In 1985 and 1986, Orson Scott Card won the Nebula and Hugo Awards, respectively, for his groundbreaking novel Ender’s Game. Originally published as a short story in Analog Magazine (August 1977), Ender’s Game tells the story of Andrew Wiggin (a.k.a. “Ender”), a six-year old boy conscripted into military training, along with dozens of other child geniuses, to defend Earth from a horrifying alien race that no one alive has ever seen.

The novel follows Ender as he navigates the puzzling, cruel and unfair world created by the Battle School teachers and the other children to complete his military training and assume the responsibility he has been shaped for, by learning to out-bully his enemies, outsmart his teachers, and think like the aliens he is being raised to kill.

Ender’s Game, the Novel: A Modern Classic

Ender’s Game is science fiction with a tough, enjoyable core of psychology and ethical dilemmas. The most intriguing aspect of this novel is not the clichéd concept - brilliant child is selected by authority figures and grows up to save the world - but the startling tweaks in that concept and the details through which Orson Scott Card presents Ender’s isolation, his inner turmoil, and the extremes to which a young boy is forced in the name of what is “good.”