Thank You Orson Scott Card...

...for Enders Game. I've just read this for the second time after nearly twenty years and have to admit that it's an absolutely fantastic, seminal sci-fi work that inspires, is thought provoking and is a genuine joy to read.

I picked up a copy recently for my eleven year old son, who's a voracious reader and who's recently been keen to get into some sci-fi after pretty much reading most of the contemporary "young adult" fiction out there at the moment. Once he'd finished with it (and I have to say that he thought it was completely awesome and has since read the first two sequels Speaker for the Dead and Xenocide) I picked it up and worked my way through it in about a day.

For those of you that have never read it, then the basic plot is centered around the early years of Andrew "Ender" Wiggin as he is taken from his home and put through a military school (Battle School and later Commander School) with the sole objective to turn him into the perfect military leader, to help Earth overcome the forces of the (apparently) nefarious Buggers - an insect like race hailing from some far flung corner of the galaxy.

This book has a number of quite visionary elements to it in my opinion, and brims over with engaging and thought provoking ideas that really good sci-fi should always have. To name but a few of the ones that I found most interesting are:

1. The idea of propagating "remote" war through the medium of simulated reality. Ender and his cohorts are trained over the years using rich simulated environments, not a million miles away from the kind of FPS and RTS games that have been evolving over the past ten years.
2. The idea of a political, questionably democratic movement asserting itself through nothing other than the media networks and news channels. One of the sub-themes within the book is how Ender's brother and sister rise to have real political power as a result of them instigating of social change purely through the expression of their ideas on something very similar to the Internet as we know it today.
3. The notion of homogenisation of nation-states into less granular super-powers and the alignment of these super states against opposing idealogical principles.
4. What it means to be a killer and what it means to separate the consequences of an action from the initial intention of the action.

Meaty stuff eh? Don't get me wrong though, although there are some heavy-weight concepts woven throughout the fabric of this book - the reason why it's so good is that it has a pace and pathos that keeps you engaged throughout, so much so that at the end of the book you really do find yourself empathising with a number of lead characters; in particular Ender himself.

In other words, it strikes precisely the right balance between challenging the reader at the abstract, philosophical level but (if you want to take the whole thing a lot more literally and on face value) also allows even the most casual reader to enjoy a thoroughly good yarn with all the trademarks of strong character development, interesting and intriguing plot twists - the lot.

Thank you Orson Scott Card, for this fantastic and amazing novel.