Ender's Game - spoiler-free review

Ender’s Game is so many people’s absolute favorite book, and for good reason. It’s well-written, well-paced and has something for every age of reader. As a kind you might gravitate to the action and the cool zero-gravity games. As a teen you might relate more to Ender’s struggles with his family and with growing up and having new responsibilities thrust on him. And as an adult you’re probably going to find the psychological and ethical angles of the book most fascinating. This is why Ender’s Game is one of the very few books the I’ve reread.

Ender’s Game follows Ender, a little boy from Earth who gets sent to a Battle School, a school in space where kids barely study regular subjects and instead devote their time to a sport that’s played in a giant, zero-gravity room. Two armies of children armed with laser guns battle each other for points, prestige and the skills necessary to move on to Command School where they’re trained to command fleets of space ships, all in preparation for the next alien invasion. Earth was almost destroyed the first time the aliens came, and the humans don’t want to see that disaster happen again.

Ender’s Game is a very digestible sci-fi novel, even if you’re not a fan of the genre. It has action, memorable characters, heart-warming relationships and a main character who is frighteningly, fascinatingly brilliant. I love reading stories from the perspective of someone way smarter than me, and I’m always impressed by the authors who can pull off smart characters.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Left Hand of Darkness - spoiler review

I didn’t like The Left Hand of Darkness. I wish I did. I badly wanted to. But when I compare the fascinating sci-fi concepts and the cool setting (pun intended) to the plot, the plot doesn’t live up to the potential. I expected Le Guin to blow me away with a riveting story, but instead I got political intrigue and a dull and lengthy escape across a glacier. Here’s the premise: In the far future there is a collection of planets that form an alliance called The Hundred Worlds. A man names Genly travels from one of these worlds to a cold, ice-covered planet named Winter that isn’t part of the alliance. His job is to convince the inhabitants of Winter to join The Hundred Worlds, but the inhabitants are very skeptical and old fashioned. They’ve never had a visitor come from space before, and they don’t even really believe that Genly came from space at all… except that Genly, unlike everyone else on Winter, is male, a person who always displays the physical characteristics of a man. This blo
Read more

House of Suns by Alastair Reynolds - spoiler-free review

If you want a one-line review, here it is: House of Suns is like We Are Legion (We Are Bob) ... just way more exciting. House of Suns is technically a hard sci-fi space opera. Technically. But that generic description doesn’t do this galactic murder mystery justice. Let’s start with the premise. Six million years before the story’s main plot, Abigail Gentian created 1000 clones (aka, “shatterlings”) of herself and sent them out across the galaxy. Every once in a while (say, a couple hundred thousand years) the shatterlings reunite and exchange memories from their adventures in space. But at the latest reunion, the Gentian Line is ambushed. Most of the shatterlings are killed. And that’s where House of Suns begins. The book follows two plot lines, one about the shatterlings and how they search out answers and revenge and one about Abigail Gentian and her story up until she cloned herself. Alastair Reynolds did an awesome job balancing action, interesting characters and a mysterious plo
Read more