"Ender's Game" by Orson Scott Card
Above: "Ender's Game" - Orson Scott Card - 324 pages. I completed reading this novel today. 03 September 2024.
Ender's Game is not only a fast paced, page turner of a science fiction story, but also a thought-provoking exploration of complex moral and ethical issues.
Wikipedia Synopsis
War breaks out between humans and an insect-like alien race called the Formics. The humans achieve a narrow victory then create the International Fleet (I.F.) and train gifted children to become commanders at their orbiting Battle School.
Andrew "Ender" Wiggin is born a "Third": a rare exception to Earth's two-child policy, allowed by the government due to the promise shown by his two older siblings. The eldest, Peter, is an intelligent sociopath who bullies Ender. His sister, Valentine, is deeply empathic. The I.F. removed Ender's monitoring device when he was six years old, seemingly ending his chances of Battle School. He is bullied by a fellow student, Stilson, but Ender violently attacks him. Stilson later dies from his wounds. Colonel Hyrum Graff visits Ender after hearing about the fight. Ender attests that by showing superiority now, he has prevented future struggle. Graff offers him a place in the Battle School.
Once at Battle School, Graff and the other leaders covertly work to keep Ender isolated. Ender finds solace in playing a simulated adventure game that involves being killed by and eventually killing a giant. The cadets participate in competitive war simulations in zero gravity, where Ender quickly masters the competition with novel tactics. To further wear Ender down, he is promoted to command a new army composed of raw recruits, then pitted against multiple armies at once, but Ender's success continues. Ender's jealous ex-commander, Bonzo Madrid, draws him into a fight outside the simulation, and once again seeking to preemptively stop future conflicts, Ender uses excessive force, and Bonzo dies from his injuries.
Meanwhile on Earth, Peter Wiggin uses a global communication system to post political essays under the pseudonym "Locke", hoping to establish himself as a respected orator and then as a powerful politician. Valentine, despite not trusting Peter, agrees to publish alongside him as "Demosthenes". Their essays are soon taken seriously by the government and the people.
Ender, now ten years old, is promoted to Command School. After some preliminary battles in the simulator, he is introduced to Mazer Rackham, a hero from the Formic war who saw key patterns in the Formic behavior. Ender participates in space combat simulations created and controlled by Mazer. As the fighting becomes harder, he is joined by some of his friends from the Battle School as sub-commanders. Ender grows depressed by the battles, his isolation, and the way Mazer treats him.
For his final test, under observation by I.F.'s commanders, Ender finds his fleet far outnumbered by Formic ships surrounding their home world. He sacrifices his entire fleet to fire a Molecular Disruption Device at the planet. The Device destroys the planet and paralyzes the surrounding Formic fleet. The commanders cheer and celebrate. Mazer informs Ender that the "simulations" were real battles, directing human spacecraft against Formic fleets via an ansible and that Ender has won the war. Ender realizes that he has committed genocide and become just like Peter.
Ender and Valentine join a group of space colonists. On their new planet, Ender becomes the colony's governor. He discovers a structure that matches the simulation of the giant game from Battle School and inside finds the dormant egg of a Formic queen. The queen telepathically communicates to Ender that before the first Formic war, they had assumed humans were a non-sentient race, for want of collective consciousness, but realized their mistake too late. Instead, she had reached out to Ender to draw him here and requested that he take the egg to a new planet for the Formics to colonize.
Ender takes the egg and, with information from the queen, writes The Hive Queen under the alias "Speaker for the Dead". Peter, now the leader of Earth and 77 with heart failure, recognizes Ender as the author of The Hive Queen. He asks Ender to write a book about him, which Ender titles The Hegemon. The combined works create a new type of funeral, in which the Speaker for the Dead tells the whole and unapologetic story of the deceased, adopted by many on Earth and its colonies. Ender and Valentine leave the colony and travel to other worlds, looking for a safe place to establish the unborn Hive Queen. Wikipedia
Reader's Notes
Orson Scott Card grew up in my hometown, Provo, Utah. I didn't know him growing up. He is five years younger than I am. He attended the private Brigham Young High School, graduating in 1968, the year BY High closed its doors permanently. I have old Provo friends who went to BY High who are on the mailing list for this book report. Perhaps they can provide more insights into the young Orson Scott Card.
Ender's Game is not only a fast paced, page turner of a science fiction story, but also a thought-provoking exploration of complex moral and ethical issues.
Card notes in Ender's Game that only boys were chosen to be soldiers for reason of their genetic strength and monomaniacal focus to wage war. There is one exception: Petra Arkanian is an Armenian student who is the only female in the Battle School. During Earth's invasion of the bugger worlds, Ender relies on her heavily, often giving her complicated and critical assignments. In the movie, Ender's World, produced in 2013, eighteen years after publication of the novel, a quarter of the troops (my guesstimation while watching the film) are female. It's not clear whether this change to incorporate more female soldiers into the movie had Card's approbation, but it would be interesting to know.
An overarching theme in the book is about the morality of war. Only Ender asks hard questions of how much effort has been made by IF to communicate with the formics. The short answer is not much. IF is hell bent on getting the formics before the formics get earth. Still Ender, emotionally a youngster, is manipulated into using his superior intellect and fighting talents into destroying the formics. Ender and his lieutenants are led to believe that the battle which destroyed the formic planet was just another simulation.
The IF had concluded that gifted young people had the malleability of mind to process and execute war strategy better than adults, whose brains were stultified. A gifted young person's seeming easy excelling on a video game is an example of this. As a youngster, Elon Musk played video games for hours, sometimes well into the morning. However, is it morally right to force child soldiers to grow up quickly and lose their innocence too soon? In his preface to the second printing of his novel, Card refers to a heated letter from a mom who calls into question the morality of using gifted children to execute war. Keep in mind, Ender killed off an entire species. Ender felt contrition at the end. He felt deceived by his IF handlers. The book ends with Ender seeking personal atonement for his genocide (formicicide?) by reseeding the formic race into the galaxy using a live pupa of the formic left, deliberately for Ender, on the destroyed home planet by the formic queen.
"Ender's Game" is on the Marine Corp's Commander's Reading List. The book is a study in management...how isolation forms a leader, for example. Once Ender becomes a commander, he is given a solitary room and prevented from living amongst his soldiers. Despite having jealous pretenders to top command, selfless Ender engenders respect of the main body of soldiers by true accomplishment on the simulated battlefield. He is quick to give praise and recognition to those of his subordinates who excel. Soldiers also come to respect his ability to take care of himself when personally challenged by resentful peers.
Despite being willing to kill if threatened, Ender possesses a deep sense of empathy. IF handler Hiram Graff understands this and considers empathy to be an important quality of a leader. Ender shows compassion, when necessary, towards his soldiers and also has compassion at the end for the formics.
Closing Note
"Ender's Game" was a great book. I listened to half of it on Audible while driving from Park City, UT to Ivins, UT (350 miles) and the other half by reading from a hard copy into the evening after I had arrived in Ivins. Card wrote further books using Ender as a central character. I don't know if I'll have time to read Card further. My next science fiction project is "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy," by Douglas Adams, published in 1976. Elon Musk, famously, used this book as a bible during his young years. He credits learnings from the book as animating his own yearn to see that mankind populates new worlds. I'm a great believer in Musk's quest to hedge humanity's bets by moving humans to other planets. I want to see how "Hitchhiker's Gude to the Galaxy" animated this belief.