The public librarian recommended Ender’s Game to my eighth-grade class, lo these many years ago, and from there I read just about all of Orson Scott Card’s books except the ones I thought looked lame. And including several I thought wouldn’t be lame but were, after all.
Just reread these two. I also recently reread Xenocide and Speaker for the Dead and Children of the Mind, and I guess it’s because I most recently read Children of the Mind that I felt like I never wanted to read anything by Orson Scott Card ever again as long as I lived and even if I died and dead people brought me books in the graveyard and the only book I had at all was Speaker for the Dead still even then I would reject it totally and just lie all dead and read nothing whatsoever.
Yeah, that was weird. But the feeling passed, and I reread Ender’s Shadow first and then Ender’s Game. And I was really struck by how much more I liked Ender’s Game than a) I remembered and b) Ender’s Shadow. Really. It’s a pretty good book.
However, reading all this Orson Scott Card has made me realize how dreadfully smug and self-righteous everybody is. They really are. All the characters are, they all are, not a single one of them isn’t. They just all think they’re totally right and they say many smug and self-righteous things in defense of their positions. I thought that the reason I didn’t ever want to read OSC again was that I had just overdosed on his books, but I think now it was overdosing on smugness and self-righteousness.
Which is funny because those are two qualities I possess in spades.
This isn’t much of a review. I’ll go again.
Basically, the humans are under attack by these aliens they call buggers (or formics sometimes), and the most brilliant children of all the children are being recruited to learn to be commanders so that they can fight the buggers off, and the most brilliant child of all the children is Ender. (Except in Ender’s Shadow it turns out that the most brilliant child of all the children is actually its protagonist, Bean.) And because Ender is so brilliant, they are grooming him to command the entire space army that will destroy the buggers, and his life’s really unhappy in learning-to-defeat-aliens school.
It’s good. I don’t mean to put anyone off by saying that all the characters are smug. They’re still fun to read about, because you know, a lot of times you have a good idea but when people say snide things about it, you can’t immediately think of the clever thing to say to prove what a good idea your idea is; but the characters in these books? They can always think of the clever thing to say to prove what good ideas their ideas are.