[September 2013]
Ender’s Game, Orson Scott Card
number of voters: 11
percentage of voters who finished the book: 100
highest rating: 9.26
lowest rating: 4
average rating: 8.26
menu: “Bean” dip. pineapple upside “down is the enemy gate”
cake. hive queen cocoons. “Valentine” cookies. giant eyeballs. the Giant’s
drink.
*****
The message on the desk read:
“Ho Launchies! You’re
assigned to Dragon Army. Report to the battle room at 1900. Follow gray orange
gray. Commander Overall.”
We’d never had a battle at Group before. This would be a
first. It seems like it’s been all firsts lately: There was the first time we
meet at a park under a play structure, the first (and only) time a reporter
wanted to do a story on us, and the first time a teenage boy joined Group for a
night. It was even the first time we’d read a sci-fi classic.
We donned our Group gear and prepared, mentally and
physically, to meet whatever the Colonel would throw at us. We followed gray
orange gray to the doorstep of the battle room.
But we were in for a surprise. It wasn’t a battle at all.
Commander Overall had instead prepared for us a night of rest and nourishment,
a chance to let our guards down and discuss Ender’s
Game, the story of how Ender saved us all back in the days before we knew
we didn’t need saving.
Many of us confessed that if it weren’t for Group we never
would have read about Ender. But we loved him, and pitied him, and wanted to
fight for him or hold him—or maybe both. His story engrossed us, even those of
us who admitted to skimming the battle scenes.
The people surrounding Ender were a complex lot. Never
fully good or evil, but sliding scales of good intentions and mistakes,
selfishness and altruism. Moment to moment, they could swing from loveable to
despicable and back again, leaving us as full of doubt as our young hero.
Perhaps most shocking for this group of self-proclaimed
non-sci-fi fans was that in the 1970s our 21st century technological future was
foretold in such vivid detail. Ender’s
Game is a layered, nuanced tale of a world where nothing is black and white,
the future is uncertain, and child geniuses rule technology.
Sounds familiar.
