A Study Guide for Orson Scott Card's "Ender's Game"

By Gale and Cengage

A Study Guide for Orson Scott Card's "Ender's Game," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Novels for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Novels for Students for all of your research needs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cengage Learning - Gale
• Release date: Jun 27, 2016
• ISBN: 9781535822749

Book preview

3

Ender's Game

Orson Scott Card

1985

Introduction

Orson Scott Card first wrote Ender's Game as a short story in 1975. He submitted the work to a leading science fiction magazine, Analog, hoping to make some money to help pay his school debts. Not only did Analog publish the story, the 1977 World Science Fiction Convention nominated it for a Hugo Award and gave Card the John W. Campbell Award for best new writer. In 1985, the author developed Ender's Game into a novel, and it became the work which established his reputation as one of science fiction's most prominent new writers. This longer version swept both the Hugo and Nebula Awards, the most prestigious accolades given to science fiction and fantasy works. A favorite with readers, the novel has inspired three additional works featuring Ender Wiggin and his struggles to understand the universe.

Ender's Game follows the training of Andrew Ender Wiggin, a six-year-old genius who may be Earth's only hope for victory against an invasion of insectoid aliens. While most critics consider the plot elements of human-against-alien and the child-soldier to be science-fiction cliché, Card renders them new with his stress on the underlying themes of empathy, compassion, and moral intent. It is only Ender's ability to empathize with the buggers that enables him to overcome them, and the reader experiences his solitude, anguish, and remorse over his various victories. As a result, Michael Collings noted in the Fantasy Review, the novel succeed[s] equally as straightforward SF adventure and as [an] allegorical, analogical disquisition … on humanity, morality, salvation, and redemption.

Author Biography

Born to Willard and Peggy Card on August 24, 1951, Card grew up in Utah, where he was raised in the Mormon faith. When he was sixteen, he read Isaac Asimov's Foundation trilogy, which had a profound effect on his thinking about the future. The plot of Foundation implies that history repeats itself, regardless of the people involved or the specific situations that they encounter. Asimov softens this message through his idea that humans can learn these patterns and work to minimize the most harmful effects of change. Since Card's Mormon beliefs hold that people are basically good, he liked Asimov's notion that human beings are capable of overcoming adversity through self-improvement and cooperation. As a result of his thinking about Asimov's message, Card decided he wanted to write stories that would affect others in the positive way that Asimov's writing had affected him.

At the time, he focused on military topics. His brother served in the army, and Card had read Bruce Catton's three-volume Army of the Potomac. He learned from his reading that leadership makes the difference in an army's success. This led him to think about how future leaders would successfully train their armies, particularly for battles in space. His thinking led to his creation of the Battle Room in Ender's Game, where the children-warriors practice for three-dimensional warfare with three-dimensional games. The young Card had little experience writing, however, and the idea would remain undeveloped for almost ten years.

Card graduated from high school as a junior in 1968 and went on to study archaeology at Brigham Young University. He soon found he preferred writing plays to digging for artifacts and studied theater instead. After returning from