What if, Ender’s Game asks, humanity was presented with a foe that didn’t share its biology? What if that enemy was so alien to us that ideological differences paled compared to the threat they posed? And what if the only way our best military minds could conceive of beating this enemy was to raise up a child they could sharpen as their innocent weapon?
And what if the extinction of the human race was at stake?
Timely, resonant questions, given how long we’d been in a Cold War that made the same threat of extinction.
Ender’s Game won both the Hugo and the Nebula for that year—the two highest honors in the genre—and then Card went on to do it again the next year with his follow-up, Speaker for the Dead.
Like I said—resonant questions.
The Cold War is over now. A year after I returned from my tour of duty, the wall came down. And on September 11, 2001, we became afraid of a new enemy—one who flew passenger planes filled with men, women, and children into buildings filled with men, women, and children.
I remember watching it on the news that morning, mouth open wide and tears streaming down my face. I remember a sky completely empty of airplanes for days. I remember being afraid.
Not a Cold War but a different kind of war this time, one that played even more directly to fear . . . to terror. I think it shook us—and the world—to the core. My own books—and several of my short stories—are heavily influenced by 9/11. And my life as well, but I’ll get to that in a bit.
Ender’s Game translates perfectly into this context as well, and as a first-time reader here in 2012, eleven years after the Al Qaeda attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, I found a different experience than I ever could have had back in 1985.
Because there’s more to the story. More to my context for Ender’s Game when I finally came around to reading it. Four years earlier—nearly to the week as I sit down here to write this—in the spring of 2008 my family lost one of its best and brightest to this new war. My nineteen-year-old nephew—an Airborne combat medic just barely into his first tour of duty in Afghanistan. He was killed when an IED went off on the side of the road as his convoy passed by.
His name was Andrew.
“Peter, you’re twelve years old. I’m ten. They have a word for people our age. They call us children and they treat us like mice.”
—VALENTINE, Ender’s Game
It is no wonder to me why Ender’s Game does so well with YA audiences; the children Card writes are capable, strong, and real. They are obviously not all good. We see them at their best and worst—as bullies and heroes, friends and foes.
And the things that the adults in the novel force those children to endure—especially Ender—are horrific. But the adults are not doing it out of hatred; they despise what they do even as they believe there is a higher good to be served by it. A few children sacrificed to save the human race. Another “Cold Equation,” like writer Tom Godwin’s, only Ender is the stowaway in the airlock and the vaccine must be delivered.
Card lays this out before us and I never sensed he set out to answer the questions he raised. Instead, he let them ride forward with the reader, for the reader to process—and answer—at their own risk, and as I read it, within my own personal context, the book became alive to me and did what good books do—it made me think, it made me feel.
And a part of that context that we haven’t talked about is a newer one for me, one rooted deep in emotion—my role as a father. In just a few months, my twin daughters turn three. They were a life-changer of unspeakable proportions, the best and scariest and hardest and most beautiful story I will ever be a part of. And you see, I’m wired to feel that way. It’s the sequel to Nature’s First Great Trick of Keeping Humans Around (yes, I’m talking about sex), the gosh-wow follow-up: little people who arrive and change your life in ways that are hard to explain fully unless you’ve been down that road. Pretty neat trick.
Something wacky happened when my kids were born; there was a shift in my reality. When I talk about it with other parents, they usually smile and nod their heads. When I heard Elizabeth’s first cry, I felt a weird biological “click” inside my brain. And this new reality, a new and higher priority, was already firmly cemented into place before Rachel made a peep: I was a father and my children mattered more than anything, period. Keeping them alive and cared for in the world, preparing them for a successful, meaningful life, was my new mission, and I knew I would spend myself utterly to do so.
And it just simply ambushed me in a moment. Nature is sneaky that way.
One of the bizarre changes in me as a result of fatherhood is that it’s even harder now to read books or watch programs where children are put at risk or killed. I have a visceral reaction now that I didn’t used to have. So watching the way that the children were used in Ender’s Game was tough on me.
Of course, seeing it on the news each day is even tougher.
Because, despite this biological click that so many parents report having, we have a pretty poor track record, overall, as a species when it comes to our offspring. It’s only rather recently in our history that we’ve implemented laws to protect children from exploitation and abuse. And despite improvements all around the world, children continue to be used, abused, and killed. Especially during times of war.
Card’s imagined future simply dresses it all up with higher stakes by bringing the children to the center of the stage. Ender is humanity’s best hope for defeating its fearful enemy. And the questions Card raises for us about fear and war and how we use our children are all brought to a head by his sucker-punch ending.
The enemy is soundly defeated and the child who made that possible is soon confronted with the realization that the xenocide he’s committed was unnecessary. The formics, once they had learned humans were a thinking species, had broken off their attacks and put their effort into understanding humanity—and, eventually, into making contact with Ender.
But fear had done what fear does best: it had blinded Graff and his people to everything but itself and that cost those on both sides of the table far more than was ever returned on the investment.
“I said I did what I believed was necessary for the preservation of the human race, and it worked; we got the judges to agree that the prosecution had to prove beyond the shadow of a doubt that Ender would have won the war without the training we gave him. After that, it was simple. The exigencies of war.”
—GRAFF, Ender’s Game
I am angry about the exigencies of war. I can’t help it. This is what Ender’s Game whispered to me when I came around to it at this season in my life: war costs too damned much.
And like the best of storytellers, Card shows us the cost to Ender and the others rather than trying to answer the questions raised by that cost. Humanity expands out into the territory of its fallen foe, unchanged by yet another war of the thousands in its history. Cast aside, Ender experiences a type of death as the full weight of what he’s done—what he’s been caused to do—settles upon him. And then, when the formics’ final message reaches him and their future lies in his hands, Ender rises to new life as the Speaker for the Dead.
My Andrew didn’t survive to learn something profound. I’m left pondering the exigencies of our war and finding nothing profound either, only tragedy. I have no idea what exact exigencies exist within the group of people who built and positioned the IED that killed my nephew, but I’m certain they believed that they, too, were doing what they had to. War is tricky that way; exigencies abound for all involved.
I’d like for us to outgrow it as a species.
We humans are inventive, amazing critters and I’m convinced that if we can teach ourselves to fly like birds, to swim like fish, to go to the moon even—then we can figure this one out at some point. I just have to believe that we are capable. That learning to work in collaborative community is where our future lies.
Not in war.
Not in fear.
“We may be young but we’re
not powerless. We play by their rules long enough, and it becomes our game.”
—VALENTINE, Ender’s Game
After I finished Ender’s Game, I sat with the feelings it evoked for several weeks. My thoughts on what to say about the book were scattered—a vague flickering of ideas about fear and love and manipulation and the cost of war.
It brought me questions and I pondered them, wondering what it’s all about. It took me straight into the recent memories of my nephew’s death, of the limousines we rode in along a street lined with people waving flags, holding signs that thanked us for his sacrifice. Of the rifles they fired at his graveside. And it delivered me back to that Almighty Click I experienced when I first met my children, that sure and absolute sense that they were now what mattered most.
And when I look at my daughters, I can see that there’s a sub-text to the story here that holds the key to these questions about the exigencies of war. Despite the way these children are used, and despite the fear that surrounds and shapes them, they ultimately learn what they can from the generation in power, see that which is lacking, and set out to change it.
Peter unites the world after dividing it with Valentine via their mock arguments. He uses the same justifications as Graff—the salvation of humanity. And like Graff, he resorts to manipulations and machinations, influencing the world through written arguments between imaginary foes in an effort to save it. He plays the adult’s game until he owns it, but unlike his brother, Peter Wiggin isn’t motivated by love.
Ender is different from Peter and that difference is apparent from the earliest pages of the book. Despite what he’s forced to do, Andrew Wiggin maintains a sense of compassion and empathy as he learns the games put before him. And at the end of it all, Ender uses that same empathy to alchemize what he’s learned into a book about the formics that changes humanity.
I do not think it’s a coincidence, either, that storytelling becomes the vehicle through which that change seeps in. Storytelling has always given us the perfect sandbox to play with our ideas and explore our hopes…and our fears. We need our storytellers to bring us to the edge of these places, to lean us out into the questions in the hopes that, if enough of us ask, we’ll find an answer and a better way. Because the stories they tell stay with us longer than any news story we read or watch. Our stories travel with us down decades that become millennia and change us.
Speaking of stories, I have a couple of two-year-olds who are going to need a bedtime story soon. I want it to be a tale of plenty and of walking in the shoes of others and never being too scared to ask questions and always knowing where home is.
When they are older and the game is theirs, they’ll hear other stories that act as compass needles northward—stories like Ender’s Game. They’ll be shaped by the art they’re exposed to. And as they find their voices, they will tell their own stories about what they’ve learned along the way, asking their own questions. Those stories will march out from their lives to touch other lives and spark other stories. Somewhere at the end of it, I think peace is waiting.
It is the slow and upward spiral of our species.
Ken Scholes is the critically acclaimed author of three novels and over thirty short stories. His series The Psalms of Isaak is being published both at home and abroad to award nominations and rave reviews. Publishers Weekly hails the series as a “towering storytelling tour de force” in starred reviews of the first three volumes. Ken lives in Saint Helens, Oregon, with his wife, Jen West Scholes, and his twin daughters, Lizzy and Rae. He invites readers to look him up at www.kenscholes.com and follow his antics on Facebook.
Q. What is Alai’s surname? You haven’t mentioned it in the book.
A. Not every culture has or requires surnames.
—OSC
Q. Why did you not have Ender lose at least one battle in the Battle Room?
A. Because the teachers were not trying to make him fail. They were trying to help him learn how to respond to unusual circumstances. Ender had been given a superb, hand-picked army, consisting of soldiers whose virtues all the other commanders (except Bean, not yet a commander) had overlooked. They stacked the deck in his favor, provided Ender had the wit to see what he had and use it.
Likewise, the battles in which they seemed to be cheating against him—facing two armies, the late notification, having too many battles in a row—were really circumstances that benefitted him, if he saw how to exploit the situation.
Facing two armies that could not work as a coherent unit left Ender outnumbered, but with some clear advantages, as his opponents vied with each other to fall into his trap. Facing an army that was able to establish itself first in the field of battle worked to his advantage because his opponent was incompetent and arrayed himself with as much stupidity as the French at Agincourt.
His exhausted army quickly became the most cohesive, experienced veterans in battle school; they never lost their focus. It worked to ender’s advantage, even if he did not see it.
The teachers did not want ender to fail; they wanted him to learn. He learned; he won. If he had ever lost a battle it would have shown that he was not ready to lead the International Fleet, because with all his advantages Ender should not have lost. That was what Graff was doing, and it worked.
—OSC
ENDER’S GAME: A GUIDE TO LIFE
MATT NIX
Admit it: you were Ender.
You know what I’m talking about. When you read Ender’s Game for the first time, you didn’t say to yourself: “What an interesting exploration of the interior life of a young warrior-in-training!” You read it the way every true devotee of the novel does—with the secret knowledge that you were reading about yourself.
I read Ender’s Game as a teenager after a close friend handed it to me and demanded that I start it immediately. I devoured it in a single sitting and then re-read it many times. It was a little different each time, but I always had the sense that it wasn’t just a novel: it was a guide to life. No, that’s not specific enough—it was a guide to my life.
As a writer myself, I know this has something to do with the particular literary technique used in the novel. We spend the entire story in Ender’s head. We see the world through his eyes. The lessons he learns are the lessons we learn. But a trick of narrative perspective doesn’t explain everything. Remembrance of Things Past takes place largely in the main character’s head, but I didn’t spend my youth imagining myself eating cookies in early-twentieth-century France. For some reason, I looked at this unhappy six-yearold who saves the world only to live the rest of his life in lonely isolation and said…, “I want some of that.”
I recently turned forty. I have a career and a family. I just read Ender’s Game to my oldest son, and will be reading it to my other two children soon enough. With the novel fresh in my mind, I think it’s an appropriate time to re-examine some of the lessons I drew from it twenty-five years ago. Is it a good guide to life, or not? We shall see.
Lesson One: You are the single most important young genius on Earth. This fact will soon be recognized, and your destiny will be revealed.
Okay, just to be clear: I’m not saying I actually believed I was the smartest kid on Earth. I knew kids who were smarter than I was. And even by the standards of Ender’s Game itself, I had already missed the mark by the time I read the book—I did nothing truly world-shaking before puberty. The closest I came to Ender-like brilliance was programming a version of “Space Invaders” on a TRS-80 personal computer when I was eleven. But did I believe I was destined for greatness? Hell, yes! I was intensely ambitious, but I was possessed of a lot more drive than direction. I didn’t know what I was supposed to be doing, precisely, but I knew that it was something Very, Very Important. And so I waited. I waited for my Colonel Graff to come and tell me what it was I was supposed to be doing, what this fire burning in my guts was for. I knew it wouldn’t be easy. I knew that I might not even want to follow the call of duty when it came. But at least the questions wo
uld be resolved, and I would know what I was destined for. It was a terrible realization for me (reached sometime in my twenty-fourth year) that with respect to Colonel Graff, Ender’s Game had steered me wrong. No one was ever going to come along and force me to live up to my potential. It scared the hell out of me—not because I was afraid of working hard, but because I was deathly afraid of looking stupid. And isn’t that what we’re all afraid of, deep down? Consider how different Ender’s Game would be if there had been no monitor, no tests, and no Hyrum Graff. Imagine if Ender had had to volunteer to go to Battle School. Imagine his letter to the Strategos: “Hi, my name is Ender Wiggin. You don’t know me, but I’m pretty sure I’m the one you’re looking for to save mankind.” It would have been less exciting but a lot more like real life. In real life, you have to go out and find what you think is your destiny, and risk looking like an idiot if you’re wrong. Ender had it hard, but he didn’t have to lie awake at night, wondering, “Am I fooling myself? Maybe I should just go to law school instead.” So did this first “lesson” steer me wrong? I’d have to say yes and no. Certainly it led me to believe fervently in destiny, even if my Graff-driven version would prove to be a fantasy. Eventually, I got impatient waiting for Graff to open the door and push me through it, and I did what we all must do: I opened the damn door myself. As for being the most important young genius on Earth, well . . . I suppose I have to acknowledge that, although I love my career, making TV may not be that important. Then again, you never know. It’s possible my broadcast signals are being picked up by aliens, who are re-evaluating their invasion plans because Earth is seemingly populated with lots of bad-ass guys with guns and cool sunglasses.
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