Ender’s Game

If you’re looking for a great science fiction book that will keep you guessing until the end, allow me to recommend Ender’s Game.  If you’ve read it before, read it again.  If you’ve never read it, pick up the whole “Ender Quartet” boxset at your local Barnes & Noble… 0r do as you please and grab it wherever including Amazon or your local library.

Written by Orson Scott Card, I found myself immersed into the life of Andrew “Ender” Wiggin as he grows into the most powerful military leader of all time.

Ender begins life as a Third — the term used for the third child when futuristic families are typically allowed two — due to the promising genius of his older brother and sister.  The governing powers found his brother to be too ruthless and his sister to be too kind.  With Ender, they were hoping for the perfect blend of their personalities.

Without spoiling too much of the book, I’ll tell you that Ender is whisked away from his unorthodox family and entered into military training at the Battle School.  There he discovers much about himself as he grows in age, talent and popularity.  He’s spends several years of his life learning military tactics and redefining strategy only to find that many challenging decisions were already made for him.  After Ender leaves the Battle School, everything becomes a blur to the reader with several twists that made me cringe, smile and eventually grow to love.

The whole story kept me captivated from Ender’s first fight to the final pages of the book.  I never predicted exactly what would happen next, but every decision was perfect: the author gave me everything I didn’t know I wanted.  Card steals the top seat as my favorite science fiction author… quite easily.

I’ve just finished reading “Speaker for the Dead.”  Considered the second book of the series, I’ll be continuing the Ender analysis on this blog through the quartet.  Card will release a new book relatively soon that will fall between Ender’s Game and the Speaker for the Dead… so I guess that makes the Xenocide books number 3, 4 and 5 in the series.  While more emotionally heavy than the first book, SFTD was just as intriguing as the first book.  I’ll write a synopsis of each book and sum up the series with a full analysis of Ender at the end.  After finishing this series I expect to move onto the Shadow series that starts with the same events from a different character’s perspective.