Ender's Game (Ender Wiggins Saga)

Potomac: that the soldiers were all so young and innocent. That they shot and bayoneted the enemy, and then slipped across the neutral ground between armies to trade tobacco, jokes, liquor, and food.   Even though it was a deadly game, and the suffering and fear were terrible and real, it was still a game played by children, not all that different from the wargames my brothers and I had played, firing water-filled squirt bottles at each other.
    "Ender's Game" was written and sold.   I knew it was a strong story because I cared about it and believed in it.   I had no idea that it would have the effect it had on the science fiction audience.   While most people ignored it, of course, and continue to live full and happy lives without reading it or anything else by me, there was still a surprisingly large group who responded to the story with some fervency.
    Ignored on the Nebula ballot.   "Ender's Game" got onto the Hugo ballot and came in second.   More to the point, I, was awarded the John W. Campbell Award for best new writer.   Without doubt, "Ender's Game" wasn't just my first sale--it was the launching pad of my career.
    The same story did it again in 1985, when I rewrote it at novel length--the book, now slightly revised, that you are holding in your hands.   At that point I thought of Ender's Game, the novel, existing only to set up the much more powerful (I thought) story of Speaker for the Dead.   But when I finished the novel, I knew that the story had new strength. I had learned a great deal, about life and about writing, in the decade since I wrote the novelet, and it came together for the first time in this book.   Again the audience was kind to me: the Nebula and Hugo awards, foreign translations, and strong, steady sales that, for the first time in my career, actually earned out my advance and allowed me to receive royalties.
    But it wasn't just a matter of having a quiet little cult novel that brought in a steady income. There was something more to the way that people responded to Ender's Game.
    For one thing, the people that hated it really hated it.   The attacks on the novel--and on me—were astonishing. Some of it I expected--I have a master’s degree in literature, and in writing Ender's Game I deliberately avoided all the little literary games and gimmicks that make "fine" writing so impenetrable to the general audience.   All the layers of meaning are there to be decoded, if you like to play the game of literary criticism--but if you don't care to play that game, that's fine with me. I designed Ender's Game to be as clear and accessible as any story of mine could possibly be.   My goal was that the reader wouldn't have to be trained in literature or even in science fiction to receive the tale in its simplest, purest form.   And, since a great many writers and critics have based their entire careers on the premise that anything that the general public can understand without mediation is worthless drivel, it is not surprising that they found my little novel to be despicable.   If everybody came to agree that stories should be told this clearly, the professors of literature would be out of a job, and the writers of obscure, encoded fiction would be, not honored, but pitied for their impenetrability.
    For some people, however, the loathing for Ender's Game transcended mere artistic argument.   I recall a letter to the editor of Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, in which a woman who worked as a guidance counselor for gifted children re ported that she had only picked up Ender's Game to read it because her son had kept telling her it was a wonderful book.   She read it and loathed it.   Of course, I wondered what kind of guidance counselor would hold her son's tastes up to public ridicule, but the criticism that left me most flabbergasted was her assertion that my depiction of gifted children was hopelessly unrealistic.   They just don't talk like that, she said.   The don't think like that.
    And it wasn't just her.   There have been others with that criticism.   Thus I began to realize that, as it is, Ender's Game disturbs some people because it challenges their assumptions about reality.   In fact, the novel's very clarity may make it more challenging, simply because the story's vision of the world is so relentlessly plain.   It was important to her, and to others, to believe that children don't actually think or speak the way the children in Ender's Game think and