Book Review: Ender's Game

Ender's Game is a science fiction novel written by Orson Scott Card. Set in the future, it follows the adolescent protagonist Ender Wiggin as we see his ultimate struggles in training to fight humankind's alien enemy, the "Buggers". Through his training in Battle School by the International Fleet (IF), we see Ender's tactical genius in commanding others.

This is a book flawed with many small problems that detract from its otherwise unique quality. I would not recommend this book as a fun read.

3. What are the weaknesses of this book, in your opinion?

Although Ender's game is a good and respectable novel, it has many faults that make it difficult to enjoy. My major problems come from the book's pacing.

Pacing is a very important aspect of every novel, and defines its ability to communicate to the reader the story in a clear and concise way. Unless the pacing of the book is deliberately set up in a specific way, there should be no confusion to the reader about the flow of the story. Ender's Game fails to give readers a good read by skipping and starting the story at different points.

One such example is the gap between Ender's experience at Battle School and his renewed cooperation with the IF at the hands of his sister. It is explained in the novel that Ender stopped cooperating with the IF after he left his training. Since that time, he had supposedly been on a lake for several months, building a boat. The lack of clear explanation for these two points in time deprives the reader a chance to explore Ender's ultimate psyche in the face of humankind's Armageddon:

Ender sees the world his own way. We had to persuade him to see you. As for Peter and your parents, he was not interested. Life at the Battle School was - intense.

What do you mean, he's gone crazy? (232)

Although it is implied that Ender hates the IF for their ruthless training, it is never stated outright to the reader. We never truly understand Ender's ultimate motivation for continuing to conform to Battle School despite having no will to continue. After training it would be mandatory to explain his feelings in depth concerning the IF to explain his decision to stay on the lake.

This happens again at the conclusion to the book, when Ender's apparent hero status and his decision to go to a colony with his sister are never explained. Although there are one or two lines that explain the motivations, nothing further is said. As Ender's brother, Peter, is the leader of Earth at this point, it is necessary to explain Ender's feelings.

The entire novel is focused solely on Ender and his struggles. Most of the three-hundred page book is devoted to his years of training and his growth into adolescence. And yet, the ending of the book is rushed enough to conclude the rest of his life into a mere sentence:

So they boarded a starship and went from world to world. (323)

Even though Ender is the protagonist, Orson Scott Card makes it appear that all the other characters are much more developed. The motivations and aspirations of all the characters besides Ender is always clear, if not inferred heavily at multiple points. However, we get to know very little about Ender's true thoughts and convictions. Even though this vague description of Ender may be intentional, this makes the novel feel rushed and uninspired.

Because of pacing problems, Ender's Game feels like an early draft of a story with unfinished sections. The sections present in the book seem to be held together with very thin transitions. This damages the essence of an otherwise wonderful novel.

7. If you've read other books in this same genre, how does this one compare?

Being a fan of science fiction novels, I detract from my usual judgment of books by relevance to my interests. By standard, a science fiction novel is to captivate a reader and immerse them into an otherwise foreign and not easily imaginable scientific world. This, in my opinion, is achieved through the setting more than the actual story.

Ender's Game suffers in setting when compared to other science fiction novels. It approaches its own setting halfheartedly, almost adamant on leaving major details to the imagination of the reader. Nothing in the setting of the novel is explained if it is not necessary to the story.

This is clearly opposed to mainstream science fiction, which captivates readers in details, no matter how small or unimportant. It is these details that sparks and captures the attention of the reader. In Ender's Game, there are very little descriptive details to build on for any form of cognition. Multiple readers of Ender's Game might collaborate to find that their visual description of "Buggers" are radically different:

Lots of film showing marines carving their way into bugger ships. Lots of bugger corpses lying around inside. But no film of buggers killing in personal combat, unless it was spliced from the First Invasion (189).

This is opposed to other science fiction novels, such as Halo: Evolutions. A collection of short stories, Evolutions never fails to describe its cannon fodder:

The Jackals stood tall, with weird back-jointed legs, and had Mohawk-like feathers and birdlike faces. The dwarfish Grunts - with their doglike faces behind breathing equipment, squat legs, and weird triangular methane tanks - started shooting at us. (Buckwell 128)

Although a reader may have never seen a Grunt, Jackal, or Bugger before, it is clear that the Halo description is rich in sparking artistic imagery. It is easy to form a mental picture of what is being described.

Another staple of science fiction is the explanation of complex and imaginative sciences. This includes detailed descriptions involving terms and concepts obviously unfamiliar to the average reader. In Ender's game, this is done poorly:

I can't explain philotic physics to you. Half of it nobody understands anyway. What matters is we built the ansible. The official name is Philotic Parallax Instantaneous Communicator, but somebody dredged the name ansible out of an old book somewhere and it caught on. (249)

Other novels, like Joe Haldeman's The Forever War, can demonstrate this concept beautifully:

Just fling an object at a collapsar with sufficient speed, and out it pops in some other part of the galaxy. It didn't take long to figure out the formula that predicted where it would come out: it travels along the same "line" (actually an Einsteinian geodesic) it would have followed if the collapsar hadn't been in the way - until it reaches another collapsar field, whereupon it reappears, repelled with the same speed at which it approached the original collapsar. Travel time between the two collapsars...exactly zero. (8)

This easily distinguishes Ender's Game from other science fiction books in the genre. Whether the deficiencies of Ender's Game are intentional or accidental, it is clearly a unique work on its own right.