Ender is the elite of the elite -- he is a 6-year old kid who possesses the most advanced physical and mental abilities of anyone that the universe has ever seen. Let me try and sum up some of his most incredible accomplishments: he figures out that he can impersonate someone else's log in name by adding a space after it, he figures out that any direction can be considered up in zero gravity, and he develops winning laser tag strategies like not assembling your troops into rigid formations. I mean, sure that's all great for a six-year old, but we're talking about the guy who we're counting on to save the universe here.

The plot itself is very thin. It's good versus evil in a video game battle. I'm sure this was all a whole lot more exciting when it was written in 1977, before the internet and when video games were in their infancy. But that is no excuse for the way over-simplified story line, the ethnically-stereotyped characters, and the painfully crude dialogue. It reads like it was written by someone who hasn't been around kids for 30 years trying to remember how kids talk.

Don't waste your time with this one.


Suitable only for 13-year olds   May 23, 2005
 29 out of 56 found this review helpful

Wouldn't it be neat if somebody recognized how brilliant you were, and took you out of the boring school you're at, and took you away from your dorky parents who don't like you anyway, and put you in this neat training facility with really cool arcade games and even a battle game that you got to play in zero gravity? No? Well then you must be a reader who's outgrown adolescence, and you won't like this book.

How this piece of juvenile fiction ever won the Nebula and Hugo awards I'll never know. The premise is that inter-stellar armies are best run by children with a predilection for violence. Ender is the smartest and most violent of all and he manages to win every fight he's in by miraculously re-writing the book on tactics all on his own. He outsmarts all the kids and adults he's up against with strategies that are bewilderingly original to the other characters in the book, but incredibly obvious to the reader. It's kind of like Harry Potter goes to space, but with much less thought and writing talent.

What a waste of time.




Don't bother if you're over 18   June 10, 1997
 23 out of 60 found this review helpful

I tried reading this juvenile SF novel when it first appeared, and stopped halfway through -- I was put off by the ludicrous subplot, in which the brilliant hero's sweet sister and mean brother (not deep characterization -- they only need one adjective each) use invented Internet alter-egos to take over the world. Billions of people on the Web, and not _one_ has a single idea, except for Ender's siblings. But that's the pattern of the book, a book that makes no attempt to describe the contentiousness or complexities of real life.

Ender, the hero, is no more a character than, say, James Bond -- Ender always wins, always bests every obstacle, defeats every enemy, shames every teacher, with a mininum of effort. Other characters exist only to extol or mirror his greatness; the handful who don't admit to his superiority are easily disposed of. There's an almost pornographic feel to the final chapter, in which Ender founds a new space colony, saves the alien race he thought he had single-handedly destroyed, and invents a new religion(!), all the while wallowing in the self-pity that started at page 2 and never stopped.

I would give this the lowest grade possible but for two factors -- Card is a facile, easy-to-read writer, and the book might do some good to bright pre-teen boys who aren't getting much support from their environment. Of course, "Playboy" might too, but it isn't art either. Not recommended for adults at all.


Stuck in the middle with you   May 19, 2004
 23 out of 35 found this review helpful

I really enjoyed reading ENDER'S GAME, although I certainly had a few qualms along the way. I found it to be an entertaining, engrossing read that had me quickly flipping through the pages, eager to see what came next. But, to be honest, I'm a bit baffled by the overwhelming praise directed towards this book. Sure, it's good, but I didn't find it nearly as powerful as others have.

Plot is the most important part of this book, coming at the expensive of style. The prose is mostly workmanlike, though it's deceptively good at slowly ratcheting up the tension. Characters are virtually nothing more than ciphers for the storyline, and while they're distinctive, they're rarely given much depth. Ironically, I felt the only character that approached full-development was Ender's sister, Valentine, and she is really only defined by her relations with her two brothers.

One thing I should mention is that I absolutely hated the ending of this book. Hated, hated, hated it. It took the suspension of disbelief that I'd been managing to hold onto for three hundred pages and just threw that out the window. I can accept that selectively bred children can be perfectly reasoning geniuses. I can even accept that they can talk in perfectly formed little speeches to each other (though this is a bit harder to digest, to be honest). But I simply cannot believe that any organization (I'm being deliberately vague in order to avoid spoilers) would allow that certain decision to be made by a character of that age. It's laughable. Ridiculous. And unfortunately, coming at the end as it did, it put a bit of a bad taste in my mouth. Not enough to ruin the previous chapters, mind you, but enough to turn me just a little bit away. I can take (and often enjoy) fictions that are overly cynical, but this seemed to be cynical just for the sake of being cynical, i.e. very contrived. It felt exploitative and manipulative. Given that the main themes of the book are exploitation and manipulation, this may very well have been deliberate, and the reaction I felt was exactly what the author wanted me to feel. But you can't expect me to like it.

Maybe the kudos that this book receives is because it's a fictional novel that asks and hints at a lot of heavy, deep philosophical questions. Of course, humankind has been asking these same questions for a few thousand years now, and I'm not convinced that ENDER'S GAME is bringing anything particularly new to the table. Truthfully, I enjoyed this book simply as a straightforward science-fiction action-adventure, nothing more. The philosophizing and moral dilemmas were presented in a slightly too clumsy and obvious a manner for my tastes. Clearly, mileage will vary on this point, as many, many others would evidentially appear to have got a lot more out of this than I did.

That said, I think the book's attempt to tell the story more or less completely from the point of view of an especially gifted child was a success. On the other hand, the eventual reason for the main characters being so young does come across as a bit of cheat at the end, and one wonders if it wouldn't have been a tad more believable to make these mature-seeming people just a slight bit older in age too. Still, it worked for me, so I can't complain too much. When Ender must deal with bullies and other "child" problems, he is presented as more (adult) rational than (child) emotional (not what I would have expected), but ultimately he does come across well as an unusually composed youth. The parts where I really felt disturbed by the cast's age was during the more bloody of the fight scenes; in particular, when two pre-pubescent boys stand naked in a bathroom kicking each other in the groin until one of them collapses. I suppose the point was to make the reader uncomfortable, but I think it really could have been done better in a less distasteful way.

My copy of the book (a paperback of the 1991 reissue) contains an overly defensive introduction from Orson Scott Card wherein he attacks opponents of his book for being too insecure and unable to empathize with gifted, intelligent children. He seems to be of the mind that people either loved his book unconditionally or loathed it utterly, with no room for opinions in the middle. Looking around at the other reviews, he may very well be right. But I find myself in a rare position. I abhorred some portions of this book, but really enjoyed others. Overall, it more than maintained my interest and kept me speeding through, and I'll give it a lot of credit for that. I didn't fall in love with the novel, but I enjoyed it enough that I'll probably get around to the sequels eventually.

(Oh, and I was amused to note that Card seems to have correctly predicted the rise of the Internet-based political blogs, although he does get confused as to whether he wants his would-be power-grabbers to be merely influencing memes or controlling people and events directly. Of course, in his fictional universe, we're to believe that people take on-line political scribblings a lot more seriously than they do in ours.)