perelgut@utai.UUCP (Stephen Perelgut) (12/29/85)
Ender's Game Orson Scott Card Tor, 1985 (paperback) This is the novelization of one of the best short stories ever written. If you loved the story, you'll like the book. If you haven't read the story (shame on you), go buy this book. But if you didn't really like the story, go back wherever you came from without bothering with the book. The basic plot is that Earth has to defeat evil aliens who have almost destroyed humanity in the past. To do this, the take promising children and train them almost from birth to be soldiers. Ender is the most promising of the lot. The training and battle scenes are every movie car-chase scene rolled into one, and you get lots of them. Well, that's not quite right, but they're gripping. The real story deals with "do the ends justify the means". Since we (the "good guys") win, the answer in the short story is an unqualified yes. The book adds a subplot (unimportant and usually ignored), and lots of background and a new moral at the end: "the bad guys aren't so bad, just misunderstood". A few scenes have been changed, but I can't figure out why. Nothing major or really shocking. On my scale of -4 to +4, I'd give this book a +2. (The short story gets a +4). Very little that was added turned out to be worth a heck of a lot. It's nice to know what became of Ender, and where he came from, but the mystical ending is tripe. Either Card is losing it (which I won't believe) or he just slammed together a few hundred random words. -- Stephen Perelgut Computer Systems Research Institute, University of Toronto