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Ender's Game

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Ender's Game (1985) is the best-known novel by Orson Scott Card. Set in a future where mankind has barely survived two invasions by the "buggers", an insectoid alien race, the world's most talented children, including the extraordinary Ender Wiggin, are taken into Battle School at a very young age to supply commanders for the expected Third Invasion. The book takes place in the year 2135, and its sequel, Speaker for the Dead, follows some 3000 years later.

The book originated as a science fiction novelette in Analog magazine (1977), and Card later expanded the novel into the Ender's Game Series, dealing with the long-term results of the war.

A slightly updated version was released in 1991.

[edit] Plot summary

Mankind has made contact with an insectoid alien race known to humanity as the "Buggers", or more formally as "Formics". The buggers have attempted to invade Earth twice; having been narrowly defeated the second time by a man named Mazer Rackham, and the threat of a third bugger invasion looms large over the Earth.

Enter Ender Wiggin, christened Andrew Wiggin, his nickname given to him by his sister Valentine, a six-year-old boy and third child of his parents, an audacity under the population restriction laws, permitted only by special sanction by the government that is seeking the next brilliant military commander. Young Ender is approved by the government for training at the elite Battle School, a space station where children train in armies commanded by older children in mock 41-on-41 battles (One Lieutenant, 40 Soldiers). Ender chooses to accept Colonel Graff's offer to attend, leaving behind his parents, his sister Valentine whom he deeply cares for, and his sadistic and manipulative older brother Peter.

Upon arrival at Battle School, Ender is immediately singled out by the administration and kept at arm's length from the camaraderie of the students there. He moves quickly from army to army, annoying many of his commanders with his brilliance which serves to reflect their inadequacy, and he quickly becomes the top-ranking soldier in school. Ender finds a way around the teacher's social segregation of him by forming his own nightly "practice" sessions, instructing anyone who wishes to come in zero-gravity battle simulations, teaching other students strategy and tactics regardless of their given army alliance.

Meanwhile, Ender is participating off and on in a fantasy video game created by the administration to monitor their students psychologically. Ender progresses farther than any student before, and the computer struggles to come up with environments to show Ender as he goes beyond the programming of the game. Ender acts out scenes of gruesome violence and ultimately compassion as he struggles with the images the computer is creating for him. Eventually, the game becomes too gruesome and unbearable for him, and he refuses to play any longer.

Back on Earth, Ender's brother and sister have begun trying their hand at popular politics, assuming the virtual identities of Locke and Demosthenes. The latter, written by Valentine, is a hot-headed rabble-rouser who stirs up discontent and whose main purpose is to provide a counterpoint to Peter's Locke identity, whom he is using to gain real power and influence over the world stage.

Ender is quickly promoted to commander of a brand new army, Dragon Army, and he molds his young soldiers into an unbeaten team, despite the teachers' stacking of every game against him. Some time after an especially brutal victory against one of Ender's former commanders, Bonzo Madrid, Ender is cornered in the shower by Bonzo along with several of Bonzo's soldiers. Unable to escape the situation without violence, Ender convinces Bonzo to fight him alone and Ender defeats him soundly. As Bonzo's unmoving body lies on the shower floor, Dink Meeker, one of Ender's colleagues, escorts him out of the bathroom and to his private commander's barracks, where, after a fitful sleep, Ender is awakened to news that his army will have to go into their third battle of the day, this time against two different armies—an unprecedentedly unfair situation in the battle school. After quickly surveying the battleroom, and noting the impossible outnumbering of Dragon Army, Ender, along with his five toon leaders, decides to confuse the two enemy armies by briefly adopting the very strategy that their army had famously made obsolete: a formation. Knowing that the situation was hopeless, and feeling utterly abandoned and disillusioned by the integrity of the game and the authorities of the school, Ender instructs his army formation to bypass the broken and hidden clusters of the enemy soldiers and carry out the "victory ritual" of opening the enemy's gate without actually winning the game. This is an audacious move that breaks the unspoken, and therefore unenforceable, rule that the winning army must destroy or disable all of the soldiers of the losing army before opening their gate and declaring victory. However, since the rule was never explicitly defined, and the gate could be opened regardless of how many soldiers were harmed, Ender's army technically "won" the game. This clever circumventing of an impossible situation incites glowering anger and reprimands from Major Anderson, and moments later, Ender's army is broken up, transferred to other armies, and Ender himself is promoted to Command School, six years earlier than anyone else in the history of the system—most children leave the Battle School at sixteen, Ender left at nearly ten. He is taken directly to a shuttle for Command School after a brief stop on Earth to visit his sister Valentine.

Ender is taught at Command School by Mazer Rackham, kept alive into his own future by sending him away at near lightspeed and then turning around and bringing him back at near lightspeed. Mazer reveals that the Buggers appear to be telepathically controlled by some sort of leader group, and that he had won the Bugger war by destroying a leader. Mazer instructs Ender in a game very similar to the Battle Room, only this time instead of commanding soldiers, Ender will command ships in a 3-D space battle. Mazer puts Ender through a grueling pace of games, followed by critiques and then more games. At this point, Ender is reunited with the closest people to him from battle school as his subordinates in this battle game. Ender commands them directly, and it is up to them to carry out his commands. Ender is told that from now on, he will play against Mazer directly, and that it is these tests that will determine if he is ready to command the fleet that Earth is sending against the Bugger threat. There is a new weapon Ender is given in these tests—the Molecular Disruption Device or MD Device. It is an energy ray which causes solid matter to de-construct itself down to the molecular level, and that deconstruction causes a sphere of energy to expand around the target. Any additional matter caught in this sphere is drawn into the process and chain reactions to additional matter around it. Ender finds this weapon particularly useful against closely-grouped fighters, but much less effective once Mazer orders his ships to keep separated.

Each day the games become more and more grueling, and Ender is slowly being worn down to psychosis. He is haunted by nightmares of the Buggers and thus sleeps very little. Waking and sleeping blend together as Ender loses his sanity, but he maintains his military brilliance. His unreasonable demands on his subordinates create tension, which culminates in one of his friends cracking under the pressure and breaking down into hysterics. Late into a lengthy battle, Ender passes out from exhaustion and his team has to finish the battle without him.

Finally Mazer confronts Ender, telling him that he will face an extremely grueling final exam. The game begins, and Ender is outnumbered 1,000 to 1 and is near what he comes to find out is the Bugger home world. His commanders express hesitancy at their odds and Ender, tired and angry at this unwinnable situation, comes up with a desperate plan. He forms his ships into a tight-knit group and sends them directly at the planet, much like the enemy-gate maneuver that won him the impossible game against the two armies back at the Battle School. When they are finally in range, Ender orders the use of the MD Device against the planet itself, destroying the simulated planet and all ships in orbit. Ender consciously makes this decision knowing that it is expressly against the respectable rules of war, hoping that his teachers will find his ruthlessness unacceptable and remove him from command, and allow him to return home.

Ender removes himself from the simulator after the game and finds that everyone in the room is rejoicing. It is revealed to Ender that every battle he has been fighting against Mazer was actually a real battle taking place in bugger space. The military sent ships at the bugger planets many years ago, and outfitted them with the ansible, making instantaneous communication possible. Ender realizes that he just ordered the actual destruction of an entire race, and the guilt of the massacre forces him into a five-day coma.

When he awakens, its revealed to Ender that he is being heralded as the savior of the human race, and now that the bugger threat has been eliminated, mankind is expanding into the empty bugger planets and repealing the population laws. Valentine arrives at command school and convinces Ender to go with her on the first ship leaving for colonization. When they arrive on the bugger world, Ender finds a large constructed statue resembling images he saw in the fantasy game. As he walks through a cave nearby he discovers a single cocoon, the last unborn bugger queen. He resolves to atone for his destruction by finding a place to resurrect this bugger queen, bringing the alien race back into existence. The unborn queen shares a psychic link with Ender, and she is able to communicate that they didn't understand that humans were sentient creatures, and their defeat during the Second Invasion forced them to realize humanity's true nature (an indirect result of Mazer killing a Queen), and they had resolved to never attack Earth again. Ender writes of the compassion and pain of the bugger race and titles his book The Hive Queen (later, on request from his brother Peter who is now Hegemon of Earth, he also writes a book called "The Hegemon" to tell the truth of Peter's life), and signs it "Speaker for the Dead."

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[edit] External links

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