Ender's Game

Orson Scott Card

Macmillan, Aug 15, 1992 - Fiction - 226 pages

Winner of the Hugo and Nebula Awards

In order to develop a secure defense against a hostile alien race's next attack, government agencies breed child geniuses and train them as soldiers. A brilliant young boy, Andrew "Ender" Wiggin lives with his kind but distant parents, his sadistic brother Peter, and the person he loves more than anyone else, his sister Valentine. Peter and Valentine were candidates for the soldier-training program but didn't make the cut—young Ender is the Wiggin drafted to the orbiting Battle School for rigorous military training.

Ender's skills make him a leader in school and respected in the Battle Room, where children play at mock battles in zero gravity. Yet growing up in an artificial community of young soldiers Ender suffers greatly from isolation, rivalry from his peers, pressure from the adult teachers, and an unsettling fear of the alien invaders. His psychological battles include loneliness, fear that he is becoming like the cruel brother he remembers, and fanning the flames of devotion to his beloved sister.

Is Ender the general Earth needs? But Ender is not the only result of the genetic experiments. The war with the Buggers has been raging for a hundred years, and the quest for the perfect general has been underway for almost as long. Ender's two older siblings are every bit as unusual as he is, but in very different ways. Between the three of them lie the abilities to remake a world. If, that is, the world survives. Ender's Game is the winner of the 1985 Nebula Award for Best Novel and the 1986 Hugo Award for Best Novel.

What people are saying

Review: Ender's Game (Ender's Saga #1)

User Review  - Nate - Goodreads

Everytime I read this book I love it even more. What makes it great is how clearly Ender represents how I feel, the isolation, the pressure, the expectations to succeed and sucumb to people's hopes ...

Review: Ender's Game (Ender's Saga #1)

User Review  - rameau - Goodreads

I am disgusted. I am so thoroughly disgusted with this book that I can't even logically explain my utter revulsion. Ender's Game reads like propaganda, and the characters in it are living it. It wasn ...

Contents

• Third: 1
• Peter: 7
• Graff: 12
• Launch: 20
• Games: 28
• The Giants Drink: 40
• Salamander: 48
• Rat: 70
• Locke and Demosthenes: 86
• Dragon: 110
• Veni Vidi Vici: 123
• Bonzo: 141
• Valentine: 160
• Enders Teacher: 179
• Speaker for the Dead: 213

About the author

Orson Scott Card is the author of the novels Ender's Game, Ender's Shadow, and Speaker for the Dead. Ender’s Game and Speaker for the Dead both won Hugo and Nebula Awards, making Card the only author to win these two top prizes in consecutive years. There are seven other novels to date in The Ender Universe series. Card has also written fantasy: The Tales of Alvin Maker is a series of fantasy novels set in frontier America; his most recent novel, The Lost Gate, is a contemporary magical fantasy. Card has written many other stand-alone sf and fantasy novels, as well as movie tie-ins and games, and publishes an internet-based science fiction and fantasy magazine, Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show.  Card was born in Washington and grew up in California, Arizona, and Utah. He served a mission for the LDS Church in Brazil in the early 1970s. Besides his writing, Card directs plays and teaches writing and literature at Southern Virginia University. He lives in Greensboro, North Carolina, with his wife, Kristine Allen Card, and youngest daughter, Zina Margaret.

Bibliographic information

• Title: Ender's Game; Book 1 of Ender Series; Ender Wiggin Saga; Book 1 of The Ender Quintet
• Author: Orson Scott Card
• Edition: reprint, revised
• Publisher: Macmillan, 1992
• ISBN: 0312853238, 9780312853235
• Length: 226 pages
• Subjects: Fiction / Science Fiction / General; Fiction / Science Fiction / Space Opera