Book Review: Ender's Game

“Ender Wiggin isn't a killer. He just wins--thoroughly.” 

 "Nobody controls his own life.  Welcome to the human race."

2014 marches on.  I am feeling a little bit like my real life is coming into being as I have got stuff for my calling to do, and I think things are just coming together all of the sudden.  But I'm still technically on vacation, and I'm still having the life of such.  But then, vacation is the time when I feel guilty for living like I'm on vacation.  I guess you can't have it all.  Book Review!

I told you that I got books out of the big-people section.  I have always had it on the list to read Ender's Game.  And the most sure-fire way to get me to read a book that I've always intended to read is make a movie out of it, so that I say, "Dang it.  I'd better read it, because I can't see the movie until I read it."   Just a personal rule of mine.  But I didn't regret it.

Ender's Game, for the precious few who have not read it, is about Andrew "Ender" Wiggin.  He was born for one purpose, and that purpose is to become the military genius who will save Earth when the Buggers come back.  The Buggers are an alien race that came and slaughtered humans, leaving behind a traumatized, but weakly united-out-of-necessary world.  And so, at the age of six, Ender is taken to military school.  But this is military school to the max, and he is immediately taken out of childhood and into war.

I have mixed feelings about this book.  The biggest internal battle I have it whether to like Ender.  They created what could become a genius.  He's a genius in the normal sense, and then he's ruthless and yet compassionate, manipulative when he needs to be, observant in finding strategies and weakness in life and battle, and completely unattached and uninhibited.  He's the type of child that can learn the proper way to lose, without ever actually losing--or even coming close to losing.  Then, he's still a child, and has all the reckless abandon that comes with being a child.  And I'm left thinking, "He's a manipulative little sociopath in the making."

I mentioned this to my brother-in-law, and he said, "Yeah, he's manipulative, but he's also manipulated."  And maybe that's why I like him.  Because the woman in me looks at him and says, "He's just a child.  I can't help but like the little guy."

Then there's the whole battle of what's going on in the story and what the government does to Ender.  For that, I just get sad.  Especially at the end.  I get very sad.  They are frightened, and frightened people do insane things, and I guess that's the point of the book.  Do we do insane things because we're frightened?  The book was written in 1985, so put it in context of the end of the Cold War, and a whole 'nother can of worms of discussion is opened up.  We can't say, "Well we'd never do what these people do."  We almost did.

The down-side of the book?  I don't appreciate the language, especially from an LDS author.  But, really, for a military-based setting, he actually tones it down.  Even though it breaks my internal standard, I can't hold him to my self-imposed language-in-fiction standard, just because we share a religion.

I give it 4 out of 5 stars.  I really like dystopia.  Have I mentioned that?  I vaguely think I have.  And this one does dystopia well, with the thoughts and questions that are served well by dystopia.

Also, everyone, it's a SciFi that I didn't hate.  You may put that down in the history books.