Ender's Game

A book review.

Ender's Game

by Orson Scott Card

published: 1985

ISBN: 9781904233022

genre: Sci-Fi

reviewed:1998.06.06

This is a story of a young boy who's raised to lead humanity in a war against an unstoppable alien race. He attends a miserable military academy where he's frankly not a star. But he starts winning games and is given more and more responsibility. In the end of course it's revealed that the games were the war, that the simulation in which he was engaged was actually carried out in deep space combat. I'm not at all sure that this carries, because the strategies he was deploying (memorably, numbing his legs with a mild shot from his own weapon, so that he was immune to the shots from his opponents) were not translatable to real war in deep space. Maybe I need it explained to me but the whole thing doesn't hang together.

I originally read my brother's copy of this book back in the mid-'80s but recently re-read it. I have to say it's a bit too clever in some areas and once you know the "big reveal" it's not really as engaging. I think that Sci-Fi was changing by the mid '80s and that this book was still part of the older heroic deeds set - a style that hadn't changed much since the '50s.