‘Ender’s Game’ Book Review: Finally reading a book my nephew advocated for over a decade
Two of my earliest writing influences were Sol Stein whom I took a direct computer class with in the early days of the internet in the mid 1990s and the Science Fiction writer Linda Nagata. Both writers helped me work on the craft of writing leading to The Symposium of Justice in 2004 and Tail of the Dragon in 2012. During that time with Linda where she lived in Hawaii and I in Ohio I would mail her copies of my work in hard copy form back then—she’d mark them up and send them back with comments. That went on for a while and at the end I had digested so much science fiction that I felt it had spilled over into my own writing interests. I read all the books she recommended which tended to be Hugo and Nebula award winners and I read religiously the “Magazine of Science Fiction and Fantasy” so that I could take her advice and similar career path toward the realm of writing. To learn science fiction and fantasy writing better I read a book she recommended called Hatrack River by Orson Scott Card and soon felt I was drowning in the genre. As much as I enjoyed those types of works, my interest was in politics and philosophy to a much greater extent than I had imagined, and I found myself trying to go into a different direction than what Linda did. I had to find my own path through the forest, and I wanted nothing to do with the paved road that she had taken which required winning Nebula and Hugo awards. The more I thought about it, the less I was interested in appeasing a panel of judges who oversaw those award panels.
At the same time all this was going on one of my nephews whom spent a great deal of his childhood in my care was urging me heavily to read Orson Scott Card’s treasured Ender’s Game series starting of course with the first book, aptly named. He declared to me that Ender’s Game was the best book he had ever read and that I would love it. I had no doubt that he was correct, but I knew Orson Scott Card from Hatrack River and wasn’t crazy about combining alternate history and fantasy together in that book. But worse than that Orson Scott Card reminded me of Linda as he was a winner of the Hugo and Nebula awards which was a path I had decided not to take. So I told my nephew that I would read the novel when I got around to it.
It took around 15 years but upon hearing that Harrison Ford was staring in the upcoming 2013 movie version of Ender’s Game I thought I should finally get around to reading the book before I saw the film. I had written a few novels of my own and had picked a rather difficult path through the forest on a road of my own making that was well established, so I could easily now put behind me my reservations about letting those early writing influences contaminate my thoughts with their strong presence. I bought the novel on my way to Florida to begin reading at the beach while on vacation, but more pressingly I wanted my nephew who lives near our vacation destination to know that I was physically reading the book after promising him I would for over a decade.
I started reading the book toward the end of my vacation and it took me a bit to get passed the much studied writing techniques that were so familiar to me from my writing instruction with Linda. But after I let myself get into the story and drop away all the rules of plot, paragraph structure, and character development, I found myself enjoying the novel the way my nephew knew I would. As many who follow me daily on my blog know I have put a major emphasis on the failures of societies that become philosophically committed to collectivism, especially lately. The reason is that many of the modern political problems that defame the world currently have their root cause in social collectivism. Once I learned that collectivism was the villain of our age I have been able to apply it to virtually every problem not because once learned the mind sees it everywhere by default, but because it is the cause of most human problems. Ender’s Game is essentially about two societies that are colliding, an insect oriented species that uses collectivism as a military weapon to destroy their enemies and a society on earth that has attempted to duplicate the methods of the insect species to beat them. Ironically, only one very promising student in world history figured out a strategy that would give earth a chance to destroy the alien threat and that is the young child Ender Wiggin trained from a 6-year-old boy to become a general of the International Fleet against their interstellar enemy.
The novel explored themes of sacrifice, honor, and individual integrity in ways that were more philosophy than science fiction. Upon closing the book I felt I had read a remarkable story from Orson Scott Card which explains why there are 14 books in the series written from 1985 to 2013. Now I understand why they are so popular. If I had read them back when my nephew had first mentioned Ender’s Game I might have saved myself a lot of headache in working out my own explorations into the folly’s of collectivism. Orson Scott Card certainly did a wonderful job of arriving at many very interesting conclusions that are without question deeply inspired from the Cold War of the Reagan years.
If the movie comes close to how excellent the novel was it should be quite a treat during the Holiday Season of 2013. I’m glad that my nephew was so persistent in trying to get my attention with the novel because it was well worth my time. My July has been an unusually busy month, so it took me a few weeks to get through it not because the pacing was slow, but rather I took my time to absorb it like a fine wine, which is exactly what I thought as I closed the book. I had thought about many of the problems presented in Ender’s Game from much more terrestrial angles, so it was a real pleasure to read them in the context of a heavy science fiction story that has much more to offer any serious reader than just spontaneous entertainment. Ender’s Game is an important work for our times that belongs right alongside Jules Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon.
Rich Hoffman
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