Read it damn near 20 years ago, and it was...OK. Not bad, not great. I don't regret reading it, but I've read better. I read the original short story a few years ago & it was better than the novel.
You're still stuck on "Dick and Jane", then?
Oh, now you remember reading it?
Frankly, if you thought that was a good book, it explains much. Creepy protagonist who has an incestuous crush on his sister. Two dimensional characters. Oh, yeah, and the "hero" commits genocide at the end of the book.
It's the story of a young boy who was dreadfully abused by the grown-ups who wanted to mold him into an exemplary citizen. Forced to suppress his own emotions in order to avoid being paralyzed by trauma, he directed his energy into duty rather than sex or love. In time, he came to believe that his primary duty was to wipe out a species of gifted but incomprehensible aliens who had devastated his kind in a previous war. He found the idea of exterminating an entire race distasteful, of course. But since he believed it was required to save the people he defined as human, he put the entire weight of his formidable energy behind the effort to wipe out the aliens.
You've read it, you say? It's Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card, right?
Wrong. The aliens I'm talking about were the European Jews, blamed by many Germans for gearing up World War I for their own profit. The book is Robert G. L. Waite's The Psychopathic God: Adolf Hilter.
I don't know of any pair of novels that have been as consistently misinterpreted as Card's Ender's Game and Speaker for the Dead. Even a reader with a rudimentary knowledge of twentieth century history might be expected to guess that the character of Ender Wiggin, the near messianic superhero, is based on that of Adolf Hitler. Card himself is the "Speaker for the Dead" who seeks to understand and forgive the genocidal dictator's behavior by demonstrating that his intentions were good. Because Hitler/Ender committed genocide to preserve the existence and dignity of what he defined as human, he is not a monster but a true Superman who willingly shouldered the heavy responsibility thrust upon him.
Peachfront Speaks
I seem to recall reading about many comparisons made between The Lord of the Rings and Hitler/Nazis/WWII.....and then reading quotes by Tolkein in which he denied that was the case. Yet the comparisons continued.
My point is that sometimes, a story is just a story. It doesn't need to have any profound correlations or be an analogy for something else. It can just be a story!
I have no idea if Card meant to write Ender as a Hitler analogy. I read the book once, wasn't all that impressed, and that's the extent of my Orson Scott Card knowledge. I'll probably watch the movie, because it's a well-budgeted sci-fi movie, and the book is widely considered a classic of the genre.
