Ender Wiggins saved the world at eleven years old. Where is someone supposed to go from there? Well, there’s a bit more to the story than that. This brilliant science fiction story, written in 1984 by Orson Scott Card, takes place in the not-so-distant future, when humanity has already had two major wars with an alien invader named “The Buggers.”

The Buggers are ruthless hive-thriving insect-like creatures which seek to dominate the earth and destroy humanity. For years, the governments and military of earth have been searching for the next Alexander the Great to lead the Earth forces into battle to destroy The Buggers once and for all.

Enter Ender Wiggins, a third child in a family earmarked by the leaders of Earth as worth watching. His older brother Peter is a brilliant lunatic who is so power-hungry at eleven that he got busted out of the academy and knocked from the top of the list as a potential candidate. Likewise, Ender’s older sister, Valentine, didn’t have the emotional fortitude to lead men in battle to their deaths.

For that matter, neither does Ender Wiggins but that doesn’t stop the army from training him to be the most merciless and meticulous military leader in the history of the human species (all this in five short years).

Ender trains on a virtual reality-like video game system that he believes is only training. He goes through the hard-knocks of prep school, then leadership school, only to triumph by using non-linear tactics in his final test which turns out to be him really leading troops in battle and finally slaughtering every last Bugger alive, paving the way for humanity to conquer the Bugger’s home world.

Ender had no idea that he was going to be a tool used to eradicate an entire species of life, enemy or not and here lies the crux of the problem—how can you get a leader who is so magnanimous and benevolent that soldiers will follow them into battle even to their own demise, and yet still have that leader be willing and able to mercilessly destroy the enemy by using superior tactics and detaching themselves completely from the emotional reality of murdering another living being?

The answer, of course, is to make them think it’s only make-believe, a game, a training module. Make them think that winning at all costs is all important because there are ultimately no risks of loss involved. This actually underlies a point that JD spoke about the other day in his blog post where he talks about going into war half-assed—you can’t do it and expect to secure victory.

Dr. Mead said it best in Gone with the Wind when he snapped Aunty Pitty Pat for suggesting the impropriety of Scarlett staying in Atlanta (which was burning to the ground in Sherman’s invasion) without an escort. He said, “Good heavens, woman—this is war not a garden party.”

And this is one of those weird points where fiction begins dialogue in reality because the current war we are engaged in is being billed as a war of compassion. We are fighting to secure the rights and liberties of other human beings (at least that’s what we’re being told and it feels right) but this is a totally different kind of war than that which is on the level of: raise their villages, burn their crops, castrate and decimate their men, murder their women and children, and wash your weapons in the sea. That is Old Testament warfare which stand in stark contrast to this idealistic gobbeldy-gook that is used to sell warfare to the taxpayers nowadays.

But isn’t it the point of war to kill the other side? To murder them until they can’t hurt you any more? How can you do that without losing all the humanity which you are hoping to instill in others? If we were blind to the act, would that save us from the repercussions of the act?

Perhaps we should be building war robots that are manned by human automatons controlling them like I shoot the shit out people in Call of Duty 2 on Xbox Live.

In the past, the first rule of warfare was to turn the other side into monsters and rally public support for the eradication of monsters. But what happens when the preternatural understanding that we are each human beings begins to supersede any propagadic attempts to shortcut rational thought? The answer is that the illusion must trump reality in order for the enemy to be defeated and prevent the loss of that which we must preserve above all else, even our lives—our humanity.

Ender’s Game explores this conundrum in fascinating arc, rich with military tactics and conflicts so human and simple that they could come from the mouth of a child.

I highly recommend this book to anyone (especially JD) and I want to thank Fantastic Bastard for turning me onto it.

Also, Card is currently working on a film script that he expects will result in a movie by 2008. This is a series of books, which I look forward to reading after I reread this book. Here is the order of the books:

  1. Ender’s Game

  2. Speaker for the Dead
  3. Xenocide
  4. Children of the Mind
  5. Ender’s Shadow
  6. Shadow of the Hegemon
  7. Shadow Puppets
  8. Shadow of the Giant

Links:
Orson Scott Card
Ender’s Game
JD’s Post

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