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Ender's Game [Book]

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    • Spoon
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    I'm not a reader, but since I was going on holiday and now have an ipad, I figured I would pick up a book and if I got bored while on the plane or in my hotel room, I'd try to read some of it.

    I didn't really have much hope of finishing the book on the holiday since I generally have never been able to justify the time to myself (even though instead I'd just watch a tv show or spend time mindlessly browsing the internet). Ender's Game was the book I decided to pick up for this purpose since I'd heard it recommended as peoples favourite book many times and the trailer for the upcoming movie looked fairly cool.

    Turned out I loved the book. Not only did I finish the book, but I also finished the sequel by the end of the holiday (I'll make another thread for that later).

    I'd like to know your thoughts on the book, your favourite parts and what you think will / won't / can't work in a movie adaptation of it.
    • Hanlol
    I haven't read the second book, but I intend to. I hear it's kinda a 'not actual sequel, but then kind of a sequel' thing.

    I absolutely LOVED the first one though. I loved Ender and his confusion with his thoughts about people and violence. The first scene with what's his face at the school was totally brutal, but it really did make sense logically.

    I found that every thought Ender had, was a logical but thoughtful one.

    The war was fucking awesome. Somehow I did not even see it coming until the actual scene when they were all cheering that he'd won the war.

    The actual end really saddened me, with the buggers being like "hey bro, just wanted to be friends". But really, it was quite peaceful.. after Ender killed everyone...

    Super awesome book, I'd recommend it to anyone and everyone.
    • Remedial
    Yeah awesome series, one of the few books where you read a 6 year old then 12 year old boy get brutally murdered and still come away thinking "yeah that made perfect logical sense, i could totally see myself doing that in the same situation

    if you like these you'll also like the bean saga, which follows bean on his return back to earth and subsequent wars that are eluded to in enders game, specially you hannah if you liked the war scenes in there, these books also left me thinking "yeah that's totally how i'd crush my enemies in a similar warlike situation"

    also if you want to continue liking them never ever google orson scott card homophobe, you really don't want to know all the disgustingly homophobic things that come out of the mouth of someone that writes so well about things like interspecies tolerance
    • Spoon
    I enjoyed the concept of the International Fleet right from the start where they're using the 'monitors' to gain insight into these children to see if they were worthy of being trained.

    The fact that the Battle Station had already been running for quite a few years made it seem like they'd really been working their way up to having anyone even nearly as capable as Ender get involved.

    The incident with Stilson was pretty good and the fact that you didn't learn till later that Stilson had died from it was pretty powerful. Bonzo was much the same.

    The Battle Room was an awesome concept and it was very cool learning about all the tactics as Ender discovered / developed them. I found the room itself quite hard to imagine though, so I'll be very interested to see how they do it in the movie. I imagined the flash suits to be much bulkier too than they appear in the movie trailer (so that each person is roughly the same sized target).

    Bean was a great character as it was like seeing Ender from Ender's perspective. Apparently one of the later books in the series is Bean's perspective of the same events and I'll be quite interested to get to that one. (Note: I wrote this before Rem posted, so I'm glad to hear there's more of them and they're good)

    Graff was pretty great the whole way through and I like the way he cared for Ender so much yet to Ender's face he appeared to not give a shit about him.

    When the old man appeared in his room, I was hoping that's the direction it was going, but when he actually said his name was Mazer Rackham I thought it was excellent. All the stuff about the relativistic travel was very cool too.

    I wasn't really expecting the voices on the other side of the simulation to be his former classmates since it sounded like they'd just set them all up as leaders in the Battle School armies etc, so that was pretty cool. Finally something that worked out in favour of making him happy.

    The ending was exactly what it needed to be and all of it was superb.
    • Tooheys
    I really liked this book. I picked it up after watching the movie trailer.
    Really changed the perspective around and made it quite easy to read. The battle station like Spoon said was fantastic, however I was able to imagine it quite easily. Some of the tactics were really good.
    There were parts of the book that felt a little rushed, almost like the author was impatient to get to the good part and I thought the end quite sad and I felt sorry for both Ender and the Buggers.
    I still need to read the rest of the series.
    • bladearts
    I shamefully haven't gotten around to reading it but I've read the comics which are fairly good.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ender's_Game_(comics)

    Definitely pick them up if you are into that and have a CBR reader on a tablet or your computer. Really enjoyable reads with some good art to set the story and visualize the concepts in the book. Nothing stellar in the art department but it's manageable. I liked the battle room scenes in it a lot.

    Now back to the book. Something I will have to pick up before the movie releases. If what I've heard is true it should be a great read.
    • Fork
    I finally smashed out the last part of this book last night, what an ending!

    It had a bit of everything for everyone, and pulled no punches on delivering some hard hitting shit. I agree that finding out Stilson and Bonzo died later in the book was played very well, as was the deceit at the end where he was fighting real battles instead of simulations with Mazer.

    At the very end when Ender got to the Giant's corpse / Worlds End and the interaction with the hive-queen it transcended into something different, something more.

    "The humans did not forgive us, she thought. We will surely die."

    That was bone chilling.

    I've already bought Speaker For The Dead and will start it during lunch today.

    Now I can watch the movie when a decent quality version comes out, and be disappointed and complain how it wasn't as good as the book. That said, I don't know how they can make a Hollywood version of Command School as they'll want to show us the real battles instead of just blips of light on a hologram. I assume they'll just make the hologram super realistic so that they can still have dogfights with explosions and shit to appeal to the masses. I think I'll stay out of the movie thread until I've seen it just in case they change something.
    • Hunterbob
    I read this a few weeks ago and chewed through it in a week of commuting and a couple of afternoons. I'm not a fast reader, but this was so engrossing. So many powerful scenes in the book and so well portrayed.

    I had figured out that at the end the battles were real when Mazer got tough on losses ...and I couldn't help but hunk "no fucking way is this the case..." (And yeah, how cool was the concept of relativistic travel?)

    He really managed to portray his characters so well for such a short novel, and it's this I think (tied with the great political analyses), which made it all so believable.

    A++ would definitely read again and sourcing the rest of the series.
    • Pakuz
    Remedial wrote:
    if you like these you'll also like the bean saga, which follows bean on his return back to earth and subsequent wars that are eluded to in enders game, specially you hannah if you liked the war scenes in there, these books also left me thinking "yeah that's totally how i'd crush my enemies in a similar warlike situation"


    I have to disagree on the Shadow/Bean Saga. While I loved Enders Game and Enders Shadow, the rest of the Shadow Saga (Shadow of the Hegemon, Shadow Puppets and Shadow of the Giant) get more mind numbingly boring with each one. While the general story of what happens to everyone in the jeesh is cool, there is way too much geography and politics (especially world politics, yuck) through the saga. To me the battle room and other technologies as well as them learning battle field tactics is what made Enders Game/Shadow so fun.
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