Ender's Game
Orson Scott Card reminds us to pick our own perspectives.
Welcome to By the Books, a newsletter dedicated to capturing and distributing wisdom from works of classic literature.
Each post will take less than 5 minutes to read, and will feature one great book, including:
A brief summary
A distillation of relevant themes
One actionable insight
Live by the best books, one day at a time.
“Ender’s Game” by Orson Scott Card
I was twelve when I read this book for the first time. It was assigned reading in a small, advanced class I was lucky enough to get into. We were expected to adhere to a strict reading schedule, so that the class discussions could be targeted and productive.
But once I started, I couldn’t stop. On the first night, we were only supposed to read one chapter. I read four. Two days later, I had finished the book and started again. By the time the class reached the end, I’d read it three times.
The story follows a child prodigy named Ender Wiggin in a near-future where Earth has been twice attacked by an alien species known as the "Buggers." As the military prepares for a third invasion, Ender, just six years old, is selected to attend an orbiting Battle School. Isolated from his family, bullied by his peers, and manipulated by the school’s administrators, Ender quickly rises through the ranks, eventually commanding others in increasingly complex war games.
It would be an understatement to say that this was my favorite book as a kid. I had never encountered anything like it. It was the first time I had that visceral feeling that any lover of books comes to know, of somehow being seen by the author. I knew I wasn’t a one-in-a-billion genius like Ender, but even so, I bonded with him as though he was somehow a version of myself.
“The enemy’s gate is down.”
Actionable Insight*
Kids have been falling in love with this book for nearly four decades (it was published a month before I was born), and this is primarily because even though he is writing it for “kids,” Card absolutely never patronizes his audience. He digs into complex themes and moral ambiguity with the same rigor you would expect in a novel written for adults.
That said, there is one idea in particular that left a permanent stamp on my soul, and it is captured by that quote. The first time he enters a zero-g battle room, Ender realizes that the frame of reference anchored by gravity is no longer relevant. Instead, he decides that, in the context of the war games he must master, “the enemy’s gate is down.”
You can go a lot of different directions with this theme (yes, pun intended), but the one that resonated most deeply with me — someone who always struggled to march to the beat of other people’s drums — was that ultimately, a frame of reference is arbitrary, and relative. And everyone who realizes this gets to pick their own.
In the book, this singular insight fast-tracked Ender to unrivaled excellence at the Battle School. For you, the situation might be a little different.
And that’s the point.
Pick your priorities, and then adjust your sense of direction accordingly.
*As a lover of literature, I must emphasize that the best way to truly absorb the wisdom of any work of literature is to actually read it, from start to finish, the way the author intended. I hope By the Books will occasionally inspire you to do just that.
I’m unsure how I never heard of this book growing up, but I didn’t. My first exposure was at Air Command and Staff College, the Air Forces’s selective professional military education course for Majors. It was an optional reading that I delayed until far later in the year, when we were informed that Card would be coming to the school as a guest speaker. I’d wager based on the questions he was asked that less than 10% of the school read it. Card showed up in cargo shorts and sandals and one of the pilots basically sneered at him “Why should we think anything a guy who had never served and dressed in sandals and shorts for a briefing, think he might have to teach elite Air Force officers”. Card responded with “Well, your leadership, General XXXX thought we might have something to learn from him, and that he dressed in sandals and shorts because he was successful enough to dress as he liked.”
The lessons he gave in that book profoundly shaped the remaining eight years of my career, to include two deployments. The book is absolute genius, and is one that hasn’t been diluted by the sequels, but further enhanced. It remains a must-know in my professional reading, and one that I recommend to anyone I mentor.
The enemy gate is down.
Love everything about this. Your post, the book, the character. I similarly fell in love with Bean as my first book in the series was "Ender's Shadow" - still an absolute delight, this series.