On the other hand, Ender does become more enlightened than his society. Rather than hating Graff for his many deceptions, Ender understands him, and even becomes his friend. In Speaker for the Dead and in subsequent books of the initial series, Ender even makes peace with his own vilification. He’s able to go on in spite of what he’s done and what the world thinks of him, mainly because Card offers Ender some mercy and a little bit of grace at the conclusion of Ender’s Game. A hive queen, whose spirit somehow resonates in his mind, forgives him totally and completely for annihilating her species—and he’s left with a formic pupa, the seed for rebirth. She feels no animosity, only an abiding sorrow that Ender can share.
What the hive queen felt was sadness, a sense of resignation. She had not thought these words as she saw the humans coming to kill, but it was in words that Ender understood her: The humans did not forgive us, she thought. We will surely die.
Yet forgiveness and hope is the gift given to Andrew Wiggin at the end of the book—and for Ender, that is the only forgiveness that matters. It ennobles him, and frees him to find a new destiny as a speaker for the dead: a religious figure of stoic truth and resolve, enlightened, sometimes tortured, yet finding a small measure of peace with what he has done, and the way the many worlds of humanity—worlds taken from the extinct formics—despise his very name.
Of course, we as readers don’t hate Ender because we know his heart every step of the way. For this reason, we love Ender. Not just for everything he is but also for everything he isn’t.
I am not a killer, Ender said to himself over and over. I am not Peter. No matter what Graff says, I’m not. I was defending myself.
He isn’t Peter. He has no ambition for himself beyond survival. He doesn’t take pleasure in destroying his enemy. His devastating victories against Stilson and Bonzo did not bring him any joy, nor did destroying the formics.
Ender himself had a powerful realization as to what he felt at the moment of victory: that what made him truly able to defeat any foe is that, at the moment of victory, he truly knew and loved his enemy.
To love your enemy is to suffer the pain of their defeat along with them. There is almost a divine aspect to that. In a sense, Ender sacrificed his soul so that mankind might live. Of course, he didn’t know at the time that his greatest battle was real, but it doesn’t lessen the power of the sacrifice he made. One can argue that he was just a victim of a duplicitous military—but never did he feel or behave like a victim. That refusal to be a victim elevates him to something of a saint. A martyr who became victory for humanity. Victory and shame.
Let everybody drink some of my sweat today.
Ultimately, Ender’s innocence is his most valuable asset, even more so than his keen intelligence. We can say he was jaded and twisted by his experience in Battle School, but that wouldn’t be true—because down to the end he maintained purity of spirit in the face of everything that was hurled at him. Ender, after everything, was still a child… and yet not—and therein lies the genius of Ender as a character. He enters the story at age six and completes his mission by age twelve, but he never sounds like a six-year-old, or a twelve-year-old for that matter. He doesn’t quite sound like an adult either. He seems both jaded and innocent at the same time. He and the child characters around him are so unique that they are ageless.
Orson Scott Card did something remarkable; he turned Ender into the child that we become in our dreams when we find ourselves back in the sixth grade reliving the most traumatic moments of our youth. We are at once the child in the dream, and the adult of our waking life. For that reason, we can’t help but deeply identify with Ender. He becomes for us not a real child but a mythic being very much like that dream-self, ageless yet eternally young. Wise, yet unjaded. Just as we identify with the Halfling whose simple innocence and purity allowed him to save the world from the evil of the One Ring, so are we touched by Ender, the mythic innocent destined to bear the weight of the world on his shoulders.
We embrace Ender because we want to believe with all of our hearts that the necessary act of survival can be done in innocence despite civilization’s need to vilify and condemn the perpetrator. It’s comforting to us as readers and accidental philosophers that we can still see Ender as a hero.
I’d go as far as to say that even Peter is ultimately a comforting character. With Peter, Card asks, “Can there be a benevolent megalomaniac?” Does absolute power corrupt absolutely? We’ve always been told that, but deep down we want to believe that the old adage is a lie, that maybe we can learn from our mistakes, that maybe even the worst of us can grow. It’s reassuring to think that a sociopathic genius like Peter could find a way to align his own selfish goals with the goals of humanity and become the great unifier of all mankind.
That’s the kind of thing that Orson Scott Card does best: forcing us to reevaluate the way we think about everything. He doesn’t give us the all-too-familiar fallen hero but rather a true hero vilified. He doesn’t give us the typical vision of a ruler corrupted, but instead shows us corruption turned to serve the greater good. Even when he had Valentine play the role of the frighteningly demagogic Demosthenes, while Peter played the role of conciliatory Locke, he was forcing us to see things a little differently, to see the irony of how the left and the right can collude to manipulate the public, and serve each other.
As mankind gains knowledge at an exponential rate, we struggle to find the wisdom with which to deal with that knowledge. More and more, we find crucial wisdom in stories like Ender’s Game. We find within fictional characters or in fictionalizations of real characters something that resonates as real in our souls. After all, a well-crafted biography is not merely about facts, but about the heart and soul of an individual, the world in which that person lived, and how that world reflects our own. The identical is true of fiction—especially thought-provoking science fiction because the arena lends itself so well to allegory.
What I see as the great hope for humanity is that we are compelled to find new perspectives, and to look at complex situations like those served to us by Orson Scott Card. For a short time, we become Ender, grappling with that which must be done versus that which is right to do—in this case, the moral ambiguity of survival. The more we challenge ourselves with literature that dares to pose the hard questions, the better equipped we are to navigate real-world complexities.
In recent years, we’ve developed a deep fascination with the understanding of not just heroes but of villains as well. The humanizing of a serial killer, such as in Dexter. The turning of Anakin Skywalker into Darth Vader. Even our obsession with the show-stopping musical vindication of the Wicked Witch speaks volumes about us. We, as a species, are beginning to realize that good and evil are not so simplistically clear as we once thought they were. Our eyes were opened by the likes of Shakespeare (the bard, not the planet) to the vast complexity of the human condition, and finally we are truly ripe for embracing it. We want our stories to show more than just the dark and the light; we are compelled to explore the grays. The intricacies of human existence, human choices, and human survival. Nowhere is that clearer than in Ender’s Game.
“Human beings are free except when humanity needs them.”
—HYRUM GRAFF
I’ve often wondered how the story would have gone if Ender knew that his final game was the actual war. Would he have gone through with it? Card answers the question in Ender in Exile. Ender says point blank that, yes, even if he knew, he would have tried to complete his mission, and end the formics to save humanity. I think it would have destroyed him, though. I suspect he would have found a way to end his own existence in the process of saving humanity, finding the weight of his harsh victory unbearable. He would have been a true tragic character.
But, on the other hand, I think Ender and Orson Scott Card are smarter than that. If Ender knew the final battle was real, I think he would have changed the game again, this time by changing the objective. Because if he truly was incapable of losing, w
ouldn’t the greatest victory be to save and preserve both species in a lasting peace?
I believe if Ender knew what he was truly doing, he would have used the fleet to find a way to communicate with the formics, and ultimately he would have been successful enough to learn that they were no longer a threat. So perhaps the greatest failure in Ender’s game was Graff’s and Mazer’s because, by not trusting Ender fully and completely enough to give him the full picture, they didn’t allow Ender to work his magic. It was Ender’s ability to see the big picture that made him a genius commander. With the whole picture, how gloriously he might have solved the problem!
Ah well. We’ll never know. Except, perhaps, in an alternate Ender universe…which, come to think of it, is not entirely out of the question. After all, there are parallel novels in the Ender world—what would be wrong with adding one that is somewhat perpendicular?
I’d definitely stay up until four in the morning to read that.
Neal Shusterman is the award-winning author of more then twenty young adult novels, including Everlost, Bruiser, Full Tilt, Downsiders, and Unwind—which was selected by NPR as one of the top one hundred young adult novels of all time. His books have received numerous awards and honors in the US and internationally, including the Boston Globe/Horn Book award for The Schwa Was Here. His novel UnWholly premiered at number two on the New York Times bestseller list in August of 2012 in its category, and a film version of Unwind is currently in the works. Neal lives in Southern California and can be found at www.storyman.com.
1 I was sitting on the floor in the hallway of a hotel while on vacation. I had to be out in the hallway because I didn’t want to wake the baby or my wife, who had tired of hearing me flip pages of Ender’s Game in bed.
2 It was more of a bed and breakfast than a hotel. The hallway in which I was reading had green carpet and yellow walls, and it smelled of dusty potpourri that infused the pages of the book.
3 While in the hallway reading at 4:00 am, I ate some leftover prime rib from dinner and got horseradish sauce in my sinuses right at the moment when Bean announced to Ender he had been named a team commander. My tears were from the horseradish. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.
Q. Why did you have Bonzo Madrid and Ender fight to the death?
A. It was only with a feeling of dread and despair that I realized I had created a circumstance where no outcome other than a fight to the death was possible. Bonzo could not relent in his need to destroy Ender Wiggin; Ender, given the way he saw the world, could not defend himself with anything less than ultimate thoroughness. His goal was not to kill, but to render his enemy incapable of a second attack. But with Ender’s smaller size and Bonzo’s reliance on groups of thugs, Ender’s only hope of victory was to isolate Bonzo by Bonzo’s own decision, and then prevail quickly and thoroughly by attacking the most vulnerable points on Bonzo’s body. Pain can be recovered from; only serious injury could stop the next attack.
When I understood this, I also understood that this was a terrible act; and while Ender did not know that he had killed Bonzo, he also did not know, going in, that he was not going to kill him. Ender also knew that bonzo might very well kill him—he had threatened to do so—and he knew that more was at stake than his own survival. Ender understood better than anyone but Graff that only Ender Wiggin had any hope of being ready to command the human fleet against the formics. If he allowed Bonzo to damage or kill him, Ender would be allowing the formics to fight a human fleet commanded by someone who was less than the best humanity had available. That was not vanity or arrogance, but the obvious extrapolation from what Ender had achieved and learned in Battle School.
Once I realized that I could not avoid this fight, and that it had to have the outcome it had, then all I could do was move forward. What I refused to do was make it an “accident” (Bonzo falls and hits his head on a sink) or pull the Hollywood trick of making the villain inadvertently destroy himself. This was a mini-war within a larger war, and war has its own terrible logic. If I was going to show war in all its brutality, I had to show that the commander—even if his naked body is his entire army and all its weaponry—must do what it takes to destroy the enemy’s will and capacity to inflict further damage. Any lesser goal in war is a decision to lose, with all the consequences that loss entails.
So I made the stakes as clear as possible to the reader, and I showed that Ender Wiggin, a highly moral person, understood and bore the moral burden of the choice he made. That is how good people fight wars—they knowingly inflict terrible damage, and they bear the moral consequences of it. By analogy, Ender’s acceptance of the cocooned hive queen is his Marshall Plan; as Churchill said of Eisenhower, “Never have I seen a man so staunch in pursuing the purpose in hand, so ready to accept responsibility for misfortune, or so generous in victory.”
Not everything Ender did was noble, but everything he did was or seemed necessary, and he accepted the consequences of his actions even when they were unavoidable or inadvertent. In our imperfect world, that is usually as close to nobility as we can ever come.
—OSC
IF THE FORMICS LOVE THEIR CHILDREN TOO
Or, How I Was Ender’s Gamed Into Reflecting on the Exigencies of War
KEN SCHOLES
Of all the other contributors to this collection of essays, I suspect that I have the distinction of being the last to the party when it comes to Orson Scott Card’s classic science fiction novel, Ender’s Game. The invitation came across my email in January 2012. There was only one real problem:
I had not read Ender’s Game.
I had read Card’s Homecoming Saga and enjoyed it thoroughly in the mid-nineties. And I’d relied upon his writing book, How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy, when I came back to writing in my late twenties. I knew he was a helluva storyteller and I had many of his books in my growing collection that I just hadn’t gotten to…yet.
Fast-forward to January 2012 and the invitation to write the words you’re now reading. Of course, I accepted. And immediately confessed, as I have to all of you now, that I had not yet read the book. But with that confession, I attached a modest proposal—what if I read the book as a first-timer coming to it now in this space and time and then construct my essay from that framework as a newcomer?
You’re reading this now, so it must have worked.
Shortly after committing to the project, Nature conspired to assist as it will, and I took a tumble on one of our few snow days in northwestern Oregon. Stuck in bed with a bungled knee, I picked up my copy of Ender’s Game and settled into a two-day ride that I’ve been pondering now for five months.
That it stayed with me for so long is the mark of a timeless book and this one has quite a track record—millions of copies sold, translated around the world, and reaching beyond the borders of genre to draw young readers not just to reading but to reading science fiction. I think this is because it resonates with the times we live in as much now as it did when it first appeared on the scene, and will likely keep doing so for years and years to come.
But more than that, Ender’s Game resonated with me on some very deep, very personal levels.
“We share the same biology regardless of ideology. What might save us, me and you, is if the Russians love their children too.”
—STING, “Russians”
When the novel Ender’s Game was published, I had just turned seventeen years old. I was midway through my junior year of high school and convinced I was going to Eastern Washington University to major in Creative Writing when I graduated. I was reading and writing a lot of science fiction and fantasy and submitting those short stories for publication. The very first was called “The Attic,” about an old man who was sitting on his porch in a quiet suburban neighborhood, going through a box of photographs and drinking lemonade on a summer day while he waited for the Soviet missiles to cross the polar ice caps and wipe out the United States. I had probably written a dozen stories at this point, sending some of them along to variou
s magazines for publication. But I was just four months away from tossing the writing aside to pursue the ministry instead and five months from joining the US Naval Reserve to ship out for basic training the summer before my senior year. I was teaching myself to play Simon and Garfunkel songs on my guitar, but the big hit on the radio was Tears for Fears’ “Everybody Wants to Rule the World.”
And we knew they did. Especially across the world in the Evil Empire. The signs were all around us—movies, television, books, music. The Russians were coming.
Sting’s album The Dream of the Blue Turtles, which included the poignant single “Russians,” came out the summer that I was in Basic Training, burnt crisp by the San Diego sun, learning how to march, run, swim, float, put out fires. I was preparing to be a force for good against the Soviet Union after a lifetime of anxiety about the missiles we had pointed at one another…and a lifetime of books, movies, and songs that played upon those anxieties. Art had been busily exploring the end of the world in a brand-new way—one that did not involve gods but men, thanks to the advent of the atomic bomb.
There was a lot of fear in the world at that time, and Ender’s Game dropped brilliantly into that pond. It completes what I think of as the Holy Trinity of military SF books written during the Cold War, standing alongside Heinlein’s Starship Troopers and Haldeman’s The Forever War. Only Card cut into the onion even a bit deeper…and brought children into it.
Back then, at seventeen—definitely a child from the standpoint of where I sit now—I missed this book. And probably wouldn’t have understood it at the time. Even a year later, when I transferred into the US Army and shipped out for West Germany, I wouldn’t have come even close to grasping the power of this book. Despite the fact that I knew, as an eighteen-year-old parts clerk and soldier, that I had a twenty-four-hour life expectancy if the balloon went up and the Soviets invaded West Germany.
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