are, in a word, fantastic.  The book is both a standalone story and a set-up for the rest of the series.  I was completely unaware that this was anything more than a one-and-done story.

Kewlest New Word ...

Philotic (adj.) : concerning the interconnection of all sentient beings in the universe.  (a made-up word in the book)

Others : Hegemony (n.)

Excerpts...

    “The sister is our weak link.  He really loves her.”

    “I know.  She can undo it all, from the start.  He won’t want to leave her.”

    “So, what are you going to do?”

    “Persuade him that he wants to come with us more than he wants to stay with her.”

    “How will you do that?”

    “I’ll lie to him.”

    “And if that doesn’t work?”

    “Then I’ll tell the truth.  We’re allowed to do that in emergencies.”  (pg. 16)

    “This isn’t just a matter of translating from one language to another.  They don’t have a language at all.  We used every means we could think of to communicate with them, but they don’t even have the machinery to know we’re signaling.  And maybe they’ve been trying to think to us, and they can’t understand why we don’t respond.”

    “So the whole war is because we can’t talk to each other.”

    “If the other fellow can’t tell you his story, you can never be sure he isn’t trying to kill you.”  (pg. 253)

 “Me? I’m nothing.  I’m a fart in the air conditioning.  I’m always there, but most of the time nobody knows it.”  (pg.  42)

    I had a couple quibbles.  First, it is a fact that Orson Scott Card is a Mormon, and so I was not totally shocked to see a little bit of his religion sneaking into the storyline, along with a couple other biblical quotes.  I think I counted three of these little spiritual plugs and they were all awkward fits.  But there were none after about page 100, so maybe he got it out of his system.  Because, let's face it, if you’re going to inject religion into your science fiction story, the proper course is to invent one.

    Second, is anyone else tired of the baddies in sci-fi novels always being either robotic or insectoid?  I recognize this is so sensitive young minds don’t get too upset about we noble humans splattering extraterrestrial innards all over the universe.  But just once, I’d like to see Earthlings have to mow down an invading army of ruthless and murderous Ewoks.

    Finally, and this is more of a bit of advice than a quibble: I enjoyed Ender’s Game a lot more once I started reading it as a piece of Dystopian Fiction.  As a Sci-Fi novel, the book is rather blah.  We already have most of the technology presented in the book, so there simply isn’t much fiction to be entertained by.

    But as an examination of a dystopian world, the book shines.  There are strong deterrents for anyone wanting to have more than two kids, and Ender suffers from being a "third".  The government can insert “monitors” into the heads of small children to see if they have qualities befitting a military leader.  And while they can’t unilaterally take a promising kid away from the parents, they are permitted to give the tyke a sales pitch about leaving the family for a multi-year education at Battle School, where they can totally mess up his psyche.  I was fascinated by all this.

    8 Stars.  I found Ender’s Game to be much more akin to Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World than to H.G. Wells’s War Of The Worlds.  For me, that’s a huge plus.  And I never did figure out why the protagonist’s name changed from Andrew Ender to Ender Wiggin when he entered Battle School.  Perhaps it was too late at night when I read that part.