Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card
My Rating: 3/5 stars
The story of Andrew 'Ender' Wiggin, a gifted boy who lives in an unspecified future where humanity is at war with aliens that they call the Buggers. The alien threat unites the world but also turns it into a totalitarian dystopia. At the age of six Ender is told that he might be humanities great chance to defeat the buggers and must leave his family for the Battle School where he is pushed to the limits by his teachers whose goal is to save humanity no matter what the price might be.
The fact that I ultimately gave this book 3 stars, and not 4, came as a surprise to me. There were some good things in this story that I really enjoyed but in the end it wasn't enough. So let's start with the good. I liked Ender, I have no antipathy against him despite the many problems of his character. He is a child in situation that is way over his head and constantly manipulated. Through out most of the story he is pretty much helpless and stuck in a situation he can't change because he is overpowered by stronger and more powerful enemies. In a way he represents the world he is living in - scared and grasping at straws. He was a character I could empathise with. I also like the world of this story, to a certain extent, the tragic irony of it. The people of the world are no longer at war with each other, but they are no better for it. It is a fragile peace that without the alien threat would collapse any minute. But what I mostly "liked" (if you could say that about such a sad story) was that in a effort to save humanity they were sacrificing their children to the war. The middle part of the book was my favourite because it dealt with what the Battle School was doing to it's students.
Now for what I didn't like. A thing I noticed some time ago is that it is hard to do children right. Be it in books, movies, plays or whatever most writers go for two extremes - either make them too serious, in effect adults in children's bodies, or make them downright stupid (and I'm not sure which is worse). This book is no exception. With only a few rare exceptions there's nothing child-like about the children of Ender's Game. Worse yet the author seems to think that intelligence automatically equals maturity, which seems to especially be the case with Ender's siblings Peter and Valentine. The fact is that an intelligent child is still a child. If the characters were at least teens when the major events of the story happened I might look at the story better, but as it is the story just seems ridiculous. And while we're on the subject I think the most ridiculous thing about the story was that of Peter and Valentine where the two children team up to write on the net and through their writing amass a following and one day rule the world (well it's mostly Peter's idea to rule the world). Now to be fair I liked the story, in many ways it was interesting but it pretty much broke my suspension of disbelief. The words "they're just children" just kept screaming in my head. The whole children, but not really aspect of the story was the most irritating, but the second one - lack of consequences. The part that I found most interesting was when Dink (student at Battle School and Ender's friend) talked about how many of the students of Battle School were crazy and what this school and its teachers was doing to them. I think the story would have been better if that idea hadn't been dropped, if the author had shown the effect that the events of the story had one the characters. At the end of the story Ender has gone through hell (at least that was my opinion) at a very young age and seemingly without any consequences. He doesn't become the violent sociopath that he feared he might be, he doesn't suffer a mental breakdown and there are no legal or social ramifications of what he did. It's like everything that happened had no lasting effect, except when in the end we are briefly told about the aftermath of the war which seems to stray very far from the book's otherwise realistic story. Also I was not fond of the fact that in the end the children fought the war. I mean whose bright idea was it? It all could have went disastrously wrong. And lastly a somewhat minor complaint - what annoyed me was that the characters kept constantly repeating "save the world". It just seemed cliche and lazy just repeating these 3 words.
So that's my two cents about Ender's Game. Not bad, but could have been a lot better.
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