Ender's War

Reviewed 7/16/2024

Ender's War, by Orson Scott Card
Cover art by Vincent Di Fate
Ender's War
Orson Scott Card
New York: Nelson Doubleday; BCE, June 1986

Rating:

5.0

High

ISBN-13 978-?
ISBN-10 ? 634pp. HC $7.98

This SFBC anthology combines Ender's Game (© 1984) and Speaker for the Dead (© 1986.) They are two very different novels: the one a story of battles, deception and ultimate conquest; the other a story of the difficult struggle to a greater understanding of life and truth. It is, in a way, difficult for me to understand that they both were born in one mind.

Ender's Game 1

They took him away when he was six years old.

Andrew Wiggin, known as "Ender," was a Third: a rare third child allowed parents in a world where two was not only the norm, but the legal maximum — absent a special dispensation from the state. Ender's parents had earned such a dispensation because of the promise his siblings Peter, age 10, and Valentine, age 8, had shown. Both had been recruited, and both had washed out: his brother Peter because he was too violent, and his sister Valentine because she was too gentle. Now Ender had also had his Monitor removed, a sign that he too was judged unsuitable in some way. But that was only an assumption.

Ender had been recruited into a great and noble cause: preventing the extinction of humanity. His training was arduous, requiring him to be isolated from his family and, indeed, from any friendship or assistance. He had to learn to trust only in himself. No other course would force him to develop his abilities fully. So he trained for five years in the orbiting Battle School, where he learned to fight singly and to lead troops of fighters, and then was taken to I.F. Command in the minor planet Eros, which had been transformed by the Buggers — the apparently implacable enemy who had made the whole exercise necessary.

"Look, Ender, I'm sorry if you're lonely and afraid. But the Buggers are out there. Ten billion, a hundred billion, a million billion of them, for all we know. With as many ships, for all we know. With weapons we can't understand. And a willingness to use those weapons to wipe us out. It isn't the world at stake, Ender. Just us. Just humankind. As far as the rest of the earth is concerned, we could be wiped out and it would adjust, it would get on with the next step in evolution. But humanity doesn't want to die. As a species, we have evolved to survive. And the way we do it is by straining and straining and, at last, every few generations, giving birth to genius. The one who invents the wheel. And light. And flight. The one who builds a city, a nation, an empire. Do you understand any of this?"

Ender thought he did, but he wasn't sure, so he said nothing.

"No. Of course not. So I'll put it bluntly. Human beings are free except when humanity needs them. Maybe humanity needs you. To do something. I think humanity needs me—to find out what you're good for. We might both do despicable things, Ender, but if humanity survives, then we were good tools."

– Pages 36-37

The Buggers had swarmed out of interstellar space with superior weapons. They reaped the human fleet in their first invasion, and would have done the same the second time, but for the poorly understood insight of Mazer Rackham which led him to attack their one vulnerable point. The leaders of humanity were sure there would be another invasion and threw everything into preparing for it. They learned a great deal from Bugger ships they wre able to study, including how to make the ansible: a means of instantaneous communication. But technology was no guarantee of victory, so they looked for a tactical genius. That, they hoped, was Ender.

And Ender did not disappoint them. But they greatly disappointed him, for it turned out all his training at I.F. Command, all the simulated maneuvers he practiced, had been the real thing, even the toughest one where he faced a Bugger fleet vastly more numerous than Earth's and beat it by destroying the Bugger home world — effectively wiping out their entire species. The pain of that drove him from Earth out among the stars where, on an abandoned Bugger world, he found a message that launched him on a long, lonely quest.

Among other awards, Ender's Game won the Nebula Award for best novel in 1985 and the Hugo Award for best novel in 1986. It was also nominated for a Locus Award in 1986.

Speaker for the Dead 2

As I've said, this is a very different novel than Ender's Game. Yet they are two sides of the same coin. Set 3,000 years after the Bugger Xenocide, it concerns another alien species humans call "Piggies." Its plot is intricate and absorbing. I won't attempt to describe that plot, for, like life, it must be experienced to be understood. But I will quote from it to give you an inkling.

"Your dream is a good one," said Ender. "It's the dream of every living creature. The desire that is the very root of life itself: To grow until all the space you see is part of you, under your control. It's the desire for greatness. There are two ways, though, to fulfill it. One way is to kill anything that is not yourself, to swallow it up or destroy it, until nothing is left to oppose you. But that way is evil. You say to all the universe, Only I will be great, and to make room for me the rest of you must give up even what you already have, and become nothing. Do you understand, Human, that if we humans felt this way, acted this way, we could kill every piggy in Lusitania and make this place our home. How much of your dream would be left, if we were evil?"

Human was trying hard to understand. "I see that you gave us great gifts, when you could have taken from us even the little that we had. But why did you give us the gifts, if we can't use them to become great?"

– Page 593

That is the question. Like Abraham Lincoln — or Abrahamo Lincolni3 — it belongs to the ages.

Speaker for the Dead also won the Hugo and the Nebula. Both these novels are excellent. I give them top marks. I saw only two mistakes, and I suspect those are due to an editor.4

1 Ender's Game was filmed in 2013. Directed by Gavin Hood, it starred Harrison Ford as Colonel Hyrum Graff, Ben Kingsley as Mazer Rackham, and Asa Butterfield as Ender Wiggin. It is generally well regarded, with an IMDB rating of 6.6, and it won the Saturn Award in 2014 for the best science fiction film.
2 Speaker for the Dead has not been filmed, AFAIK, and I don't think it could be without destroying the worth of the novel.
3 A reference to Babylon 5, which shares much of the same spirit.
4 On page 358, there's the statement that Ender "had realized that Trondheim was the end of their three-thousand-mile odyssey." It should be "three-thousand-year odyssey." And on page 381 someone calls Andrew "Ender" who in my view shouldn't know his history.
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