I can’t believe I’m doing this, but what the heck… there is a movie in the works for this book, and it’s definitely one of Orson Scott Card’s better ones, so I will make him my very second writer to be featured twice. You may remember him already from a Scholastic Saturday on Characters and Viewpoint. Well, this is him writing narrative.
OSC is, frankly, a bit of a jerk. I would strongly recommend against reading his blog if you are anywhere to the left of Fred Phelps and wish to attempt to enjoy his writing on its own merits. As I said earlier this week in the Flannery O’Connor piece, there should ideally be nothing outside of the text. That being said, we aren’t perfect and so I say don’t even put his execrable politics into your mind, at least not after you’ve read this book and maybe a few others (I’m partial to his short story Euripides in the Fourth Floor Lavatory).
Okay, so enough about Card. Let’s talk about Card’s writing. I am not by habit a really big fan of fantasy and science fiction. I mean, I am a veteran of Dungeons and Dragons and like all geeks/nerds of my age I loved me some Star Wars when I was a kid, and so I’m not averse to the genres per se. At the same time, though, an awful lot of the genre doesn’t do much else than provide escapist fantasy for the reader. Okay, that’s not necessarily a bad thing in and of itself. Sometimes it’s nice to pretend to be somewhere else. The thing is, I can do that just as easily with War and Peace as I can with the tales of Drizz’t,* and I can get more out of War and Peace at the same time.
Okay, I’m beginning to sound like some sort of hipster intellectual type. If all you want is said escapist fantasy, great, more power to you. Personally, it’s not my bag.
Anyway, all that being said, one of the nice things about Card is that he *does* add theme to his stories. Ender’s Game is on the highest level about a small group of kids beating back an alien race. On another level, there’s some interesting material in here about the effects of technology on dehumanizing the enemy, material which is if anything even more pertinent now than it was when OSC wrote this book. There’s also a lot in here about the kinds of qualities that make someone a hero in wartime but a horrible, horrible person in other situations (to that point, there are a couple parts in here – I’ll warn you now – where actions of the eponymous character will make you cringe). There’s even perhaps something to pull out of here about what happens to children when they’re put into roles only adults ought to be put into.
There are several books that come after this which work only to varying degrees. Game is far and away the standout of the series. It’s really the standout of OSC’s work as a whole, frankly. But it is a very good book, I have to give it that.
*If you don’t know, you don’t want to know either.
A Book A Day, That's All We Ask 