by Black, Jake
I read that copy over and over until it fell apart. And to make up for my klepto-cism, I made it a mission in life to purchase the book and give it away to as many people as possible. I don’t know how many copies I have purchased, but it is probably around twenty—I know I sent four copies to soldiers in Iraq this past Christmas.
What I couldn’t tell from the cover is this: Ender’s Game is about bigger issues than spaceships and aliens. It is about Truth and Duty and Perseverance. The story is a success because the characters—from Ender to Graff to Valentine—stay true to their own selves, their own moral consciences.
Ender realizes a Truth early on: If you want to stop a ruthless enemy, you have to go for the win. If you try to reason with someone who wants to hurt you, it will just make them hurt you worse. The only way to “defuse” someone with evil intentions is to beat them to the punch. Or to put it another way, when a situation is kill-or-be-killed, always go for the throat.
That was a harsh truth to digest when I was fourteen, but it was important. And now that I have a wife and three kids, I identify even better with the idea. If someone messes with my family, I’ll hurt them so bad their life will never be the same.
Thanks for the life lesson, Ender.
Dustin Dopps, marketing
Portland, Oregon
The most profound concepts provided by the Ender novels are the racial undertones. I have had conversations with fellow readers and was surprised to hear most had never considered the novels from that angle. While reading Xenocide, I began to reflect on the interactions the different races had with each other. Consider the humans assuming murder by the piggies when in fact the intent was to glorify. Think about the Queen’s interaction with Ender and the ignorance that was shown on both sides. These novels offer invaluable lessons and the humans of planet Earth would do well to learn from them.
Roman Pierantozzi, computers
Endicott, New York
Christmas morning 1987 was a normal one with plenty of gifts and surprises. One gift though was very strange. It was a set of paperback books with one called Ender’s Game and the other called Speaker for the Dead. My father had picked these up for me since he knew I was reading books for my freshman high school English class and was tackling books that were probably way over my current reading ability as someone new to the whole idea of reading for fun.
At first I was a little stunned. Dad hadn’t read these books and had no clue if they were any good. He said the guy at the bookstore recommended them and how it was the first time the Hugo and Nebula Awards had gone to sequels. To me as a young teenager, it seemed like a lame gift that required little thought and I quickly set them aside for more exciting gifts.
Eventually it came time to start another book for my class and I began looking around for something to read. I saw the “lame” book on the shelf and thought about it with the still bitter memory of what seemed to me at the time as a “I’ll just get the brat something” gift, but somehow decided to open it up and see what all the hooey was about.
Needless to say, after I started Ender’s Game I wasn’t able to put it down. This was a first in my life since before this I really didn’t like reading. Of course I was a slow reader, but there were a number of sleepless nights where before I knew it, it was early in the morning. I was totally caught unaware of the twist at the end since I knew there was a sequel and didn’t think much that the book might end suddenly. When I gave my report to my class, it was a very exciting and upbeat report.
After that I was a book reader. I continued on in the series and picked up other books with eagerness. Once I saw in Ender’s Game that you could connect with characters and care about them like they were real, it made reading for enjoyment a passion.
I have reread Ender’s Game more times then I can count. I always recommend it to people and challenge them to read the first twenty pages with the bet that they won’t be able to stop after that. No one has yet.
Jay Taylor, computer engineer
Grafton, West Virginia
My name is Lars Doucet and I have a brain disease. I was diagnosed at the age of fifteen with a fairly severe case of Tourette’s Syndrome.
Tourette’s patients suffer from uncontrollable, random bodily movements and vocal outbursts, sometimes violent, sometimes obscene, always embarrassing. Most people consider us to be “freaks” or “spazzers.” The silver lining is that we tend to make up for this strange behavior with above-normal intellectual and creative faculties.
Long, long before I was diagnosed, I’d been showing what we now know to be symptoms of TS. Throughout those dark years I was disciplined by teachers and principals, harassed by my fellow schoolmates, and excluded from almost every social activity.
Ender’s Game has always been my favorite book since I read it in sixth grade. That year I endured not only the worst teasing at the hands of other children, but the unrelenting scorn of one of the worst ultradisciplinarian middle-school math teachers I’ve ever had the displeasure of knowing.
I always related to Ender; I think a lot of kids like me probably did. Even more so, I related to Bean. Being alone in a world where you were a freak to not only your peers, but also the teachers who were supposed to protect you, was a story that spoke to me.
All those years I was in the dark, not realizing that I even had a disease. I just believed everyone when they called me a freak. As far as I knew, I could control my symptoms if I tried hard enough, but I just had bad habits, like biting my fingernails.
The best part though, was that Ender and Bean seemed like real kids to me.
You see—most adults who write stories “for children” do not understand children. When I read Ender’s Game the first thing that came to mind was, “Wow! These kids actually act like me!”
A lot of other people who write those kinds of books—or try to—just treat children like imbeciles or babies. You’d be surprised the level of conversation you can carry on with a ten-year-old!
So, thanks for providing a bright spot in the worst year of my life, and reminding me that sometimes it’s up to the freaks and the spazzers to save the world.
Lars A. Doucet, video game developer
College Station, Texas
Prior to Ender’s Game, I had never read sci-fi/fantasy; just not my genre, I’d thought. I’d heard much good from many people about Ender’s Game, but only after my wife read it, did I—just to see what all the fuss was about. Turns out it is everything I heard it was and more, because for me it was a gateway novel.
Had I not read Ender, I never would have read the scores of other amazing novels in the sci-fi/fantasy world and I certainly would have never attempted writing my own contributions to the genre. My sci-fi/fantasy writing led to workshops and writer’s groups, from which I have dear friends who I never would have known and I suspect will be around for a long time to come.
My life would not be nearly as enriched, nor would I be the reader and writer that I am today were it not for a Third.
Christopher Miller, trainer
North Salt Lake, Utah
I first encountered Ender’s Game as an adult in my thirties. I loved the story and the surprise ending. I knew when I first read it that it would be great for eighth graders. I collaborated with two other English teachers, and in 1993, I convinced them to let me write a unit on this book for all the eighth graders. I knew the book was a success when the students kept reading ahead. The students thought that they were reading just an exciting adventure story, but I knew what was coming. I could sneak in lessons on tolerance and fairness. We had wonderful discussions on, “Does the end justify the means?” This is my thirtieth year of teaching. Every year I teach different books, but the only book that stays on my syllabus from year to year is Ender’s Game. It reaches students at every level economically, academically, and socially.
Many students go on to read Speaker for the Dead and Xenocide. The themes in Ender’s Game make a great lead in to our study of the Holocaust. At
twenty-five students a year for almost sixteen years, hundreds of lives have been touched by Ender’s Game.
Sandra Wilson, teacher
Marietta, Georgia
At the age of eleven, it took me a little over a week to finish the book. This was only because I eagerly absorbed every word. I had read some sci-fi before. My grandmother had a wall full. I had been to “The Red Hills of Mars” and I knew the first rule of robotics, but I had never been to battle school. I had no idea a young boy could save the world . . . and he was a boy just like me.
My ability to relate with Ender and his conflicts got my attention. I have been seeking that feeling every since. Alvin Maker was another character I soon found. As I get older the magical reads seem fewer and farther between, but I still read and my children now go to my wall of books much as I did to my grandmother’s. When I see that spark in their eyes, I can understand it. This is, after all, why we read.
Scott Robert Dantzler, chef/writer
Crawfordville, Florida
When I was in the seventh grade in 2001, my older brother Marko, who was in college at that time, introduced me to Ender’s Game. He had the book since he was in fifth grade. After finishing it, I couldn’t stop myself from reading it for the second time . . . then the third, then the fourth and so on. I must have read it at least ten times.
Now I’m twenty years old and I’m still in love with the story. Each time I read it, there’s always a new personal realization that comes to mind. I realized that humans can be capable of so many things: love, hate, and survival. This book means so much to me because in a way, I saw myself in some of the characters but most especially in Ender. Though I am not a genius like Ender is, I could relate to him because he was a child who had to act strong despite his own personal fears.
In a way, Ender’s story helped me realize that I, too, am capable of triumphing over challenges and it doesn’t matter whether I’m seven or thirty years old. Ender’s Game will forever be a part of who I am.
Rossanna V. Fojas, college junior
Metro Manila, Philippines
I was something like thirteen years old when my mother brought Ender’s Game back from the library. And there, I fell in love. The whole universe was in my room. Of all the books that I had read and loved, laying on my bed, my fingers wrapped around the book’s cover and the shivering pages, none was ever as good as that one. But most of all it was the opening of a huge dream too big for my head: the universe. And the start of a big frustration: WHY don’t I live in those kinds of worlds, me, hmm?
Today I’m twenty years old and I still dream of living adventures like those in the science fiction books.
To live like Ender, with lots of technologies so hallucinating, the conquest of space and the infinity everywhere, everywhere, to travel at light speed, communication by ansible, to go and see in a black hole if the physicists are right, what is going to happen and how to react when facing the unknown.
To visit the infinity of the universe! To never stay anywhere, to be everywhere, to know many lives, to write about new living forms and about the wars that we’ve won, the healed wounds and the scars as trophies, to live for so long thanks to the effects of relativity and to have the possibility of seeing everything, breathless, to cry the departures, the inexorable, to search for the edge. The edge of infinity.
Ender made me discover galaxies that I could touch with my fingertips, astrophysics, dreams out of the atmosphere.
Seeing that I’m just an ordinary girl and that I don’t have the destiny of an astronaut (but without abandoning the hope of an extraordinary and memorable destiny to discover in the weeks to come, or to, one day, be part of an experimental program). I continue to read science fiction and I say to myself that surely, one day, I will write some to live it from the inside as much as possible.
PS : I’m French and I’m very sorry if my English is, hm, not very good. I’ve so many things to say. It’s easier in French.
Emmylou Haffner, student
Bruxelles, France
Sixteen years ago I was a senior in college. It had been a rough year. I had been diagnosed with a rare form of cancer and had dropped out of school so I could live at home. My life changed in unexpected ways. I had always been the link between my two best friends, but while I was gone they forged their own bonds of friendship, and I felt left out. And although it was true that I liked to flirt with almost anyone who would flirt back, it still hurt to find out that while I was gone another friend was spreading rumors about how I liked to steal other girls’ boyfriends. Not only was this untrue, but it was embarrassing, because my friend was beautiful. It would have been humiliating to even imagine stealing a boyfriend from her. Ironically, at about the same time, her roommate started dating one of my best friends, and he never spoke to me again. While I had cancer I also figured out what I wanted to do with my life, and it wasn’t what I was majoring in.
After Christmas, I was plunked back into my college life with nothing more than a huge scar on my leg to show that I had ever been gone. Somehow, everything was different though. I had a huge class load. I was determined to graduate on schedule, so I could start graduate school in the fall. Although I thought of myself as smarter than average, I had never applied myself before. Everything that had seemed important about college seemed vaguely asinine now. I was having unexpected difficulties fitting back in, but these were my friends, and I loved them. Leaving college without healing my friendships would have left a bigger scar on my heart than the one on my leg.
Then someone handed me Ender’s Game. After I read it I started over and read it again and again. Ender’s Game became my manual for life. Ender’s struggle to forge a place for himself in Battle School helped me reshape my college experience. I read it when I was stressed about finishing my master’s thesis, the night before I got married, while I was pregnant, and again after my children were born. I held on to Ender’s Game like a lifeline when my husband and I moved across the country to Maine—my own personal transfer to Command School. I have it on my computer table right now as I struggle to edit my first novel.
I am amazed at the way that Ender has helped to define and shape my life. When I first read Ender’s Game, I was not much like Ender. I was too afraid to find my own limits. Ender was the missing balance in my life. I’m a natural born follower, but Ender has taught me not to fear my own uniqueness, because there is no excellence in merely doing what everyone else is doing.
Melanie Crouse, mother/author
South China, Maine
My dad was a very intelligent and quiet man. He provided a wonderful life and education for three, sometimes rowdy, girls. He loved the three of us in his own quiet way, but we never really had too much in common with him.
In high school, I was going through his two eight-feet-by-six-feet bookshelves each stacked three deep of sci-fi and fantasy books, when I asked him, “Would I like any of these books?” With a smile on his face he handed me Ender’s Game. It was like he was waiting for at least one of his children to love what he loved. When I finished, he asked what I thought about the story. That was the first time he ever asked what I thought about anything. We talked about the story and he recommended other books I could read.
We had finally found a common bond. It showed me we could talk about everything, not just books. The bond continued until the day he died. My mom gave me those books after he passed, and I treasure them. They are my link to the world my dad loved.
Paige Wurtsbaugh, data auditor
Marion, Ohio
In graduate school, Eduardo, a friend from Argentina, gave me Ender’s Game as a gift with the inscription: “When I first read this book and Ender’s moral decisions, I thought about you.” Eduardo and I had had a number of important conversations about ethics and culture, so I valued his recommendation and eagerly approached the book, though I had read nothing written by this author before. When I started reading, I was hooked and found myself trying to squeeze in reading the novel whil
e at work at my campus job in the library.
Since then I have read a host of other works by Card, attended his writing workshop in Virginia, and used his books (Ender’s Game, Speaker for the Dead, Pastwatch, and Red Prophet) in the classroom. I am in the process of writing a book that relates his work to that of C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, Gene Wolfe, and the TV show Lost. I hope that one day Eduardo will be able to read this so that I can again thank him for his gift.
Brett Patterson, professor of Theology and Ethics
Anderson, South Carolina
In December of 2005, I was sitting around my brother-in-law’s house waiting to enjoy Christmas dinner when I noticed this book sitting by the chair. I asked about it and discovered that it belonged to my teenaged nephew. He hadn’t read much of it but had picked it up at a bookstore a few weeks earlier.
I remember sitting there reading the first page, caught up in the chapter title “Third,” wondering at the abuse this little kid in the book was taking. I had never heard of Card, much less Ender. I finished the book in twenty-four hours (excluding Christmas dinner).
I’ve often reminded my nephew of this story because of the impact it had on me. I must have read a dozen different Card books since then. However, my nephew never finished Ender’s Game! I did give him War of Gifts for Christmas.
Cliff Thompson, University Theater professor
Henderson, Tennessee
At the time I read Ender’s Game, my life was the flip side of normal. Taking care of grandparents in my stepparents’ home, waking my brothers up for school because Dad was at work, and trying to develop some semblance of a relationship had taken over my sanity and was giving me little, if any, normal hold on my life. At best, I was a disillusioned teen trying to make sense of a mad world. My mother was an alcoholic and I tried to make the best of it by being the “good boy.” At best, I identified myself as a young adult, because who else my age would be dealing with this stuff? What I had done then, was to begin forming an identity of myself, but it had to be secret, something that gave me strength.