Pros: This novel is character driven, thoughtful and philosophical.
Cons: If you don't like SF that dwells on ethics questions, you won't like this.
The Bottom Line: This is a classic. Five Star books are great rereads. Four star is good read, three star compares to most in print, two is flawed, one star has major problems.
robertsloan2's Full Review: Orson Scott Card - Ender's Game: Special 20th Anni...
Okay. I've read this book several times, it's got a five star rating because it hit my Reread List over and over. I happen to like Orson Scott Card's deep conscience and I particularly like SF novels that show a character who's overcoming major obstacles by intelligence, common sense and personal character.
It's got a lot of action in it, particularly at the level I like to read action scenes. Ender's playing a lot of games in training. He's supposed to be a military genius and he winds up actually questioning the authorities that have shaped his life pretty much from birth. They intend to use him in a military capacity. He questions the entire concept of war. Now if you're an SF reader who's fonder of interstellar war and doesn't like being distracted by moral questions about whether war is right at all, this is not the book for you.
But if you're a Star Trek fan you might well appreciate Ender's point of view. On his own in a level of social isolation almost unthinkable to most people, without a strong philosophical background, he begins to derive his own worldview and actually by good observation devises a strategy of communicating with aliens instead of just shooting them down. I don't think this is a spoiler. To me the point of the book is following Ender's personal growth as he uncovers more and more of the policies surrounding his very strict, strange, militaristic barracks childhood and questions the goals other people have set for his life.
He's also a plausible genius.
Most SF readers of any stripe tend to fall into the upper statistical deviations for IQ and education. At a convention I attended in the 1980's, David Gerrold asked "How many of you had a library card in first grade?" The entire room raised our hands and laughed out loud. Incidentally, some statistics I ran into suggest that reading and education improve IQ scores by up to 20 points, so that may have something to do with this Fans are Slans phenomenon. We take an interest in things that people who don't read consider trivial and wind up creaming tests a lot easier, scoring higher and being labeled as brains.
Most SF fans also wound up a bit alienated as children for that reason, we don't tend to swim with the mainstream or live unexamined lives. Ender was profoundly resonant to me as an SF fan because Ender was a lot like I was in school. There were the rest of the kids just taking orders and doing what they're told. There's Ender questioning the system and noticing that it's hypocritical. That's the universal experience of any child who keeps his eyes open.
Ender triumphs over the nightmare schooling he had and goes on to make his own way in the world.
We did too. You're an adult reading this and no one's telling you that you can't post an opinion that the Electoral College is not true democracy anywhere. That's just one of the many unfairnesses a lot of bright kids notice before they give in and think as they're told.
So pat yourself on the back for your high IQ and your wise honest perceptions of life and if you haven't read Ender's Game before, settle in for a good time. You won't be disappointed. And hey, if you disagree with Orson Scott Card's view of war, just write a science fiction book! It can be done. That's how the literary conversation gets going.
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