Ender’s Game

"Ender’s Game is a science fiction novel that has always been near and dear to my heart. I read it when I was a boy, several times, and I’ve read it with my own children. I put it in the category of being an apocalyptic novel because it deals with war between humanity and what Card calls “the buggers.” That conflict is one in which those two societies are locked in a struggle that will end in one of their demises. And so it’s a book about the end of a civilization, but it’s also a book about war. “Serving in places like Iraq and Afghanistan…you come to see how very tenuous society is” The protagonist of the novel is a boy named Ender Wiggin. In the novel, you travel with him, from about the age of seven to nine or ten years old. The premise of the book is that it takes a childlike understanding of emotion and a childlike intelligence to become the type of facile military commander that humanity needs in order to anticipate the actions of an adversary that’s trying to destroy us. So Ender becomes the general in this war. Fiction teaches you and war forces you to learn empathy, much the same way Ender does. When you go to war, when you are in combat, you become locked in a shadow dance with your adversary. This was certainly my experience. You spend a lot of time thinking about and trying to anticipate your adversaries’ actions. To survive and to win you must understand who they are and what they might do at any moment. So you’re consistently engaged in exercising empathy. And if you’re a good soldier, you’ll start to appreciate your adversary and develop sympathy for them. Ender says, “When I truly understand my enemy, understand him well enough to defeat him, then in that very moment, I also love him.” You are locked in a very intimate relationship with them. And after a while, you come to appreciate who they are, despite all the differences that might exist between you. And you come to realize that the two of you have defined each other through this experience. And to a certain degree a deep, profound understanding exists between you, an intimacy that is like love. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Specific to your question about how war allows you to imagine an apocalypse: Serving in places like Iraq and Afghanistan , which have been devastated by war, you come to see how very tenuous society is and how very tenuous peace is and how tenuous the civilizations that we live in are as well."

"Ender’s Game is a book that you read when you are twelve or thirteen, and you come for the cool war games in zero gravity. Then you read it as an adult, and you find yourself mortified the entire time. It’s another book about a war that Earth is having (Earth is having a lot of wars), with another enemy that is very bug-like (Earth also really doesn’t like bugs. I don’t know what’s up with that.) The military is recruiting incredible, almost savant-like children to become their officers and their strategists. Ender is unique from the moment that he is born, because he is the third child in his family and there are birth quotas: the only reason his parents are allowed to have him is because his brother and his sister already show incredible cognitive abilities, and there’s a belief that he will also be incredibly intelligent. Ender has a rough time growing up. His brother is mean and bordering on sociopathic. His sister is a lot nicer, but that doesn’t make things much better. But after Ender commits a very violent act at school, he gets scouted by the military, and they say, ‘Why don’t you come with us and train?’ – so he does. And that’s when the cool part of the book starts, because there are a lot of simulated war games that he participates in. I remember reading this as a preteen, and thinking, ‘Wow, that is so cool, this training montage is really fun…’ And then I returned to the book when I was in my late twenties, and I realised that the entire book is about how an institution is turning ten-year-olds into soldiers who do not question their orders and who truly, genuinely believe that what they’re doing is right. And again, call back to the mecha genre: that’s a theme that comes up in a lot of Gundam anime, because the protagonists tend to be teens, and when you watch it as a teenager you think it’s cool that they get to fly these mecha suits and engage in battle. But when you think about it as an adult, you realise that they’re child soldiers, and they never really had a choice whether to participate in this or not. I think Ender’s Game is great for that reason: you can read it at different stages in your life, and you can take away a very different experience of the book."