Ender’s Game Review: Popular Science Fiction
Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game is definitely a science fiction classic. The story takes place in the distant future, when a six-year-old boy like the novel’s protagonist, Ande, is mature and smart enough to attend a military school and fight to save humanity on Earth. At that time, mankind was facing an unprecedented crisis.
The unreasonable Zerg fleet was about to launch the next round of deadly attacks on Earth. The Earth United Fleet must select a person who is worthy of the mission to lead the Earth’s army to defeat the enemy before the Zerg attack. Six-year-old Ender was selected by the military and sent to combat school for brutal training so that he could become a fleet commander with courage and resourcefulness enough to lead Earth’s army.
Fortunately, Ender was a genius, he managed to withstand all kinds of man-made and unexpected tests, did everything well, and eventually became the hero of the earth, leading the fleet to successfully eliminate the Zerg, saving mankind. During this process, Graf, the instructor of Ender’s combat school, always tried every means to test Ender’s limits, and even made him face the test of life and death again and again!
However, this novel is not just a hilarious sci-fi story as some people say. The real intriguing and enlightening aspect of this novel is that it is also an inspirational novel, which is wonderfully performed for us. The whole process of a boy growing into a real man. It can be seen that the author Orson has a lot of research on psychology, and in fact, he uses the relevant principles of psychology to construct complex allegorical plots in the novel.
The training of the combat school is for purely military needs. In order to succeed in this kind of training, Ender is not directly facing the enemies of the Zerg, nor the computers and machines, but the partners and comrades around him. Unite the majority of your friends and fight back against the few enemies, first in relationships, and then at the top of your career.
Ender has excellent leadership ability and strong creative thinking ability. Although the instructors embarrassed him in order to test his ability, and fate played tricks on him from time to time, he and his team were always able to achieve the final victory. The methods and strategies he used in the combat school, and the abilities he had developed, could also be applied in his final battle against the Zerg as the commander of the Earth Fleet.
In the command room of the Earth Fleet, Ender, as if he were commanding his subordinates in a combat school, successfully eliminated all the enemies in a straightforward manner. When the officers cheered the victory, he was told that what he had done was not an exercise, but a decisive battle and that he had successfully led the Earth Fleet to victory.
This storyline is not only symbolic but also practical.
Psychologists have long noticed that children’s play is an important part of the development of a person’s personality and ability, not just a waste of time in the pursuit of happiness, those children who play regularly with children of the same age or other people — this It is even suitable for adults whose personality is generally stereotyped.
Being able to subtly learn the basic principles of dealing with people and doing things during the game can ensure that they can adapt to society better than those who do not like to play games. Children’s games and adults’ social competitions do have a certain degree of similarity. Children first learn how to get along with others in games, and then they can face the waves and storms of the adult world.
In a way, this book is written for boys who are slightly inferior or weak — of course, children are always inferior and weak relative to the adult world, so anyone can also learn from Ender to find his own shadow. The novel sets out the life dilemmas that most young children inevitably face — how to fight your bully, how to break out of isolation, how to turn enemies into friends, how to deal with unruly people, how to Deal with people who are higher than themselves and deliberately embarrassing themselves, how to organize their own small groups, etc., and then use the method of letting Ender speak out, telling the strategies and methods of how to concretely act in the face of the above problems.
For example, when Ender’s former battle captain Bonzo, out of jealousy and resentment, contacted some people to try to kill Ender in the bathroom while Ender was alone, the naked Ender rationally analyzed the situation and thought that the winner was The key is to defeat the leader of the opponent first. He used Bonzo’s vanity to force Bonzo to take on himself one-on-one, turning the enemy’s advantage into an even match. He pretended to show weakness and made a sneak attack, completely defeated Bonzo, and successfully escaped in the chaos.
However, the novel does not attempt to lead the reader to become a dehumanizing Machiavellian cynic. In the novel, Ender brutally defeats many of his opponents with tit-for-tat violence, even causing the deaths of his two children, but Ender remains Feeling sad about his actions, he didn’t want to hurt anyone, but people always hurt him intentionally or unintentionally, and he was forced to fight back against his opponent only when he was forced to do so.
But the instructors found that he could never beat one man, and that was his older brother Peter. Peter is a wicked and ambitious child. He is brooding about giving up himself for the combined fleet and choosing to cultivate Ender. Because of jealousy, he even wanted to kill Ender at one time, and he often bullied Ender at ordinary times. Why can’t Ender do anything to Peter? In Ender’s own words, he didn’t want to beat Peter, he wanted Peter to like him. Ender has always been full of attachment to his sister Valentine.
In his opinion, a rationale for fighting the Zerg is to not let his sister be harmed by the evil Zerg. When the Zerg was wiped out, the sympathetic Ender even communicated with the ghost of the Zerg Queen and promised to help the Zerg resurrect at an appropriate time and place. And the Zerg Queen trusted Ender precisely because she knew that he was a benevolent child.
Yes, living in an imperfect and imperfect world, we must always use means, even cruel means, to protect ourselves and our loved ones from harm, but you should not forget that the starting point of everything we do is not out of hate but out of love.
