Ender's Game

Ender's Game (1985) is the best-known novel by Orson Scott Card and is set in a future where mankind is facing annihilation by an aggressive alien society, the insectoid "Buggers" (more formally known as "Formics"). Faced with extreme odds, humanity prepares to gamble all by preparing a coordinated all-out assault on the alien worlds. To achieve success, they train specially bred genius children, one whom they hope will make the perfect military leader for the upcoming conflict.

Overview

The protagonist, Andrew 'Ender' Wiggin, is one of the child soldiers trained as future war leaders, and thought to be the best and brightest, as well as possibly last, hope of humanity. Like the other child soldiers, he is recruited at a very young age and is sent for training at Battle School, where he learns to fight and to lead armies of other pupils. Due to his extremely high aptitude for tactics and leadership, he is advanced through his training much faster than the other students - a policy which is also designed to isolate him socially from the other pupils, so as to make him a more efficient officer later on.

Related Topics:
Andrew 'Ender' Wiggin - Battle School

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Meanwhile, his psychological development is monitored by the "mind game", an apparently partially sentient computer game embedded in the school's computer network, and manipulated to a large extent by the cynical but well-meaning Colonel Hyrum Graff, who runs the school.

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Due to his accelerated abilities, Ender is several times promoted years earlier than usual, setting him up for resentment and pushing his abilities to the limit, both intended consequences. The latter half of the book focuses on Ender's exploits as he starts being given command responsibility in the tactical games the pupils play as the main part of their education.

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After several grueling months of trials, Ender is promoted to Command School to learn to combat the buggers instead of being restricted to the more abstract training games. He proceeds to be taught by Mazer Rackham, the genius behind the previous human success against the buggers. A long series of simulated battles, without sufficient sleep during the nights (during which he is plagued by strange nightmares), leads him to a simulated final confrontation, where he has to overcome unfair odds by flouting the assumed rules of the game.

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In this final confrontation, he destroys the buggers' home planet, killing their queens - and by extension, all buggers, which are linked telepathically to their queens. Afterwards, he is shocked to find that the fights since his start in command school had not been simulated after all, that in fact he has just engineered the victory of the human race, and by it, commited xenocide against the buggers. In fact, his expected revulsion at such a deed was what had kept the teachers from telling him the truth.

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The final, short part of the book deals with Ender establishing a connection to the last remaining, hibernating alien queen. From it, he learns that the buggers had in fact attacked humanity by accident but were unable to make themselves understood in time due to the totally different mental states of the two species. Only via the nightmarish visions at the end of the book had they partially succeeded in empathically contacting Ender, but too late.

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