I promised this a while ago so here’s my book review of Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card. I also added a link to this book on my resources page. You can find lots more useful stuff there that I both like and use personally, so check it out if you like.

 

Introduction

Before I start, there are a couple things I need to mention. First of all, I listened to the audio version and it was pretty good. If you prefer audio over paper or e-books, you’ll probably like this one too as the production quality is great. The added benefit is that you get an extra piece spoken by the author himself, explaining why he wrote the book, why he refused so many movie deals and more. Well worth it and partly the reason why I write this review.

Second, this is a relatively old book as it was first published as a novel in 1985. This shows in certain regards and apparently, the author updated the book in 1991 to make it more relevant to modern times.  But don’t let this stop you from reading it; there’s nothing in the book that is too closely related to the past that it might hinder the story. On the contrary, in many ways it is still relevant today, perhaps even more so than back then. I won’t go into that here to avoid spoilers.

Third, this is a science-fiction book. If you’re a fan of the genre, you’ll already know about it as it’s one of the classics. If you’re not, consider it anyway. The sci-fi stuff is done well and also not as intrusive as in other books. Once you accept the basic premise, you don’t have to do lots of leaps of the imagination to follow the story. Some authors mess up in this genre, thinking they can get  away with anything. Orson Scott Card didn’t, he got it right and placed the characters, their motivations and thinking, their evolution from children into warriors, all this comes first. So don’t let the genre scare you off either.

 

That said, a quick word about the story:

Ender Wiggin is born sometime in our future in an Earth at war: humankind has started exploring the universe and encountered an alien race that attacked them, starting a series of wars. Earth cleans up it’s act and starts working together on a global scale to avoid being annihilated. They set up a special program to find the brightest children and send these off to military school in the hopes of finding the one who can lead them to victory.

Ender is one of those children and the book follows him on his journey. I can’t really say more without giving too much away so I’ll leave it at that.

 

The relevance to self-defense training

Like I mentioned in my post about The Walking Dead and Self-Defense, I like to use examples from movies to illustrate concepts that are valuable in real life. To a degree, you can do the same things with books with the only real difficulty being the need for the other person to actually read the whole book. As this takes a lot longer than watching a movie, I can’t always convince people to do so. No big deal, I just have to find another movie reference then…

Anyway, why am I so enthusiastic about this book? [Read more…]