Casual Cogitations

How long has it been since I read Ender's Game? Just barely a few months ago but for the life of me, I still cant shake off the impression the book left me. Well how can I ever? This book is held accountable for pulling me out of this cut-and-dried universe and throwing me into the dazzling, highly intelligent and challenging world of science-fiction.

Written by Orson Scott Card, Ender's Game is a novel of extraordinary power that is among the very best the genre has ever produced. Lauded with both the Hugo and Nebula awards, it tells the story of genius child Andrew "Ender" Wiggin who is reared to be the military savior of humanity. At the tender age of six, he is whisked off to battle school where warfighters tutor him in the lonely job of commanding Earth's fleet against the alien "buggers" who twice attacked earth.

The novel follows Ender as he navigates the puzzling, cruel and unfair world created by the Battle School teachers and the other children to complete his military training and assume the responsibility he has been shaped for, by learning to out-bully his enemies, outsmart his teachers, and think like the aliens he is being raised to kill.

Ender's Game takes a familiar theme from war fiction — war as seen through the eyes of a child, and reframes it by making the child the war's central figure. It is a tale defined by a sense of both tragic inevitability and cold irony. It is not merely about the loss of innocence, as so many stories are with children at their center. It is about innocence systematically deceived and purposefully destroyed in the fanatical pursuit of a misguided higher ideal.

Ender’s Game is science fiction with a tough, enjoyable core of psychology and ethical dilemmas. The most intriguing aspect of this novel is not the clichéd concept - brilliant child is selected by authority figures and grows up to save the world - but the startling tweaks in that concept and the details through which Orson Scott Card presents Ender’s isolation, his inner turmoil, and the extremes to which a young boy is forced in the name of what is “good.”

A hardcore sci-fi war and gravity-free mock training battles will appeal to some readers, and the psychological dilemmas and mental puzzles will appeal to others. However, it is Ender’s personal journey, and that of his siblings back on Earth and his cohort of other Battle School students, that will fascinate readers whether or not they are fans of science fiction.

Ender's Game works from its first page to its last. For one thing, it's the character study of a young boy whose childhood is being denied him by those who are in fact putting on a show of catering to it. The battle games are just that, games, but the consequences are real in terms of how they effect real lives. Ender's flawless leadership record — his gift for unconventional thinking means he never once loses, even when the odds are absurdly stacked against him and his platoon — earns him enemies among lesser, jealous commanders, and an actual attempt on his life is made. When Ender successfully defends himself against one (using the same skills at thinking on his feet that have made him victorious in the Battle Room), the blinders come off. This world of children's games is in fact one that deals in the grim realities of life and death.

But are the blinders off all the way? The I.F. is clear about their agenda: fight the buggers. What they aren't clear about are their methods. The more Ender advances, the more it becomes clear the Battle School's games have no rules at all, or none that can't be changed completely. Ender's Game examines the ethics of power and the role sheer manipulation can play in forming the cultural and political landscape people live in. Both in the Battle School, and in an interesting subplot where Ender's siblings Peter and Valentine (both of whom are as much prodigies as he is in their own way) compose for their own amusement pseudonymous political essays on the web that end up having more influence worldwide than they could've dreamed of, Card explores how easily and unwittingly people can find themselves played. And even when you are aware of it, how difficult it can be to do anything about it. And this all comes to a head in the book's sucker-punch of a climax.

Ender's Game is no didactic anti-war tract. It wouldn't be, really, as Card is a proud conservative. If the book has any message to deliver about war, it does so through the time-honored tradition of fine storytelling, and it's this: It's no game.