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.