The Giant Bomb Book Club: Ender's Game

Hey peeps, this is just a little feature I'm going to throw together every so often. If I'm being serious about writing more frequently, I figured I'd best set aside some time every week to devour some literature. This will absolutely not be a regular thing, unlike the other new features I started this week, but I do want to make an effort to get more reading done this year. Consider it a New Year's resolution.

For the time being, I'm catching up with a lot of classic speculative sci-fi novels; playing SOMA, Axiom Verge and The Talos Principle last year awoke in me a desire to read more intelligent discussion about what it means to be human in an ever technologically-expanding universe that continues to blur the lines between machine and man. It's not all going to be transhumanism and robotic consciousness type material, but sci-fi has been dealing with those themes for many decades and I'd like to have the same base that many of those above games' writers did. Likewise, by reading some classic sci-fi, I'll start to see more parallels and influences in many games from the same genre.

These little book reports won't get too deep into the themes and events of each novel they cover, given this isn't really a forum for book talk, but I did want to critique them with a few recurring metrics. So far I've got: a general synopsis for those who don't feel like checking Wikipedia for the same few paragraphs of summarized plot, followed by what I knew about the book prior to reading it through cultural osmosis, then what I recognize of the book's influence in contemporary games after I've read it, and finally my overall interest level in pursuing more books from the same author/series.

The first book of the Giant Bomb Book Club is Orson Scott Card's 1985 novel Ender's Game.

Synopsis

Essentially, the book covers the childhood of one Andrew "Ender" Wiggin, a prodigy who is recruited by Earth's military to become their greatest military commander. Due to the required amount of fast thinking speeds and tactical innovation, it became necessary to seek out children who could learn how to become master strategists at a young age and lead massive spaceship battles, retaining the capacity for the enhanced learning speed that adults lack. Ender rises quickly through the ranks of each learning institution he is enrolled in, adopting heretofore unseen strategies along the way, eventually becoming the savior of mankind when it is revealed that his final examination was actually a real-time battle against the homeworld of the hostile insectoid alien "buggers".

There's a lot more than just that going on, however. Throughout the story Ender is concerned about his barely-contained psychopathy and how close he is to becoming his older brother Peter, a sociopath of equal intelligence who was passed over by the military for the same role due to his lack of compassion, a necessity for earning the trust of subordinates. Conversely, Ender's similarly genius sister Valentine was passed over for being too kind and conciliatory, lacking the sort of killer instinct necessary for a military officer. Ender's fear that he is closer to his brother than he realizes coupled with the magnitude of what's expected of him and his very young age paints a troubled portrait who pushes onward out of an obstinacy borne from his desire to not be controlled or coerced, especially by the untrustworthy adults in his life. If he is to be a tool of the military, he intends for it to be on his own terms.

Despite all the major characters being geniuses of varying degrees, the book's written in a straightforward manner that suggests something of a Young Adult reading age. I've got nothing against YA fiction, of course, but I anticipated that a lot more of the strategic stuff would fly over my head. Not to spoil too much, but Ender basically wins through a combination of recklessness - a result of being pushed too hard and wanting to break an incredibly unfair simulation with an outrageous feint, not knowing that the unfair simulation was actually an unwinnable real battle against the alien homeworld - and a deus ex machina matter disintegration weapon he discovered a unique application for. Likewise, a scheme concocted by his two siblings to engineer public outcry via two anonymous, charismatic and ostensibly contrasting internet personalities in order to rally many adults to causes intended to assure a global peace among the Cold War-esque Earth nations, is equally surface-level. We don't see much of what they debate, only the intended effects that their dialogue is creating among the populace. (Though kudos to Card for calling out how powerful a tool the internet would become for anonymous propaganda and rabble-rousing. Dude basically outlined Twitter three decades before it existed.)

Even so, there's something to be said for accessibility, and Card doesn't necessarily need to get into details to keep the story moving, instead focusing on Ender's increasing instability and apparent tactical brilliance. At the start of each chapter we overhear conversations about the plot and what's happening to Ender that we later discover to be audio tapes brought as evidence to incriminate a major character, learning that the adults in Ender's life had been manipulating and mentally torturing him throughout his education in order to ensure he was the correct candidate for the military invasion of the buggers' homeworld, and it is information the reader is privy to that Ender can only assume through his intuitive ability to read people. As he is forced into unjustly weighted simulated battles and artificially-created interpersonal quandaries, he is observed closely at all times for the choices he ultimately makes. Because he manages to retain both his compassion and his capacity for great violence when pressed, he becomes the hero the world needs, even if he can barely look at himself in the mirror any more. And all this before he reaches his teenage years. It can be a tough read at times, though one that - like most YA - tends to feature children who are forced to grow up fast.

What I Knew

Well, there's a whole lot about Orson Scott Card that's come to light in recent years, and very little of it good. We'll put that aside for the moment, since I try to separate the artist from the art whenever possible (though, yeah, there's no escaping some of the politics within the book itself). His most overt connection to the gaming industry would be penning the story for Shadow Complex, a SpaceWhipper concerning an oddly well-financed domestic terrorist cell within US soil that did some neat things with 3D perspective in an otherwise 2D game. I recently acquired the remastered Steam version in a bundle, so I'm considering another playthrough.

Beyond that, my understanding of Ender's Game was that it concerned some kid who becomes a genius tactician and wins a star war with a bold play or several. Nothing too in-depth, though, and certainly nothing of the torturous soul-searching and the slightly creepy relationships between Ender and his brother and sister. I haven't seen the recent movie featuring Harrison Ford and Asa Butterfield, but I'd heard enough to give it a miss. Maybe now that I've read the book, I could see how it was adapted.

What I Know Now

As for Ender's influence, well, I now recognize that there are snippets of it in many places. I recognized the trope of using a simulation to direct an actual space battle, which is something I did back with Mission Critical semi-recently, and that of a sympathetic insectoid race with whom humanity fought because of a mutual distrust and inability to understand each other. The rachni of Mass Effect are obvious allusions to the buggers of Ender's War, right down to Commander Shepard being the only hope that race has of starting anew with its last queen, after the latter is able to communicate with the former and help her understand what the rachni were and why they were initially hostile: the rachni, like the buggers, didn't consider the other sapient alien races in the galaxy to be intelligent because they lacked the same sophisticated hivemind telepathic communication, and so they were treated like mindless animals to be subjugated and consumed. This sympathetic facet of insectoid alien races might've come earlier in the universe of science fiction literature, but there were distinct parallels between how a benevolent Shepard might handle the discovery of a living rachni queen after the supposed extinction of her race, and how a slightly older Ender did at the end of the novel when the final bugger queen egg communicates their race's legacy to him telepathically.

I don't play nearly enough interplanetary strategy games to know the full brunt of the influence of Ender's Game on that particular genre, and there's been plenty of other forms of science-fiction that concerns military strategy between giant fleets of ships that those games might've also pulled from regardless. The anime Ginga Eiyuu Densetsu (or Legend of the Galactic Heroes) for instance, is pretty much all exquisitely-detailed strategic space battles between two equally brilliant opposed commanders while classical music plays in the background, and the first volume of its manga was published three years earlier than Ender's Game. If it has nothing else in common with Card's novel, it de-emphasizes the immense loss of human life with its detached perspective, presenting the battles as little more than "games" its protagonists play. But again, that's hardly exclusive to space warfare.

Further Reading

I checked out the first few pages of the next in the series, The Speaker of the Dead, and it seems to jump at least a hundred years into the future. Ender is historically reviled for destroying an entire sapient species, despite the necessity at the time, and humans have used that lesson to adjust how they present themselves to other intelligent alien races. I'm not sure how much of that is just the intro or what, or if Ender and Valentine are still alive somewhere (because of the relativistic oddities of faster than light travel, it's possible to live a few years on a moving ship and have many decades pass for everyone else), but it's certainly a departure. I might check out the rest of the "Ender Saga" - a collection of six books, from my understanding - but I'm torn between wanting to reading further and wanting to move onto something new. Anyone familiar with the series think I should stick with it?

(Feel free to add some of your own recommendations too, by the way. Sticking to (mostly) classic sci-fi cornerstones for now this year, unless The Winds of Winter finally comes out, but if you have any other genre fare I'll add it to the list.)