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| Wednesday, November 7, 2007 12:01 PM |
| Book Report: Ender's Game |
 by Fëanor |
Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card is one of those sci-fi classics I somehow had completely missed reading, so when I spotted it on the shelf at the library a few weeks ago, I decided it was time to pick it up and give it a shot. Turns out it's a sci-fi classic with good reason: it's very, very good. I found it engrossing, moving, intelligent, entertaining, and insightful. It also rather impressively predicted the future of the internet and video games. The only thing I found a bit odd about it was the ending. Pretty much the entire book is a lengthy description of Ender's training to be the next great commander; it concentrates on strategy, tactics, technology, and the politics of human interaction and emotion. And then all of the sudden, in the last twenty pages or so, the book starts taking huge jumps forward in time and swings off into weird new directions that are religious and mystical in nature. This concluding sequence does end up working pretty well, but it still seems like rather an odd fit.
Ender's Game is a book that ultimately decries violence and war, while actually spending most of its time revelling in them. The endless scenes describing battles and battle simulations are thrilling because there's a real love of battle and battle games behind them. Which almost seemed hypocritical to me, until I realized it is that very perverse part of human nature that's being examined here.
So yes, all-in-all, a fine novel. It seems odd to me that there's a whole series of books that come after this, as I think it's very strong just standing alone as a single novel. I doubt I'll bother tracking down all those sequels and prequels. I was also kind of creeped out to discover, upon reading more about Orson Scott Card afterwards, that he's actually a very strange man with some very strange ideas, especially about sexuality. But happily I didn't notice any of those ideas creeping into the text of Ender's Game. |
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