If the awards given to Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game are
any indication, he has written a novel that may well become part of the canon
of science fiction:
- Nebula Award for best novel in 1985
- Hugo Award for best novel in 1986
- Nominated for a Locus Award in 1986
- American Library Association's "100 Best Books for Teens."
- Margaret A. Edwards Award in 2008
It’s been translated
into thirty-three languages, ranked
#59 on the reader's list of Modern Library100 Best Novels in 1999, and included on the Marine Corps Professional Reading List. Oh, and the movie (starring Harrison Ford) is opening in just a few weeks.
If you enjoy analyzing stories such as Ender’s Game, there are a lot of excellent commentaries online.*
Rather than replicating their content, I would like to offer some
thoughts on why I believe this story is so compelling.
After the climatic battle that ends the Game, Ender discovers the Hive Queen has survived his accidental genocide. She communicates the story of her and her people to him, and in this knowledge Ender finds truth, empathy, and a path toward a form of redemption. As he records her story for all to know, he becomes the first of many Speakers of the Dead, people who speak the truth of a person’s life at their funeral.
Ender's story continues in Speaker of the Dead. He begins what will be (thanks to the quirks of space travel) centuries of searching to find the Hive Queen a new home, a new place to begin rebuilding the civilization he once destroyed. Meanwhile, he continues to "speak" the lives of those who have died as sort of a prophet in a new religion that seeks to bring truth, peace and honor to life in all its forms.
Ender's Game was the first novel in the Ender saga, but Speaker of the Dead was always meant to be the heart of the story. Card explains in the introduction to SOTD why this aspect of Ender's life is so important to him:
Ender's story continues in Speaker of the Dead. He begins what will be (thanks to the quirks of space travel) centuries of searching to find the Hive Queen a new home, a new place to begin rebuilding the civilization he once destroyed. Meanwhile, he continues to "speak" the lives of those who have died as sort of a prophet in a new religion that seeks to bring truth, peace and honor to life in all its forms.
Ender's Game was the first novel in the Ender saga, but Speaker of the Dead was always meant to be the heart of the story. Card explains in the introduction to SOTD why this aspect of Ender's life is so important to him:
“I grew dissatisfied with the way that we use our funerals to revise the life of the dead, to give the dead a story so different from their actual life that, in effect, we kill them all over again. No, that is too strong. Let me just say that we erase them, we edit them, we make them into a person much easier to live with than the person who actually lived…To understand who a person really was, what his or her life really meant, the speaker for the dead would have to explain their self-story – what they meant to do, what they actually did, what they regretted, what they rejoiced in. That’s the story we never know, the story that we never can know – and yet, at the time of death, it’s the only true story worth telling.”
Speaking for the dead wasn’t always
pretty, but it was always powerful. Ender becomes passionate about telling “what they meant to do,
what they actually did, what they regretted, what they rejoiced in.”
Not until I read Speaker did I begin to understand what I found so compelling about Ender's Game. The heart of the story of how a deceived, brainwashed, abused child accidentally becomes the
bane of the universe became clear only in light of Card’s previously cited explanation about Ender himself. The only story worth telling cannot show merely what Ender meant to do, it must show what he actually did.
