Book review: "Ender's Game"

It's not a nerd revenge fantasy, but a cautionary tale.

Warning: This review contains major spoilers.

Ender’s Game, by Orson Scott Card, appears at or near the top of many lists of the greatest science fiction books ever written. Whenever I see its name pop up on those lists, I feel my skin crawl a little bit. Whenever I meet someone who gushes about how much they love Ender’s Game, I immediately become a little wary.

This is not because Ender’s Game is a bad book. Quite the opposite — it is an excellent book, a singular achievement. I believe it deserves its position on the lists. And in fact, Ender’s Game was one of the formative books of my own childhood. But at the same time, I wouldn’t say that I liked it. It’s one of those things that changed me by disturbing me — like Grave of the Fireflies, or Crumb. It made me reflect on things about myself that I didn’t like, and things about the world that terrified me.

To recap, Ender’s Game is the story of Ender Wiggin, a super-smart kid who gets recruited to fight in a war against a marauding race of bug-like aliens. He advances through various games and trials, gathering companions and fighting back against bullies along the way. In the end, he and his teammates participate in what he thinks is a video game of war against the aliens, only to find afterward that it was real — they were controlling an invasion fleet remotely. Ender defeats the aliens by using a weapon of mass destruction on their homeworld, wiping out nearly the entire species.¹

Most people I meet who love Ender’s Game see this as a triumphant tale — the story of a plucky, put-upon nerd who fights back against everything the Universe throws at him and comes out on top. I never saw it that way. To me, it was the cautionary tale of a boy whose excessive pride in his own natural ability and resentment at his chronic mistreatment combine to make him amoral and destructive.

Ender Wiggin is a terrifyingly violent person. In one of the book’s graphic first scenes, when he’s only six years old, he kicks a bully to death. Later he beats another bully to death in the shower on a space station. In a video game designed to measure children’s psychological profiles, he defeats a supposedly unbeatable giant by digging through its eye into its brain with his bare hands.

That horrible image — Ender digging through the giant’s eye while it screams — stuck with me my entire life. I read the book at age 13 and have not re-read it since, and yet I remember that scene with precise detail. When I read it, I decided that this psychological game, rather than the “Battle Room” or the final war, was the “game” referenced in the title. Its meaning was obvious — Ender was a person who always responded to violence with greater violence. Ultimately, when he destroys almost all of an entire sentient species, it’s just another example of the same pattern.

Ender’s Game, I believe, was intended to be a story about how violence begets violence. Notably, Ender is transformed by the realization of what he did to the aliens — he becomes a gentle, peripatetic religious figure, spending the rest of his life attempting to atone for his crime. Orson Scott Card has written that he intended Ender to be an innocent, but at the same time, he makes it unambiguous that Ender had done monstrous things.

The thesis, then, is that children are a blank canvas — that a violent world makes them into violent people. As soon as Ender is mature enough to realize who the world has made him, he chooses to be someone else.