I just finished the book and thought it was… OK. Pretty good, even. I’d give it a solid B, maybe even a B+. No idea what all the fuss was about, though. Some people (here and elsewhere) have praised it to the skies as the greatest scifi novel in years, even decades, and it won a bunch of awards. But hold on, sez I. It’s not all that.
What do you think? And are any of the sequels worth reading, and why? (No spoilers, please).
It’s not the best by a long shot, and I wonder whether folks who say that are folks who read a lot of the cream-of-the-crop, award-winning SF that’s being written today. I don’t think it was genre-changing in the way that Neuromancer was, nor did it have anything like Neuromancer’s effect on pop culture. Also, Orson Scott Card has written the same book over and over (super-bright, misunderstood tweener saves the world), with a few exceptions, and his nonfiction is appallingly stupid, arrogant, and hateful. I try not to let the last sentence influence my reaction to the book, but it’s hard.
That said, I thought it was an entertaining read. The three-dimensional games were well-written, and the buildup of suspense toward the end of the book was accomplished quite well. Ender was not, emotionally speaking, a realistic character, but this was not a book about character; it was a book about tactics, coupled with a meditation on the ethics of conflict. The title reflects both aspects of the book.
I’ve never got the adoration for it either. I enjoyed it and thought the 3D game was an interesting creation, but think of it as more of a teenage book. I couldn’t hack Speaker for the Dead at all.
Without spoiling Speaker for the Dead, I read that one first, and it is a sequel to Ender’s Game, so the surprise ending of EG wasn’t a surprise to me at all either :). I kinda liked SftD more: it’s not Card’s story of a tweener genius saving the world, it’s more of an adult story, and it’s more like something written by Ursula K. Le Guin, who’s one of my all-time faves.
I’m just a few pages in, having had the book for quite some time on the shelf. I’ve half a feeling that it may be one of those books where the roles and actions for each character are all laid out, all we need to do is read about the characters following them. Much like the writing of Harry Harrison and Steven Baxter seems to me.
Ender’s Game was pretty decent. Although it mostly just made me want to play laser tag. The bit about his siblingsRising to international (interplanetary?) power by becoming the awesomest bloggers and forum posters in historyseems a bit quaint and silly today.
Speaker for the Dead was… interesting in its own right and I liked the Speaker concept but the story as a whole wasn’t much. I never bothered with any after that.
The kids spend most of their off duty time in the barracks naked. It’s pointed out, that since most of them are males, it gives Petra (a girl) an advantage to walk around starkers and make the others uncomfortable.
I think of it more as a young adult book than as adult science fiction (adult science fiction includes books like Left Hand of Darkness, Spin, Sparrow, Eiflheim, etc.) Perhaps it should more appropriately be compared to other YA science fiction, e.g., Asimov, Heinlein, etc.?
I have a hardcover first edition - signed. It was published simultaneously in hard and softcover so I think there were only about 1,000 hardcovers printed…
I love that book. Silly, intellectually engaging, speculatively accurate, meandering plot-twisty fun.
I really like Ender’s Game, it gets an A in my book. However, I am not a big science fiction fan at all. Not that I never read science fiction, but it is not something I usually seek out. One of the things I enjoy about Ender’s Game is that it doesn’t seem particularly focused on the science-y parts, and that what the character of Ender lacks in being realistic is made up for by being interesting. I’ve never had any inclination to read the sequels, it seems like the sort of thing that’s better left as is.
Oh, I absolutely agree with Jophiel about the goofiness of that particular plot point.
Part of the problem I have with the novel version of Ender’s Game is that I first encountered the story, and most of the main characters: Ender, Bean and whazzizname (The teacher/former admiral) in the novella that preceded the novel. A lot of the things that people mentioned here as taking away from the novel, Ender’s siblings or the VR game, for example, were put in to pad the novella to novel length.
For me, it didn’t work all that well. I bought, and read, the novel when it came out - but the better story, IMNSHO, is the novella, which focuses completely on the “game” as war, and the cost to Ender for winning the war for Humanity. (At least, that’s the big thing I recall from the novella, where the ending has Ender being shown as being nearly as dissipated as an old man.) I think the biggest strength of the novella is that it allowed OSC to end the story with a tragedy within the triumph - and leave Ender totally destroyed. Whether that is realistic is beyond the point - it made for a very powerful drama. For the novel, he chose to soften the ending, and that weakened the whole work, IMNSHO.
Having said that, I really like Speaker for the Dead. First off, because it doesn’t simply expand a previously published work, with seemingly extraneous plot lines. It’s a far more tightly plotted work, and that helps a lot. The central mysteries are better built up, too. While the book is nominally about culture clashes between two alien species - the human characters are what drives the plot. And while there are notes of grace within the individual tragedies of the novel, I didn’t have the feeling that the author had tacked them on with little regard to the logic of the story.
I really enjoyed Ender’s Game and Speaker for the Dead, and found the second to be a more mature book. Xenocide is OK, and plays around with some interesting ideas before inventing an absurd deus ex machina towards the end. All the other books in the whole series (Children of the Mind, the entire Shadow sub-series) have been pretty crappy. The Shadow books in general seemed like a blatant play for money - ‘I haven’t had a new idea in ages, but let’s rehash the same stuff, and when I get bogged down, I’ll just invent a new character and move things to a new location!’
I did find the character of Ender much more complex and sympathetic in the book-length version rather than just the novella.
I haven’t read the latest Ender book yet; I’m waiting on it from the library, because OSC hasn’t written much worth reading in at least a decade, probably more, and I’m not wasting my money on it.