1 Ender's Game (2 page)

Maybe it was because of the children in the car on the way up that I decided that the trainees in the Battle Room were so young.  Maybe it was because I, barely an adolescent myself, understood only childhood well enough to write about it.  Or maybe it was because of something that impressed me in Catton's Army of the Potomac: that the soldiers were all so young and innocent. That they shot and bayoneted the enemy, and then slipped across the neutral ground between armies to trade tobacco, jokes, liquor, and food.  Even though it was a deadly game, and the suffering and fear were terrible and real, it was still a game played by children, not all that different from the wargames my brothers and I had played, firing water-filled squirt bottles at each other.

“Ender's Game” was written and sold.  I knew it was a strong story because I cared about it and believed in it.  I had no idea that it would have the effect it had on the science fiction audience.  While most people ignored it, of course, and continue to live full and happy lives without reading it or anything else by me, there was still a surprisingly large group who responded to the story with some fervency.

Ignored on the Nebula ballot.  “Ender's Game” got onto the Hugo ballot and came in second.  More to the point, I, was awarded the John W. Campbell Award for best new writer.  Without doubt, “Ender's Game” wasn't just my first sale--it was the launching pad of my career.

The same story did it again in 1985, when I rewrote it at novel length--the book, now slightly revised, that you are holding in your hands.  At that point I thought of Ender's
Game, the novel, existing only to set up the much more powerful (I thought) story of Speaker for the Dead.  But when I finished the novel, I knew that the story had new strength. I had learned a great deal, about life and about writing, in the decade since I wrote the novelet, and it came together for the first time in this book.  Again the audience was kind to me: the Nebula and Hugo awards, foreign translations, and strong, steady sales that, for the first time in my career, actually earned out my advance and allowed me to receive royalties.

But it wasn't just a matter of having a quiet little cult novel that brought in a steady income. There was something more to the way that people responded to Ender's Game.

For one thing, the people that hated it really hated it.  The attacks on the novel--and on me—were astonishing. Some of it I expected--I have a master’s degree in literature, and in writing Ender's Game I deliberately avoided all the little literary games and gimmicks that make “fine” writing so impenetrable to the general audience.  All the layers of meaning are there to be decoded, if you like to play the game of literary criticism--but if you don't care to play that game, that's fine with me. I designed Ender's Game to be as clear and accessible as any story of mine could possibly be.  My goal was that the reader wouldn't have to be trained in literature or even in science fiction to receive the tale in its simplest, purest form.  And, since a great many writers and critics have based their entire careers on the premise that anything that the general public can understand without mediation is worthless drivel, it is not surprising that they found my little novel to be despicable.  If everybody came to agree that stories should be told this clearly, the professors of literature would be out of a job, and the writers of obscure, encoded fiction would be, not honored, but pitied for their impenetrability.

For some people, however, the loathing for Ender's Game transcended mere artistic argument.  I recall a letter to the editor of Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, in which a woman who worked as a guidance counselor for gifted children re ported that she had only picked up Ender's Game to read it because her son had kept telling her it was a wonderful book.  She read it and loathed it.  Of course, I wondered what kind of guidance counselor would hold her son's tastes up to public ridicule, but the criticism that left me most flabbergasted was her assertion that my depiction of gifted children was hopelessly unrealistic.  They just don't talk like that, she said.  The don't think like that.

And it wasn't just her.  There have been others with that criticism.  Thus I began to realize that, as it is, Ender's Game disturbs some people because it challenges their assumptions about reality.  In fact, the novel's very clarity may make it more challenging, simply because the story's vision of the world is so relentlessly plain.  It was important to her, and to others, to believe that children don't actually think or speak the way the children in Ender's Game think and speak.

Yet I knew--I knew--that this was one of the truest things about Ender's Game.  In fact, I realized in retrospect that this may indeed be part of the reason why it was so important to me, there on the lawn in front of the Salt Palace, to write a story in which gifted children are trained to fight in adult wars.  Because never in my entire childhood did I feel like a child. I felt like a person all along--the same person that I am today.  I never felt that I spoke childishly. I never felt that my emotions and desires were somehow less real than adult emotions and desires.  And in writing Ender's
Game, I forced the audience to experience the lives of these children from that perspective--the perspective in which their feelings and decisions are just as real and important as any adult's.

The nasty side of myself wanted to answer that guidance counselor by saying, The only reason you don't think gifted children talk this way is because they know better than to talk this way in front of you. But the truer answer is that Ender's Game asserts the personhood of children, and those who are used to thinking of children in another way--especially those whose whole career is based on that--are going to find Ender's Game a very unpleasant place to live.

Children are a perpetual, self-renewing underclass, helpless to escape from the decisions of adults until they become adults themselves. And Ender's Game,  seen in that context, might even be a sort of revolutionary tract.

Because the book does ring true with the children who read it.  The highest praise I ever received for a book of mine was when the school librarian at Farrer Junior High in Provo, Utah, told me, “You know, Ender's Game is our most-lost book.”

And then there are the letters.  This one, for instance, which I received in March of 1991:

Dear Mr. Card,

I am writing to you on behalf of myself and my twelve friends and fellow students who joined me at a two-week residential program for gifted and talented students at Purdue University this summer.  We attended the class, “Philosophy and Science Fiction,” instructed by Peter Robinson, and we range in age from thirteen through fifteen.

We are all in about the same position; we are very intellectually oriented and have found few people at home who share this trait.  Hence. most of us are lonely, and have been since kindergarten.  When teachers continually compliment you, your chances of “fitting in” are about nil.

All our lives we've unconsciously been living by the philosophy “The only way to gain respect is doing so well you can't be ignored.” And, for me and Mike, at least.  “beating the system” at school is how we've chosen to do this.  Both Mike and I plan to be in calculus our second year of high school, schedules permitting. ( Both of us are interested in science/math related careers.) Not to get me wrong; we're all bright and at the top of our class.  However, in choosing these paths, most of us have wound up satisfied in ourselves, but very lonely.

This is why Ender's Game and Speaker for the
Dead really hit home for us.  These books were our “texts” for the class.  We would read one hundred to two hundred pages per night and then discuss them (and other short stories and essays) during the day.  At Purdue, it wasn't a “classroom” discussion, however. It was a group of friends talking about how their feelings and philosophies corresponded to .or differed from the books'.

You couldn't imagine the impact your books had on us; we are the Enders of today.  Almost everything written in Ender's Game and Speaker applied to each one of us on a very, very personal level.  No, the situation isn't as drastic today, but all the feelings are there.  Both your books, along with the excellent work of Peter Robinson, unified us into a tight web of people.

Ingrid's letter goes on, talking of the Phoenix Rising, the magazine that these students publish together in order to maintain their sense of community. (In response I have given them this introduction to publish in their magazine before its appearance in book form.)

Of course, I'm always glad when people like a story of mine; but something much more important is gong on here.  These readers found that Ender's Game was not merely a 'mythic" story, dealing with general truths, but something much more personal.  To them, Ender's Game was an epic tale, a story that expressed who they are as a community, a story that distinguished them from the other people around them.  They didn't love Ender, or pity Ender (a frequent adult response); they were Ender, all of them.  Ender's experience was not foreign or strange to them; in their minds, Ender's life echoed their own lives. The truth of the story was not truth in general, but their truth.

Stories can be read so differently--even clear stories, even stories that deliberately avoid surface ambiguities.  For instance, here's another letter, likewise one that I received in mid-March of 1991.  It was written on 16 February and postmarked the 18th.  Those dates are important.

Mr. Card,

I'm an army aviator waiting out a sandstorm in Saudi Arabia.  I've always wanted to write you and since my future is in doubt--I know when the ground war will begin--I decided today would be the day I'd write.

I read Ender's Game during flight school four years ago.  I'm a warrant officer, and our school, at least the first six weeks, is very different from the commissioned officers'. I was eighteen years old when I arrived at Ft.  Rucker to start flight training, and the first six weeks almost beat me.  Ender gave me courage then and many times after that.  I've experienced the tiredness Ender felt, the kind that goes deep to your soul.  It would be interesting to know what caused you to feel the same way.  No one could describe it unless they experienced it, but I understand how personal that can be.  There is one other novel that describes that frame of soul and mind that I cherish as much as Ender's Game.
 It's called Armour and its author  is John Steakley.  Ender and Felix (the protagonist of Armour) are always close by in my mind.  Sadly, there is no sequel to Armour as there is to Ender's Game.

We are the bastards of military aviation.  Our helicopters may be the best in the world, but the equipment we wear and the systems in our helicopter, such as the navigation instruments, are at least twenty years behind the Navy and Air Force. I am very happy with the Air Force's ability to bomb with precision,  but if they miss, the bombs still land on the enemy's territory.  If we screw up, the guys we haul to the battle, the “grunts,” die.  We don't even have the armour plate for our chests--“chicken plate”--that the helicopter pilots did in Vietnam.  Last year in El Salvador, army aviators flew a couple of civilian VIPs and twenty reporters over guerrilla-controlled territory and there were no flares in their launchers to counteract the heat-seeking missiles we know the rebels had.  One of our pilots and a crew member were killed last year on a training flight because they flew the sling load they were carrying into the ~ at 70 miles an hour.  It could have been prevented if our night vision goggles had a heads-up display like the Air Force has had for forty years.  I'm sure you beard about Colonel Pickett being shot down in a Huey in El Salvador just a few months ago.  That type of aircraft is at least thirty years. old and there are no survivability measures installed.  He was a good man, I knew him.

The reason I told you about these things is because I wanted to paint a picture for you. I love my job but we aren't like the “zoomies” that everyone makes movies about.  We do our job with less technology, less political support, less recognition, and more risk than the rest, while the threat to us continues to modernize at an

unbelievable rate.  I'm not asking for sympathy but I was wondering if you and Mr. Steakley could write a novel about helicopters and the men that fly them for the Army twenty years in the future.  There are many of us that read science fiction and after I read Ender's Game and Armour three times each I started letting my comrades read them.  My wife cried when she read Ender's Game.  There is a following here for a book like the one I requested.  We have no speaker for us, the ones that will soon die, or the ones that survive...

As with those gifted young students who read this book as “their” story, this soldier--who, like most but not all of the Army aviators in the Gulf War survived--did not read Ender's Game as a “work of literature.” He read it as epic, as a story that helped define his community.  It was not his only epic, of course--Armour, John Steakley's fine novel, was an equal candidate to be part of his self-story.  What matters most, though, was his clear sense that, no matter how much these stories spoke to him, they were still not exactly his community's epic.  He still felt the need for a “speaker for the dead” and for the living.  He still felt a hunger, especially at a time when death might well be near, to have his own story, his friends' stories, told.,

Why else do we read fiction, anyway?  Not to be impressed by somebody's dazzling language—or at least I hope that's not our reason. I think that most of us, anyway, read these stories that we know are not “true” because we're hungry for another kind of truth: The mythic truth about human nature in general, the particular truth about those life-communities that define our own identity, and the most specific truth of all: our own self-story.  Fiction, because it is not about somebody who actually lived in the real world, always has the possibility of being about ourself.

Ender's Game
is a story about gifted children. It is also a story about soldiers.  Captain John F. Schmitt, the author of the Marine Corp's Warfighting, the most brilliant concise book of military strategy ever written by an American (and a proponent of the kind of thinking that was at the heart of the allied victory in the Gulf War), found Ender's Game to be a useful enough story about the nature of leadership to use it in courses he taught at the Marine University at Quantico.  Watauga College, the interdisciplinary studies program at Appalachian State University—as unmilitary a community as you could ever hope to find!--uses Ender's Game for completely different purposes—to talk about problem-solving and the self-creation of the individual.  A graduate student in Toronto explored the political ideas in Ender’s
Game.  A writer and critic at Pepperdine has seen Ender's
Game as, in some ways, religious fiction.