Hello people of "The Wired", my name is Quan, and today, it's the sci-fi novel that has somehow won Hugo and Nobela prizes as well as the admiration of many a reader: Ender's Game. Here we go.
Fast forward to an unspecified point into the future where the plot to almost every science-fiction book ever is taking place; we have made first contact with aliens known as "buggers", and I guess they decided they didn't like humans very much, almost completely wiping out the human race in their two attacks. In defense, we form the I.F(International Fleet) to defend against the buggers, and through mental and psychical enhancements work to create a new generation of war genius kids in hope they can save the earth from the third and perhaps finishing bugger attack. Our protagonist is 6 year old Ender Wiggan, a child super-genius who has been specially groomed to be perhaps humanities last hope, as he is taken from his family at a very young age to be recruited by the I.F. We follow Ender throughout a span of years as outwits every challenge thrown at him, and rises quickly through the ranks as he tries to live up to the huge responsibility of well, saving the human race. It doesn't help that as Ender witnesses the lengths the I.F are willing to go to save protect the human race, he starts to doubt whether he even has a reason to fight. In a nutshell, they play some war games, Ender whines about being a genius, and the grownups whisper silently about turning Ender into a weapon, not disguising in the slightest about how obviously up to something else they are.
"Carn Carby left, and Ender mentally added him to his private list of people who also qualified as human beings."
-page 184
So, despite what I might say in this review coming up, I can buy this as a solid if not entirely original premise. Let's be honest, a last ditch effort to raise a team of war geniuses to save the human race from aliens is cut from from the same cloth as just about every science fiction novel ever, but the first few chapters of Ender's Game manage to set up everything rather nicely and take the usual grim tone of aliens threatening to destroy earth and change it into something a little more organic. Ultimately, the problem with the premise isn't the premise itself but rather what the book does with it, namely absolutely nothing. OK, yes, maybe the students at I.F play some war games in the zero-gravity room(which admittedly is pretty cool), and Ender will make enemies because of how smart he is, but the entire plot for the majority of the book is just a collection of mostly unrelated events. The only structure you really get through the book is Ender's rise through the ranks, and since he's on the move for most of the book, there's hardly any reliable cast to pick up the slack. And really, the book is kind of boring, something I really did not expect going into this book, at the very least I thought I would get something entertaining. But no, it's just kind of a scrapbook of Ender's "Battle School" years, with mildly entertaining battle games and a couple of interesting concepts. At the same time as Ender, his siblings, Valentine and Peter have their own little side-story where they take over the world using the power of blogging, which easily was my favorite part of the book just because it wasn't Ender. But even that has a bizarre and somewhat unsatisfying conclusion to it, so I kind of just question why it was even there. I'm guessing there were some political messages in it, but I really couldn't care less at this point.
However the most frustrating part of this book is when ideas actually do become interesting. Throughout the book, Card drops a couple of really good ideas that hint that the story or the characters are nothing like what they seem. For example a character named Dink tells Ender his theory that the buggers don't even exist, a theory made all the more plausible that we haven't even seen a bugger at that point in the book. This would be interesting, but that, as well as a couple other potential story-turners like Ender potentially going insane and blow up in the IF's faces, just never go anywhere and are never explored. Though this might be because Card was saving one for the end.
Yes, I'm going to be talking about the last few chapters of Ender's Game here, not because I just want to spoil it for everyone, but because for a story like Ender's Game, the end might be the only reason it exists. So, if you're one of those people who have somehow evaded spoilers for a nearly 30yr old book, you're free to skip past the section marked with the spoilers brackets. Agreed? OK. (SPOILERS) So, just to give the run-down, this is basically what happens at the end of the book. Ender now ten years old, has graduated to Command School 6 years early, and is practicing with his own personal squad on a simulator to prepare for the final confrontation with the buggers. In his final exam, he and his squad face impossibly unfair odds, the program outnumbering him with buggers a thousand to one against his small fleet. Burdened with emotional exhaustion and tired of being manipulated and treated as a weapon by everyone around him, Ender decides to purposely flunk the exam and go out in a blaze of glory. He successfully destroys the bugger home-world, but loses nearly all his fleet, thus failing the test. And then... the I.F let him in on the trick. As it turns out, Ender wasn't controlling a simulator at all, and was actually controlling real people and killing buggers, effectively meaning not only has he caused a species-wide genocide, but also killed the hundreds of people he used as distractions and suicide bombers when he thought it was just a game. He destroyed the buggers once and for all, but is now the most effective serial-killer that has ever existed. You can imagine what this does to him, and why this twist is perhaps the reason why Ender's Game has gained such critical fame. And yes, I agree, this is an amazingly well executed and horrifying twist, one that I really didn't expect, but that's almost a problem in itself. The rest is so mediocre in comparison, and it feels like the entire story only exists for the purpose of this one twist, and that is in fact a huge problem. If not for the this one thing, I don't feel like Ender's Game really wouldn't have been significant in any way; like the entire plot is trying to be justified by the merits of the ending alone. And you know what? It almost does. Almost. (END SPOILERS)
"I don't if I pass your test, I don't care if I follow your rules. If you can cheat, so can I. I won't let you beat me unfairly-I'll beat you unfairly first."
-Ender, page 293
Now, for my final problem, but maybe least justified is here, in the characters. If I were to be honest with myself they aren't really that bad. Ender himself is a decent character, and his whining for the first part of the book is really of justified seeing that he's only 6 years old when the story begins, but still it gets annoying. I guess everything that he's put through in the book leaves him as a sort of a blank-sheet, not in the way that he has no personality, but in the way that he's like a corpse walking through life, just waiting to finally die. Everything that happens nearly breaks him mentally, which is understandably, and it's admirable that he's able to reach the end of the book mentally stable, but he really doesn't have much to him besides from his intelligence. He at least comes off at smart, unlike some other geniuses in books, and with the tactics he uses, gives you the impression that this kid could easily destroy the world if he was given an army.
My main problem with the characters is that almost everyone else besides Ender is completely one-dimensional, probably because they are hardly in this story at all. As I said, Ender is almost constantly on the move in Battle School, so whoever he meets on his way basically vanishes as soon as they're introduced, which leaves practically no time for development. All these characters, Alai, Bean, Dink, Petra, Carn Carby, really just don't matter when you get down to it, and only appear at the very end after each of their few page introductions(mostly coming off as either unlikable or too tense), and that just isn't good. Not at all. Even Ender's older brother Peter is basically just a psycho-path who wants to take over the world(again through the power of blogging) and Valentine, while she is maybe the only good person in this entire book, only seemingly exists so she can give Ender a pep-talk near the end of the book.
So, there you have it, my evaluation on Ender's Game, and to summarize, I just don't like the book. It's not terrible, they are certainly worse things to read, but it just doesn't do it for me. The characters are unlikable, the story is for the most part really bland, and whatever philosophic points it tries to make just fall flat under the mediocrity of everything else. I know a couple of people really like this book(well quite a few actually), but I find myself on the other side of the face, puzzled and just wondering what the fuss was about. Because again, if not for that thing that shall go unamed, Ender's Game fails on all accounts, and I have no intention to read another book by Card or the three sequels to this book. Well, goodbye for now guys,
Final Verdict: 5/10
P.S: Can someone explain the whole Giant Game thing to me, because I don't get it.
My "A Game of Thrones" review is here, while my Coraline review is here.
Like anime by chance? Click here for my review of Fate/Zero.
My countdown of my Top Five Wishlist Anime is here.
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