Title: Ender’s Game
Author: Orson Scott Card
Publisher: Tor
Year Published: 1985

Ender’s Game is, without a doubt, one of the single best novels Science Fiction has to offer. It broaches themes and topics far beyond the scope of standard SF fare. It asks deep, terrifying questions; questions whose answers, in the twenty-two years since it’s novelized publication, have evolved and grown with society but have also remained at the periphery of all our smaller questions. Much like Ender himself, we poke at the details while those larger questions go unanswered, or, worse, unasked.

With Ender’s Game, Orson Scott Card may not have redefined the genre (I think the genre is far too strong to be redefined by any single work), but he most certainly made it sit up and take notice. Much like the work of Ursula K. LeGuin in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s (The Left Hand of Darkness in particular) Card raised the stakes for genre authors by focusing upon issues entwined with his contemporary social conscious. Ender’s Game is as much a story about an embattled child psychology as it is about interstellar war, as much about political and social manipulation as it is about individual isolation and alienation, and as much about xenophobia and annihilation as it is about love and the strength of family.

The explorations Card makes into and through all these areas is at once hesitant and terrified. They are, after all, the explorations of a boy who, regardless of how super-intelligent he may be, is working though these issues for the first time. Fumbling for first for an understanding of the questions themselves, the answers he so desperately craves from the very first page must be put on hold until he comes to some sort of greater understanding about first himself, and then the world he has left behind.

This isn’t the first time I have read Ender’s Game, and it certainly will not be the last. Already I am itching to begin again and look for things I may have missed. I’ll wait, though. I’ll wait and let time and experience bring me more information so that when Ender once again faces those big questions I’ll have more to bring to the table. And maybe, just maybe, I’ll be a little closer to coming away with some of my own answers rather than just more questions.

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Title: Lisey’s Story
Author: Stephen King
Publisher: Scribner
Year Published: 2006

I’ve mentioned before that I am a big fan of Stephen King. I don’t know what it is about the guy, but when he gets it just right, the man just manages to push my buttons, and more than a couple of his books have ended up on my all-time favorites list. That said, there have been times when he has stepped up, swung with all his might, and missed in grand fashion. When you are as prolific as he has been, not everything is going to be everybody’s favorite.

But still I return to a few of his books time and again. I have roamed the halls of the Overlook Hotel on several occasions. More than once have I journeyed across the nation with a rag-tag group of survivors fleeing the devastation of Captain Trips and in search of some kind of hope in a Nebraska cornfield. And I owe it to myself to once more join Roland in his pursuit across the desert of the Man in Black. And I can tell already that the time will come when, once again, I yearn for Lisey to breathe the waters of The Pool into me and take me back to Boo’ya Moon.

Lisey’s Story has a feeling of familiarity to it from the very beginning. The kind of familiarity that King has spent his entire career building and perfecting. His fictional town of Castle Rock is his Yoknapatawpha County, where his characters live and breathe and wave at each other as their stories pass along the sidewalks on Sunday strolls. The sense of community and trust he has established is infectious to long-time readers. We know where we are… it’s familiar ground.

But Lisey’s Story is, I think, a different kind of “familiar” we usually get from King. It’s softer, more sensuous than I remember, more introspective, more personal. Maybe it’s because our protagonist, Lisey Landon, is female, and it’s my own perception of her that somehow skews King’s usual voice. Or perhaps its because the story has so much to do with truth and memory, things in which I am particularly interested in at the moment, that this particular story rings true on a much deeper level for me than most of his stories.

Whatever the reason, it sucked me in and swallowed me whole. Lisey’s Storey is a wonderful trip through life, death, sibling devotion, and parallel dimensions. King’s work with flashback and point of view is simply masterful as he blends stunning character history and depth into a story just aching to drag the reader forward. With the exception of the multi-novel Dark Tower series, the plotting done here is King at his best. Not a beat is missed, not a moment spared.

I find Lisey’s Story to be King’s finest work to date. Though fantastical, it is filled truth and discovery for character, reader, and, I suspect, writer alike. It is a story, I think, that eclipses even his Dark Tower series (my personal favorite) in many ways, including sheer complexity. It may not be representative of his entire bibliography, but it is easily his only book that I can, and will, recommend to everyone, regardless of whether they think they are fans of King or not. It simply is that good.

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