The Authorized Ender Companion

by Black, Jake

  I don’t know exactly when, but my little brother brought home Ender’s Game because his history teacher recommended it. Since I was and still am an avid reader, I didn’t mind picking it up, because if I knew it was a good book, I would have it finished by tomorrow anyway. I was wrong—I finished it the night I picked it up. So profoundly had the tale of Ender gripped me, that I needed the companionship the book gave me. No one else could give it to me until then.

  What Ender’s Game has given me is a moral compass so to speak. I don’t use the logic in it to make my decisions, but I do use the technique of thinking things out thoroughly and definitely, as Ender did, to make my decisions. I’ve learned that when you eventually are self-aware enough to develop your own beliefs, it’s okay that they be challenged or even dismissed if they have no moral value. I learned that responsibility is not just saying you’ll do something, but that you’ll do something and be the best at it that you can possibly be.

  DJ Bookout, Special Ed paraprofessional

  Newton, Kansas

  I was twelve when I read Ender’s Game and stayed home sick to finish the book in one day. I loved the characters, and was fascinated by the games in the book. I knew very little programming at the time, but decided I wanted to make a video-game version of the Battle Room. I wrote to the author requesting further details, and treasured the reply greatly. At the time, almost all games were two-dimensional, but I wanted a fully three-dimensional simulation of the Battle Room. I taught myself trigonometry, projecting coordinate systems, sprite graphics, collision detection, all so I could relive that game.

  I ended up getting my master’s degree in computer graphics, and today work for the Air Force, building a touch-table interfaced battlefield visualization system. Over the years my tastes have changed a little, and I am not so interested in playing the Battle Room as I once was. But I’m thinking about starting on something like the Fantasy Game . . .

  Douglas Summers-Stay, computer research scientist

  Bellbrook, Ohio

  I first read Ender’s Game when I was in third grade, and immediately felt an extraordinary bond with Ender’s character. Like Ender, I was considered the smartest and most talented kid in the community and, also like Ender, I was under constant and considerable pressure from my teachers to achieve increasingly difficult goals, to the point of impossibility. Ender’s dual yet contradictory qualities of ruthless determination and empathetic gentleness are qualities that I always strove to balance in my own day-to-day life.

  This has served me well later in life, both as a musician and a pilot. I recently finished writing an opera based around Ender Wiggin, chronicling his life from the time his monitor is removed to his final destruction of the Buggers. Now, an opera is a huge undertaking, even for a full-time professional composer. For me it was even more daunting, and yet once the seed of the idea sprouted in my imagination there was no turning back. Ender had inspired me to such great heights, and I needed to pay him back.

  I had already written a few pieces either based on or dedicated to Ender, but this was a different animal altogether. I needed to do Ender proud, to give his story the power and energy that it so richly deserves. I spent more than a year studying every musical technique available to me and picking and choosing what felt right for Ender. Now I have over two hours of no-holds-barred emotional music ranging from Ender’s cautiously introspective reflection on his love for Valentine to the bombastic frenetic fury of the Battle School to Bean’s achingly poignant lament for the soldiers in the farflung human fleet. Only now, finally, two decades after I first read about Ender, can I finally say that I have created something worthy of the impact that he has had on my life.

  Every moment of the music touches on the connection that Ender and I share, that bond that develops between a person and their most revered hero, even if he is an imaginary hero. Ender has shaped all aspects of my life, not so much by instilling certain qualities in me but by showing me that the qualities I possess are worth having. He has helped me pursue and achieve my life’s ambition to fly for the Navy and he has helped me live as any decent person should: with grace, compassion, and honesty. More important than anything else, though, he has provided me a muse.

  Music is my language, and Ender is my reason for speaking.

  Joe Stephens, Navy pilot and composer

  Pensacola, Florida

  I gained a love of science fiction very early, thanks to my stepfather. Although I only saw him and my mother once or twice a year, it was a great enough impact that I began to seek out new works to satisfy my growing need for good stories.

  When I visited one summer, he handed me a copy of Ender’s Game with a smile on his face. I had it read (twice-over) in a matter of days. When I finally had my fill, he and I sat in the living room for hours discussing all the intricacies of the young protagonist and his journey. The depth of that discussion, and the love of Ender and his companions, have propelled me into my adult life with a sense of wonder regarding the unknown. Do I walk through with the obvious paths at hand, or do I find an unusual, unexpected approach? And though my stepfather is long since gone, Ender’s Game will always represent in my heart a bond of understanding between parent and child, two followers of such an enduring story.

  Katherine Stafford, college student

  Hot Springs, Arkansas

  Mom read sci-fi. We were merely her children, and we didn’t really care about sci-fi. That was before we encountered Ender’s Game, published in the August 1977 issue of Analog. I remember reading it, rapt, in my attic bedroom by the light of oil candles.

  I really cared about Ender Wiggin, more than I cared about Luke Skywalker, to whom I was also introduced that summer of ’77. By the time Ender saved the world, he was about my age (I was a rising high school freshman). Ender was me like no individual I’d ever read in fiction. He was smart, he was an outcast, he was being manipulated by a system he didn’t understand. I gloried when he successfully carried the fate of the world on his shoulders.

  I’m old now. But I can look back and see that I was changed by that story. I began to believe that my life could matter. I began to understand the terrible sacrifices that sometimes accompany meaningful success. I began to look at my siblings as people for whom I wanted to feel the loyalty Ender felt for Valentine, rather than merely the fear or disgust Ender felt for Peter.

  I can’t go back and live a life where I didn’t read Ender’s Game to objectively measure the difference the story made in my life. But I do know the example of Ender Wiggin—boy, soldier, priest, man—made me a better person.

  I count myself blessed that Mom read sci-fi.

  Meg Stout, program manager

  Annandale, Virginia

  Ender’s Game came home with me from the public library because it had cool spaceships on the cover and because the back promised a young boy rising up to lead an army of the future. My kind of material. I read it while on a family vacation to the North Carolina coast. It was the summer that spanned the gap between the watercolor cocoon of elementary school and the social minefield of middle school. I was eleven.

  As we started out on our way to the ocean, I tackled the first page. I didn’t like it. There was no way to tell who was talking! When I pressed on I was startled by the brutality of the first chapter. This kid was the hero? My sympathy for Ender grew over the passing miles with the introduction of his siblings. I never forgave Peter Wiggin for that game of buggers and astronauts, even if Ender did. And then there was Valentine. In the beginning, I loved Ender because Valentine loved Ender.

  My memories of that beach trip are inseparable from my memories of the book. When I was swallowed by an ocean wave, I was Dink Meeker spinning in zero gravity. While floating, I would pull my legs up to my chest, fire between my knees and think, “The enemy’s gate is down.” I read every moment I was not engaged in a family activity. When I would finally turn off the light to sleep, the images played on inside my head. I tried to double numbers like Ender, bu
t I never made it very far.

  I finished the book on the way back home. When Graff and Ender returned to space, I read the name of a place that sounded familiar and asked my dad, “Where’s the Pamlico Sound?”

  “It’s right outside the window,” he replied. I looked out, imagining towers of concrete and steel. When Ender learned that he had not been playing a game, I put down the book, bent forward, and placed my hands on the side of my head while taking deep breaths. My family thought I was carsick. And when I finished the book, just a few miles from home, I cried. My dad asked me if it had a sad ending, but that wasn’t it at all. The ending was pure hope. It was the simple fact that the book was over. My journey with these characters, these friends, was over. Ender had drifted off into the universe like the smoke from the birthday fire.

  Now I teach eleven-year-olds, some already weary of the lives they lead, and I hope they find a book that teaches them what Ender’s Game taught me: People do not like it when you stand out, but sometimes that is what it takes to be great. No matter how many battles you face, you can survive. Childhood is a treasure, to be valued and protected at any cost.

  And, of course, the enemy’s gate is down.

  William Tobey Mitchell, teacher

  Dobson, North Carolina

  I have always been an intelligent child, maybe a genius, maybe not, the definition of genius is far too variable to apply to yourself, but I was definitely smarter than a lot of my classmates, and they knew it. And they hated me for it. It may sound like arrogance to say such things, but it was simple fact. I tried not flaunt it, but I knew answers, and wasn’t patient enough for the teacher to give up asking and tell us. I wanted to learn and I wanted to keep learning. This, of course, led to abuse.

  All throughout middle school and into high school they teased me and taunted me, and it hurt me, and depressed me, and probably worst of all made me angry. When I lost control it just looked weak, because I was small and didn’t know much fighting.

  Then I picked up Ender’s Game on a recommendation from my cousin. I started reading it on the way to a family vacation in Key West, and that first day I stayed in my hotel room until I had finished it.

  I just kept going and couldn’t stop. I was so easily able to immerse myself into Ender’s character, to understand his point of view. It made sense to me, it was like Ender was me only, of course, better. I was stunned at the accuracy and depth of the portrayal of the mind-set of a child like Ender, and I was stunned because all of a sudden it wasn’t a character in a book, it was me.

  After reading the book, I was able to draw strength from Ender’s ability to endure, and I was able to draw confidence from the strength. When one carries themselves with confidence, people start treating you differently. Without any hyperbole, I can say my life changed for the better the moment I read that book—to the point that whenever I go to a new, strange place I bring it with me, and whenever I feel weak I read it. It gives me the courage to smile and do what I have to do. I am going to college soon, and when I arrive, the first thing I will do is open Ender’s Game and read it again.

  Nicholas Gilbert, student

  Griswold, Connecticut

  When Ender’s Game was introduced as required classroom reading in high school English, I initially regarded it as I did most such literature: with a resigned annoyance at yet another in a long line of books that teachers gush about and that I can look forward to wasting hours of my life trying to figure out what the author “meant” or “felt” when they wrote the book in the first place.

  I soon found that Ender’s Game, and many of the books that followed it, were different altogether. As an adolescent who had been quickly advanced through earlier grades and was present in a class of peers several years my senior, I found a literary mirror that offered an examination of many of the same feelings and challenges that I was going through. The difficulty of bully magnetism to a younger kid (in my case, my rotund physique did not exactly help). The feeling of isolation; each success driving a further social wedge between myself and my peers. The congruency of finding comfort in a group of similarly ostracized freethinkers.

  While I certainly could not claim any real experience of mortal danger or having somehow saved the fate of humanity by my own story’s end, I can definitely say that Ender’s Game provided a comfort in a difficult situation. Here was a story of a fictional youth enduring many of the same sorts of challenges that I had endured. He framed that intellect into executing each task put before him despite his personal struggles and constructed a life of excellence around his gifts, using a backdrop of friends to complement his weaknesses and provide the grounding necessary to succeed.

  In Ender’s Game, I found support for my own journey through adolescence and the message that excellence is not only acceptable but is not a unique condition. Silent observation. Calculation. Hope. A drive to be the best. These are themes that I wish every teenager could have the same opportunity to internalize through literature.

  Wayne Anderson, systems engineer

  Brighton, Colorado

  I used to not be a science fiction fan, or a fan of any fiction for that matter. I read Ender’s Game for the first time last summer after a friend brought it to work. He gave me a summary of the story and I spent the next few hours reading it over his shoulder. Since then I’ve read every book in the Ender series, and passed it on to several friends. Having just finished Children of the Mind, it feels like I’ve lost a close friend since there aren’t any more books to read.

  Ender’s Game has fueled my interest in politics, history, and literature. It has inspired me to go deeper in my education and create a new class at my university. My philosophy professor and I will be launching a Concepts of Rights and Justice class next semester that will deal with the founding of new government laws and ethics. After reading Ender’s Game I began to see a lot of things differently. Ender has a knack for seeing past what people are saying and finding what it is that they really want and need. I’ve tried to implement that into my own life as much as possible and the outcome has been amazing. Ender’s Game is more than mere fiction. It has the ability to teach people new things and inspire them to greatness.

  Garrett Stevenson, college student

  Elk City, Oklahoma

  I have always been into science fiction and was reading a lot of Robert Heinlein in those days, and a buddy of mine asked if I had ever read a book called Ender’s Game, and I hadn’t.

  We were in the library (this was back in high school and since I didn’t have a car like the cool kids, I pretty much hung out in the library with all the other geeks) so my buddy Boaz went and grabbed it off the shelf and put it in my hands. He had never steered me wrong with literature before, but I was skeptical when he told me it was about a bunch of kids in space. But he was/is my friend, so I cracked it open and began to read. Nothing could have prepared me for the journey I underwent.

  I would like to tell you that this book changed my life, but I think that would be overstating things just a little and might sound faintly corny. What I can tell you is that it did change my mind about how much of an impact the written word can have on an individual. Because the ending is so unbelievable, I was completely unprepared for it, and it hit me like the proverbial ton of bricks. I literally read those words in awe.

  That story made me want to be a better writer. They say when you are in the presence of greatness you’re either embarrassed or you’re inspired and I would definitely say this book inspired me and still does to this day. It’s a story that I keep coming back to in my mind and I don’t make the mistake of trying to write a story like Ender’s Game but I want to do to a reader what was done to me—when the truth of that moment opened my eyes to an entire world of possibilities I hadn’t previously considered. This is the kind of story I have passed on to friends and family and one day if I ever have children I will share it with them. I carry Ender and his courage in my heart. And in my heart he will live forever.

  James S.
Wirfs, Jr., Wal-Mart

  Oak Harbor, Washington

  In my freshman year of high school, my English teacher required that we read one book per semester. So of course, as most students would, I waited until that last minute to find one and get the grade. I had never been interested in reading books, as there were girls to swoon and baseballs to be thrown around. My best friend had picked up Ender’s Game randomly from our school library because, he had said, that the cover was cool. Upon reading it, he hurriedly told me that I didn’t have to worry and that he had found the book that I was to read for the class project. Something like, “Yeah dude, it’s a cool book. The main character gets in space battles and stuff—you’ll like it.”

  Needless to say, I had my work cut out for me. I didn’t care what I read, as long as it was relatively easy and at least mildly entertaining. It took me two school nights to read it. My mind was blown—never had I believed that a story told in print could grip my imagination so completely. From that point on, reading became one of my most important activities. Simply put, through Ender’s Game I learned to love stories; through stories, I’ve learned to love life. For me, Ender’s Game was a life changer.

  Jonmark Ragsdale, college student

  Tampa, Florida

  My brother had to read Ender’s Game in high school. He loved it and raved about it. The next year, I had to read it as well and fell in love with it and read Speaker for the Dead, Xenocide, and Children of the Mind and it really opened up my mind and opened me up to a lot more of OSC’s books.

  At this point in my life I was still living as a male . . . I am a postoperative male to female transgender. At the age of twenty I confronted my long hidden secret and exposed my true self to the world, risking everything for the chance at a happier life. After nearly being shot in the face, I decided I loved life, but if I would have died, no one would have known who I was inside. So at the age of twenty, I confronted the skeletons in my closet.