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.
Like Ender, and like many fans of Ender’s Game, I grew up as a smart kid. Children don’t know what’s good or special about themselves until someone tells them, and what everyone told me was that I was smart. So my intelligence became core to my identity. It’s hard to remember now, but I believe that this gave me a certain arrogance — I could do things my peers couldn’t, and I felt that this made me special and different.
I was only bullied a little bit when I was young, but my sense that I was special made it seem all the more unjust. When I wrote stories as a child, it was always the smart kid who prevailed, and his virtue was a natural and obvious function of his natural intelligence. In my simplistic moral universe, might — intellectual might — made right.
I imagine that this is all a fairly common experience.
I don’t resent or blame my childhood self for any of this. By the time I reached adulthood, I had become a very different person. There were a lot of things that changed me. One of them was Ender’s Game.
Reading the novel at age 13, I naturally imagined myself as Ender Wiggin, as I always did with “smart kid” protagonists. Which meant I imagined myself doing all the things Ender did — kicking a helpless six-year-old until he died, driving a teenager’s nose into his brain, digging through a giant’s living eye. It made me sick. I had nightmares. I suddenly understood a terrible truth of this world — that in the right situation, I could be a torturer, or a brutal prison guard, or a child soldier, or a genocidaire. I understood that just as being intelligent wasn’t enough to make Ender a good person, it wasn’t enough to make me a good person either.
This was an incredibly salutary revelation.
When I meet other people who love Ender’s Game, I rarely get the sense that the book affected them in a similar way. Many seem to have taken it as the kind of straightforward “revenge of the smart kid” fantasy that it was in fact intended to subvert. Those who dislike the book tend to interpret it this way as well. I feel like they’ve all missed the point. They’re like people who read Love in the Time of Cholera as a triumphant romantic tale. I never understood why people could read such a dark and violent book as a heroic epic, but I suppose there’s lots of demand for stories that fit that mold — both to adore, and to criticize.
In any case, I felt — and still feel — that I received the message the author wanted to send. It was not a pleasant experience by any means, but it was an important one. It shattered my egoistic child morality, and set me on the path to finding better reasons to like myself. That is why Ender’s Game, to me, will always be one of the greatest science fiction books ever written — and why I’m still afraid to re-read it.
But anyway, this is an economics blog, and so I thought you might also enjoy hearing some thoughts about the broader socioeconomic context from which Ender’s Game emerged.
The age of the nerd
Contemplate, for a moment, the Valeriepieris Circle:
It was always going to be highly unlikely that the center of global manufacturing would be so far from the biggest, densest concentration of world population. Manufacturing relies on proximity for efficient production and continuous improvement, meaning that it tends to concentrate in geographic areas with lots of customers and workers. As soon as the countries of Asia got over communism and other early missteps, it was always highly likely that manufacturing would shift there.
The U.S., being a very adaptable nation, managed to survive and even thrive in the era of Asian manufacturing dominance, by pivoting its economy to activities that were even higher-value than manufacturing that could be easily done remotely. I am talking about knowledge industries — IT, industrial design, innovation, biotech, finance, business services, etc. Asia became the world’s factory; America became its research park.
Manufacturing is very capital intensive, but knowledge industries are more human capital intensive — you need a lot of brain power to be a systems architect, or a hedge fund quant, or a molecular biologist. Whichever companies have the most copious supply of such geniuses will tend to dominate the rest. Economists call these companies “superstars”.
Every company wanted to cash in on the new knowledge-industry gold rush, which meant hiring a lot of human capital. The college wage premium began to rise relentlessly:
The premium for advanced degrees rose even more.
There was a palpable shift in the 1980s and 1990s. Suddenly, bespectacled nerds who had been relegated to the basements of big companies in the 1970s were moving to the executive suite, or even starting their own companies. The titans of industry went from backslapping dealmaking “bros” to engineer types; at some point, the world’s richest man became a skinny mop-haired nerd with giant square glasses. By the 2010s, engineers at superstar companies were getting paid half a million a year.
It wasn’t just superstar companies that outshone the rest of America after 1980 or so — it was superstar cities as well. In his book The New Geography of Jobs, economist Enrico Moretti showed that it was tech hubs like San Francisco, along with college towns, that prospered far more than other cities from the 1980s through the 2010s. Measuring a town’s human capital level was the best way to predict whether it would succeed or fail in the new economy.
By the early 1980s, it became apparent to everyone that America was going to need to find and cultivate its best and brightest to be the vanguard of these new industries. A vast apparatus emerged to find the smartest kids in the country and send them to the best schools. Selective schools became more selective. Everyone wanted the nerds, and public schools began identifying and preparing their high flyers early on.
It was out of this general cultural milieu that “boy genius” stories (yes, it was always a boy, this was the 1980s) began to emerge. Movies like Real Genius, WarGames, The Manhattan Project, D.A.R.Y.L., or The Wizard seem pretty clearly to be metaphors for an economy looking for gifted kids. The character of Wesley Crusher on Star Trek: The Next Generation was perhaps the most perfect instantiation. Ender’s Game fit squarely into this genre; it was probably because “boy genius saves the world” was becoming such a standard trope that the much darker nature of Card’s story was overlooked.
The years since 1980 have been the Age of the Nerd.
I now live in the beating heart of Cerebral Valley, San Francisco, where the young AI engineers go to live and work and play. It is here that the Age of the Nerd has been honed to a fine spearpoint. Engineers at Google make hundreds of thousands a year; engineers and researchers at a top AI company make millions. Under their guiding hand, pure mathematics has woken up and started talking. The supernerds of today’s cutting-edge industries are not the weirdos of yore — they are beautiful people with perfectly optimized workout routines, active romantic and social lives, and refined cultural and artistic tastes.
And yet I feel like the supernerds of the modern tech industry have assimilated the tropes of the 1980s a little too deeply. Some AI engineers talk about their models in terms of “IQ”; this is not a very useful way of thinking about AI capabilities, but I think it reflects the fact that IQ is a big part of what gave AI engineers themselves their special status in society.2
Similarly, many AI engineers I talk to seem convinced that when AI gets good enough, all humans except for a few exceptionally intelligent individuals will become economically obsolete. This is despite the fact that so far, every study of generative AI finds that it boosts the abilities of lower-skilled humans much more than higher-skilled ones. Nerds have been masters of the Universe for so long that it might be difficult for the younger among them to imagine a world where their skills command less of a premium.
But that age may be coming anyway. In addition to AI-driven skills compression and the prolonged startup bust, the college wage premium has been falling in recent years. That might reflect deep changes in the U.S.’ industrial structure, but a simpler explanation is that America simply sent so many people to college that they competed down the market value of each other’s human capital. In other words, the market for nerds might be glutted.
I highly doubt this will result in software engineers being reduced to flipping burgers. But the idea that the world naturally trends toward greater IQ-driven inequality is an assumption that might turn out to be inaccurate. There is no guarantee that the Age of the Nerd will last forever, any more than the Age of the Aristocrat did.
Right now, though, supernerds are the masters of the Universe. That’s why Ender’s Game continues to be such an important book. Read carefully, it’s a reminder that even the smartest people are not supermen, beyond good and evil, or any other Nietzschean cliche, but morally culpable and fallible beings just like everyone else. I can think of few more important life lessons.
There’s also a subplot back on Earth, where Ender’s brother and sister manage to take over the world through blogging. When people ask me where I got the idea that blogging could change the world, I tell them it was Ender’s Game. Fortunately or unfortunately, my own sister is not particularly interested in blogging.
By far the silliest example of this is when I was walking behind two men in Noe Valley, and one was telling the other how he wanted to marry an Asian woman, so that their kids would be more likely to have high IQs, so that they’d be more likely to survive the coming AI-driven job apocalypse and still be valuable to society. Very few AI engineers say ridiculous stuff like this, but it was such an amusing anecdote that I felt I had to relate it.
Interestingly enough, the novel is an expansion of a short story, which omits a lot of the backstory for Ender and his family and focuses on the training at the space station and the actual campaign against the aliens. It is likely the reason so many people consider "Ender's Game" a triumph of capable and intelligent people over an imminent threat.
The novel is the one that puts the plot in a different context, and it is indeed very frightening. The realisation that high intellect doesn't save you from your inner darkness has always given me shivers. However, the most terrifying part of all is that what Ender does is actually rational. He applies extreme violence against his bullies not because he enjoys it, but because he doesn't want it to happen again, as he realises nothing will shield him from more bullying if he lets go.
I have always considered this a reflection of actual global politics. Essentially, it is the idea that you don't strike first, but when attacked, you respond in massive force so it doesn't happen again. This is probably the most brilliant part of the novel, as it brings that concept from global politics, where many would support it, to children, where it is terrifying. What the novel taught me is that actions have consequences, especially violent actions.
To wrap up, you don't have to look hard to find countries that apply a doctrine of extreme response when attacked. There is a conflict going on right now that has been ignited by that doctrine, as a matter of fact - and yes, I am referring to Israel and Gaza. So the novel provides plenty of food for thought. It is also yet another example of how fiction becomes reality, like manipulation of public opinion through social networks could lead to massive policy changes (this is about the novel's subplot featuring Ender's siblings).
Ender’s game is as you say an excellent SF but also so much more. With the following several books in what became a series it is both cautionary and visionary. The horror of genocide, the Intelligent agent of later books, the demagogic power of social media. The exploitation of the planet of autistic people. Important and powerful. The movie sucked