“His isolation can’t be broken. He can never come to believe that anybody will ever help him out, ever. If he thinks there’s an easy way out, he’s wrecked.”
                                                                                            Ender’s Game, Ch. 5

Sometimes as readers, we find ourselves confronted with some big questions. Do the ends ever justify the means? Does the good of the many outweigh the good of the few? If we lose our humanity, is humanity still worth saving?! Perhaps these questions seem melodramatic (especially the last one), but if ever melodrama was turned into a surgeon’s knife, it is in one of the most acclaimed science fiction novels of the 20th century, Ender’s Game . In this HUGO Award and NEBULA Award winning novel, author Orson Scott Card presents a thought experiment to help us explore some of the convictions we hold most closely.

In the book, young genius Ender Wiggin is bred and trained to literary save humanity, but for readers, humanity itself is put under a microscope for our inspection. Through the actions of his world’s political and military leaders, Card shows that some decidedly inhuman actions may be necessary in order to preserve humanity from a looming alien threat. Ender, who is a very young child, is repeatedly and intentionally exposed to bullying of the most extreme measure, tested by instructors to the point of physical and mental exhaustion, and left to fend for himself in situations that sometimes require lethal force. While under normal circumstances, any of

these actions would be considered abuse, the author masterfully creates an environment which allows readers to seriously ponder whether these methods would be acceptable in order to save all of humanity. Card could only present this question in a realistically debatable forum if he set his story in an unrealistic environment where these methods were necessary to forge the soul of a child who would be humanity’s only hope to avert an extinction-level event.

Science fiction, at its best, puts the reader into a world where we can wrestle with ideas that may be hard to get a handle on in our own world. Ultimately, yes, Ender’s program of suffering was successful in preserving a human race that was cruel enough (dare I say inhuman enough) to allow him to suffer enough to save itself. How this translates to our own lives is a great place to start a conversation, but let me pose this: if Ender and all he went through in preparation to save humanity destroyed something foundationally important to what makes us human, was it really humanity he was saving, or something else? It seems that Ender himself was struggling to hold on to what he considered vital to being human. For instance, his love for his sister and friends, and his deepest fear that he would become a true killer like his brother show us that Ender is desperately grasping at what it means to be human; perhaps in this, Ender’s plight gives us an opportunity to examine ourselves and consider what convictions we would be willing to abandon in the direst of circumstances.

Of course, this is not the only theme that Card presents in Ender’s Game ; he also presents wonderful examples of leadership, sacrifice, innocence, and cold logic, but those will have to be discussed over a pint. Drink up, my fellow launchies, we’re going to battle school!