There are very few “best of” sci-fi/fantasy lists
that do not feature Orson Scott Card’s 1985 Ender’s Game near the top. The story of a young boy’s rise through a
space academy tantalizing and highly inventive throughout, the reasons are
obvious. Card hit upon an idea, mined it
for every penny of entertainment, and cashed in—a wholly absorbing novel with
humanist elements tacked to the end the reader’s reward.
Ender’s Game is the story of Ender Wiggins and his
often exciting, always visceral fight for place in a space academy. Though he had a bit of trouble
fitting in on Earth with his classmates, Ender proves himself more than capable
of surviving in a system intended to separate the Darwinian wheat from the
chaff. But it’s at the price of his relationships. The war games the
children and teens play anything but light, laser-tag is only the appearance. The challenges Ender faces in the game
rooms—social, authoritarian, and strategic—break and mold him into a young
man. But what kind of young man does he
become?
Card’s imaginative span great entertainment, the
scene is brilliantly set for one challenge after another at the Battle School. Readers are constantly kept guessing how
he—Card and Ender—will top himself, each new setup the next mission
impossible. Yet, it consistently
happens, and in the process Ender must use every molecule of brain power to
overcome the American Gladiator-like obstacles placed in he and his team’s path
by the academy’s authoritarian overseers.
Card portraying the war games in video game fashion, the levels only get
more difficult, creating a mountain of suspense in the process. The war games, in fact, provide the main draw
of the novel and are undoubtedly the reason it is regarded so highly by readership.
Aside from neither brilliant nor dull prose, the
only other potential fault of the novel is its moods. The story of a boy at a space academy innately
juvenile, a young adult feel prevails throughout. Card attempts to make the story more “adult” by
splashing strong language here or there, adding some graphic details to the
challenges at the Battle School, and moralizing at various points, but the overall
effect is not very subtle. There is the
sudden prominence of a theme fully adult at the novel’s conclusion, but it doesn’t
help. The story retains a tone that
could be either YA or standard.
Love it or hate it, the most subversive aspect of Ender’s
Game is its conclusion. Events taking a
major turn, readers can not expect things to transpire as they do. Holding a mirror to the story, Card uses a
suddenly new perspective to bring Ender to the next stage of his development. The manner in which Card pulls the literary rug
out from under readers’ feet to accomplish this, however, will either have
people nodding their heads in better understanding of the novel’s true message,
or shaking their heads, preferring such an adventure come to a more conventional
ending, the plummet from action to anthropological sci-fi perhaps too quick to
handle. In a genre featuring all too
much derivative, Card should be lauded for this, however.
In the end, Ender’s Game is some of the most exciting
entertainment readers of any genre can have.
The sharp left turn of an ending, while poignant to Card’s larger
aspirations, may leave some readers disoriented, but will certainly interest
those looking for sci-fi with more depth than the standard fare. Enjoyable at many levels, character to
setting, plot to theme, it’s difficult for this book to disappoint save the
overall lack of maturity in tone. Having
some thematic points in common with Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War and Forever Peace
or Heinlein’s Starship Troopers, readers who enjoyed those two novels but
have (somehow) never read Ender’s Game will want to check it out. The same is true vice versa.
