I’d give Ender’s Game a C, maybe a C+… as for the other 2 of the trilogy: I don’t think you’d miss anything exciting if you got the Cliff’s Notes.
(obviously not a huge OSC fan)
I thought Ender’s Game was amazing when I read it … in sixth grade. Then I went and checked out the sequel, Speaker for the Dead, from our local library, and … wow, that was an amazing book. I like it better now. I’m the one person on earth who also enjoyed Xenocide AND Children of the Mind and who was excited when OSC said in an Audible.com audiobook extra at the end of the Audible Children of the Mind that he was going to write a book joining the four Ender books and the four Bean books. However, it seems that instead of doing that, he’s written another Ender book (Ender in Exile) and has started blatantly adding his political opinions into his fiction. Grrr.
Eh…'twas ok…
I’ll chime in to basically endorse the consensus here. Ender’s Game is a good science fiction novel, but not the greatest masterpiece of all times. It is well written with a tightly constructed plot and lots of surprises. The struggle that Ender goes through while at battle school is very believable and yet also makes for incredible tension and emotional involvement. The subplot involving his siblings is definitely off the wall.
Speaker for the Dead is another good book. There are not nearly as many plot twists as in Ender’s Game, nor nearly as much action, but there are more detailed characters and emotionally touching scenes.
Xenocide is just plain nuts. For one thing, Card jettisons his hold on scientific plausibility. He simply makes up a bunch of new laws of physics that are just plain bizarre and contradictory. He tries to rewrite some of what happened in the previous two novels retroactively, without much success. And it’s all just so far-fetched. We’re expected to believe that after humanity goes centuries without much scientific progress, suddenly a single family of brilliant scientists can basically discover or invent all kinds of amazing stuff in a matter of days.
I found Ender’s Game to be a decent SF novel mainly because of the central character of a child pushed to sociopathic limits.
Speaker for the Dead on the other hand I found to be absolutely terrible. My main problem is that Ender is not a character in that book so much as a plot device. There is early on in the novel a broken home where the family hates each other and there’s an out of control child. Ender shows up, speaks a few bland bits of psychobabble, hugs the kid, and then magically everything is better.
And that is how every problem is in the book. It’s there, Ender shows up and says a few words that don’t really amount to much, and then everything is better despite the fact that even if things improved healing should have taken years. He becomes a walking deus ex machina that washes away consequences.
And it doesn’t help that the book is built on the premise that biologists have been genetically engineering alien species which they don’t even know the life cycle of, something that they could have learned with a little bit of observation.
I think a lot of how much you like the book has to do with how old you were when you first encounted it.
I love the book, and have read it dozens of times, but it is impossible for me to judge it fairly because of the amount of nostalgia I have wrapped up in it. I pick it up and I am the 14 year old who read the whole thing in a single sitting again. As a smart 14 year old who felt like an outsider (and what 14 year old doesn’t) and who loved SciFi, this book was the greatest thing ever written. And it was written for me and people like me. I don’t think it was intended to be anything other than a fun YA novel that could serve as a prefix for Speaker for the Dead.
It’s fun, it’s smart, and it’s engaging in a way that a lot of SciFi just isn’t. Card has the ability to create very human characters that, frankly, a lot of popular SciFi writers just don’t have. (William Gibson, mentioned up thread, has this problem in spades.) But as an adult reader of SciFi I can see (I suppose) that it isn’t an innovative book, and that I am not the target audience which is why I think a lot of people are underwhelmed. Think of it as the spiritual father of Harry Potter (along with other stuff, but you get my meaning I hope) and you get a better idea of how great the novel is at achieving what it sets out to achieve. And in the end, I think that’s the only way you can fairly judge any work of art.
I have tried several of Orson Scott Cards other works since, and I like the Alvin Maker series a fair deal (Seventh Son etc.) but for the most part I don’t like his work. It’s preachy in a way that makes me uncomfortable as an adult. They are mostly very thinly veiled allegories, and frankly I don’t like my allegories to last more than a few dozen pages.
There may be something to this. I was 40 or 41 when I read it.
Oh yeah - every book has an ideal age. Jeez, if you read The Fountainhead when you’re 17, it’s the most brilliant philosophical treatise in novel form ever…until you try reading it again when you’re about 23…
That is why I am trying to get my son to hold off on reading Dune - he knows it’s an all-time fave of mine and has liked what I have turned him onto so far. But I think 14 or so is a better time for Dune - lots of Big Ideas and Machiavellian plot twists in that book…
I’m another who read Ender’s Game too young to be able to make an objective judgment about it now. I gave it to my 12-yr-old recently and was a little disappointed when he was lukewarm about it.
I enjoyed Speaker for the Dead, but the next two books went in a direction I didn’t like (abstract, far-fetched technology that resembles magic.) I do remember being fascinated by the story of the people who thought their hereditary OCD was the gods speaking to them.
Overall I have disliked more of Card’s books than I have enjoyed.
I agree with the fact that the original novella was much better than the novel version of Ender’s Game. I read the novella first in my 20s, and really liked it. I read the whole novel in my 30s, and remembered I had really liked the shorter version, but still liked the novel tolerably well. I preferred the first sequel, but I’ve never gotten up the desire to read Xenocide, mostly because for a long time I was focused on other authors, and partly because I recall how awful some other things Card wrote were.
I was ten or eleven when i first read it, so it really spoke to me. Card was my favorite author for a good while, till his religious soapboxing started becoming insufferable. If I’d just read it now? I don’t know. I’d probably still like it.
I thought the first two books were pretty good SF.
Xenocide, not so much.
The Awards often depend on the competition. Here was the final Hugo ballot for Ender’s Game:
Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card [Tor, 1985]
Cuckoo’s Egg by C. J. Cherryh [Phantasia, 1985; DAW, 1985]
The Postman by David Brin [Bantam Spectra, 1985]
Footfall by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle [Ballantine Del Rey, 1985]
Blood Music by Greg Bear [Arbor House, 1985]
I don’t think you could argue that any of the other options were that much better. Blood Music was more groundbreaking, but that makes it hard to make awards.
Here is the ballot for Speaker for the Dead:
Speaker for the Dead by Orson Scott Card [Tor, 1986]
The Ragged Astronauts by Bob Shaw [Gollancz, 1986; Baen, 1986]
Count Zero by William Gibson [Asimov’s Jan,Feb,Mar 1986; Gollancz, 1986]
Marooned in Realtime by Vernor Vinge [Analog May,Jun,Jul,Aug 1986; Bluejay, 1986]
Black Genesis by L. Ron Hubbard [Bridge, 1986; New Era, 1986]
A more interesting list. Marooned in Realtime and Count Zero might have been stronger choices, but the latter was hurt in comparison to Neuromancer.
But the Hugo is a popularity contest, and Ender was a bigger seller. Plus the balloting system for all SF awards tend to favor middle-of-the-road options.
Here is the Nebula competition for Ender’s Game:
Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card
Blood Music by Greg Bear
Dinner at Deviant’s Palace by Tim Powers
Helliconia Winter by Brian Aldiss
The Postman by David Brin
The Remaking of Sigmund Freud by Barry N. Malzberg
Schismatrix by Bruce Sterling
Some stronger choices here – Dinner at Deviant’s Palace would be my choice and The Remaking of Sigmund Freud would be my second.
Now for Speaker:
Speaker for the Dead by Orson Scott Card
Count Zero by William Gibson
Free Live Free by Gene Wolfe
The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
The Journal of Nicholas the American by Leigh Kennedy
This is the Way the World Ends by James Morrow
This is the Way the World Ends is by far and away the best choice here, and Free Live Free is a solid second choice. Again, Speaker is a solid middle of the road option.
But due to the Australian ballot, truly groundbreaking work often does not win the awards.
I might have gone with The Postman myself but Worldcon that year was in Australia and there was no way a novel with an American patriotic theme was going to win.
The short story “Blood Music” had already won a Hugo and I’ve noticed that there is a real aversion to awarding the same thing twice. The only expansion that has won multiple awards is McIntyre’s “Of Mist, and Grass, and Sand” and Dreamsnake which both won Nebulas (and I hated Dreamsnake for just about all of the same reasons I hated Speaker for the Dead).
Marooned in Realtime in a walk for me on that one, though I have not read the Hubbard or Shaw book. Though this is a case where I think it’s just a pretty good SF book rather than an exceptional piece of literature (similar to Ender’s Game in that regard).
I think you’re selling the popularity contest aspect of the Nebulas short. 
You’re right though that a moderate quality book from a big name will get the nod before a really good book by a relative unknown. Such is life in the award games.
As for me, I read the novella as an adult, and had never read anything else by Card. I had no preconceptions about the story other than having heard that it was, like, rilly good, and I had no idea what the plot or twist was.
I thought it was overwhelmingly meh, and based on my experience with it I have no real desire to read anything else that Card has written.
YMMV, of course.
I read neuromancer and dune when I was ten, and if snow crash had been around I would have LOVED it…
I would give the kid the opportunity.
This was my favorite part of all the books.
This, exactly. I still reread it every couple of years (and I was 13 or 14 when I first read it) and remember exactly how it felt to read it for the first time.
It starts like it’s been fired out of a cannon, it speeds through an absolutely fascinating world at top speed, and it finishes by slamming into a wall. Endings are hard.
I’d love it if some group of authors got together to expand on the universe of Snow Crash. It’s a rich, nuanced world the novel’s plot left mostly unexplored.
ObOT: Ender’s Game is fascinating because it demonstrates that complex, interesting characters can exist in hard SF. (One of the implicit assumptions of the New Wave was that hard SF had characters as flat and streamlined as spaceship bulkheads. New Wave SF, on the other hand, had fully-3D characters completely folded up into their own navels.) The morality of using children resonates with kids, who always feel adults are using them to somewhat shadowy ends, and the extreme violence of Ender towards bullies resonates even further, because in the real world bullies go unpunished. It loses its luster once you begin to think kids have it all their own way.
Not in the way it does for the Hugo. It’s more the author’s personal popularity. In addition, there were some behind the scenes maneuvering (Card used a loophole in the rule to increase his chances) and a major controversy (when it broke, the SFWA Forum published its biggest issue ever) that made Card some strong enemies and also some strong supporters. But the two sides probably cancelled each other out.
And the Australian ballot.
I must be the exception. I first read Ender’s Game when I was about 30. (I think it was back when Enderw24 was Enderw23 ) I just loved it. Still do. I’ve read it several times.
But some of Card’s other work? Oy gevalt!
I have one right here…I think I got it for free. I hope I didn’t pay good money for it! It’s called “The Memory of Earth.” In it, Card not only indulges in the masturbatory practice of giving the characters totally unfamiliar and difficult names, but he also gives everyone nicknames that you have to remember and specifies that the names aren’t pronounced the way they would seem to be pronounced! So, “Nafai” is pronounced “NYAH-fie” and is sometimes called “Nyef.” What the heck is the point of all that?
Maybe to distract the reader from the fact that the story sucks?