Ender's Game (Ender Wiggins Saga)

matter how much these stories spoke to him, they were still not exactly his community's epic.   He still felt the need for a "speaker for the dead" and for the living.   He still felt a hunger, especially at a time when death might well be near, to have his own story, his friends' stories, told.,
    Why else do we read fiction, anyway?   Not to be impressed by somebody's dazzling language—or at least I hope that's not our reason. I think that most of us, anyway, read these stories that we know are not "true" because we're hungry for another kind of truth: The mythic truth about human nature in general, the particular truth about those life-communities that define our own identity, and the most specific truth of all: our own self-story.   Fiction, because it is not about somebody who actually lived in the real world, always has the possibility of being about ourself.
    Ender's Game is a story about gifted children. It is also a story about soldiers.   Captain John F. Schmitt, the author of the Marine Corp's Warfighting, the most brilliant concise book of military strategy ever written by an American (and a proponent of the kind of thinking that was at the heart of the allied victory in the Gulf War), found Ender's Game to be a useful enough story about the nature of leadership to use it in courses he taught at the Marine University at Quantico.   Watauga College, the interdisciplinary studies program at Appalachian State University—as un military a community as you could ever hope to find!--uses Ender's Game for completely different purposes—to talk about problem-solving and the self-creation of the individual.   A graduate student in Toronto explored the political ideas in Ender’s Game.   A writer and critic at Pepperdine has seen Ender's Game as, in some ways, religious fiction.
    All these uses are valid; all these readings of the book are "correct." For all these readers have placed themselves inside this story, not as spectators, but as participants, and so have looked at the world of Ender's Game, not with my eyes only, but also with their own.
    This is the essence of the transaction between storyteller and audience.   The "true" story is not the one that exists in my mind; it is certainly not the written words on the bound paper that you hold in your hands.   The story in my mind is nothing but a hope; the text of the story is the tool I created in order to try to make that hope a reality.   The story itself, the true story, is the one that the audience members create in their minds, guided and shaped by my text, but then transformed, elucidated, expanded, edited, and clarified by their own experience, their own desires, their own hopes and fears.
    The story of Ender's Game is not this book though it has that title emblazoned on it.   The story is one that you and I will construct together in your memory.   If the story means anything to you at all, then when you. remember it afterward, think of it, not as something I created, but rather as something that we made together.
    Orson Scott Card
    Greensboro, North Carolina
    March 1991
     
     

1
     
    Third
     
     
      "I've watched through his eyes, I've listened through his ears, and tell you he's the one. Or at least as close as we're going to get.”
      "That's what you said about the brother.”
      "The brother tested out impossible. For other reasons. Nothing to do with his ability.”
      "Same with the sister. And there are doubts about him. He's too malleable. Too willing to submerge himself in someone else's will.”
      "Not if the other person is his enemy.”
      "So what do we do? Surround him with enemies all the time?”
      "If we have to.”
      "I thought you said you liked this kid.”
      "If the buggers get him, they'll make me look like his favorite uncle.”
      "All right. We're saving the world, after all. Take him.”
     
      The monitor lady smiled very nicely and tousled his hair and said, "Andrew, I suppose by now you're just absolutely sick of having that horrid monitor. Well, I have good news for you. That monitor is going to come out today. We're going to just take it right out, and it won't hurt a bit.”
      Ender nodded. It was a lie, of course, that it wouldn't hurt a bit. But since adults always said it when it was going to hurt, he could count on that statement as an accurate prediction of the future. Sometimes lies were more dependable than the truth.
      "So if you'll just come over here, Andrew, just sit