Orson Scott Card - Ender's Game

In 1977 Card published a short story called Ender's Game. Later a book with the same name was written and published.

I always enjoyed Card's books. The simplicity of a language is something that makes the story fast pacing and also gives room to your own imagination. Card deals with many problems (mainly political and religious) in his books and that makes us realize a lot of things. In Ender's Game we don't really see that though. The first book of the series is rather action packed novel with introduction to the political situation in the 22nd century (where the book takes place). With this I don't want to say the book is just dull action. We see Ender's inner fights that torture him. Ender is highly intelligent and self-aware. Ender can see that he is capable of violence (when he's cornered) and is afraid his life would be turned to the dark side. His brother is the one who showed him cruelty (just a side note... skinning squirrels alive??? eeek) and he does not want to become like him. He is also utterly devoted to his sister and tries to cope with all those mixed feelings he has for her. Also being a leader is a heavy burden. Especially when you later find out that you actually committed a genocide.

In this book we learn a story of a group of gifted children trained in waging wars.
A humankind is at war with Formics, an insectoid race (with a hive and queen thus). The Formics are real threat to humanity. They almost managed to raze all the humans. International Fleet was founded and IF successfully managed to defend humankind . Later they decided it would be better if Formics would cease to exist.
They founded Battle and Command School for gifted children that would be fighting the aliens. Ender Wiggin is one of the best elite soldiers at Battle School and is permitted to enter Command School earlier.
The book follows the experiences of Ender at the school. He becomes a leader of a group of students. All of them are training in a war game simulator that adapts to the groups' tactics and strategy after each battle. Each battle is thus more and more challenging. The strain is big on the leader and he almost gets insane (he's got a back up though - to learn about his story check out Ender's Shadow) but he wins the final battle too (even though by sacrificing most of the (human)fleet). He later is told that all the battles they thought in the "simulators" were actually real.

The story of Ender Wiggin continues in other books (Speaker for the Dead - Creepy!!, Xenocide, Children of the Mind etc). There is also a shadow series to Ender's Game which tells the story of Beans (Ender's "back up") and Peter Wiggin the Hegemon.

Personal Rating 4.5/5

Conclusion: An easy to read catching science fiction story that offers much more than just the story itself. I would recommend this book to anyone who likes to read even if science-fiction is not something the person is interested in.