Ender's Game

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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.

Contents

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Overview

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.

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

At the Battle School—a space station housing the children being trained by the IF—he learns to fight and to lead armies of other students. Due to his extremely high aptitude for tactics and leadership, but also due in part to the teachers' desire to test Ender, he is advanced through his training much faster than the other students. Ender is initially assigned to Salamander Army, where he meets both Petra Arkanian and Bonzo Madrid, 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 another team—Rat Army. There he meets Dink Meeker, who to a certain degree becomes the caring big brother that Ender never had.

Meanwhile, his psychological development is monitored by the "mind game", a partially-sentient computer game embedded in the school's computer network, and manipulated to a large extent by the cynical but well-meaning Colonel Hyrum Graff, who runs the school.

Due to his accelerated abilities, Ender is promoted to Battle School Army Commander years earlier than usual, setting him up for resentment by his peers and pushing his abilities to the limit, both intended consequences. The latter half of the book focuses on Ender's exploits as he starts being given command responsibility in the tactical games the pupils play as the main part of their education.

Jealous of Ender's ability, Bonzo Madrid attempts to kill Ender, but ends up being killed 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 grueling months of trials, Ender 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, without sufficient sleep during the nights (during which he is plagued by strange nightmares), leads him to a simulated final confrontation, where he has to overcome unfair odds by flouting the assumed rules of the game.

In the final test, he destroys the buggers' home planet, killing their queens—and by extension, all buggers, since the buggers have a true hive mind and think only through their queens. In effect, the physical death of the queens causes the brain death of the buggers as a whole. However, at the same time, his plan causes the deaths of all the digital units under his control; it was a suicide attack on the Buggers' planet.

When Ender completes the last battle, Ender is told that he has not been playing a game, but instead has been commanding units 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 Ender's "tests", war breaks out on Earth. The battle lasts all of five days, but the impact is done: 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. As such, he (along with his sister Valentine Wiggin) is sent out on the first colonization ship as the governor of the new colony.

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 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 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, talking to the hive queen with his mind, writes about the buggers from their perspective. He calls the book The Hive-Queen and signs it 'Speaker for the Dead'. He then takes the cocoon and leaves the colony with his sister, seeking a place suitable for the repopulation of the buggers.

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Creation, sources, and awards

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.

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. Another influence was historian Bruce Catton's works on the American Civil War.

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.

Some military colleges, such as the Marine University at Quantico, have used Ender's Game as a textbook on the psychology of leadership.[1]

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Trivia

  • Orson Scott Card published Ender's Game in 1985 and Speaker for the Dead in 1986. Both books received both the Hugo and Nebula awards. He is the only author ever to receive both awards for each book released in two consecutive years.
  • The name and basic function of the ansible were borrowed from Ursula K. Le Guin.
  • After writing the novels, Card later found that there is a boy's name of Turkish origin, "Endor", that means "One in a million".
  • 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.
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Character list

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Wiggin Family

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Battle School Characters

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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:

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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.

See Ender's Game (film) for more information.

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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 the superior officers within the book) 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 the idea of Card supposedly stating that the morality of an act is based solely on the intentions of the person acting.

He 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 a moral sin. 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, in each case faced with a conflict with a more powerful enemy, knows that he will have no assistance, especially from the adults at the school, and that 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 his guilt at having destroyed an entire race.

Another alternative viewpoint is to distinguish between the manipulated Ender and the adults who trick him into an action he might have rejected as immoral, based on their own belief that destroying the Buggers was a moral necessity. Nothing in Card's novel indicates that he 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. 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 either the humans must wipe out the Buggers, or vice-versa.

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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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External links


Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game series
Ender Quartet Ender's Game | Speaker for the Dead | Xenocide | Children of the Mind
Bean Quintet Ender's Shadow | Shadow of the Hegemon | Shadow Puppets | Shadow of the Giant | Shadows in Flight
Short stories First Meetings: "The Polish Boy" | "Teacher's Pest" | "Investment Counselor"

Intergalactic Medicine Show: "Mazer In Prison" | "Pretty Boy"

Books | Characters | Miscellanea
es:El juego de Ender

fr:La Stratégie Ender he:המשחק של אנדר pl:Gra Endera zh:安德的游戏

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