Ender's Game
by Orson Scott Card
Summary
Andrew Wiggin, called Ender, is six years old when the military takes him. Two alien invasions have nearly ended humanity, and the fleet believes the next commander must be trained from childhood, so gifted children are sent to Battle School in orbit and drilled in a zero gravity war game against each other.
Ender is the best of them, and the adults running the school know it, so they systematically isolate him. Every time he makes a friend they move him. Every time he masters a rule they change it, giving his army impossible schedules and outnumbered fights, because a commander who has never faced unfairness is useless. What they are doing to him is deliberate and they discuss it coldly in the interludes between chapters.
He also kills two other children, in fights he did not start, and is not told either time.
His sister Valentine and his brother Peter, left on Earth, conduct a parallel campaign of political manipulation through anonymous essays on the networks, which reads oddly now as a 1985 prediction of what pseudonymous posting would do to public debate.
The ending is one of the most effective in the genre and should not be spoiled.
The battle room sequences are the reason the book is loved: a cube in free fall, forty children with practice weapons, and a commander who works out that there is no up, that the enemy gate is down, and that formations invented on the ground are worthless.
Around three hundred pages, fast, cold and brutally readable, with very short chapters and prose stripped to nothing.
It is read by adults and by children, and it is far more disturbing than its reputation suggests: the sympathy runs entirely toward a boy who is being deliberately broken, and the adults doing it believe they are right and may be.
Best for readers who want a book about the uses adults find for gifted children, and one of the few genre novels almost everyone has an opinion about.
Historical Context & Significance
Ender's Game won the 1986 Hugo Award for Best Novel and the Nebula Award, and its sequel Speaker for the Dead won both again the following year, making Orson Scott Card the only writer to take that pair in consecutive years.
It grew out of a 1977 short story of the same name, expanded specifically to give Card a protagonist for the novel he actually wanted to write, which became Speaker for the Dead.
The book was for years on the United States Marine Corps professional reading list, valued for its treatment of leadership and command, an endorsement that sits strangely with a novel about the abuse of children.
Card's public campaigning against same sex marriage has made him a contested figure, and the 2013 film adaptation drew organised boycotts on those grounds.