In the beginning, there was Ender’s Game.
Before sequels expanded the “Enderverse” and the titular character became an apologist for Hitler, before the author’s name became associated with bigotry as often as science fiction, it was 1985 and a novel based on Orson Scott Card’s first sci-fi story spoke to bright young readers.
The book’s prescience grows more impressive with time. Not only did it anticipate iPads and drone warfare, the story featured a now-uncomfortable subplot where a self-absorbed child gains political power largely through disingenuous online posts (I think we can all agree anonymous Internet essayists are the worst). But the futurism of Ender’s Game is secondary to the exciting space war simulations mastered by Andrew “Ender” Wiggin, a military savant in the form of a sensitive little boy. Rare is the smart preteen’s shelf that doesn’t have a well-thumbed copy.
The adolescent appeal of the book is clear, even if it chaffed Card to see the publisher market it as a YA novel. Ender’s school is the envy of real-world children trapped behind desks and textbooks. The Battle School trains its students in videogames and zero-G laser tag, and young Ender excels at all of it. On a literary level, the book provides straightforward characters, protagonist included. Ender is the most exceptional of the exceptional, selected to apply his special skills of war to the protection of the human race against an anticipated third attack by alien invaders nicknamed the Buggers. But this Chosen One has a delicate soul. He weeps for his dead enemies moments after being compelled to unleash merciless violence against them.
Despite his dominance of the games, Battle School is a source of torture for Ender. In addition to threats from his fellow child soldiers, Ender is constantly pressured and persecuted by the adults assigned to protect and teach him. Effectively their method of instruction is to toss Ender into the deep end of the anti-gravity chamber and step on his hands when he reaches for the safety bars. In the book’s climax, Ender is crushed to learn he has wiped out the telepathically-linked Buggers in a remote attack disguised as a game. One need not be connected to the hive-mind of gifted adolescents to understand the thrill of this narrative. It’s tragic how Mr. McKlinsky forces me to wreck the Algebra II bell curve! No wonder I’m alone on a Friday night.
Ender’s A+ in Advanced Placement Empathy is key to the book’s enduring appeal but it also invites accusations of hypocrisy. If a sign of a successful endeavor is the quality of the detractions it elicits then Ender’s Game has some proud accomplishments to hang on the fridge. Critics have taken eloquent umbrage with the “ends justify the means” message or the lengths Card takes to humanize Ender (who is, in the end, a mass murderer). While the book attempts to explore the balance between society’s need for protection and man’s capacity for kindness, many have accused Card of putting his thumb on the scale in favor of brute force and point to the book as evidence of emotional immaturity.
Conclusions that Ender’s Game is a not-so-covert justification for war crimes up to and including genocide have convincing support in Card’s text and even more evidence from Card’s own words. Card wants desperately for the reader to love and pity Ender whatever the amount of death he deals and, as John Kessel articulates so well in this essay, the Card that wrote Ender’s Game believes that intentions trump actions. With this in mind, 1985’s Ender’s Game creates a plea for understanding for the evangelist – for someone compelled from birth to fulfill a destiny described by councils of adults who concern themselves with saving the human race.
Card was famously Mormon before he was famously reactionary. He is a great-great-grandson of Brigham Young. He attended BYU and was an associate editor for the Latter Day Saints magazine The Ensign. Men in the LDS Church are expected to take a proselytizing mission trip in their young adulthood; Card spent two years in Brazil for his.
As LDS readers (and Card himself) can attest, Ender’s Game contains only flavors of Mormonism. In the world of Ender’s Game, religion has been outlawed by the government. Young Ender is the child of two secretly religious parents including a Mormon mother. He’s a Third, meaning a rare child allowed to parents who have already birthed the maximum two children. The government, focused on producing a military commander capable of protecting the Earth from a third attack by the Buggers, allowed the birth of Ender after seeing the potential in his two older siblings, Peter and Valentine. Both had the cognitive ability to be that commander, but Peter was rejected because of his brutality and Valentine because of her gentleness. Fairy tales, if not genetics, suggest that this third baby will be just right.
Six-year-old Ender soon leaves his family behind for Battle School. While Ender yearns to reconnect with Valentine, he’s constantly haunted by the idea that he identifies more with the sadistic Peter. Meanwhile, the military commanders in charge of the school isolate Ender and test his potential to the point of cruelty, believing that his trials will push him to fulfill his mission to save humanity.
In the LDS Church, priesthood can be conferred on boys as young as twelve. Mormonism also allows for a large potential in individual humans that spans into eternity. A good Mormon, through his or her works and ministry, is concerned with an impact through the ages, not just a limited time during terrestrial life.
With his 1990 essay “The Hypocrites of Homosexuality,” Card made the first of many public stances against homosexuality, the practice of which is forbidden by the LDS Church. His recommendations have moved from an advocacy of laissez-faire policy to an alarming “take the pro-gay government by force” stance. But the justification for his vehemence never changes. He sees this stand as nothing less than a battle for the continued existence of the Mormon community.
After his commands have destroyed the Buggers, Ender is awash with regret. He eventually discovers the dormant egg of a Bugger Queen and sets out on a mission trip to find a new world where it is safe for the Hive Queen to begin repopulation. His only companion on this journey is Valentine, the gentle one.
In Ender’s Game, Card begs for sympathy for a life compelled to evangelism by a structure of strict but well-meaning elders. If other people and societies are harmed by the evangelism, can’t we see the evangelist doesn’t revel in the pain, but rather carries its burden out of sight of larger society, wounded personally, and without the comfort of victimhood?
Ender and his author have traveled far down their set path since the book’s initial publication. The Orson Scott Card of today has made it clear he will do the intellectual gymnastics required to justify a retrograde social viewpoint. But Ender’s Game glimpses the cohabitation of two Orson Scott Cards: the writer who conceives of alien races in a future hundreds of years away and the faithful man whose religion discounts the possibility of either extra-terrestrials or a distant future. The dualism of Ender has a mirror image in the dualism of Card, and Ender is an expression of the weight of expectations to do right by humanity. In the same way Jerry Siegel couldn’t be expected to fly, perhaps it was a bit much to hope that Card could match Ender’s level of understanding.