Ender's Game

Yes, I do enjoy writing book reviews.  But I don't review War and Peace, or Gone with the Wind, or Les Misérables.  I don't review them, because everyone who would enjoy those classics has either read them already or already plans to read them at some point in the future.

Similarly, I won't review Ender's Game, by Orson Scott Card.  Anyone interested in science fiction or fantasy knows about the book, at least, and probably read it long ago.  A much publicized movie based on the book is scheduled for release in the United States for November 1. 

The book was written in 1985, and it's my own fault that I just got around to reading it this week.  Mr. Card's writing is serviceable and adequate, but not particularly "literary" -- a fact that he acknowledges in a somewhat embarrassingly lengthy apology in the latest edition's preface.  But the story is absorbing, the characterization of the hero is moving, and the "message" is well worth noting. 

So I won't review the book -- its plot or character development -- but I do want to mention the "message" (or one of the messages) I find in that book.

The story, in quick summary, is that mankind, 150 years from now, has been engaged in battle twice by attacks from an alien species of bug-like humanoids that we call the "buggers."  Earth's forces have been sent -- by relativistic means -- across space to the buggers' own realm in the hope of defeating their forces before they regroup for a third attack.  Young Ender, a genius, has been bred and recruited, and is being trained, to direct these forces as supreme commander.

Most of the book is devoted to Ender's rapid development from a six-year-old child to an eleven-year-old conquering hero.  Ender's forces not only defeat the buggers, but totally annihilate their species, opening up their own planets for Terrestial expansion.

But Ender learns, after the celebrations conclude, that the buggers were far more civilized than we had given them credit for.  More civilized than ourselves.  Because of their own physiological functioning, they had believed that Earth was uninhabited by intelligent life, and that humans were simply robots left from an earlier and now departed civilization.  They realized their mistake after the second battle.  They therefore had no intention of ever launching a third attack.  Their "queen," realizing that defeat and annihilation were inevitable, and that Ender had the empathy to appreciate what she would tell him, found a way to leave Ender a message; her message told him that the buggers had never intended harm to an intelligent species.  Nevertheless, they accepted their fate, and she recognized that humans were now the heirs of what the bugger civilization had accomplished.  She wished them well.

Ender, now 12-years-old, and the toast of humanity, realizes that he has unnecessarily caused the death of billions of civilized beings, and an annihilation of their entire civilization.  He is devastated, despite the assurance of adults that man is evolutionarily a killer, that killing is the key to survival, and that survival is the ultimate goal of any species. 

A nation that came close to wiping out its own indigenous Indian population, enslaved Africans, attacked Spanish possessions without reasonable provocation, dropped its second atomic bomb on Nagasaki, replaced democratic governments with dictatorships in Chile and other Latin American countries, and accepted devastating "collateral damage" in Southeast Asia and Afghanistan, should have no difficulty in understanding the weight of Enver's self-accusing guilt, and in asking similar questions about its own policies.

The lesson is not that we should never kill.  It's that we must develop the empathy to understand our supposed adversaries before we ever resort, as a final alternative, to killing.

So far, humanity has never totally obliterated an entire intelligent species (unless, perhaps, we count whatever homo sapiens did to the Neanderthals, which I don't).  But we still have 150 years to hone our abilities.