Matt’s Reviews: Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card

•   Publisher:              Macmillan Audio
•   Publication Date:  2013
•   Print Copyright:     1985
•   Disc Count:           9
•   Listen Time:          11 hrs 57 minutes
•   Author:                  Orson Scott Card
•   Read by:                Stefan Rudnick, Harlan Ellison, and others

Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card is the classic 1985 military science fiction book. The novel won both the Nebula Award and the Hugo Award in 1985 and 1986 respectively. 

Sometime in the indeterminate future, Earth has survived attacks by an insectoid race, commonly known as the ‘buggers’.  Humans narrowly avoided disaster in the last invasion and has come together under the International Fleet.  The fleet recruits the best and brightest children to send to battle school to prepare for the next invasion which is inevitably coming soon. The Earth is overcrowded and no one is allowed to have more than two children.  Based on the exceptional qualities of the Wiggins’ first two children, they are allowed to have a Third, Andrew “Ender” Wiggins. 

Bullied at school for being a “Third” and at home by his brother, Ender’s only true connection is with his sister, Valentine.  Ender proves to have the genius of his siblings, but without quite the psychopathy of his older brother, Peter, or the overly empathetic nature of his sister.  At six years old, he is recruited into the battle school that takes place off-Earth.  Most of the novel takes place in these military schools and training exercises where Ender proves brilliant in his strategies and tactics and quickly takes on a leadership role amongst the students. The administration of the school puts great pressure on him as they believe him to be their best bet to help lead in the next bugger war which they suspect is very close.

This is a really great book.  It is one of those timeless works that makes you think on multiple levels.  How much is survival worth?  What are we willing to do to increase our chances of ‘victory’?  Do individual people have more worth than humanity? What is the cost to individuals in participating in war and killing?  Do we need a universal foe to come together as humans? 

Ender’s Game is really one of the ‘must read’ science fiction books.  If you have never read it, you really should.  If it’s been a few decades like it had for me, it’s probably time to revisit it. The twists are not as surprising on a re-read, but it is still a great story and a great book.

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