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Ender's Game is one of my favorite SF novels of all time, a story that is both compulsively readable as a military SF coming-of-age story and yet willing to tackle serious themes such as ethics, guilt, genocide, abusive training of child soldiers, authoritarianism, etc.

Now that Ender's Game has received the Hollywood treatment (and the film version unfortunately failed to capture the psychological depth of the book, perhaps unavoidably), I decided to re-read this seminal piece of SF literature by Orson Scott Card, almost 30 years after its initial publication in 1985. I'm pleased to say that the story hasn't aged much at all, although I myself have gone from an shy 6th grader who absorbed the story completely, and closely identified with the alienation felt by the similarly-aged protagonist, to a 40 year-old adult who has a much more nuanced (perhaps somewhat jaded?) view of the world and the concepts of innocence, guilt, cruelty and forgiveness.

Anyway, something that really fascinated me about the story is how reader's reactions are so divided on the ethics of the book. And though I first enjoyed the story purely for the excitement of a propulsive first-person narrative, the questions of morality it raised also piqued my attention even as a 6th grader.

In high school I encountered an essay by Elaine Radford in Fantasy Review called Ender and Hitler: Sympathy for the Superman, which compared the two figures by drawing parallels in their lives, and suggested that Orson Scott Card was attempting to justify the genocide perpetrated by Hitler. Well, that's a pretty outrageous accusation. I found the original article still available on the web, though Elaine Radford seems to have completely distanced herself from the SF community since then:

Ender and Hitler: Sympathy for the Superman



Further web searches turned up an even more in-depth and intriguing essay discussing the morality of Ender's Game by John Kessel:

Creating the Innocent Killer: Ender's Game, Intention, and Morality



However you view the actions and decisions made by Ender Wiggins, and how much you attribute them to his difficult upbringing and manipulation by his military superiors, I think it's fairly ridiculous to think OSC had a secret agenda in this book. In fact, he himself made a very eloquent rebuttal of the initial Radford essay, which unfortunately I cannot locate on the internet at this point (anyone know where to find it?). I still find the character very empathetic and the story cathartic, and whether we should judge guilt and wrong (including murder and genocide) based only on acts or also on intentions is something the book leaves up to the readers.

It's quite amazing the amount of interest and debate this book has generated since first being published in 1985, and that itself is a testament to it's value in the SF canon. I'm glad I revisited it, and plan to also reread Speaker for the Dead next, but skip Xenocide and Children of the Mind (which both seem to be heavy on exposition but weak on plotting and story). I have read quite positive reviews of Ender's Shadow, which covers the events of Ender's Game from Bean's perspective, so I might give that a go afterward.