Ender's Game, by Orson Scott Card

Now that this month's book club has had its session, I am free to write about the last book we all read - Ender's Game. In all fairness, I have to tell you that I am not really going to review EG so much as just write a blog post on why I love it.

Ender's Game is one of my favorite books of all time.  It may be one of the more famous examples of science fiction, as it won the Hugo and the Nebula awards. The premise, like most in this genre, sounds ridiculous (child soldiers being trained to defend the world from destruction by alien insects), but maybe one of the biggest components in writing a good science fiction novel is being able to take such a strange premise and making it - not just plausible, but, somehow, inevitable.

Ender is Andrew Wiggen, a child born sometime in the indeterminant future. The nations of the world coexist in uneasy peace that is only maintained because everyone is preparing for the inevitable Third Invasion by the buggers, the alien species that inexplicably attacked their world twice before in the last century. Ender, born onto an overcrowded planet, is the youngest of three children, and is given the pejorative term "Third" by his brother and classmates, to remind him of how his existence violates the population control laws.

Fortunately, Ender doesn't live on Earth for very long - he is taken up to Battle School, a space station that revolves around the earth and trains child geniuses in military strategy to prepare them to be the next - and hopefully last - generation to fight the Buggers. In Battle School, Ender soon becomes the best, among a school that only chooses the best. And as he copes with grueling training, isolation from his friends, and the slow realization of who the enemy really is, he finds himself in real danger of losing his mind.

Without giving too much away, that's pretty much it in a nutshell. But there is so much more, and every time I read this book, it just gets better. When I read it as an adolescent, I just followed the story. In a later reading, I interpreted Ender as a Christ figure in a very sci-fi interpretation of the hero's journey. This last time I read it, I couldn't get away from the socio-political and religious themes.

While Ender is trained to save the world in space, the narrative occasionally returns to Earth to follow his two siblings, Peter and Valentine. They are just as gifted - and dangerous - as Ender, although they turn their brilliance to politics. Peter, Valentine, and Andrew - three children, all named after Catholic saints. It is casually mentioned at one point that their father is a Catholic and their mother is a Mormon, although both are lapsed. In fact, religion is kept rigidly out of view throughout the entire novel - almost pointedly so. Parents abandon beliefs because, in a modern world with population restrictons, it is too risky to allign yourself with a religion that endorses large families. Children in Battle School have no knowledge of religion or moral guidance - as highlighted when Ender echoes his friend Alai's greeting, "Salaam," without knowing what it means.

A lot of science fiction focuses on apocolyptic and post-apocalyptic scenarios. Knowing that Orson Scott Card is Mormon (he has written extensively about it in other books), I wonder: is Ender's Game another version of the apocolypse? Humanity isn't dead yet, but, in Ender's world, socialism is slowly squelching religion. In a sense, Ender isn't just working to save humanity from the buggers - he is working to save the world from atheism. In the scenario that Card posits, there are two possible out comes: in the first, with Ender beating the buggers, humanity is free to fall back into self-destructive world wars, but perhaps spiritual belief again can prosper. In the second scenario, the buggers win and there is no humanity to re-discover religious belief anyways.

I have a lot more thoughts about Ender's Game, but it's hard not to take into account the rest of the Ender series, or the Bean Series that Card wrote later, both of which pick up where Ender leaves off at the end of the novel. I will say this though - the introduction to the book talks about liberal arts colleges discussing Ender's quandries in their sociology and psychology classes, while military academies also use it to emphasize effective leadership. This is such a versatile book - a fact that is highlighted by the fact that at the last book club meeting, we had a woman with a post-graduate degree in English and a cop on the local SWAT team who had both loved it. We had college students and grade-school teachers who each brought their own spin to the meeting and discussed. My brother read this book when he was 12 and couldn't put it down, and my dad, now in his fiftes, will discuss at length the Freudian themes behind the characters. There is something about Ender's Game that gets people, and sucks them into the world of a little boy, fighting to save the world.

Favorite quote: "Human beings didn't evolve brains in order to lie around on lakes. Killing's the first thing we learned.  And a good thing we did, or we'd be dead, and the tigers would own the earth."