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Ender's Game

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File:Ender's game cover.jpg
Ender's Game

Overview

Ender's Game (1985) is the best-known novel by Orson Scott Card. It originated as a science fiction short story in Analog Magazine (1977) and is set in a future where mankind is facing annihilation by an aggressive alien society, an insect-like race known colloquially as "Buggers" but more formally as "Formics." Genius children are seen as the ultimate leaders of the protection of Earth and are recruited into training for an upcoming battle against the alien race. Card later expanded the novel into the Ender's Game series.

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The protagonist, Andrew 'Ender' Wiggin, is one of these child soldiers. He is recruited at an unusually young age because of his extremely high aptitude for tactics and leadership. He is sent for training at Battle School, where he learns to fight and to lead armies. Meanwhile, his psychological development is revealed through a computer game embedded in the school's computer network, and manipulated to a large extent by the cynical Colonel Hyrum Graff, who runs the school.

The original short story is merely a snapshot of Ender's experiences in Battle School; the full-length novel is a deeper and more complex work dealing with Ender's life before, during and after Battle School, and the consequences of his final battle with the alien 'Buggers'.

Ender's Game was the winner of the Hugo Award for best novel in 1986 and the Nebula Award for best novel in 1985, the two most prestigious awards in science fiction. It was reprinted in a slightly revised edition in 1991.

Some military colleges have used Ender's Game as a textbook on leadership.

The series

Card went back and expanded the short story into a novel after realizing that he wanted to use Ender as a main character in another novel, Speaker for the Dead. That novel takes place several thousand years later. Card then added two sequels: Xenocide and Children of the Mind. Starting with Ender's Shadow, three (soon to be four) more novels have been released which tell the story of the people whom Ender left behind--this has been dubbed the Shadow series (also known as the "Bean Quartet") . Ender's Shadow is a parallel novel to Ender's Game, telling many of the same events from the perspective of Bean, a mostly peripheral character in Ender's Game. Card has also written three short stories set in the Ender universe: The Polish Boy, about Ender's father, John Paul Wiggin; The Investment Counselor, about Jane, a digital sentience; and Teacher's Pest, about the first meeting of Ender's parents. All three have been published along with the original Ender's Game short story in the book First Meetings.

ISBN numbers

  • ISBN 0606040439 (prebound, 1985)
  • ISBN 0312932081 (hardcover, 1985, revised)
  • ISBN 0312854021 (hardcover, 1992, Limited Edition)
  • ISBN 0312853238 (paperback, 1992)
  • ISBN 0812550706 (paperback, 1994, revised)
  • ISBN 081252358X (mass market paperback, 1994)
  • ISBN 0765342294 (mass market paperback, 2002, reprint)
  • ISBN 0765550709 (mass market paperback)