When the formics are defeated, Ender and the other children finally find out the truth about this battle, that it has been real, that they have truly killed the enemy. Petra and Bean and Ender laugh rather grimly at the thought of going back to being kids, to a regular middle school on Earth. But what else can be done with them? There is a trial to decide how to punish the adult Graff for misdeeds during the war, and some of the other children who are lesser figures in the victory against the formics are welcomed back. But no one knows what to do with Ender. He is persona non grata, not because he is responsible for xenocide (that judgment comes later), but because he is a child who is not a child, and although he was useful during the war, he cannot fit into normal society anymore. In the end, this is the real tragedy for teen readers who want to believe that they will be accepted as adults. Even in Ender’s world, it’s only a one-time, special-circumstances kind of situation. It doesn’t mean that society has changed. The attractive futuristic world of Ender’s Game for teens is over, even before the book itself is, and the jolt back into reality hurts.
After winning the war, what Ender hates the most is the cheers of the colonists when they see him. He thinks, “They didn’t blame him for any of his murders because it wasn’t his fault he was just a child.” But Ender knows he wasn’t a child, and he has no excuses for what he has done. He’d rather be court-martialed himself than watch Graff be court-martialed in his place. He wants to be treated as an adult, but even in Ender in Exile, when he has gone through puberty, when he is being sent to run a whole colony, he is still treated as a teen (not as a child but still a step back from his previous position), as incapable of taking on an adult role as yet. He has to prove himself again and again.
I am interested in this topic because of my own experience as a teen—when I felt as if the main role of adults was to hold me back from adulthood under the guise of protecting me—because I write for teens, and because I am a parent of four teens now. I am often surprised at those around me who roll their eyes at their teens’ complaints, who sigh with fond memories of their children’s early years, and who seem to disdain everything teenage. They wonder how it is that I can enjoy my teens’ company during these years. But simply giving my teens the ability to make their own choices in their lives has made them very unteenly. They don’t make extravagant gestures of rebellion because there is very little for them to rebel against. When my teen can’t do a family job because she is busy doing homework or being in a play at school, I don’t make a fuss about it. When a teen needs some time off to spend with friends, I encourage it as I would encourage a healthy adult friend to take care of her emotional needs. When my teen decides that playing an instrument is taking up valuable time that might be spent pursuing another aspect of her life that will help her in her career, I don’t try to talk her out it. I commend her for the adult decision she has made. My main interest as a parent is in helping my nearly adult children get what they want in life once they have figured out what that is. I am not interested in making them do things I think they should want to do. I expect my teens to give me respect, but I also offer them respect for their areas of expertise in turn. I am flexible about rules of the house in much the same way that I would be with another adult who lived in my home.
In the world of children’s literature, young adult and not teen is the term that has been used to describe literature written for those over the age of twelve, and this is the age group that has seen the greatest increase in book buying in the last twenty years. From a handful of books available in the children’s section of the bookstore in the seventies, YA has become a publishing juggernaut. Certainly Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series, which for at least one year recently accounted for four out of every five books purchased in America, should be given some credit for this. And then there is J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter, which created a huge reading public of children eager for new books. But the truth of the matter is that, if not for the adults buying these YA and other children’s titles, there would not be the same publishing phenomenon. Adults are reading YA in huge numbers. Why? Because YA books are shorter and easier to read and Americans don’t have the attention span for more adult books? I think it is more likely because, as Garth Nix argued recently, YA books are merely a subset of adult books, as young adults themselves are a subset of adults.
The latest trend in YA is so-called dystopian novels, including Suzanne Collins’ wonderful The Hunger Games, James Dashner’s The Maze Runner, and Ally Condie’s Matched. But are they really dystopian in the way that adult dystopian novels have been grim depictions of a future that cannot be changed? I don’t think so. These books show teens in charge of revolutions against corrupt governments that adults have done nothing to fight. They are books that show teens with adult power.
In a way, Ender’s Game is a forerunner for this kind of book because of both the difficult circumstances in which Ender and the other children of Battle School are placed, and the dark future world the book depicts, where humanity is at risk and there are dangerous enemies never before faced. In such books, as in Ender’s Game, teens’ decisions have life-and-death consequences, and there are no adults to protect them. Teens learn what they need to learn about survival in the adult world. They make hard choices and sometimes lose friends for the sake of principles. They give up childhood willingly because they want the power that they can only get with adulthood. It’s no wonder that Ender’s Game is still being read. Even as YA explodes, teens are still treated as Ender was when he had done what adults needed him to do and they didn’t know what to do with him: when he became a teen, the uncategorizable, the unnecessary, the not-yet and still-to-be.
Mette Ivie Harrison is the author of Mira, Mirror, the Princess and the Hound series, Tris and Izzie, and the forthcoming The Rose Throne (May 2013). She is a competitive triathlete and has a PhD in Germanic Languages and Literatures from Princeton University (1995). She has five children and lives in Layton, Utah. Her website is www.metteivieharrison.com.
Q. What experiences did you draw from to create Ender and Bean? Your representation of the “gifted child” demographic is spot-on. My heart is closer to those two characters than Holden Caulfield, which is quite odd for an adolescent fighting the clutches of cynicism and role confusion.
A. Let me deal first with the matter of adolescence and Holden Caulfield:
When I finally got around to reading Catcher in the Rye I was already in my forties. I found holden caulfield to be a believable “bright adolescent”—selfcentered, shallow, arrogant, and nowhere near as bright as he thinks he is.
But Salinger chose Holden Caulfield because he wanted to write about just such a shallow, arrogant character; I chose Ender and Bean for very different reasons, and so they were very different children. For one thing, they really were smarter than everyone around them, rather than merely thinking they were.
More important was the fact that Ender Wiggin was not an adolescent in Ender’s Game. He was still a child, and was held by Battle School in a prolonged childhood, where his entire reality was created by the adults around him. Where he was able to break out of that reality was only in ways that were useful to the purposes of the adults; his adolescence did not come until after the war.
In fact, his adolescence consisted of all his years as an iconoclastic speaker for the dead, a role that is as isolated and skeptical as that of any adolescent, but one that was ultimately generous in a way that is utterly beyond a Holden Caulfield. That is, Ender Wiggin remained true to his inner magnanimity even during his time of self-invention and questioning. Speaker for the Dead takes up his story at the end of his adolescence, when he is ready to commit to membership in a community and to take a permanent adult role.
Thus the story of Ender Wiggin completely skips over the very phase of life that Catcher in the Rye is devoted to.
Bean, however, is forced into a premature adolescence by the struggle for survival in the hideous version of Rotterdam I invented for Ender’s Shadow.
He is cynical; he questions everything, trusts no one, and thinks only of himself. This makes him very much more like Holden Caulfield—only, again, much smarter, and with far more important things at stake than are ever involved in the shallow life of Holden Caulfield.
It takes Bean a while to see past his own survival issues and recognize his responsibility to the human race as a whole—a species to which he does not feel himself to belong. But that very feeling of not-belonging is adolescence, and his decision to act for the sake of humanity is also a decision to become an adult. It is in that adult role that he functions thereafter, even to the point of embracing marriage and childrearing as the primary objective of the rest of his life. It was a commitment he thought would be impossible to him; yet he made that commitment, as most adolescents do, when they finally decide to grow up.
As to Ender and Bean serving as an accurate depiction of gifted children: I’m on very firm ground here. Though I was no world-changing genius as a child, I was very bright, with all the social burdens that imposes. I was fortunate to be in the California school system back when it was committed to ability-grouping and bringing all students to achieve their maximum potential, rather than miseducating everyone in the name of political correctness, as the California schools are committed to doing today.
The result was that I met other bright kids, and saw the problems and the benefits of unusually high intelligence. I knew how bright kids talk to each other, and how they learn to camouflage themselves in order to get along. I am amused by adults who say, “I’ve worked with gifted kids, and they don’t talk like the kids in Ender’s Game.” To them my answer is, “They don’t talk like that to you.”
The fact is that I modeled ender’s verbal ability on my son Geoffrey, who was five years old at the time I wrote about Ender as a six-year-old. Anyone who knew Geoffrey at that age has no problem believing the dialogue of the children in Battle School.
It is also worth remembering that military command is impossible without the ability to formulate plans and present them clearly and persuasively to superiors and subordinates. So part of what was tested for in admitting children to Battle School was verbal effectiveness.
Here is the great secret, however: All children are able to identify with the Battle School kids, regardless of their level of academic talent, because all children feel themselves to be autonomous individuals, with clear motives and moral reasoning. They are “childish” only in their inexperience and ignorance; if you give them experience and education, their brains are capable of all the thought that adults are capable of. And, prior to the onslaught of adolescent hormones, they are sometimes capable of making decisions not less but more rationally than adults.
So my creation of all these bright children comes from my memory of being one and my close observation of children since then, whether labeled as geniuses or not. Brilliant children are not so different from non-brilliant ones as outsiders often suppose. The skills we label as “intelligence” are not dissimilar to the skills we label as “athletic” or “musical” or “social.” Children are good at different things, but at core they are people, and a writer who thinks otherwise will write them very badly.
—OSC
Q. A trivial question, but it’s always bothered me: From the short story to the novel, why did you change Ender’s surname from Wiggins to Wiggin?
A. Oh, it’s worse than you think. I changed from Wiggins to Wiggin within the short story. So when I came to write the novel, I basically flipped a coin and chose Wiggin.
I have a terrible memory for names. I have to keep a table of all the names in an ongoing book, and then I consult it frequently, because otherwise I’ll misremember a character’s name and change back and forth throughout. Even with such a table, the character Olivenko in Pathfinder spent much of the book as Ovilenko, and I no longer remember which was the original choice.
—OSC
ENDER ON LEADERSHIP
COLONEL TOM RUBY (USAF, RETIRED)
I was a relative latecomer to Ender’s Game. It’s not that I didn’t know about the book. It’s not even that I hadn’t had it recommended to me. Only a bunch of times by people I trusted. I remember visiting my old Air Force Academy mentor, Colonel Jim Heald, and his family in Florida when I was attending Squadron Officer School in Alabama in 1993. Jim’s oldest son, Mike, was telling me that I really needed to read this book. I said, “Okay,” and never did. I think I finally went to Ender’s Game when I was mature enough to read the books that people I trusted recommended to me, regardless of genre or what phase of life I was in. And bully for me. All I’d done by delaying was deny myself eight years of good thinking. But it was more than good thinking I denied myself. Had I read the book earlier in my career, I could have benefitted from Ender’s experiences by applying them to my own as a rising Air Force officer, one who endured and battled through much of the head-scratchingly unbelievable bureaucratic mess that nattered Ender.
When I finally did read Ender’s Game, I was a major in the Air Force with a line number to lieutenant colonel, waiting for the day of my promotion to roll around. I was also a doctoral student at the University of Kentucky, studying political science and focusing on morality in warfare. Living in the university environment rather than on or near a base, it was most interesting for me to see how similar some of the sociological issues of the university were to those of the Air Force.
I was also interested in how un-bridgeable a chasm it was. The two societies (one academic and the other martial), despite their tremendous natural commonalities, didn’t know anything about each other, and were too leery of each other to want to find common ground. But inside each was an organizational model that you could have stepped right into without knowing anything other than what you learned from Ender’s Game. Although they ought to be natural allies, the Academy and the military often fight each other as if they were mortal enemies. But within each world there are also parallel battles—battles for ideological supremacy and battles for leadership over those they ostensibly lead. When I read Ender’s Game I was stunned at how precisely the book painted both worlds I was in at the time. I was stunned as well at what I had been missing all those years in not reading the book. And after earning my degree, I soon learned firsthand even more about those ideological battles, not in the book, but through it.
By the time I was senior enough to influence an organization, I was a senior faculty member at the Air Force’s Air Command and Staff College, a premier graduate school where the top tier of Air Force majors attend a yearlong resident program of graduate study in international relations, history, and strategic studies. While there, I made reading Ender’s Game a mandatory part of the curriculum. I then experienced some of the same issues, such as resistance to longstanding paradigms, that Ender slogged through during his service.
Many of my colleagues, civilian and military, historian and political scientist, questioned my inclusion of Ender’s Game in the curriculum at the Staff College. What can we learn, some vociferously and indignantly asked, from a science fiction book about something that will never happen? Some had never been challenged to defend their core beliefs about how we know what we know. Others hadn’t yet learned to trust their colleagues’ recommendations about something as important as their time. Most didn’t understand that the only place in which they could explore the sociology of a situation that has not yet happened is in fiction. And they certainly didn’t know that science fiction is not about robots and alien invasions and long space journeys. Those things are only vehicles for exploring social situations and human nature, for thought games in which they could ask, How would people interact if this happened? or, Would the societal structure stand up to this stress?
I think the lessons military leaders can learn from Ender’s Game are numerous and simple. And that nearly guarantees that most won’t bother trying. It is ironic that Ender is perhaps best known by a segment of society that will never serve in uniform: those sci-fi fans who understand that t
he genre is about sociology and thinking about what might happen. (That same hypothetical elegance is what has made Ender’s Game so appealing to Hollywood. But could any screenwriter truly present Ender as he is without neutering him into something a producer thinks that a kid ought to be? If ignoring Ender is bad, then rendering him hapless, lucky, or a puppet is a crime against his [fictional] being.)
So for both military leaders that seek to better themselves and for civilians unsure of how realistic the story is, let us consider some military leadership truths of Ender’s Game. Ender was no dupe. He didn’t just ride a wave of subordinate success. He was not the accidental hero. Ender was for real. Just like so many military leaders throughout history and living today are for real. We’ll consider Ender’s leadership strengths and then explore the battle he was forced to fight against his own leadership while preparing to fight the formics.
Ender learned very early on that skill and excellence are at once both one’s means to promotion and a threat to peers and immediate superiors. So it is in the military today and so it has been in the military throughout history. One must perform well in order to be recognized. But such performance also marks a stud performer for retribution. Ender is the youngest kid ever in Battle School (at least until Bean comes along). When placed in his first army, he does exactly what his idiot boss tells him to do, and when it backfires on the idiot boss, the boss takes his anger out on Ender instead of either praising the kid for following directions or keeping his mouth shut and pondering the lesson from the Battle Room. The toon leaders Ender encounters when he first arrives at Battle School were all pretty much equally mediocre to average, and that’s fine with them. It’s more important not to rock the boat and be one of the guys than to try to excel and get ahead of one’s peers.
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