I’ll admit I had some issues with this book. I know about OSC politics and his opinions about homosexuality, but I hoped that his writing didn’t have anything to do with them. After three years of studying literature, I should’ve known that was a vain hope. Shame on me.

So, right now I’ll try to explain all the reasons why reading this book was infuriating and disgusting for me.



This book basically is about Ender Wiggins, a six-year-old who is so awesome and cool that he’s the only one that can save Earth from the horrible threat of a race of ugly aliens. Why? Just because. Throughout the whole book there is absolutely no explanation why Earth’s best shot is a child as opposed to, I don’t know, an ADULT. No, we’re only told that he’s the most intelligent child in Earth and that’s reason enough to allow him to command our armies.
I would’ve understood (and maybe even liked) this book a lot better if the children were took to Battle School to give them a thorough training, so they became officers as adults. I know about suspension of disbelief, but I need something to sustain that. That someone tells me that those children are the best choice we have is not something. If anything, that's nothing that might help me suspend my disbelief.

So, we have awesome and incredible Ender who can do literally anything. He’s the best in everything he does, whether it is strategy, fighting or whatever. He’s so amazing that he beats the videogame the teachers make them play, something nobody ever managed to do. Because he’s the coolest kid ever.
When you realize that Ender will have little difficulty, if any at all, confronting everything the evil teachers put in his way, the book becomes boring. Almost every chapter in Battle School is basically the same: teachers talk about this amazing kid and they try a new test to prove him, Ender passes brilliantly and the chapter ends. It’s mind numbingly. I like my heroes with flaws. I like that they can fail and move on. I like that they can be defeated every once in a while. But that doesn’t happen with Ender. He’s never confronted with something he can’t do.

At the end, we all know that Ender will win and destroy the evil aliens (who didn’t seem very evil to me. I mean, they weren’t a constant threat, leaving the invasions aside). It’s true that in almost every story, the main character will succeed. But in the stories I consider good, usually the protagonist is forced to face something that they think they cannot overcome. So, the ending is more satisfactory for me as a reader. With Ender, it was like another test of the evil teachers.

About the characters, this story is a completely centered around Ender. Everything the other characters do has to do with him and they are characterized according to whether they like or not Ender. If a character likes Ender they are probably amazing soldiers, nice persons and very intelligent. In that group we can have Alai (I was actually surprised that OSC portrayed an Arabian boy so nicely, kudos!) , Petra and Dink. On the other hand, characters who don’t suck up to wonderful Ender (some of them with actual good reasons to dislike the boy, if I may say so) are portrayed as terrible soldiers, mean and selfish. We have here Bernard, Bonzo and Rozen, whose portrayals were even borderline racist. Forget about that, straightforward racist. At least for Bernard and Bonzo. Bernard had a “stupid-sounding accent” because apparently France has decided to teach their children English after they learn French (which actually sounds perfectly okay for me), and Bonzo has “Spanish pride”, whatever that means. The nationalities of the characters who like Ender (and I still wonder why) aren’t brought up.

And that gets me to another point: the world order. Okay, I get it. We are under the threat of another bugger invasion (but I’ll insist that they didn’t seem much of threat anyway. I recall reading something about them not attacking civilians), so we have to unite. I’d be cool with that. But then we have the US’ normative becoming the world ones. Everyone has to speak English (they call it Standard, but I’m not stupid), nobody can have more than two kids (unless someone says that your third kid will be awesome, based on the intelligence and abilities of the previous ones), and so on. I don’t think that for unity around the globe we need to have all the same culture and shame those who doesn’t. And it begs the question: why do everyone have to accept the US’ standards and not somewhere else’s? That part was chauvinistic, to say the least.

Oh, the off-handed comment about women having centuries of evolution working against them was appalling. I mean, who on Earth is that the males of a species are more developed than the females? It made no sense and made me angry. Unless, in Ender’s universe women appeared centuries later than men, who reproduced somehow without women. That’s the only explanation that I can think of to justify that stupidity.

Well, actually, while in this world they can guess that a child is going to be a genius just looking at the older siblings (yeah, that made no sense in the book either), they cannot see that they have a text-book psychopath in front of them. Maybe the scientific advances they are supposed to have weren’t so awesome after all.

I’ll admit that the premise of this book was interesting enough. The whole idea of pushing kids to their extreme was somewhat shocking, but it could have worked (maybe if the kids were a couple years older). Nevertheless, the execution felt clumsy and didn’t work for me. It’s not that I don’t like science-fiction. I do like it. But this book felt like propaganda, and bad propaganda at that.