First Published: 1985

Rating: Average

"I've watched through his eyes, I've listened through his ears, and I tell you he's the one."

When I ask around for a good sci-fi book, Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game is almost always on the list. People rave over it, and if word of mouth alone isn't a good enough recommendation, the novel won both the Hugo and Nebula awards--the biggies in the science fiction world. So it has to be a good novel, doesn't it?

Eh...not really.

In Ender's Game, Earth monitors its children so it can send the brightest and the best to Battle School, where they undergo training from the age of six in order to prepare them to be commanders in the war against the alien Buggers. Ender Wiggin, a young super genius, attends the school and swiftly rises in the ranks, becoming unbeatable at the mock battles the students play in zero gravity. He's advanced through the ranks faster than any other student, because, clever as he is, he's the Earth's Only Hope (!) against the Buggers.

But like they say, it's lonely at the top, and Ender suffers from pressure from his teachers, isolation and hatred from the other students, and his own fears that he'll end up like his brother Peter, who tormented him when he was still on Earth. Meanwhile, that same brother is back home trying to take over the world with Ender's sister Valentine, and succeeding.

The premise is excellent; it's the execution that falls flat. The story outlined above simply repeats itself over and over as the book progresses (or fails to progress), and the plot, which revolves around Ender's alleged superiority, relies heavily on the stupidity of the other students--students who, if not as smart as Ender, are still geniuses in their own right.

The school itself is pretty neat, and the scenes involving the battle rooms are easily the best in the novel. The students, divided up into armies, play what amounts to a glorified game of laser tag, if you threw in some freezable suits and took out the gravity. It's pretty cool, even when Ender's clever battle plans turn out to be things the other students should have thought of years ago. 

Once the battle room scenes are out of the picture, though, the books loses what little charm it had. The purpose of Battle School is to provide a generation of commanders for the war against the Buggers, but we don't learn much about the aliens or why Earth is at war with them (apart from that the Buggers attacked Earth previously). So the majority of the book is spent building up to a war with an enemy that the reader knows next to nothing about, all leading up to a dazzling anti-climax. I seriously thought Card was joking when I hit what turned out to be the novel's climax, and that there would be something more exciting in the last pages of the book...but no. That's it.

Then there's the writing itself. Ender's Game is a good-sized novel, but one of the quickest reads I've had in a while. That's the good part. The bad part is, Card's writing leaves something to be desired, to the point that he himself admits that his style is lacking. The novel is filled with clunky sentences, some of which have to be re-read several times. And Card's idea of slang includes characters--including adults--constantly calling each other things like "fartearter," which is only one indicator that the writing lacks maturity on many levels. 

And then we come to Ender himself. He's such a pretentious, distant character that he's difficult to relate to, and he somehow manages to maintain a know-it-all attitude while missing some major clues about the books twists and turns. Ender acts like a spoiled brat and does some pretty inexcusable things, and Card's attempts to make an unlikeable character likeable were lost on me.

The concept of Battle School and the battle rooms is pretty neat, and Ender's Game does present an interesting perspective on war from the eyes of a child grown up too quickly. But apart from that--well, I tried to like Ender's Game, but in the end, it's a sci-fi version of Lord of the Flies without the depth or the class.

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