Ender's Game (the book) - Thoughts? [Spoilers]

[Fox12]

Well, keep in mind it's a kid/teenager book,

Don't assume that because a books narrative is centered around children that it is intended for children. His Dark Materials, Forever War, Starship Troopers, Enders Game, Catcher in the Rye and To Kill (A bloody) Mockingbird have narratives centered around children or adolescents. None of them were ever intended to be read by children. It still amuses me to this day why scholastic decided that the Golden Compass was a child's novel; a lot of cocaine must of been involved.

Make no mistake, Enders Game was never intended for the child market; the fact it was originally published in Analog magazine compounds this fact.

The book is taught in middle school, and the author mentions in his foreword that children and teenagers have written him letters discussing how they could relate to his characters. "Because the book does ring true for children. The highest praise I ever received for a book of mine was when when the school librarian of Farrer Junior Highschool... told me, "you know, Enders game is our most lost book."

I was taught A Clockwork Orange in the equivalent of 'middle school'. That doesn't make A Clockwork Orange a children's book, the same goes for Lord of the flies; erred logic is still invalid. ANALOG magazine is not a children's magazine; and as the original publisher of the story is thus a much better indicator of Ender's intended audience.

I don't know what to tell you. It's always been classified as a young adult (juvenile fiction) novel aimed at the teenage level. The equivalent to middle-school and high school. The author acknowledges it, critics acknowledge it, and most fans acknowledge it. Even the writing is basic and simple, and Card said that was intentional to reach as large an audience as possible. I will clarify, when I say children, I'm not talking about a seven year old, I'm talking about people in the twelve+ range. Authors will publish their work wherever they can, keeping in mind he was not an established author at that time, and just because something is a young adult book doesn't mean it can't have literary merit. He wanted to be taken seriously by the Sci-Fi community, hence why he published it in a major Sci-Fi magazine, but he has made it very clear he always considered the book to be the voice of children. If you believe Enders Game was specifically written for adults then you are mistaken.

Lord of the Flies is obviously an adults book, as it deals with the total collapse of human civilization, the rise of dictatorships and fascism, the loss of innocence, and the nature of evil and barbarism in every human being, as well as original sin. The characters are children in order to more easily take them back to their animistic nature. To Kill a Mockingbird deals with race relations in the rural south, and is filled with rape, murder, and violence. The main characters are children in order to give the situation a unique perspective. The themes in both novels are wildly more mature, and frankly far better written, then Cards fairly decent pop culture Sci-Fi story. Those two stories really aren't applicable, because the themes are adult themes, even if the writing is fairly simple. I would argue that Cards themes are nowhere near as mature, or as well articulated. In any case, all have child protagonists, but only Cards book is really tailored to juveniles and teenagers. To Kill a Mockingbird can be read and easily understood by that audience as well, but it's pretty clear that it really was aimed at an older audience. Lord of the Flies doesn't strike me as a book that can be fully appreciated by children, so it's stupid that it's taught in middle school.

 

[BrassButtons]

The treatment also had a very small chance of increasing his capabilities. Emotional trauma encourages escapism, escapism into a fantasy encourages one to excel at the said fantasy. Its so cliche its practically a trope; but true nonetheless. As I note below; the staff had plenty of time to find the best candidate; and plenty of candidates to choose from.

Even if you're right about it having a small chance of helping him, the risks FAR outweighed the benefits, because they DIDN'T have plenty of time. It is repeatedly said (during the conversations between the adults, where they presumably aren't lying) that time is running out, and they've basically hung all their hopes on Ender. Consider this exchange from chapter 11 (can't give page numbers because I'm using a Kindle, but it's at the start of the chapter:

"I thought we'd give him two years as a commander. We usually give them a battle every two weeks, starting after three months. This is a little extreme."

"Do we have two years to spare?"

"I know."

Or this bit from the beginning of chapter 12, discussing Graff's decision to do nothing about Bonzo's plans to murder Ender:

Colonol Graff, the name Ender Wiggin has percolated through the high command. It has even reached my ears. I have heard him described modestly as our only hope of victory in the upcoming invasion."

[...]

"God help you if you're wrong."

"God help us all if I'm wrong."

There are other, similar quotes throughout the book. Ender is not discussed as being one of many potential fleet commanders, but as the only potential fleet commander. The adults are all pretty convinced that it's him or nothing.

The Gentry refer to the class of professional soldiers in Europe who typically came from noble or 'upper middle-class' backgrounds. Most began their training in childhood, and entered formal training as pages/squires or an equivalent at 8-14 years old; children by our standards. Then they were subjected to harsh discipline, beatings, practice fights, mental conditioning, things that to a modern observer may very well qualify as child abuse. The result was some of the most potent fighting units on the battlefields of the old world; Knights, Hussars and Byzantium Cataphracts. Similar practices were done by the Spartans, albeit to much greater extremes; but all share common traits: harsh (borderline abusive in most cases) treatment of candidates and the use of 'games' to encourage the growth in strategic and tactical combat skills.

This really doesn't counter my arguments at all. My issue isn't with the idea that they used a game to teach Ender, but that they used a game which appeared to have no real-world consequences, and then they used that game to issue orders to a real fleet in a real battle. Ender had no reason to think his actions had any consequences beyond affecting his grade, and he had no reason to trust the adults to grade him fairly, so he had no reason to take it seriously. He already knew the adults were a bunch of lying jerks who would promise to do one thing, and then do another, so why should he play by their rules? Why not deliberately destroy his own ships? Or avoid engaging the enemy for as long as possible? Or try to surrender? From his perspective it was just a game, and one without the potential to cause any real-world harm. Neither he nor his team could actually get hurt, and the ships were just dots on a screen.

 

[Gatx]

The thing that I keep thinking about with Ender's Game doesn't have anything to do with story itself, it's actually that one game he plays in his spare time early on where he at some point digs a giant's eye out or something? Every time I play a game like Minecraft, Proteus, Cubeworld, etc. with procedural world generation, I'm reminded of that game.

 

[CrimsonBlaze]

I've read the first installment of this series, Ender's Game, and I don't remember too much about it.

I also came out with a sort of underwhelming feeling once it was done and it was definitely not one of the better books that I read in school. I heard that its sequel gets a bigger praise, so maybe it gets better somehow.

 

[BrassButtons]

I will admit it has been a while since i last read the book. My understanding that all the students of the battle school represented potential commanders of the invasion, Ender simply being the best candidate; and thus the one they were most invested in. If I take the extension of gambling logic; abusing him to get a potential victory may be considered a viable option if his current state grants little or no chance of victory.

I just read the book within the last few months, so it's pretty fresh in my mind. Especially since the ending pissed me off so much

And I'm telling you (with citation, no less) that your understanding is incorrect. If Ender failed the Third Invasion failed as well. Thus taking risks with Ender--particularly risks that could get him killed--was a supremely idiotic thing to do.

My bad, i assumed you were questioning the practicality of training children.

That's odd, considering that I explicitly said what my issues were.

As for predicting his behavior, I assume he was psycho-analyzed to the point were the staff could get him to play the game with a reasonable chance of his cooperation. Otherwise hand wave it a plot devices and such.

The fact that you have to make assumptions or use hand waving is the reason I take issue with it. It means that there a things in the story that do not make sense, but instead of fixing the plot to make it work (or at the very least hanging a lampshade on it) the author just left it that way. That's not good writing. Especially when I had spent the entire book waiting for a reveal that would explain all of the little problems I had been noticing.

I do want to stress again that I completely understand why some people like this book. I'm not saying "if you like this you have terrible taste"; I'm saying "there are definite flaws with the writing that prevent me from liking it". I don't want anyone to think I'm putting them down for their taste in literature (been on the receiving end of that, so I know how much it sucks). My gripes are not everyone's gripes

 

[bigwon]

Each time I went through those books I sort of just enjoyed it for what it was. I felt it conveyed it's points well enough. The progression from earth, battle school, military base to the alien planet that so happened to be identical to the generated world in his video game. (thanks to new born sentient life form Jane...I believe and her link to the hive queen that provided a link in between ender and hive queen)

As far as story board goes...I dug it! Really allowed the following books to go out and explore more metaphysical/spiritual/philosophical concepts.

I never really felt any inconsistencies.

As far as Ender's motives are concerned....I think it's more that he came to understand the adults motives and realized that no matter how seemingly trivial the shit they threw at him was that it was probably in his best interest to go along with it. I mean it's only the FRAGGING EXISTENCE OF THE HUMAN RACE AT STAKE!!! Besides it seemed to work so far. He started from bottom rank to that "throw all the teams against there 1 scenario" so they must have been doing something right.

He grew through all of the challenges they put him against. He understood that, he still grimaced his predicament but he understood there reasoning. It was until the end that he felt the magnitude of his content ignorance. He merely followed them because he believed there methodic madness was the only way....but came to the epiphany that maybe it wasn't.

(remember the nights of the battles he was being begged by the hive queen to let them be and tried to portray emotional images in his dream that reflected there empathy/compassion/other soulful stuff)

loved the series....Still puzzled as to how the author of these books could be the same fellow so hell bent against such a trivial thing as gay people marrying (I mean that in a 'what's the big deal with penis on penis, vag on vag action? way. How could campaigning against that be so important considering the concepts you discuss in your novels? way.)

Probably a word soup, if I said something too awful you can interpret that as my drowsiness....hehe

 

[wolf thing]

Ok, so I just finished Ender's Game this morning, and came out thoroughly underwhelmed. Ender came off as a rather flat character, many instances of people's motives and rational are idiotic (We need a killer who can love, a child is a superior soldier to an adult.), some of the logic is likewise dumb (the aliens can somehow read Ender's mind, fly around in space for 50 years and you won't age for some reason), it gets quite boring (watch as Ender's siblings write political commentary articles!, Ender plays a video game), and so on.

I don't get it though. This and its sequels have been so thoroughly praised, but I can't get why. Did I just completely miss something?

For more discussion, what did you guys think of the book? Think this was worth being adapted into a movie?

When you travel close to the speed of light time move more slowly to you, it called the theory of relativity, we learn this in school and it is explained in the book, i dont know how you missed it but it is worth reading up as it is science used in the real world and more knowledge never killed anyone.

 

[Heronblade]

I will admit it has been a while since i last read the book. My understanding that all the students of the battle school represented potential commanders of the invasion, Ender simply being the best candidate; and thus the one they were most invested in. If I take the extension of gambling logic; abusing him to get a potential victory may be considered a viable option if his current state grants little or no chance of victory.

I just read the book within the last few months, so it's pretty fresh in my mind. Especially since the ending pissed me off so much

And I'm telling you (with citation, no less) that your understanding is incorrect. If Ender failed the Third Invasion failed as well. Thus taking risks with Ender--particularly risks that could get him killed--was a supremely idiotic thing to do.

They did have a backup. Bean

Between the two, Bean was significantly more intelligent and a better tactician, but his ability to connect with others was poor.

You find out in another book that Bean was actually given an override switch to take control of the entire battle if he felt Ender was beginning to crack.

 

[MagunBFP]

What was the point of abusing Ender the way they did? What was the point of singling him out, of constantly changing the rules on him, and of basically making his life hell? The adults note constantly that what they're doing is going to fuck him up for life, but they make vague references to how "necessary" it is. Except it isn't. Ender doesn't know that he's committing genocide at the end--he doesn't need any kind of emotional detachment. All he needs is strategic knowledge, because he thinks he's playing a game. Nothing that happened to him previously mattered.

Heck, the reason they chose him--his kicking that one kid to death? That was also completely irrelevant. Since the entire plan revolved around him not knowing that he was commanding actual ships in an actual battle, there was no need to have a kid who saw that kind of fighting as a good thing. They just needed someone who was good at strategy. That's it. The idea that they needed someone who could emotionally connect with the bugs or whatever was complete idiocy. You don't need that to be able to be good at strategy--you just need to be good at strategy.

Also, that plan had to be one of the dumbest things I've ever come across. Take a kid, emotionally abuse him for years, then hand him a "game" that actually relays real orders to real ships on a real battlefield. Yeah, nothing could possibly go wrong there. Unless, thinking it's a game, Ender decides to just screw around (we've all done it--firing at friendly ships to see if they'll explode, flying into the sun/asteroids/planets, crashing ships into each other, etc). Or, because his teachers are total douchecanoes, he just decides not to play at all. Or decides to send all of his ships away from the battle, to see what happens. Or the pilots decide they don't trust the orders coming from a kid who doesn't even know he's commanding a real battle. The only reason the plan worked is because of author fiat.

I can understand why some people enjoyed it, but after that ending I don't think I'll be touching anything else by Card.

I've seen that you and Fraser Greenfield have had a discussion about this already, and there's nothing I can add to that, but there are a couple of points that I don't think were covered.

The reason the adults fucked with him, isolated him, gave him all the impossible tasks and set him up to fail was so he wouldn't bond with anyone. The point was to make him entirely self-sufficient, not relying on others for advice or sympathy, driving him to a point where the military and the "game" was everything to him. It was a strategy that would either work or fail and blow up in their face. If it failed they would get the next best Commander to lead the fleets as they arrived, it was an all or nothing gamble because at the end of the day they didn't even believe Ender could win and the Ender at the beginning of the book couldn't have lead Dragon army to the victory if they were unopposed.

Brief recap of the reason he was born. Peter was brilliant, intellectually everything the military wanted, except he couldn't inspire people to follow him, he would have had no loyal Sub-Commanders for his battles. His sister, Valentine, is described as being the complete opposite she would have had the love and loyalty of her subordinates but lacked the ability to make the hard decisions due to her compassion. This leads to Ender who for some reason they assume will be the balance of his siblings (yeah, I didn't buy that logic either, but it's really one of the least significant details of the story).

As you pointed out Enders admission to Battle School is because of his fight with Stilson and part of the reason is because he was he was so totally out of his weight class but still managed to win. The other part is his reasoning for how he fought. Ender knew he was breaking the rules of honourable fighting by kicking Stilson when he was on the ground but he did anyway, he also knew he was doing a lot of damage to the kid... but the reason for this was so that his victory would be so complete, so unquestionable that Stilson and any other bully would never attack him again for fear that Ender would beat them like that. Up until the end of the book Ender never knew he killed Stilson. Ender didn't want to have to fight, and he believed the way to avoid fighting was to make an example out of Stilson.

You mention how its possible that Ender could have screwed around with the "game" at command school, shooting his own fighters, flying off to find "the edge of the map" etc and you're right the odds are that he would do that, at the beginning he had training levels, getting used to the controls, simulated battles with his Sub-Commanders. I don't know about you but I'll screw around with a game at the beginning but in the higher levels with a decent difficulty I'm usually too busy trying to win to screw around. Not all of his battles in the "game" were actual live battles, some were just actually computer games.

If I remember correctly he does refuse to play several times before being coerced back into it. As for the pilots trusting a kid, well all the info they've been given is that they're following the orders issued to them by a computer that's being directed by the best person for the job, they have no idea that its a kid. That very last battle Ender sees the challenge as impossible, and decides to quit for good after he breaks the game and cheats by firing the MD device into the planet, he thinks that he's going to be kicked out of Command School and never have to deal with that shit again. One of the key things about the "game" is that he's being told to treat it as if it was real battle, Ender knows if it was real life that he would be wiping out all life on the planet and that's something he's not allowed to do, which is why when he does it he thinks it's going to be all bad.

... that turned out to be a little bit longer then I intended, but Enders Game is one of the few books that I've re-read to destruction. Hope I've been able to give an alternate context for some of the story, but if not I'm sure there's something you like that I don't so we'll just agree to disagree on the books merit.

 

[Zack Alklazaris]

The book was quite unique for its time. Now we have stories of children battling to the death with each other. So a character like Ender doesn't seem that impressive.

Its a nice little scifi written by a man who had a traumatic childhood. I do think it'll make an entertaining movie though. In a Harry Potter sort of way.

 

[Piorn]

I was captivated by the book, really, I loved it.
I loved the ending, which turned from a surprise victory into a cosmic tragedy, especially when he finds that place.

I'm looking forward to the movie!
There is a lot of potential in the dream sequences, the character interaction and the psychology, but I'm afraid they'll turn it into a "Harry Potter wins at Quidditch and then beats Voldemort at Chess and saves Space America." kind of story, which would completely miss the point of the book in the shallowest way possible.
Still, we'll see.