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Ender Wiggin was the smartest (and youngest) soldier in battle school, and also becoming the best soldier the world has ever seen, rapidly advancing through school, both in class and the games. The games are training devices, used to see the strategy the soldiers use, to see which ones to advance to Tactical or Command schools. The games are in null gravity and they would be like paintball is now, except when you get hit, you are frozen. Ender wins all of his games when he is commander. When Ender becomes commander, however, they (the school administration) start changing the game, less and less to Ender’s favour every time. First giving him a team with all “launchies” (launchies are kids who just arrive in battle school) then giving them games after only a few weeks of training, when they normally give teams months to train then a game every week. After such an early start into the games, they started giving him games once a day, then twice a day and it was wearing Ender out tremendously. Throughout all of the games, although, Ender won every one of them, they were making history. Soon after that, they transferred Ender to command school, and every other commander for that matter, Ender knew the war was coming soon, and that they were running out of time. Ender went through quite a bit of training at command school, being taught by the hero from the last formic war, Mazer Rackham. By this time Ender was about twice the age of when he arrived in space. In command school, they put Ender on a machine where he had to command numerous fleets. Each fleet had a sub-commander; each one was one of his friends from battle school, the best of the best, the ones that respected Ender. They were doing great as a team, beating every simulation Rackham threw at them, but some people broke under pressure. Even Ender broke at one point, but his back-up was the one person that could possibly be better than Ender, but was found too late. It was Bean, smartest child, but younger and smaller than Ender, he was found on the streets. Bean covered for Ender while he was out, he was out for awhile. But when Ender returned, things went as they were before, Ender having a little more energy than before. Finally there was a situation in which Ender could not find a way out. He thought of the stupidest plan to get out of it, having been fed up with this school, not caring about one thing anymore. It worked though, he won. He wanted all the teachers to be angry with him, for not doing things how they wanted him to do it, but they were ecstatic. They knew what Ender didn’t. Ender had been fighting the war all the time, these weren’t simulations, this was the war, and he had won it. They hadn’t told him because they knew he wouldn’t send real men in to fight, he wouldn’t want them to die. The book ends with all the children going back to earth (eventually fighting in the League War). All the children except for Ender, who is reunited with his beloved sister, Valentine, and they colonize Formic planets. Ender then writes a book called ‘Speaker for the Dead’ in which he writes about what the formics really wanted. He wrote the book without anybody knowing who wrote it, except for his brother, Peter, who is a leader on earth. Ender was definitely a hero in this book. Also, in the parallel novel to Ender’s Game, Ender’s Shadow, there is the boy named Bean, the one that is smarter and better than Ender. That book tells Bean’s story, making him seem like a much bigger hero. |
