Ender's Game

I gotta say at the outset, this book was a chore for me. If I'd read it at twelve or thirteen, I would've loved it for sure (a kid saves the world? Boss!). But the book just didn't make me feel anything in the way of youthful enthusiasm. It reinforced to me why I rarely read science fiction: the characters are often sacrificed in terms of deepening in order to astound us with weird machines and creatures, the characters often speak exposition that would otherwise be developed in the plot, and some of the stuff is just totally out of the grasp of my imagination. Perhaps that reflects more on me than the book, but I have read good sci-fi before. This just wasn't my cup of tea.

To get away from the issue of whether it's a good book or not, I think I'll address the plot points that may have recommended this book for the course: the questions of identity. When Ender is recruited to save the world, he doesn't know that he's being manipulated into a killing machine until later. He picks up on the adults' misuse of his natural abilities, but he ultimately saves the world anyway because he's tricked into thinking that the actual battles he's engaged in with the buggers are simulations.

Also, in the least believable plot development, Ender's brother Peter manages to gain power as an internet philosopher, "Locke." He does so by masking his true intentions behind the measured, concilliatory tones of Locke, while his sister Valentine plays the baddie as "Demosthenes." The book prefigures modern-day bloggers and predicts the impact that such widely-available online writers will possess (though one has yet to conquer the world).

The question, then, is "who are these people?" (excuse the Seinfeld reference). Ender is both a scared little boy who doesn't want to kill anyone, and a merciless killer and leader of men. Peter is a psychopath, and also (online) a skilled political observer. Children are being trained to fight battles that the adults can't or won't fight for them, both amongst themselves as with the mysterious buggers.

Ender's grief over his killings is a refreshing dose of humanity into an otherwise cold and sterile enviroment. Ender is brilliant, but he also feels pain, and his resolve to try and understand the buggers in the end points to the fact that, at least in this aspect, the novel diverges from the normal "shoot first and ask questions never" approach of action and sci-fi culture.

I wouldn't say that I'd pick up this novel to read for fun, there's a lot of clunky narration and awkward dialogue and the main character isn't really relatable (he's General Patton in boy's clothing, more or less). But the questions that the novel raises, about identity and responsibility, are worth exploring. Ender's anguish over what he has done contrasts nicely with the adults who train him to be ruthless and never really ask themselves what he's sacrificing in order to do that.