Lately I’ve been reading my way through Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game series. I’ve got the first major chunk of the series finished, and I thought I’d provide a review.
The series is divided into two main forks, one of which tracks the story of the title character, Ender Wiggin, and the other of which tracks the story of another character named Bean.
I wanted to wait until I’d read the novels in the Ender fork because of some of the religious issues in the novels. I wanted to make sure that what I’d have to say about the way Card handles religion, and specifically Catholicism, wouldn’t be contradicted by something in the next novel.
So over the next few days I’ll give you my thoughts on the series.
Its foundational book is Ender’s Game, which is set a century or two in the future (the exact time is ambiguous), when humanity is terrified that it’s going to be wiped out by an insect-like alien race known as the Buggers.
The Buggers have invaded our solar system twice, and the second time we were seriously threatened. A third Bugger war is looming, and humanity is under the gun to produce a military leader capable of saving us from extinction.
What humanity needs is not just another Lee or Grant or Patton or Eisenhower or MacArthur. It needs another Alexander or Julius Caesar or Napoleon. Or better.
It therefore has set up a world-wide program designed to find, evaluate, and train potential military leaders. It wants to find these leaders young so that they can have time to be trained in the intricacies of starship combat and the kind of 3-D thinking that is involved in fighting in a zero-gravity environment.
Earth’s government therefore invasively (it’s not very friendly) monitors and tests the world’s children and, when they find a promising one, they scoop him up and take him off to battle school for training to maximize his potential as a military leader.
Then they find Andrew "Ender" Wiggin.
He is the most promising student they have ever found. The adults are hoping he will become humanity’s savior, and they’re terrified by the prospect he might not.
This novel therefore falls into the category of "most important child in the world" novels, along with the Harry Potter series and Jerry Pournelle’s excellent Starswarm.
As novels of this category go, the first Harry Potter book (the only one I’ve read) is–to my mind–lame. (You may disagree, which is fine; de gustibus non disputandum est.) It’s structured completely wrong for how to tell this kind of story, and it comes off as ham-fisted wish fulfillment. If you’ve got a kid who lives a dreary life but is, unbeknownst to himself, the most important child in the world, you don’t announce this secret and hand him fame and glory on a platter in chapter two.
Instead, you make him work for it. He needs to pay his dues and have the secret of his identity revealed slowly, over the course of time.
That’s what happens in Starswarm, which to my mind makes it "Harry Potter done right" (except that it’s sci-fi rather than fantasy).
Ender’s Game takes a similar path.
The adults around Ender suspect that he may turn out to be a military genius, but Ender only finds out about this slowly, and he most definitely has to work for his place in the world.
Why’s that?
Well . . . how do you know if you’ve got a real military genius, on whose shoulders you can rest the fate of humanity?
You test him, of course.
And that’s what the adults in the story do. They put Ender through a series of progressively harder and more impossible situations to see if he can rise to them without cracking under the strain.
They start doing this even before he gets to battle school. On the shuttle up to the orbiting space station where the school is housed (we need a zero-g environment for this training, remember) they turn every single boy on the shuttle against Ender so that he has the decked stacked against him from the very beginning.
And they do nothing to help him.
Their philosophy is that if Ender is to be able to shoulder the responsibility that will one day be his then, above all, he must never–ever–think that an adult will bail him out of a situation. No matter how hard or impossible it gets, he must deal with it on his own. Even when there is a homicidal bully determined to kill Ender.
Only by putting him through a ruthless program in which the rules are changed every time Ender meets a challenge will they find out whether Ender has what it takes to fill the role mankind needs, which requires a unique balance of tactical skill and empathy for others.
A key element in the novel is the zero-gravity combat simulation that is used as a learning tool to help the kids think in terms of the three-dimensional warfare needed in outer space. This one-ups quidditch. It isn’t just about kids flying and playing a fanciful game. The physics of fighting in zero-gravity are real, and the combat tactics that Ender comes up with, based on the way the game works, are sound. So, to my mind, Ender’s Game beats Harry Potter on this score as well.
But ultimately the story isn’t about zero-g combat.
It’s about the characters, and the bottom line is that the novel is extraordinarily good.
It deserves the Hugo and Nebula awards that it won. (For non-sci-fi fans, those are the two most prestigious awards in the sci-fi community.)
The thing that makes it so good is not that it involves space ships and aliens and hi-tech and similar sci-fi tropes. Actually, it de-emphasizes all of these.
Card doesn’t try to wow us with futuristic tinsel. He doesn’t spend time showing off the tech, which is barely ahead of our own. We don’t go to exotic alien planets. We haven’t even gotten out of the solar system. Ships travel slower than light, so it takes months just to get from one point to another in the solar system. The kids are using "desks" that are recognizable as tablet-style laptop computers. They entertain themselves with video games. And we never even see an alien in the book.
What this book is about is psychology–the psychology of command and leadership and human relationships.
That’s what makes it more than just a standard outer space adventure.
It also happens to be readable by kids (though there is some crude language in it, largely related to flatulence–which, as Card points out in an afterword to the audio book edition, is inescapable if you want to write realistically about boys).
NEXT: Speaker for the Dead.
ADDED: Please AVOID SIGNIFICANT SPOILERS for books in the Ender universe in the combox.
