Comments on: “Ender’s Game” by Orson Scott Card

By: DamnedConjuror

DamnedConjuror — Sat, 13 Feb 2010 20:55:40 +0000

Ender’s Game/Speaker for the Dead are two classics and, unfortunately, Orson Scott Card has never bettered them.

By: Seth

Seth — Sat, 13 Feb 2010 17:04:15 +0000

Speaker is probably my favorite book right now. It’s definitely a deeper story, and it’s less of a Young Adult novel. However, it’s also not nearly the page-turner that Ender’s Game is. But I still prefer it.

I have the whole set, including the series following Ender’s Shadow. I think they’re all excellent, though Xenocide is probably the weak link, and also happens to be the longest, which isn’t a good combination. I listened to it on audio the first time, so that helped a great deal.

On the whole, I prefer the Shadow Series, but Speaker is my favorite single book.

By: girldetective

girldetective — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 22:18:21 +0000

N, I am unsurprised you’re a fan. Like LoTR, it’s a geekboy rite of passage, I think. I read it within the last decade or so. Unlike LoTR, I liked it, and didn’t feel I missed the bus by not reading and getting imprinted with it around age 11. (Which I did with Anne McCaffrey’s Pern series.) Ender is a fabulous character, and it was my husband who pointed out to me the skill with which Card wrote his character, and his siblings’. A lot of people at the discussion got bogged down in whether child geniuses are believable, why Ender was picked over Peter, and whether Ender’s Game is a YA novel; these questions didn’t interest me. What hit home this time around was the juxtaposition of the manipulating adults and how they often told the truth in such a way that it perhaps wasn’t the truth (like how Bonzo goes home). It reminded me of the frequent little white lies I tell my own kids to get them to do what I want, e.g. “No, I don’t have any money, we can’t buy that right now.” And of particular spookiness, which wasn’t true the last time I read this, is that I have a six year old son, who shares a name with a character in the book.

My husband loves Speaker, but hated Xenocide, and didn’t read further in the Ender series after that. A good friend once told me, though, that the fourth book, Children of the Mind, makes the third book better in retrospect, and on Wikipedia it notes they were intended to be read together.

By: weirleader

weirleader — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 21:42:52 +0000

That is one of my all-time favorite books. The funny thing is that I think I like it for mostly different reasons. For me, I think I fell in love with the character of Ender and enjoyed vicariously succeeding against whatever was thrown his way. Now that I’m reading your analysis, I easily see the other level that I had hitherto ignored and I’m thinking I should re-read it with that in mind.

As for Speaker for the Dead, I definitely need to give that a re-read. When I first read it as a late-teen I think a lot went over my head. I found it both interesting and oddly disconcerting. And I got halfway through Xenocide before I decided that I was seriously missing the point.