The verdict
A sharp, efficient, genuinely unsettling novel that most readers finish in a weekend and keep thinking about for years. Read it for the plot, and notice that under the plot it is a book about adults deciding what a child is for.
Quick facts
- Author
- Orson Scott Card
- First published
- 1985
- Publisher
- Tor Books
- Series
- Ender's Game, book one
- Awards
- Hugo and Nebula awards for best novel
- Best for
- A fast, tightly built novel with a famous twist that earns itself
- Skip it if
- You dislike child protagonists or want the aliens to be characters
Author Orson Scott Card
Ender’s Game is Orson Scott Card’s 1985 novel about a child trained to command a fleet. Andrew Wiggin is six when he is taken from his family and sent to Battle School, because humanity has decided it needs a commander more than it needs anything else, and it is willing to spend a boy to get one. It is a fast, clever, upsetting book about what that costs.
The idea behind it
The book’s real subject is not space combat. It is the machinery that turns a gifted child into a weapon, and Card builds that machinery with uncomfortable precision. Battle School is designed as a series of engineered pressures: isolation, unfair games, no adult to trust, and just enough encouragement to keep going. Ender is not trained so much as shaped, and the novel is honest that the people shaping him are not villains. They are afraid, and they are running out of time.
Card’s twist on the usual military story is that empathy is the commander’s weapon. Ender wins because he understands the enemy, and understanding is exactly what makes what he has to do unbearable. That inversion, the idea that the best soldier is the one who cannot stop seeing the other side, is what lifted this book out of the pile and kept it there.
The story, spoiler-light
Ender is a third child in a world that limits families to two, because his two older siblings were tested and rejected. He is selected anyway. At Battle School he is put through a command-training game that looks like a sport and is not, surrounded by children who have been told to beat him and by officers who have been told to make it hard.
What follows is a series of escalating tests, friendships that are also alliances, and a growing suspicion that the game is not a game. The last act is the part everyone remembers, and it depends entirely on not knowing it in advance, so I will stop here. The novel was expanded from a 1977 short story, and it won both the Hugo and Nebula awards.
What makes it science fiction
The setting is a war with an alien species, the Formics, and the technology that matters most is not the weapons but the two devices that make the plot possible: the Battle School’s networked training games, and the ansible, a machine for instantaneous communication across any distance. The ansible is the piece that turns a training story into a command story, and it is one of the genre’s better borrowed ideas.
Where it sits is between the military tradition and the child-prodigy story, and it is more interested in ethics than in tactics. Its influence is enormous: a generation of readers met the idea of command, empathy and moral cost here first, and the genre is still arguing with it.
Who should read it, and who should give it a miss
- Read it if you want a fast, tightly built novel with a famous twist that earns itself.
- Read it if you like stories about gifted children in institutions that are using them.
- Read it if you want military science fiction that is about the cost of command rather than the glory of it.
- Give it a miss if you dislike child protagonists. The whole book is children in a hard school.
- Give it a miss if you want the aliens to be characters. They are a mystery, not a cast.
- Give it a miss if the author’s later public statements put you off. That is a judgement each reader makes for themselves.
Where to start, and what to read next
Start here. It is book one of the Ender series and the only sensible entry point. From there the series splits: Speaker for the Dead continues Ender’s life years later and is a much quieter, more philosophical book, while the Shadow series starting with Ender’s Shadow retells the same events from another child’s point of view and then follows the war on Earth.
If what you liked was the school and the games, the Shadow books give you more of it. If what you liked was the moral weight of the ending, Speaker for the Dead is the direct answer to it, and it is the book Card has said he actually wanted to write.
The verdict
A sharp, efficient, genuinely unsettling novel that most readers finish in a weekend and keep thinking about for years. It is not subtle, and it does not need to be. Read it for the plot, and notice that under the plot it is a book about adults deciding what a child is for.
Frequently asked questions
Is Ender’s Game part of a series?
Yes. It is book one of the Ender series, and the series later splits into the Ender and Shadow branches. Start here.
Did it win any awards?
Yes. It won both the Hugo and the Nebula awards for best novel, and it was expanded from a 1977 short story of the same name.
Who is Ender?
Andrew Wiggin, the third child of a family that was only allowed two, taken into Battle School as a child and trained to command. The book is his story from the age of six.
Where can I buy it?
It is available as a Kindle edition, and the buy links for Amazon.com and Amazon.in are on this page.