The summer before my senior year I worked for a friend of the family as a receptionist and file clerk, which meant that I spent a lot of time staring at the unringing telephone and doing logic puzzles. But the office building also happened to be next door to the public library, and sometimes I would run over there to check out a book to read on my lunch hour (since, as the office flunky, I had to be around for the phone even while I ate). That's how I found Ender's Game, just by accident, browsing the shelves. It was the wrong book to begin on my lunch break, because it cries out to be read from beginning to end in one sitting.

And I loved it. I read a lot of books but I don't love very many of them. Like, enjoy, appreciate -- but when I say I love a book, I mean that it made an impression on me that makes it impossible for me to look at it objectively. So this won't be a very balanced review, because I want to look at some of the things that made this book so appealing to me then and now.

In the near-future Earth of Ender's Game, Earth has been attacked twice by horrible aliens that look like giant bugs (NB: If you are not much familiar with speculative fiction, you should know that Card's choice of the bug-eyed monster cliche (or BEM for short) for his aliens is fairly cocky. He pulls it off well) and barely survived these attacks. Population pressure is so intense that in most countries, families are legally limited to only two children. But in order to breed children who are smarter and better equipped to fight the buggers when next they attack, certain people with exceptional genetic qualifications are allowed to have more than two. That's how Andrew (Ender) Wiggin is conceived -- a despised Third, a scientific project that the government hopes will succeed. His older brother Peter was too violent, his sister Valentine too weak, but Ender, as the story goes, is "just right." The young genius is taken from his family when he's only six and placed in an off-planet training facility called Battle School, where he and other prospective warriors are taught to fight. Ender is the best of them all; he passes every test, wins every battle, but as the tests get harder and the battles go from hand-to-hand combat to simulated space wars, he is more devastated by the things he's learning.

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SPOILER ALERT!!!! Just skip the next chapter if you haven't read the book and don't want an essential plot element given away.

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Then the day comes when Ender, having played a simulation in which he destroys the bugger homeworld, learns that all those simulations were actually remote-controlled real battles. He's actually been leading the Earth fleet in an invasion. And he's just blown up a planet.

Normally I don't give away important details of a plot in a review. In this case, though the revelation of what Ender's really been doing is quite shocking, I don't think it's really the main point of the book. That comes afterward, though it seems like there couldn't be much "after" at that point in the plot. Read it and see, if you haven't already. As it turns out, just like in real life, creation is much more difficult, and much more important than destruction.

One of the best elements of Ender's Game is the characterization. Early SF placed an emphasis on plot and idea over character; recently many authors have turned that convention around, or at least given character equal importance. Card is one of these; while the story in Ender's Game is gripping, exciting, and full of action, the point of the story is really the characters and what happens to them. The intelligence of Ender and his siblings may seem unrealistic to many readers, but their personalities and conflicts are very human. Ender's value to the people waging the war is that, while he's capable of great violence, he's also entirely human and very empathetic. As the story begins, Ender is having the monitor -- through which the government has been observing him all his life -- removed. Without its protection, a school bully tries to start a fight with the despised little Third, but Ender fights back, and actually knocks the bully to the ground:

For a moment, the others backed away and Stilson lay motionless. They were all wondering if he was dead. Ender, however, was trying to figure out a way to forestall vengeance. To keep them from taking him in a pack tomorrow. I have to win this now, and for all time, or I'll fight it every day and it will get worse and worse.

Scary thoughts for a six-year-old to have, but Ender beats Stilson to a bloody pulp and (though we only discover this later, and indirectly) accidentally kills him. Ender's actions, though morally reprehensible, are in a Machiavellian sense very logical. It's not true that violence doesn't solve anything -- violence can be, in its way, an effective and sometimes final solution. But that doesn't make it morally right, and it doesn't make violence good for the one who uses it. Ender is painfully aware of how terrible his beating of Stilson was. Though it solved the problem of being harassed by the school bullies, it left a mark on his spirit that is never erased.

Ender stands at the center of a balance between Peter, the smiling sociopath who tortures animals and his siblings, and Valentine, smarter than either of her brothers in some ways. Throughout the book Ender fears he will turn into Peter, but through the machinations of his teachers and his own personality he's unable to be like Valentine. Ironically, it's Val who is finally able to control Peter, and one of the best sections in the book is only indirectly related to Ender's story -- the one in which Peter and Valentine begin writing political essay/speeches they disseminate world-wide in a news forum something like the Internet. As they become famous political commentators (at the ages of twelve and ten respectively) Peter's more violent inclinations are curbed by Valentine, and Valentine is goaded by Peter to excel in ways she never would have done on her own.

In addition to being excellently characterized, Ender's Game is an exciting and action-filled science fiction novel. I have some very vivid mental images of the Battle School, which has free-fall environments called battlerooms in which armies of children fight battles that are something like a combination of Capture the Flag and laser tag. Watching Ender progress from a raw "Launchie" to the leader of the best army in the school becomes something like rooting for your favorite sports team. Equally interesting, if in a less exciting way, is the computer game Ender plays that becomes more and more of an obsession with him. All the kids at Battle School play it, and it tailors itself to each individual player, but there's a point at which they're supposed to give up, because it's deliberately impossible to beat. Ender finds a way past this impossible point (surprise) and the computer stretches to its limit and beyond creating a unique world for him. The game helps to humanize him even as the things he's learning in his battles are turning him into a warrior. (Just how far the computer program had to stretch, and what happened to it afterward, is revealed in the sequel, Speaker for the Dead.)

But it's the plot of Ender's Game that is its greatest strength, the more so because it could have been so cliched. Bug-eyed monsters, space war, saving the Earth from the scum of the universe. . . . The Earth forces didn't win the first wars with the buggers; the buggers just stopped fighting. And that scared the generals, because if the buggers hadn't stopped, there was no way Earth could have survived. So from their point of view, a preemptive strike made sense -- attack them before they get us. So, too, did choosing children to fight those battles, because of those children's superior reflexes. But when I realized just what those military leaders had done, lying to Ender and his companions so they'd attack without compunction, I was appalled. Ender was left in the terrible position of having done something unspeakably evil -- destroying an entire race of creatures -- without having really chosen that path. It's an especially Mormon evil, given the emphasis we place on free agency and its role in the plan of salvation. And it burned me up, that a bunch of adults could be so despicable as to put the burden of destruction on a boy not yet twelve. Despite all their excuses about being too old to react quickly enough, the truth -- and they all know it, too -- is that not one of them had the ability to give the order that would destroy a whole species. And Ender wouldn't have either, if he hadn't thought it was just a game. We do lots of things in games that we'd never do in real life. Games are the way we test different options, figure out what will be the best choice. When Ender's game turns out to be real, he goes from being a brilliant kid to being a xenocide in a heartbeat. And though he spends years trying to repair what he's done, he can't erase that past.

Ender's Game is science fiction, but I have recommended it to everyone I know and a few people I don't, and though not all of them have enjoyed it, not one of them was turned off by the genre. It's speculative fiction, but very accessible speculative fiction. I'm telling you: If you haven't read it, go get it. If you have read it, read it again. What this book has to say about sin and repentance is important for every reader, but for Mormons it's essential.

Melissa Proffitt
Melissa@Proffitt.com