Book review: Ender’s Game (or being a teenager again)

Twenty-five years ago, when I was 13 years old, I competed in an athletics competition in Dunedin (in the South Island of New Zealand).

Those of us in the Auckland team flew down to Dunedin, and, before competing, we did a bus sightseeing tour to Queenstown and back again.  If you have been to Queenstown you will probably know how stunningly beautiful the scenery is in that area.

The trouble is, I mostly don’t know how stunningly beautiful the scenery is.  For the entire bus journey, I had my nose stuck in a book.  Whenever I looked up to see where we were, I thought, “ho hum, we haven’t yet arrived at our hotel.  I wonder why it is taking so long to get there.”  I don’t think I realised that I was supposed to be enjoying the scenery.

The book I was reading on the bus was from Frank Herbert’s Dune series (Heretics of Dune maybe, or Chapterhouse?)  Needless to say, I thoroughly recommend the series.  It is far more enjoyable to a teenage boy than stunningly beautiful scenery.

Last week, I was a teenage boy again.

When I was at the bookshop buying Mulan and Miya’s schoolbooks, I also bought Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game.  After the children went to sleep last Friday, I read it until 3:30 in the morning.  I had four hours sleep, and then when I woke I finished the book that morning.  (Luckily, it was Saturday, so Mama was around to take care of the girls.)

It should go without saying that Ender’s Game is a brilliant, can’t-put-down story.  It is perfectly paced and tensely exciting.  The twist at the end is shocking (though I must admit I did slightly suspect it coming).  It is the sort of book that I would have devoured as a 13-year-old, along with the rest of the books in the series, and I am slightly surprised that this is one book series that never caught my attention back then.

The book has the standard teenage-boy plotline, with heroes acting heroically.  It has none of that wishy-washy incompetent-loser-struggle story so beloved of school English teachers.  It is about super-smart people doing inspirational super-smart things.  Exactly what a teenage boy needs, in my opinion.

The author, Card, tells us that the book was inspired by Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series (another brilliant book series, in my opinion, which I read as a teenager).

It also has similarities with Herbert’s Dune (though in my opinion Ender is far less deep).  The storyline of both books centre on the maturing of a child genius who has the potential to save the world (Ender Wiggin in Ender’s Game; Paul Atreides in Dune).  Again, this is perfect teenage boy stuff, where the super-smart people are young themselves.

As an adult though, I am allowed to be slightly more cynical.  As much as I loved being entertained by the storyline of Ender’s Game, I felt that I couldn’t quite suspend disbelief.

In his introduction to the new edition, Card discusses a letter from a school guidance counsellor for gifted children, who thought the depiction of gifted children in the story was unrealistic.  She said that real children don’t speak and act like the children in Ender’s Game.  Card strongly disagreed.

I have to say that I agree with the school counsellor.  At the beginning of the book, when Ender is six years old, he is shipped off to military school.  For the next several years, he trains intensely, and before he reaches ten years old, he is devising new military tactics no one has tried before.  At something like twelve years old, his genius military brain is saving the world.

Inspiring stuff for teenage boys.

But probably not very realistic, even if Ender and his companions are supposed to be the several best and brightest children in the entire world.  Would even the best and brightest children talk and act in that way?  I doubt it.  And contrary to Card’s assertions, I highly doubt Card and his acquaintances thought and acted like that when they were that age.  Similarly, is it plausible that pre-teens could have better military minds than people with fifty years more experience?

Herbert’s Dune series could get away with four-year-old highly-trained assassins and so on, because it is set twenty-whatever thousand years in the future, and they are explained away by technological, chemical, and breeding advances.

But ten-year-old world-leading military geniuses in Ender’s near-future Earth world?  I couldn’t completely suspend disbelief, so I couldn’t completely accept the book.  I guess I have been thinking homeschooling and teaching for too long now.

Having said all that, I still think Ender’s Game is a great book—both entertaining and thought-provoking.  It is more of a teenage book than an adult book, and, with suitable discussions afterwards, it could be a nice introduction to military ethics (amongst other things).  I would definitely put it on the teenage schooling reading list.