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Ender's Game

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Ender's Game
File:Ender's game cover.jpg
AuthorOrson Scott Card
LanguageEnglish
SeriesEnder's Game
GenreScience fiction
PublisherTor Books
Publication date
1985
Media typePrint
Pages384 (Paperback Reprint)
ISBN0812550706 (Paperback Reprint) Parameter error in {{ISBNT}}: invalid character
Followed bySpeaker for the Dead
Ender's Shadow (Parallel novel) 

Ender's Game (1985) is the best-known novel by Orson Scott Card, set in a future where mankind is facing annihilation by an alien society, the insectoid "Buggers" (more formally known as "Formics"). Having barely survived two separate Bugger invasions, humanity institutes a program for the breeding and training of military geniuses from a very young age to supply commanders for their fleets in hopes of surviving a projected third invasion.

The book originated as a science fiction novelette in Analog magazine (1977) and Card later expanded the novel into the Ender's Game series, dealing with the long-term results of the war.

Overview

Template:Spoiler

Andrew "Ender" Wiggin is a child soldier being trained by the International Fleet (IF) as a future military commander. Being one of the youngest children ever to graduate from the Battle School, Ender is thought to be the best and brightest student. Colonel Hyrum Graff, the leader of Battle School, believes that he is the last hope for humanity.

At the Battle School, a space station where children are taught to be soldiers, due to his extremely high aptitude for tactics and leadership and to the teachers' deadline to ready Ender for the coming war, he is advanced through his training much faster than the other students. Ender skips basic training and is assigned to Salamander Army, under the command of Bonzo Madrid, where he meets Petra Arkanian — both prominent figures in his life further down the road. After an incident where Ender breaks an order to not fire his weapon during a game, Bonzo trades him to Rat Army. Rat Army's commander, Rose de Nose, places Ender in the toon of Dink Meeker, who takes it upon himself to look after Ender.

Meanwhile, his psychological development is monitored by the "Mind Fantasy Game", a complex computer game embedded in the school's computer network, and manipulated to a large extent by Colonel Graff. In the beginning of the game, Ender passes through the obstacles flawlessly, and then comes across a Giant who tells Ender that he must choose between two potions - one that will keep him alive, and another that will kill him, and if Ender succeeded this riddle, he would be taken to "Fairyland". Sure enough, one does kill Ender's character, but when coming back to the Giant, he drinks the other potion and is sent back to previous levels he had already accomplished. He realizes the game is rigged and instead of taking either of the potions (several tries later), he jumps on the Giant and kills him. As the Giant falls, Ender is taken to Fairyland and goes through another series of obstacles, many of which involves killing, and reaches a kingdom called "The End of the World." In this area, Ender finds a room with a snake and a mirror. Time after time, Ender kills the snake and sees his brother, Peter's, reflection in the mirror and is, in turn, killed by the game. He is stuck at this point, and, combined with the pressures of Battle School, is bordering on a breakdown. When he receives a letter from his sister, Valentine, who Ender had come to believe to be his enemy, he succeeds in surviving the encounter. Instead of killing the snake, he kisses it, at which point it turns into Valentine, and the mirror reflection shows a dragon and a unicorn, and Ender realizes he will always love his sister and she is always with him. After this, he stops playing the game, saying "I won." Most of this game reflected upon Ender on how much he really is like Peter, or how murderous he can be.

Being a strategic genius Ender is promoted to Battle School Army Commander years earlier than usual, setting him up for resentment from his peers and pushing his abilities to the limit — both, intended consequences. Given a hand-picked list of students, he is given command of the re-established Dragon Army, which had previously been disbanded after having never won a battle. In the time in which he is Dragon Army's commander, he trains the group so successfully that he never loses a battle, even when the battles are unbalanced to be extremely in favor of the opposing armies.

Jealous of Ender's ability, Bonzo Madrid attempts to kill Ender, but ends up being killed by Ender instead. After this, Ender suffers a nervous breakdown and gives up on the Battle School. He is promoted to Command School, but goes home for a short leave.

After several months spent in self-contemplation, Ender is convinced to return and is promoted to Command School almost six years early to learn to combat the buggers instead of being restricted to the more abstract training games. He proceeds to be taught by Mazer Rackham, the genius behind the previous human success against the buggers. A long series of simulated battles, each progressively more difficult, without sufficient sleep during the nights due to being plagued by mysterious nightmares, leads him to a simulated final confrontation, where he has to overcome seemingly insurmountable odds by flouting one of the rules of the game.

In the final test, in an act of defiance, he destroys the buggers' home planet, killing all their queens. The buggers have a true hive mind and think only through their queens. By killing the queens the remaining buggers become apathic and die within a few hours. However, at the same time, his plan, a kamikaze attack on the Buggers' planet, destroys most of the units under his control.

When Ender wins the last battle, Ender is told that he has not been playing a game, but instead has been commanding real ships across interstellar distances; this task was made possible via the reverse-engineered ansible, a form of instantaneous communication made possible through the use of Philotic Energy.

Immediately after the end of the Bugger War, the world alliance falls apart and war breaks out on Earth in a dispute about who gains control of Ender. The battle lasts all of five days, but the impact is clear: Ender cannot return to Earth because he would simply be used as a tool of the dominant government on Earth, eventually led by Ender's older brother Peter Wiggin. Instead, his sister Valentine Wiggin convinces him to be sent out on the first colonization ship as the governor of the new colony on a former bugger planet.

Ender's fame quickly wears off, but is replaced with the respect of the colonists traveling with him. Only years later, after the colony is built and Valentine has written a seven-book history of the Formic (bugger) Wars, does Ender discover something that the buggers left for him: by using their alien telepathic communication, they were able to extract images from Ender's brain, which were the source of his nightmares during his time at the Command School. Using those images, the buggers built a large scene directly taken from the Mind Fantasy Game at the Battle School. Following the steps from the Mind Game, Ender discovers the surprise the buggers left for him: their last surviving queen, in pupal form. The pupa is able to communicate telepathically with Ender, who learns that the Buggers' previous killings of humans had rested on the mistaken notion that humans were not sentient, and once the Buggers realized their mistake, they resolved not to attack humans again. Thus, the invasion and extermination of the Buggers was not necessary to defend Earth.

Ender writes about the buggers from their perspective. He calls the book The Hive-Queen and signs it 'Speaker for the Dead'. After the book becomes famous, Peter Wiggin realizes that Ender wrote it and asks Ender to write a similar book presenting Peter's perspective. The result is The Hegemon. These two books become a new faith for all the new worlds humanity inhabits.

Eventually, Ender takes the cocoon and leaves the colony with his sister, seeking a planet suitable for the regeneration of the buggers.

Creation and inspiration

The original novelette is merely a snapshot of Ender's experiences in Battle School and Command School; the full-length novel is a more encompassing work dealing with Ender's life before, during, and after the war, and it also contains some passages describing the political exploits of his older siblings back on Earth. Card has stated that Ender's Game was written specifically to establish the character of Ender for his role of the Speaker in Speaker for the Dead, the outline for which he had written before novelizing Ender's Game.

In his 1991 introduction to the novel, Card discussed the influence of Isaac Asimov's Foundation series on the creation of the novelette and novel. Historian Bruce Catton's work on the American Civil War also influenced Card heavily. He also derived the name and basic function of the ansible from Ursula K. Le Guin's works.

Awards and impact

Ender's Game was the winner of the Hugo Award for best novel in 1986 and the Nebula Award for best novel in 1985, two notable awards in science fiction. It was reprinted in a slightly revised edition in 1991. The following year, the sequel Speaker for the Dead also won both awards; Card is the only author to have won both awards in consecutive years.

The popular musical act Dashboard Confessional released a song titled "Ender Will Save Us All" in homage to the novel. The song itself has no relation to the book, though.

Several schools around the world have adopted Ender's Game as required reading, some for its psychological aspects, others for its science fiction background. Some examples include:

Trivia

  • After writing the novels, Card later found that there is a boy's name of Turkish origin, "Ender", that means "rare" or "precious".

Character list

Wiggin Family

Battle School Characters

Novel series

Card went back and expanded the short story into a novel after realizing that he wanted to use Ender as a main character in another novel, Speaker for the Dead. Card has in fact written several more sequels, spawning the Ender's Game series. The more metaphysical nature of the later books has reduced their popularity in some demographics, but increased circulation in others.

Two series were spawned from the original book:

Film

As of December 15, 2005, all previous attempts to write a script have been dropped. Card himself has announced he will be writing a new script not based on any previous one, including his own. This announcement implies a further delay to the film release date. The film is expected to be released no earlier than 2008. No casting will be done until the script is finished.

As of 22 March 2006, Warner Brothers and Orson Scott Card have extended their option on the film version of Ender's Game and Ender's Shadow. Card is still writing the screenplay.

See Ender's Game for more information.

Controversy

John Kessel published in the spring 2004 issue of Foundation, the International Review of Science Fiction an article titled "Creating the Innocent Killer," which is an extensive and critical deconstruction of the moral worldview Card propounds through Ender. He describes there how Card and his characters manipulate the reader's point of view throughout the book so that Ender can commit murder several times and, ultimately, xenocide of a species, while retaining our sympathy and remaining innocent. He takes issue with Card's supposed assertion that the morality of an act is based solely on the intentions of the person acting.

Kessel fears reading the book might incite teenagers to feel that the abuse they might suffer from others is jealousy for how special they are and that retaliation can be performed guiltlessly. However, he accepts Card's claim that any similarities between Ender and Hitler were coincidental.

One alternative viewpoint to this argument is that it is indeed the intent of an action that determines whether or not it is moral. Additionally, Kessel's assumption that retaliation is wrong is also viewed by many as incorrect.

On the other hand, it is clearly displayed in the book that Ender's actions are fueled by survival and defense rather than retaliation. Ender, who in each case finds himself in a conflict with a more powerful enemy, knows that he will have no assistance, especially from the adults at the school. In his eyes, he must win the conflict or it will never end. His intention in his hand-to-hand combat incidents was never to kill, and in fact he was not informed that he had killed his opponents until long after the incidents took place. In addition, at the end he was under the belief that he was being tested in a simulation, and is later angry at having been manipulated. In fact, the major theme of the succeeding books is his dealing with the guilt of having destroyed an entire race.

Another alternative viewpoint distinguishes between the manipulated Ender and the adults who trick him into an action he might otherwise have rejected as immoral. The adults justify this with their belief that destroying the Buggers was a moral necessity. Nothing in Card's novel indicates that Ender endorses the adults' trickery. On the contrary, it's revealed at the end of the book that the humans invasion of Bugger space was unnecessary and that the entire conflict rested on misunderstanding. Misunderstanding becomes a theme later in the series, as well. Rather than cultivate Ender's ability to understand the Buggers and explore whether peace might be possible, the adults insist on a pseudo-Darwinian notion that humanity must either wipe out the Buggers, or be wiped out themselves.

Other criticisms

Norman Spinrad also critiques Ender's Game in several of his essays collected in Science Fiction in the Real World.

Ender's Game is also heavily criticized in reference to its literary merit. Card freely admits, in the revised edition's introduction, that it is not "fine writing" by any means. Card noted most criticism of Ender's Game is based on its lack of artistic qualities. He justifies himself in that he sees writing as a tool to convey a story, and not the layered, and sometimes cryptic, art form of more literary prose, a style Card describes as "muddled".

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