Review of Ender's Game

Short: Yes. I haven't yet decided if this book is a "Great," but it's at least very close. Go for it.

Long: I started reading Ender's Game because I might be teaching a class on sci-fi and fantasy literature next semester and thought it might be important to read this book that so many thirteen-year-olds like. As such, I was expecting it to be somewhat childish--a facile and off-the-mark assumption to make based on the fact that the main character starts the book at the age of six. The fact that the language of the book was relatively simple also might lead one to this assumption.

Instead, I found myself with a complex allegorical coming of age story about violence and humanity's impulse to protect itself, even when it means becoming inhuman to do so. Unlike many sci-fi or fantasy stories with similar themes there were no easy morals.

Quick summary for the uninitiated. In the future, Earth was attacked by big scary sci-fi clichés (the buggers). They were defeated, but humanity is getting ready to fight them again—soon. And so (because apparently this is the easiest option…) the army has certain families bear super-genius children who will be sent at the age of six or so to an orbiting Battle School to train to lead the army in the coming battle. One such boy, Ender Wiggin, may be humanity’s last chance, so the army decides to make his life at school as difficult as possible so he reaches his potential.

I had heard complaint that this was just another superhero tale, and the point is taken. It is true that every character is more superhuman than the next, but in this universe superhumanity is more curse than blessing to be sure. It is a universe where everyone is cripplingly clever--and no one more so than its author, Orson Scott Card, who barrages readers with so many clever aphorisms, plot twists, and technological creations that you might worry at points that it could become cute. I found it didn't, although you may disagree.

But cleverness is nothing to revel in. In this epic match between brains and brawn, brains may win, but they are far more sinister than brawn could ever be. And as a reader and sometimes writer, I should be happy to see that often pen beats sword—but instead I find the victory more than uneasy. The complexity within the universe is mirrored in the books morally ambiguous characters, the most important of whom, of course, is Ender himself, our eponymous ubermensch of the hour.

And ubermensch he is. Though the young savior of this universe spends most of his time using his own cleverness and his bonds to his friends to survive in an otherworldly school, Harry Potter he ain’t. Imagine Harry Potter, only now imagine all of his teachers are out to get him and he has to kill his classmates to survive. “Intense is the word for Ender’s Game,” said The New York Times. Intense indeed.

Reading such a book you’d think you’d be quickly overwhelmed by darkness and disturbing imagery. True, it’s dark, and it’s definitely more disturbing than most other stuff thirteen-year-olds might like. But it's not ponderous like much sci-fi. The language is simple and sparse to counteract the adultness of its themes, but the simplicity has a clean, flowing quality rather than the childish or dissonant cadences you might find in other children’s books or thrillers. The pacing is quick for most of it, although the nitpicker in me would say it got a little repetitive towards the end. Still, I could barely put it down.

If the idea of children killing each other in no-gravity battle situations or in virtual reality video games doesn’t pique your interest, you can take solace in the fact that those moments of intensity are punctuated—perhaps overshadowed, even—by the book’s moments of quiet, sorrowful beauty. While some might remember this sci-fi classic for its epic battles and political intrigue, the scenes that I am most vividly left with are the ones in which sci-fi artifice and cleverness give way to understated images: a brother and sister on a handmade raft in a lake looking at the sky. A deserted playground. A cocoon in a boy’s hand—Card’s symbol of the hope, impossible though it may be, that humanity one day can forgive itself for its many crimes.