fedeco

** spoiler alert ** A really great book about Ender Wiggins, who is taken at the age of six to live in a military training institute where he is trained to be a great commander. He rises much more quickly than the average child because he is being groomed to be the commander of the entire international fleet against the buggers (what a horrible name Card picked for his aliens!). In the end he thinks he is still training but he’s really fighting the battle, and he destroys the entire bugger race. I kept thinking about the issue of child soldiers in the world today. I think the psychological aspects of the book are very interesting, with the relationships between Ender and his siblings, Ender and the other children, Ender and the instructors, and Ender with himself. Some of Orson Scott Card's typical themes come through, but less so than in the other books and series I've read by him. And after the twist in the story, I was thinking to myself that it ought to have been predictable, but I was so caught up in the telling that I wasn't thinking ahead to predict. One thing that Card tends to do which I sort of don't like is at some point later on in a book when he wants to advance the story quite a bit he has the characters go through years and years of their lives without really saying much about them. So by the end of the book, Ender is what, 20? 21? and I still felt like he was 11. Actually quite a bit of the end felt like it had just been tacked on to the book and wasn’t nearly as good as the rest. I didn’t really like the bit where Ender was receiving psychic messages from the dead bugger queen, or that she had somehow gotten into his head and recreated parts of his dreams. And the computer program at the battle school that somehow got Peter’s picture and created new things just for Ender was never explained. In any case I think this is the best book by Card I’ve read so far, and I could even see myself re-reading it at some point. There’s a lot to think about in it, and it’s also an engrossing story. [It’s very unfortunate that Orson Scott Card, a writer with such great imagination and ability, also happens to be a crazy right-wing weirdo. It’s not just the Mormon preaching he does in his books, but apparently he also posts on right wing web sites all sorts of nonsense and rubbish, including stuff about John Kerry being hostile to the military that he posted prior to the election. I wish he wouldn’t use his books to promote his right wing ideals, but at least I can just read them for the stories and try to ignore the rest.]

2022-11-14 16:16