An Endnote for Ender’s Game: A Brief Refresher (or Spoiler!)
*This is an extended footnote for an upcoming opinion piece about the power of narrative, the need for innovation “case stories,” and how we read fiction for the wrong reasons.
A century or so from now, the nations of Earth agree to a global defense effort after barely surviving an attack by an extraterrestrial species. The world’s brightest children are selected for training, mostly because of the mental agility and malleability associated with youth. The central character, Ender Wiggins, is one of those selected for the opportunity to attend Battle School. He immediately applies his unique perspectives to both the tactical training and to the strategic rationale behind them. As the staff accelerates his formal and informal trials, Ender consistently demonstrates his aptitude for playing both within the rules of the training games and with the rules of those games.
He graduates early and leaves for Command School, located at a forward deployed base. This time the game is a simulator in which Ender, as fleet commander, must exercise strategic management of his forces. As the scenarios grow more complicated, he continues to succeed through a creative tension of aggression and empathy. Still, Ender struggles with the responsibility he is being prepared for, and against the unrelenting mental, physical, and emotional stress of the training. He is tormented by dreams in which he neither harms nor hates the enemy civilization. By the time the final exam begins, his frustration motivates Ender to once again challenge the conventional rules. He directs his entire fleet into a suicide attack that succeeds in destroying the opponent’s home planet and their entire population with it.
The simulation ends and only then does Ender learn that it was not a game at all. He has been directing, like some sort of super “drone” pilot, actual operations. The weight of the situation overwhelms Ender. Not only did he sacrifice his own forces, but he unwittingly became the “ender” to an entire species.
The novel culminates with Ender embarking on an interstellar effort to colonize the enemy’s vacated worlds. Beneath the surface, however, this final act of heroic innovation is a radical plan to resurrect the enemy’s population. His dreams, it turns out, were their attempts to communicate directly to Ender and seek a peaceful coexistence. Realizing their impending defeat, their leader leaves Ender an opportunity to make amends: hidden on a distant planet is a cocoon capable of reviving the vanquished civilization. While he searches for a fertile place to plant the seed of the species he destroyed, he becomes the “speaker for the dead,” telling their side of the story. Card ends the book with the insinuation that this new mission, thanks to a liberal adaptation of special relativity, is essentially indefinite.
So, what is there to learn from this story? If you want my long answer, here’s a monograph. If you want the short answer, I’ll put a link HERE when it is published.
