Author: Orson Scott Card
Publisher: Tor
Rating: WARTY!
I've already touched on Card's homophobia in my review of the graphic novel here. I review the movie here. I can't put it any better than Kate Bonin does in her essay In the Bugger Tunnels of Planet Eros: Gay Sex and Death in the Science Fiction of Orson Scott Card which can be found at this link.
Let's talk pretentiousness. Normally I don't talk about novel covers because the author has nothing whatsoever to do with the cover that ends up on the novel over which they've labored so very hard: it's all Big Publishing™ all the time, but once in a while I do mention a cover when it's a particularly egregious offender.
Take this one, for example. It's a re-issue to tie-in with the movie. I have no problem with that, but look closely at the orange bar, which reads: A Major Motion Picture Event This Fall. Note that this is not a movie! It isn't even a film. It's not a motion picture, nor is it even a major motion picture. No! None of that is good enough any more: this is A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE EVENT! Good god, how utterly absurd can you get? Which over-paid publicity dip-shit came up with that precise wording? Whoever it was, I'll bet good money his or her middle name begins with 'P' for pretentious. Or maybe it was a committee...
Ender's Game is really 'Andrew's Game' since this is the name of the main character, a six-year-old boy who winds up in military school. This is the first novel in the Ender pentalogy. Ender is his middle name according to the movie, but whence it comes isn't explained. Nowhere in the novel does it ever show his name as Andrew Ender Wiggin that I could find, although it does appear in some book blurbs in that form, but book blurbs have no more to do with the author than do book covers and like covers, book blurbs typically lie.
In a world where, for unspecified reasons - perhaps overpopulation - a third child is illegal in some nations, Ender is a third and he's bullied for that by his schoolmates. There's no explanation for why this bullying even takes place, let alone why nothing is ever done about it. Evidently a militarily-minded school is a place not to learn tactics, fitness, and strategy, but to learn how to pick on people, since this novel is rife with it. Oh, and it's shameful to cry over anything in case you wondered.
Orson Scott Card's history of homophobia is well-known (though he claims to have grown-up since then, this novel was written at the height of his delusion and it's rife with references to homosexuality), so is it any surprise he calls the enemy 'buggers'? Way to demonize people! Both 'third' and 'bugger' are insults in this world, and if you're "not a man" you're a nobody. After all it is, in Card's own words, "manly warfare" - women and gays better not ever apply (the novel is also rife with misogyny and bigotry). In passing, Card is also something of a climate change denier, as well as a back-door creationist.
Life doesn't end there for Andrew however, since he's bullied at home by his older brother Peter (who ought to have been named 'Dick') who was so psychopathic that even the military rejected him. You can tell how bad he is by how appallingly awful those people are who actually did get invited in.
The issue isn’t actually Peter's psychopathy though; the issue is why no one does anything about him. Ender has an older sister (charmingly named 'fart mouth' by Peter - Card has an obsession with farting in this novel) who does nothing about the bullying despite the fiction we're expected to swallow that she truly loves Andrew forever. Make of that what you will; there are probably several psychiatric papers waiting to be written on that topic alone. His practically absentee parents do nothing about the bullying either, but this is YA fiction, so why would anyone do anything realistic?
The setting of this novel is a futuristic Earth which has undergone a sneak attack perpetrated by ant-like aliens. It’s been almost a century since that war, without another peep out of the aliens, yet humanity is still deeply obsessed with them. Why? No reason.
It is of note that Peter and Andrew are the names of two brothers in the New Testament, one of whom purportedly founded the Roman Catholic church, although doubtlessly much of that is pure fiction, too. The fact is that according to the Bible's own testimony, it was Paul The Turncoat who founded the church, dethroning the Messiah's chosen vicar, Peter! Way to end-run the savior, Paul!
It's interesting that the bully is Peter, and that the Roman Catholic church has a reputation throughout history for what might be euphemistically termed 'bullying'. Andrew, on the other hand is manly (that's precisely what his name means), so Card here is rejecting the Catholics as wimps, bullies, and cowards, and striding out confidently with his manly savior. Card himself is a great-great-grandson of Brigham Young, and thus a Mormon.
Ender's response to the school bullying he endures at the hands of Stilson is to take care of it in a way that (he hopes) won’t have any blow-back on him: He kicks him in the chest, and apparently fitness training is so poor that this downs Stilson, whereupon Ender kicks him three times (ribs, groin, and face), and warns his two useless buddies that they’ll get worse if they mess with him again. Why thugs such as they take this lesson to heart is a mystery. Note that the movie and the graphic novel are far more gory in depicting this scene than is this novel.
This behavior has been witnessed by the nameless watchers who appear periodically in the text, and have anonymous discussions about how fit Ender is to lead the war against the aliens. One of these watchers lovingly refers to the juvenile recruits as 'little bastards', but what it makes is little sense, because what this says quite clearly is that the entire military is incompetent, and their only hope is a young child! I find that beyond credibility. It also makes no sense in light of what's revealed later about a weapon of appalling destructive power.
Sure enough, the International Fleet representative shows up the next day and tells Ender's folks about the fight. His idiot dad, who wasn't even there, chides Ender that it wasn't fair to kick his opponent. So bullying is fair, but retaliating very effectively to end it isn’t. Got it, dad. The IF officer, Hyrum Graff, exaggerates that Ender kicked Stilson "repeatedly" in the face and body when he delivered only three precise kicks. He tells them the military owns their son, and that the reason he's picking Ender now for military service is that he wanted to know Ender's motivation for kicking a boy when he was already down. That Ender might be lying isn’t given any consideration at all.
Graff tells Ender that he will be giving-up the next ten years of his life, unable to see family or to take vacation during that entire decade. No word on why. Graff does at least give it to him straight, telling him what he'll be studying assorted subjects (he does, however, fail to inform him that there will be no teachers in sight anywhere on the space station ever!). Why military history is relevant given that they're fighting in space now, is a bit if a head-scratcher, but I've seen several sci-fi writers fail to make the jump to light-speed on this score.
These writers depict space battles not as though they're being fought in the 3-D micro-gravity vacuum of space, but as though they're being fought in the essentially 2-D environment of the ocean, before flight was invented. Their novels suffer accordingly. The most egregious offender, in my experience, David Weber with his Honor Harrington series, the first few of which I managed to like despite this problem.
The battle school is almost all boys, because girls simply didn’t evolve in the right way to be good soldiers. Seriously? Admittedly this was written in 1977, before militaries around the world truly wised-up to the need for female soldiers, but it does illuminate Card's inability to see beyond his own prejudice. The Israel Defense Force seems to be a leader in integrating women into the military with some 50% of its officers being female, and about a third of the military being women, although there seems to be a real problem with sexual harassment even so. The Israeli Caracal Battalion is about three-quarters women.
Such is the power of the military over the civilian population in Ender's Game that we learn that they requisitioned Ender's sister Valentine hoping for a milder version of Peter, before finally requisitioning Andrew, hoping for the best of both Peter and Valentine. How they figured this would work is a complete mystery, but if they can requisition a specific gender and get it on cue, then why can they not genetically engineer the perfect soldier? Makes no sense.
At the beginning, Card tells us that the recruits are forced to sit inside the launch vehicle for an hour before take-off watching a video about space travel. I don't get why they do this instead watching it on the way up to the station. Makes no sense.
The journey up there is, of course, reserved for Andrew (who has an impressive track record of beating up a kid) inflicting yet more violence upon another child. He breaks a kid's arm when he flips him over the seat after the kid removed his seat-belt and began pounding on Andrew's head. I find it hard to credit that someone's arm would break under those conditions, In space, while people do have mass, they have no weight, but I guess this is possible. What I don’t get is why Andrew is persistently depicted by Card as being violent and deadly if we’re really expected to accept that he's neither. Makes no sense.
Colonel Graff isn't a nice person. He uses terms like "scum-brains" and "pin-headed little morons" to six-year olds. He and Card often refer to "null gravity", but I'm not really sure what he means by that. If he means that gravity is effectively negated, then he's correct. If he means that there is no gravity, then he's wrong. Gravity pervades all of space. Objects and people in orbit around Earth are actually still experiencing a gravitational pull. If they were not, they wouldn’t be in orbit! The space station which they're on is actually falling towards the Earth, but the fall happens to have the same arc as the curvature of the Earth, so it never comes down and hits the ground.
Ender is supposedly smart, so for a six-year old, he understands things at a more mature level, but when Graff explains why he made Ender the focal point of the other children's ire, he makes the asinine argument that Ender needs to be a leader because it's the only way to make the kids who hate him stop ignoring him. How can they both hate and ignore him?! The two are mutually exclusive, it seems to me. Makes no sense.
Ender is so tardy in entering his dorm room that he's forced to take the lowest bunk by the door which is the one that's usually assigned to the dorm leader. How curious that no one told them this beforehand! This is the first of many examples of the complete lack of teaching taking place in this supposed school. There's a note near the bunk advising Ender that he needs to put his hand on a scanner and say his name twice to assign the bunk to his voice code. The weird thing here is that he announces himself as Ender Wiggin!
At no point has this issue of nomenclature been explained. The movie indicates that his name is Andrew Ender Wiggin. Until I saw that, I'd been speculating that 'Ender' was a nickname which his older sister had inadvertently bestowed upon him through her inability to say 'Andrew', when she was very young and he was barely a toddler, but this wouldn't explain how everyone came to employ it. The novel doesn't offer any explanation.
At his new school, Ender does finally make friends, flying in the face of Graff's advice that the only way he will make people like him is through leadership. This is supposed to be a school but there is a marked lack of instruction. A prime example of this is when the kids first enter the free-fall battle room. Despite having seen a kid get a broken arm during the trip to the station, there's no instructor to advise the kids on safety and conduct, much less on how to fight in such an environment. The kids are essentially left to themselves. I sincerely hope this isn't how our military schools train soldiers!
On that score, I've seen some critics in comments on reviews claim that you can't really appreciate this novel if you've never served in the military! Way to be a snob. This is patent bullshit. This is a novel, not a military biography, and moreover, it's a novel set in space. There isn't anyone in any military who has fought in space, and while I agree that some tactics are universal, you can't be hidebound by a largely 2-D terrestrial mentality in space, either. And military or not, there are some things which are simply wrong, and that's all there is to it. I think that they who have service experience are at risk of having a seriously blinding bias towards ignoring the real problems this novel has: problems which have to do with logic and plotting.
Having said that, there are indeed some serious issues with the military training depicted in Ender's Game - namely that there isn't any! The movie does make an effort to depict classroom teaching, but even it shows no attempt at actually training students in in the micro-gravity sphere. On the contrary: training there, both in the movie and in the novel consists of nothing more than leaving everyone to their own devices.
Worse than this, military training is about team-building, hence the insanity of the repetitive and disciplinary methods, but Ender's Game specifically rejects all of that by repeatedly depicting Ender flouting orders and instructions, and going it alone. The "justification" for this is that his commanders are routinely portrayed as ineffectual and clueless, as well as being bullies. This gets so bad that even Ender himself has to ask if the military leadership doesn't care about what goes on in its own school (p152)!
This itself is an indictment of any claim that the story depicts an accurate view of the military. Any military which permitted incompetent commanders and brutal bullies to be in charge isn't going to last long and it certainly isn't going to win any wars, but the biggest failure of all is that not a single thing in this training that we're forced to follow for page after page, bears any relationship to how battles are fought in space (as measured by the earlier encounters with the Formics).
Ender isn't even depicted as being smart, which is supposedly his best trait. His "invention" of the feet-first approach to entering the sphere, designed to give a small profile to the enemy is nothing new, and such a tactic is painfully obvious to anyone who has a ounce of common sense, but even if we grant that no one ever thought of this 'revolutionary approach' before, how is any of it at all relevant to the end goal?
Out in space the combatants are expressly not flying around in space suits in a confined area. They're in spacecraft! In 1977 when this novel was written, we already had guided missiles. How is presenting a low profile relevant when the missile can find your magnetic signature, or your heat emission, or your radar profile, or whatever, and zero in on you no matter what aspect you offer? It's bullshit! The entire section of the novel which shows these tedious "training exercises" is irrelevant to what happens later and therefore it's entirely proper to question it.
Here's a classical example. Ender has a long conversation with Dink in chapter 8, after he's joined the "Rat Army" which actually isn't an army. Even Card admits this as he describes the sub-units as "toons" - short for platoon. This would mean the 'army' is actually a company, which consists in this case of four platoons, but even that appears to be inaccurate, based upon the information Which Card gives us. Not all of the details are engraved in stone, of course. Any military organization which would do that is asking for trouble, so there's a lot of variation, but this reads more like it's the Rat platoon, composed of four sections or squads.
Dink is a squad commander who's been promoted several times, but who has repeatedly refused to obey orders! On one occasion he was moved into a Platoon leader's quarters, but he refused to come out and command his platoon. This is blatant dereliction of duty, but instead of getting busted for it, Dink was allowed to do whatever the hell he wanted, discipline-free! Those who claim that they have military service, and who are supporting this novel as an accurate portrait of life in the service need to account for problems like this in Card's narrative.
Card simply doesn't get space, I think, as an environment. This is exemplified by his claim that the battle room has negligible air currents. This is in space, in a micro-gravity environment, where a full-scale training exercise has just taken place with a large sphere, subject to asymmetrical heating from the sun, and there are no air currents in the room to speak of?! Card needs to read up on Newton's laws of motion. His description (around p150) of Ender's lone battle against multiple bullies in the micro-gravity sphere (another incident which went unhindered and unpunished by this so-called military) shows that Card doesn't have a clue about Newtonian mechanics.
Card simply doesn't get street talk, either. He periodically lapses into what can only be described as a pathetic attempt to have one or another of these kids speak 'Ebonics', but there's no rhyme or reason to who uses this lingo and when. It's completely random, like he just put it in once in a while when he remembered that he was supposed to be doing this, and then he forgot about it for page after page. It's not like he has one character who speaks like this; instead, he randomly has a character lapse into it for a lone sentence, and then speak perfectly normally for the rest of the time! This I found to be as sad as it was amateurish.
The bottom line is that this novel is illogical and not very well written. It has a hugely boring section in the middle featuring the pointless and endless battle games between children, which have diddly squat to do with training for the the actual battle at the end. This lack-a-daisical non-teaching pervades the whole novel - there is no teaching in this "school". There are no teachers in this school. There are no instructors. No instruction is ever given about anything. Makes no sense.
In short, this novel seriously sucked. I rate it warty. I'll leave the last word to Kate Bonin at the URL referenced above:
One might easily indulge in a wink-wink/nudge-nudge reading of Ender’s Game in quest of hidden gay subtext: Ender must save all mankind from the hideous buggers, who are ruled by giant, scary queens; Ender must travel to a star-base on planet Eros and live underground, in smooth-walled rooms linked by tunnels, which were originally built and lived in by the buggers; here Ender shares a bedroom with his tutor, the aging but still virile war hero Mazer Rackham, while learning to understand, empathize with and even love the buggers in order to destroy them. The buggers’ home planet is protected by something called an Ecstatic Shield; but Ender’s fleet has a special weapon called the “Little Doctor”:
“The Little Doctor penetrates the shield?” asks Ender.
“As if it weren’t there” (Ender’s Game 235).
