Orson Scott Card - Enders Game

It makes me a little uncomfortable, writing an introduction to Enders Game. After all, the book has been in print for six years now, and in all that time, nobody has ever written to me to say, You know, Enders Game was a pretty good book, but you know what it really needs? An introduction! And yet when a novel goes back to print for a new hardcover edition, there ought to be something new in it to mark the occasion (something be-sides the minor changes as I fix the errors and internal contradictions and stylistic excesses that have bothered me ever since the novel first appeared). So be assuredthe novel stands on its own, and if you skip this intro and go straight to the story, I not only wont stand in your way, Ill even agree with you!

The novelet Enders Game was my first published science fiction. It was based on an ideathe Battle Roomthat came to me when I was six-teen years old. I had just read Isaac Asimovs Foundation trilogy, which was (more or less) an extrapolation of the ideas in Gibbons Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, applied to a galaxy-wide empire in some far future time.

The novel set me, not to dreaming, but to thinking, which is Asimovs most extraordinary ability as a fiction writer. What would the future be like? How would things change? What would remain the same? The premise of Foundation seemed to be that even though you might change the props and the actors, the play of human history is always the same. And yet that fundamentally pessimistic premise (you mean well never change?) was tern-pered by Asimovs idea of a group of human beings who, not through genetic change, but through learned skills, are able to understand and heal the minds of other people.

It was an idea that rang true with me, perhaps in part because of my Mormon upbringing and beliefs: Human beings may be miserable specimens, in the main, but we can learn, and, through learning, become decent people.

Those were some of the ideas that played through my mind as I read Foundation, curled on my beda thin mattress on a slab of plywood, a bed my father had made for mein my basement bedroom in our little rambler on 650 East in Orem, Utah. And then, as so many science fiction readers have done over the years, I felt a strong desire to write stories that would do for others what Asimovs story had done for me.

In other genres, that desire is usually expressed by producing thinly veiled rewrites of the great work: Tolkiens disciples far too often simply rewrite Tolkien, for example. In science fiction, however, the whole point is that the ideas are fresh and startling and intriguing; you imitate the great ones, not by rewriting their stories, but rather by creating stories that are just as startling and new.

But new in what way? Asimov was a scientist, and approached every field of human knowledge in a scientific mannerassimilating data, combining it in new and startling ways, thinking through the implications of each new idea. I was no scientist, and unlikely ever to be one, at least not a real scientistnot a physicist, not a chemist, not a biologist, not even an engineer. I had no gift for mathematics and no great love for it, either. Though I relished the study of logic and languages, and virtually inhaled histories and biographies, it never occurred to me at the time that these were just as valid sources of science fiction stories as astronomy or quantum mechanics.

How, then, could I possibly come up with a science fiction idea? What did / actually know about anything?

At that time my older brother Bill was in the army, stationed at Fort Douglas in Salt Lake City; he was nursing a hip-to-heel cast from a bike-riding accident, however, and came home on weekends. It was then that he had met his future wife, Laura Dene Low, while attending a church meeting on the BYU campus; and it was Laura who gave me Foundation to read. Perhaps, then, it was natural for my thoughts to turn to things military.

To me, though, the military didnt mean the Vietnam War, which was then nearing its peak of American involvement. I had no experience of that, except for Bills stories of the miserable life in basic training, the humiliation of officers candidate school, and his lonely but in many ways successful life as a noncom in Korea. Far more deeply rooted in my mind was my experience, five or six years earlier, of reading Bruce Cattons three-volume Army of the Potomac. I remembered so well the stories of the commanders in that warthe struggle to find a Union general capable of using McClellans magnificent army to defeat Lee and Jackson and Stuart, and then, finally, Grant, who brought death to far too many of his soldiers, but also made their deaths mean something, by grinding away at Lee, keeping him from dancing and maneuvering out of reach. It was because of Cattons history that I had stopped enjoying chess, and had to revise the rules of