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Title:
Enders Game
Series: Enderverse #1
Authors:
Orson Card
Rating: 4 of 5 Stars
Genre:
SF
Pages: 251
Words: 106K
From
Wikipedia.com
Humanity has mastered interplanetary
spaceflight and they encounter an insect-like alien race called the
Formics, and war breaks out. The humans achieve a narrow victory, but
fearing future threats of a Formic invasion, create the International
Fleet (I.F.) and train gifted children to become commanders at their
orbiting Battle School.
Andrew "Ender" Wiggin is born
a "Third": a rare exception to Earth's two-child policy,
allowed by the government due to the promise shown by his two older
siblings. The eldest, Peter, is a highly intelligent sociopath who
sadistically bullies Ender. His sister, Valentine, is more
sympathetic towards him. The I.F. remove Ender's monitoring device
when he is six years old, seemingly ending his chances of Battle
School. He is bullied by a fellow student, Stilson, but Ender turns
violent and attacks him. Unknown to Ender, Stilson later dies from
his wounds. I.F. Colonel Hyrum Graff visits Ender after hearing about
the fight. Ender attests that by showing superiority now, he has
prevented future struggle. Graff offers him a place in the Battle
School.
Once at Battle School, Graff and the
other leaders covertly work to keep Ender isolated from the other
cadets. Ender finds solace in playing a simulated adventure game that
involves killing a giant. The cadets participate in competitive war
simulations in zero gravity, where Ender quickly masters the game
with novel tactics. To further wear Ender down, he is promoted to
command a new army composed of raw recruits, then pitted against
multiple armies at once, but Ender's success continues. Ender's
jealous ex-commander, Bonzo Madrid, draws him into a fight outside
the simulation, and once again seeking to preemptively stop future
conflicts Ender uses excessive force, and like Stilson before him
Bonzo dies from his injuries.
Meanwhile on Earth, Peter Wiggin uses a
global communication system to post political essays under the
pseudonym "Locke", hoping to establish himself as a
respected orator and then as a powerful politician. Valentine,
despite not trusting Peter, agrees to publish alongside him as
"Demosthenes". Their essays are soon taken seriously by the
government. Though Graff is told their true identities, he recommends
that it be kept a secret, because their writings are politically
useful.
Ender, now ten years old, is promoted
to Command School. After some preliminary battles in the simulator,
he is introduced to Mazer Rackham, a hero from the Formic war who saw
key patterns in the Formic behavior. Ender participates in space
combat simulations created and controlled by Mazer. As the skirmishes
become harder, he is joined by some of his friends from the Battle
School as sub-commanders. Despite this, Ender becomes depressed by
the battles, his isolation, and by the way Mazer treats him.
For his final test, under observation
by I.F.'s commanders, Ender finds his fleet far outnumbered by Formic
ships surrounding their homeworld. Hoping to earn himself expulsion
from the school for his ruthlessness, he sacrifices his entire fleet
to fire a Molecular Disruption Device at the planet. The Device
destroys the planet and the surrounding Formic fleet. He is shocked
to hear the I.F. commanders cheering in celebration. Mazer informs
Ender that the "simulations" he has been fighting were real
battles, directing human spacecraft against Formic fleets via an
ansible, and that Ender has won the war. Despite Graff congratulating
him, Ender becomes more depressed, realizing that he has committed
genocide and become just like his brother.
Ender spends several weeks isolated
before recovering. He learns that war has broken out on Earth. Ender
and Valentine join a group of space colonists.
On their new planet, Ender becomes the
colony's governor. He discovers a structure that matches the
simulation of the giant game from Battle School, and inside finds the
dormant egg of a Formic queen. The queen telepathically communicates
to Ender that before the first Formic war, they had assumed humans
were a non-sentient race, for want of collective consciousness, but
realized their mistake too late. Instead, she had reached out to
Ender to draw him here and requests that he take the egg to a new
planet for the Formics to colonize.
Ender takes the egg and, with
information from the queen, writes The Hive Queen under the alias
"Speaker for the Dead". Peter, now the leader of Earth and
age 77 with a failing heart, recognizes Ender as the author of The
Hive Queen. He asks Ender to write a book about him, which Ender
titles The Hegemon. The combined works create a new type of funeral,
in which the Speaker for the Dead tells the whole and unapologetic
story of the deceased, adopted by many on Earth and its colonies.
Ender and Valentine leave the colony and travel to many other worlds,
looking for a safe place to establish the unborn Hive Queen.
SEPARATOR
After
reading, and immensely enjoying, the First Formic War trilogy, I
realized that I had never read the original Enderverse saga. I had
read Ender’s
Game
and Speaker for
the Dead,
but never delved beyond that. Mainly I suspect because I’d read
enough of Card’s other works that put me off of him (mainly the
Homecoming series and Alvin the Maker series). But because I’m a
completionist at heart, I realized there was a gap in my Enderverse
reading that should be fixed. Plus, The Second Formic War trilogy
appears to be on hold as the second book was published in ‘19 and
there’s no definite date for the final book yet.
I’ve
read Ender’s Game multiple times over the years. I’ve never read
the original short story and I suspect I never will. I’ll stick to
the fully fleshed out novel.
This
time around, it struck me that the main theme of the story seems to
be that survival of a species justifies any and all action. Don’t
get me wrong, if the bugs had attacked Earth for real, I’d totally
be advocating for complete and utter xenocide. But I don’t have to
worry about that, so it’s the “idea” that Card plays with here
and it’s as an “idea” that I reacted to. I do not believe that
survival of a species is the be all and end all. That obviously comes
from my worldview as a Christian. On an individual level, Christians
have been tortured and killed for Millennia in attempts to get them
to deny Jesus Christ. When they don’t, bad things happen. They give
up their life because what they believe is greater than the
circumstance of death or having their fingernails pulled out and
their joints broken (a common tactic experienced by many Chinese
Christians in the 20th
and 21st
century). So if an individual can hold that something is greater than
himself, cannot an entire species do the same?
That
was the thought process swirling around in my head as I was reading
this time around. In the end, Card allows Ender to atone (even though
it wasn’t Ender’s will that had destroyed the bugs, hence the
“game” part of the title) by giving him a Formic queen egg.
Now
I want to go re-watch the movie!
★★★★☆
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