I really enjoy reading science fiction, some time ago I bookmarked the list of all time Hugo award winners and decided I would read all the books in the list.
Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card was in my very long “to read list” for months, now I have finished the book and will comment about it in this post.
Note for the curious ones: I have also read the second book in the saga: Speaker for the Dead, and I will comment later.
Ender’s game is not your average sci-fi reading. Our hero is a boy: Andrew Wiggins, which is only five when you start reading, he is known as Ender because his sister, Valentine, mispronunced the name when she was a little child.
I have to admit my first thought was “this could be Harry Potter in space", but read on and you will see this is much more profound and dark than Rowling’s writing.
We, humans, are living in a distant future in planet Earth, over population is controlled and people is not allowed to have children without permission from the planetary goverment: The Hegemony of Man.
Human race have successfully resisted the invasion, some 80 years ago, of an alien race known as the buggers, insect like of course. It is known that buggers will attack again and we should be prepared, so the military start training children, yes, special and very intelligent children, to be fleet officials and be ready when the buggers attack again in the years to come.
Due to interstellar travel and light speed issues we still have some years until the second invasion arrives.
Ender is one of these special children, actually he is a “third", name given to the third child in a family. Not many families are allowed to have three children, but Ender’s older brothers, Peter and Valentine, which will have an important participation in the story, were also trained by the military, they had the potential and Ender’s parents we authorized to have a third child with the hope he would be a better “prospect” for training, indeed he is.
Scott Card narrative is intense, he submerges us in the mind of Ender, we suffer with him when he is sent to the military school, the way his companions see him, he has a great responsibility in his shoulders as you will see.
In the school Ender will learn to fight in space and command battle ships, he also will have to fight for his life. It is interesting to notice the video games and artificial intelligence references, this was written in 1985!
As every good sci-fi book, here we see a critic to human society and the way we, humans, behave when we don’t know all the answers to our problems.
Don’t expect big space action as in Heinlein’s Starship Troopers, but this a really great book in its own way.
The mistery about the buggers will keep you reading and a great, unexpected, final made me love the book.
We don’t see many writers, if any, which has won the Hugo in two consecutive years. Orson Scott Card got that in 1986 and 1987 with the first two novels in Ender’s saga.
I always see sci-fi as something more than aliens and space ships, Ender’s game has many references to religion and political questions, humankind future and the way, sometimes, our destiny is not completely in our hands.
A must read!
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