Ender’s Game
Author’s Definitive Edition
Ender Quartet
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Ender’s Game is an incredible book, it examines many important ideas in such a way that everyone can understand and have empathy for. The book for all its brilliance has been labeled as a children’s book, which I find moderately absurd. Like any truly good book it is written concisely and without out the use of ridiculously big words just to make the author feel good about themselves “oo, I’m so smart cause I used big words” kinda thing. So in that respect I can see why maybe it got thrown into the young adult area because it’s written so that anyone can understand it, and also because the protagonist is a child could be another reason I guess it’s so labeled.
But anyways, the book examines issues that anyone can relate to, the main one I like to examine are “deplorable acts done out of necessity”. The main deplorable acts examined are war and violence, but this book isn’t a pro-war book, in fact it more likely could be considered an anti-war book, but it examines some situations where war might be a necessity.
It also examines violence as a necessity for self defense but again doesn’t promote it, he (Orson Scott Card) shows you the situations and more or less leaves it up to you to decide if it was a good or bad thing. I would definitely say this book could one day be placed among works of great literature, and it surely ranks up there with the famous books of sci-fi’s hay day like Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land, Asimov’s Foundation Series and Clarks’ Space Odysseys’ and Childhood’s End.
Now in the Ender’s series there are 10 books as far as I know, I’ve read 5 of them so far and enjoyed them, but not near as much as the first. And interestingly, by the 3rd and 4th book he’s seems to be questioning his ideals and beliefs expressed in Ender’s Game, almost like as he aged his views are becoming more, hmm…I want to say peaceful but that’s not quite right, less extreme maybe, it’s hard to describe. But if you’re a hardcore fan I’d still recommend reading them.
Orson Scott Card has also written a bunch of other books, many of which are alternative histories about our world, some about if we had failed in the Revolution to more modern themes. Very excellent stuff.
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