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fandomhigh_ooc2008-11-10 05:08 pm
endsthegame) wrote in fandomhigh_ooc2008-11-10 05:08 pm
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Spotlight on Fandoms: Ender's Game
Sorry this is late! I was tuckered out from driving yesterday, alas alas. But here we go! Spotlight on Ender's Game, guys.
---
"I've watched through his eyes, I've listened through his ears, and I tell you he's the one. Or at least as close as we're going to get."
Ender's Game is considered one of the great sci-fi novels of modern times (and chances are a good chunk of you folks has already read it). Written by Orson Scott Card, it spawned many, many (generally bad) sequels, a parallel novel called Ender's Shadow, and a lot of essays on the somewhat freaky morality of one mr. Card as displayed in the book. I'm not going to go into the sequels here, and I'm only going to gently brush over Ender's Shadow-- a book which also spawned its own line of sequels.
Let's just say that in my opinion, beyond arguably Speaker for the Dead, they're only worth reading if you want to know how much drugs Orson started doing after his books started selling.
The many, many drugs.
Anyway! SPOILERS BELOW, OH EM GEE.
Let's start with the main plot. And the subplot. Or: Len gets very TL;DR, again.
If Ender's Game had been pitched high-concept style, it would have sounded a little like this: 'Six-year-old boy gets psychologically tortured into saving humankind by destroying another species.' However, that would barely even pay lip service to the book. It has a very clear main plot with a very clear subplot-- the machinations of Ender's siblings, Peter and Valentine-- but in the end, it mostly hinges on careful character development.
---
SPOILERS START HERE BIGTIME.
---
The main plot of the book is told almost entirely from Ender's point of view, and starts when he's only six years old. They're removing the monitor that he's had in his brain since he was born: the monitor that allowed careful military watchers to judge whether or not he's ready to go to Battle School, the main training facility of the UFF. Earth has lived through two grueling wars with an alien race called the Buggers, and it's running out of space AND good military commanders. Population laws have been put into place, and religion, classically somewhat of a promoter of procreation, is largely surpressed. Everyone lives in fear of another Bugger War, one that humanity might not be able to win, and so the military is recruiting younger and younger.
Families are only allowed to have two children, but Ender is that most monstrous of things: a Third. The government quite literally commissioned him, as his parents are perfect breeding stock for the little military geniuses they're looking for. Ender's brother Peter was too ruthless, and his sister Valentine was too kind, and so they asked for another one who might be a blend of both. Ender is their last attempt at wrangling the perfect genius out of the Wiggin family, and as it turns out, he succeeds magnificently.
After the military removes Ender's monitor, he doesn't hear from them again. He assumes he's been cast off as well, and that leaves him a Third alone, a constant prey for the bullies who see him as an abomination. When he goes to school one day, they're waiting for him, ready to beat him into an inch of his life, and Ender, the little genius, realises one thing: the only way to make this stop is to utterly beat the bullies decisively today.
He stands, and he fights, and in the process, he kills another boy his age, Stilson. The next day, military officials show up at his home to tell him that he passed his last test and he's to go to Battle School.
And that's where it really begins. As of day one, Ender is constantly isolated, thrown curveballs, promoted just as soon as he's actually made friends. Soon enough, he finds himself promoted out of the newbie classes and into one of the armies, the ones that play the zero-gravity Battle Room game that determines social status within the school. In Battle School, nothing is more important than the game. And while Ender is underestimated and cast aside as a newbie, far too young to already be in an army, he learns very, very quickly. He begins to excel.
Still several years younger than any other boy commanding an army, Ender finds himself put in charge of Dragon Army. He's given no seemingly excellent soldiers, just newbies and cast-offs, but he pulls them together into an army that can beat anyone. Something's still rotten, though. Ender's army gets games too quickly, and too frequently. Slowly but surely, the officials in charge of Battle School start to stack things against him, giving his opponents extra advantages. He still wins, but it's beginning to drain him. Ender won't go into a game without winning it, feels that he can't. He has to be the best. His army has to be the best, or they won't be good enough to beat the Buggers later.
But since the game is so important to the kids in Battle School, many have started to resent him. Chief amongst them is Bonzo Madrid, Ender's first commander, who, as Dink Meeker puts it, has 'an advanced case of Spanish pride'. After several hit-or-misses, Bonzo finally drums up a whole squad of bullies to gang up on Ender as he's coming out of the shower, naked and alone. Ender, being Ender, sees that the only option is to, once again, strike a decisive blow that will keep Bonzo from ever thinking about attacking him again. He tricks Bonzo, who's bigger and stronger than him, into fighting him alone, and winds up killing him.
Needless to say, Ender's a complete mess afterwards. He won't eat, he can't sleep, and he's finally come to the realisation that he is utterly alone. When it comes down to it, no one will save him but himself.
Only hours after Bonzo's death, Ender gets one last game. He doesn't care anymore, not about winning, not about anything, but he decides to tackle it so he can go out in style. The game is stacked against him utterly: two armies opposing his one, his side of the room is cluttered with debris so he can't see, and theirs is fully open with enough cover not to get hurt. In an utterly suicidal move, he sends his entire army straight at the opponents-- except for five people, who stealthily skip through the goal in the confusion, pass through it, and end the game. Winning it on a technicality.
Ender's pretty much dead to the world afterwards, so they promote him. Up to Command School, where students aren't supposed to go until they're at least 16.
Ender is 10 at the time. The military has to drag his sister in to talk him into it.
Of course, Command School has another game, an even more draining game, one played on simulators with several of his best friends from Battle School as his underlings. He keeps winning. It wears him out worse than the Battle School games. The last game, the graduating game, is as impossible as his last one in Battle School, staging a battle around a planet where he's hopelessly outnumbered, and he decides to give up. He doesn't want to do this. He'll show them all how impossibly ruthless and not a good person he is, so they won't force him to command any armies in the actual war.
And so he orders his commanders to blow up the entire planet rather than deal with the fleet surrounding it.
Imagine his surprise when he finds out that every battle in Command School was real, and he just performed an xenocide of epic proportions.
The result? An equally epic emocoma, and, after that passes, Ender's guild-ridden escape from anything related to Earth along with his sister Valentine. He finds the last surviving Bugger Queen, and decides to travel the universe until he brings her a new home.
---
On the other side of things, we have the subplot. Valentine and Peter, Ender's siblings, might not have been a good fit for Battle School, but they're both just as brilliant in their own ways. Valentine's empathy allows her to see everything people love about themselves, flatter them endlessly, and thus gain her favour. Peter's ruthless grasp of the psyche allows him to play off people's fears, to intimidate them and blackmail them. Peter likes power, and he likes it a lot.
The only thing keeping the world government together is the Bugger War. Peter knows that once that ends, all the old squabbles will come back to the surface, and a huge war might start. When he's twelve, he decides that he'd much rather see the world stay united. Under him, of course. To do that, he needs a plan, and he needs a way to get his name out. He talks (or threatens) Valentine into going along with it, and together, they start to set up fake identities on the internet. Throw-aways at first, to learn how people talk to each other in ways that get reactions, but eventually, they establish themselves, Valentine as Demosthenes, and Peter as Locke. The hawk and the dove-- Peter tells Valentine what Demosthenes, the populist warmonger, would think, and Valentine tells Peter what Locke, the rational peacebringer, would. Tossed through their individual filters, the result is spectacular.
Demosthenes' nationalistic, anti-Russian propaganda turns out to be a big hit amongst the people. Valentine finds, to her shock and disgust, that even her father starts to quote Demosthenes' work at the dinner table. Demosthenes manages to sweep the mob up into a frenzy over whatever (s)he mentions that week; meanwhile, Locke's well-considered messages of peace become popular with the intelligentsia, who begin to point to him as the one example that all sense isn't dead in the world.
When Ender ends the Bugger War, Peter sees his chance. Just as Earth jumps happily into a war, he proposes a peace treaty through Locke. Valentine has Demosthenes toss his/her weight behind it. The mob follows. The treaty is passed, and the Earth continues on with a fragile peace.
Valentine flees the planet to go spend the next decades of her life with the brother she can stand; Peter, as we find over the course of the Ender's Shadow series, efficiently moves himself into place as Hegemon of the World with the help of some of Ender's fellow Battle School graduates.
And advance to the characters. Hopefully less tl;dr.
For the sake of keeping this brief, I won't namedrop every character in the book, or we could be here for a while...
Battle School
Andrew 'Ender' Wiggin
"I don't care if I follow your rules. If you can cheat, so can I. I won't let you beat me unfairly — I'll beat you unfairly first."
The hero of the book, if there is such a thing. Like all the Wiggin children, Ender is fiendishly clever, ambitious, and observant. Although he's a brilliant tactician, his real talent lies in his ability to bring people together, to create loyalties and well-functioning hierarchies. Unlike most kids in Battle School, he has his eyes set more on making everyone better (so they can win the war) than on hoarding glory or taking credit, and the kids quickly pick up on that-- making him both the most beloved and the most hated person in the school.
He's serious, focused, and very emphatic, but the manipulative efforts of the people in charge of his life wind up making him angry, withdrawn and paranoid, too. He's capable of bantering with the rest of the boys, but with time, the distance between him and them becomes so great that he ceases being able to really fit in with anybody again.
He's perfect for the job of commander because he's both ruthless and kind, but it's this combination that also does him in by the end. He never quite gets over his murder of Stilson, Bonzo, and the Buggers, and by the end of the book, and into its sequels, it's that guilt and sense of responsibility that drives him.
Julian 'Bean' Delphiki
"Bean was a soldier, and if anyone had asked him what he wanted to be when he grew up, he wouldn't have known what they meant."
Bean is the closest thing to a confidante Ender has in the book. He, too, is one of the tiny geniuses from Battle School. The tiniest, in fact, which is what earned him the nickname-- but despite his size, he's the cleverest person in school, and second only to Ender as a commander because he lacks Ender's innate empathy.
While Bean makes several appearances in Ender's Game, he later went on to star as the titular Ender's Shadow, which followed the events of Ender's Game from his perspective. Bean has a huge intellect, but his is cold, calculated towards curiosity, and entirely wrapped up in the art of battle. It's only with the constant challenge of Ender, always just a step ahead of him, that he begins to learn to care a little bit. Later, he'll become Strategos, commander of Peter's military forces, but in Ender's Game, he's Ender's flexibly-thinking ace in the hole.
Alai
"Salaam, pinprick."
Alai is one of Ender's first friends in Battle School. When another boy called Bernard tries to take control of their launch (newbie) group, Ender rebels, splitting the group up in two. After a while, Ender realises that that's a very bad situation for a group to be in if they're going to work together. He reaches out to someone in Bernard's group, Alai-- and Alai becomes the glue that puts the launch group back together again.
Alai is really one of the boys, jocular and snarky, but he carries the weight of his (muslim) religion with him still. He gives Ender the strength to go on with a kiss on the cheek and an uttering of the word 'Salaam', which has a profound impact on the boy. However, after Ender gets promoted to the armies, he doesn't see much of Alai again until he goes to Command School.
Petra Arkanian
"Come, little boy. The battle room is ready. Petra's hands are steady. The enemy is deadly. Petra the poet, they call me."
"They also say you're crazy as a loon."
"Better believe it, baby butt."
Petra is the one girl of the group. She's toughened up to deal with that fact, earning herself a reputation as being crazier than most of the guys. She's also the best shot, possibly even in the entire school, and she's the one who teaches Ender to shoot. They meet when Ender makes the colossal beginner's mistake (in his opinion) of becoming friends with the outcast of his first army, while his commander hates him.
Eventually, Petra becomes one of Ender's staunchest supporters, and one of his most trusted commanders. As a result, he puts too much pressure on her when they're doing battle in Command School-- she winds up breaking down, adding to Ender's guilt and teaching him an important lesson about overworking his people.
Dink Meeker
"I'm not going to let the bastards ruin me, Ender."
Ender's platoon leader in his second army. Dink takes Ender in when nobody else will. He leads the one platoon in Rat Army that actually gets things done, making him personally responsible for the success of that army. He's the one who's most suspicious of the teachers leading the school and their plans, and who frequently warns Ender about them.
Dink's a good guy. A little naive, in his paranoid way, but he always wants what's best for everyone. He's just not quite socially gifted enough to know when it's good to mention things and when it isn't, putting Ender in a few nasty spots.
Bonzo Madrid
"Nobody hates like Bonzo."
Ender's first commander, the leader of Salamander Army. He has a big case of Spanish pride, and runs his army accordingly. Nothing is more important to him than discipline, and people doing things exactly like he wants them. When Ender starts disobeying orders that he feels are stupid, he comes into conflict with Bonzo. As Ender rises in the charts with his own army, Bonzo becomes angrier and angrier, eventually getting pissed enough to make an attempt on his life.
Instead, Ender skillfully uses his pride against him, maneuvers Bonzo into a one-on-one fight, and then slams the cartilage of his nose back into his... well, let's just say Bonzo winds up very dead at the end of it.
Colonel Graff
"I'll lie to him."
"And if that doesn't work?"
"Then I'll tell the truth. We're allowed to do that, in emergencies. We can't plan for everything, you know."
The man who tracked the Wiggins for a long time, got Ender into Battle School, was responsible for most of the manipulations directed towards him, and just basically fucked up Ender's life for the sake of the world. He eats when he gets stressed, and he's got the Nuremberg defense all lined up for when the public starts asking questions about everything they did to Ender.
Earth
Valentine 'Demosthenes' Wiggin
"Nobody controls his own life, Ender. The best you can do is choose to be controlled by good people, by people who love you."
Ender's sister, older than him by two years. She shares her brother Peter's lust for power, but at the same time, she has a kindness that's absent in him. Like the other Wiggin children, she's very much socially and intellectually gifted, and her 'knack' in that respect is being able to figure out what people like most about themselves, and flatter them endlessly to get what she wants. Val is very, very perceptive, and a little snarky in her own way. She succesfully managed to sweep up the masses with her Demosthenes character, even though Demosthenes was spouting Peter's viewpoints and not her own, and it made her more pragmatic than she already was.
When it comes down to it, Ender is the sibling she loves the most-- but she spends most of the book still on Earth, with her other brother who she kind of fears and hates, even though he grows on her. She comes back for Ender a couple of times throughout the book, and at the end, blackmails Peter into letting her and Ender flee into space. Far, far away from Earth.
Peter 'Locke' Wiggin
"The world is always a democracy in times of flux, and the man with the best voice will win."
The oldest Wiggin sibling, being four years older than Ender and two more than Val. Hence, Peter was the first hyperintelligent Wiggin child, his knack tending towards fear and intimidation. He's capable of finding what people hate most about themselves, what they fear most, and use it against them. He's also arrogant and cocky; he spent most of his younger years threatening to kill his siblings, leaving great big marks on their psyches (and in return, Val and Ender dubbed him 'slumbitch').
Peter is probably the most ambitious of the three, and definitely the most power-hungry. He expresses a wish to 'save humanity from destruction' by taking control of it himself, ruthlessly using Valentine to manipulate his way into higher political spheres. That's what leads him to being able to push the Locke Proposal, a treaty to shape a fragile peace between the nations of Earth, and to eventually become the Hegemon: ruler of all of Earth.
And why I love it.
I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one who fell in love with this book as a wee 'un, identifying with Ender to crazy amounts. An American friend of mine sent me the book when I was ten years old, I read it many times, and eventually lost it. Last year, I decided to pick up a copy again and reread it for old times' sake.
It remains still an amazing, interesting book. Being me, it's the themes of repression, manipulation, and the way Ender's damage permanently affects the way his mind works, as well as the question of guilt-- who's responsible for all those deaths Ender caused because of who the military wanted him to be-- that do it for me. When it comes down to it, it's a very, very textured book, about comradery, tactics, and isolation. I'd recommend it to just about anyone, which, duh.
Trust me, my big batch of TL;dr up there don't come near to showing off the awesome of the book.
Even if Orson Scott Card is batshit crazyflakes.
---
"I've watched through his eyes, I've listened through his ears, and I tell you he's the one. Or at least as close as we're going to get."
Ender's Game is considered one of the great sci-fi novels of modern times (and chances are a good chunk of you folks has already read it). Written by Orson Scott Card, it spawned many, many (generally bad) sequels, a parallel novel called Ender's Shadow, and a lot of essays on the somewhat freaky morality of one mr. Card as displayed in the book. I'm not going to go into the sequels here, and I'm only going to gently brush over Ender's Shadow-- a book which also spawned its own line of sequels.
Let's just say that in my opinion, beyond arguably Speaker for the Dead, they're only worth reading if you want to know how much drugs Orson started doing after his books started selling.
The many, many drugs.
Anyway! SPOILERS BELOW, OH EM GEE.
Let's start with the main plot. And the subplot. Or: Len gets very TL;DR, again.
If Ender's Game had been pitched high-concept style, it would have sounded a little like this: 'Six-year-old boy gets psychologically tortured into saving humankind by destroying another species.' However, that would barely even pay lip service to the book. It has a very clear main plot with a very clear subplot-- the machinations of Ender's siblings, Peter and Valentine-- but in the end, it mostly hinges on careful character development.
---
SPOILERS START HERE BIGTIME.
---
The main plot of the book is told almost entirely from Ender's point of view, and starts when he's only six years old. They're removing the monitor that he's had in his brain since he was born: the monitor that allowed careful military watchers to judge whether or not he's ready to go to Battle School, the main training facility of the UFF. Earth has lived through two grueling wars with an alien race called the Buggers, and it's running out of space AND good military commanders. Population laws have been put into place, and religion, classically somewhat of a promoter of procreation, is largely surpressed. Everyone lives in fear of another Bugger War, one that humanity might not be able to win, and so the military is recruiting younger and younger.
Families are only allowed to have two children, but Ender is that most monstrous of things: a Third. The government quite literally commissioned him, as his parents are perfect breeding stock for the little military geniuses they're looking for. Ender's brother Peter was too ruthless, and his sister Valentine was too kind, and so they asked for another one who might be a blend of both. Ender is their last attempt at wrangling the perfect genius out of the Wiggin family, and as it turns out, he succeeds magnificently.
After the military removes Ender's monitor, he doesn't hear from them again. He assumes he's been cast off as well, and that leaves him a Third alone, a constant prey for the bullies who see him as an abomination. When he goes to school one day, they're waiting for him, ready to beat him into an inch of his life, and Ender, the little genius, realises one thing: the only way to make this stop is to utterly beat the bullies decisively today.
He stands, and he fights, and in the process, he kills another boy his age, Stilson. The next day, military officials show up at his home to tell him that he passed his last test and he's to go to Battle School.
And that's where it really begins. As of day one, Ender is constantly isolated, thrown curveballs, promoted just as soon as he's actually made friends. Soon enough, he finds himself promoted out of the newbie classes and into one of the armies, the ones that play the zero-gravity Battle Room game that determines social status within the school. In Battle School, nothing is more important than the game. And while Ender is underestimated and cast aside as a newbie, far too young to already be in an army, he learns very, very quickly. He begins to excel.
Still several years younger than any other boy commanding an army, Ender finds himself put in charge of Dragon Army. He's given no seemingly excellent soldiers, just newbies and cast-offs, but he pulls them together into an army that can beat anyone. Something's still rotten, though. Ender's army gets games too quickly, and too frequently. Slowly but surely, the officials in charge of Battle School start to stack things against him, giving his opponents extra advantages. He still wins, but it's beginning to drain him. Ender won't go into a game without winning it, feels that he can't. He has to be the best. His army has to be the best, or they won't be good enough to beat the Buggers later.
But since the game is so important to the kids in Battle School, many have started to resent him. Chief amongst them is Bonzo Madrid, Ender's first commander, who, as Dink Meeker puts it, has 'an advanced case of Spanish pride'. After several hit-or-misses, Bonzo finally drums up a whole squad of bullies to gang up on Ender as he's coming out of the shower, naked and alone. Ender, being Ender, sees that the only option is to, once again, strike a decisive blow that will keep Bonzo from ever thinking about attacking him again. He tricks Bonzo, who's bigger and stronger than him, into fighting him alone, and winds up killing him.
Needless to say, Ender's a complete mess afterwards. He won't eat, he can't sleep, and he's finally come to the realisation that he is utterly alone. When it comes down to it, no one will save him but himself.
Only hours after Bonzo's death, Ender gets one last game. He doesn't care anymore, not about winning, not about anything, but he decides to tackle it so he can go out in style. The game is stacked against him utterly: two armies opposing his one, his side of the room is cluttered with debris so he can't see, and theirs is fully open with enough cover not to get hurt. In an utterly suicidal move, he sends his entire army straight at the opponents-- except for five people, who stealthily skip through the goal in the confusion, pass through it, and end the game. Winning it on a technicality.
Ender's pretty much dead to the world afterwards, so they promote him. Up to Command School, where students aren't supposed to go until they're at least 16.
Ender is 10 at the time. The military has to drag his sister in to talk him into it.
Of course, Command School has another game, an even more draining game, one played on simulators with several of his best friends from Battle School as his underlings. He keeps winning. It wears him out worse than the Battle School games. The last game, the graduating game, is as impossible as his last one in Battle School, staging a battle around a planet where he's hopelessly outnumbered, and he decides to give up. He doesn't want to do this. He'll show them all how impossibly ruthless and not a good person he is, so they won't force him to command any armies in the actual war.
And so he orders his commanders to blow up the entire planet rather than deal with the fleet surrounding it.
Imagine his surprise when he finds out that every battle in Command School was real, and he just performed an xenocide of epic proportions.
The result? An equally epic emocoma, and, after that passes, Ender's guild-ridden escape from anything related to Earth along with his sister Valentine. He finds the last surviving Bugger Queen, and decides to travel the universe until he brings her a new home.
---
On the other side of things, we have the subplot. Valentine and Peter, Ender's siblings, might not have been a good fit for Battle School, but they're both just as brilliant in their own ways. Valentine's empathy allows her to see everything people love about themselves, flatter them endlessly, and thus gain her favour. Peter's ruthless grasp of the psyche allows him to play off people's fears, to intimidate them and blackmail them. Peter likes power, and he likes it a lot.
The only thing keeping the world government together is the Bugger War. Peter knows that once that ends, all the old squabbles will come back to the surface, and a huge war might start. When he's twelve, he decides that he'd much rather see the world stay united. Under him, of course. To do that, he needs a plan, and he needs a way to get his name out. He talks (or threatens) Valentine into going along with it, and together, they start to set up fake identities on the internet. Throw-aways at first, to learn how people talk to each other in ways that get reactions, but eventually, they establish themselves, Valentine as Demosthenes, and Peter as Locke. The hawk and the dove-- Peter tells Valentine what Demosthenes, the populist warmonger, would think, and Valentine tells Peter what Locke, the rational peacebringer, would. Tossed through their individual filters, the result is spectacular.
Demosthenes' nationalistic, anti-Russian propaganda turns out to be a big hit amongst the people. Valentine finds, to her shock and disgust, that even her father starts to quote Demosthenes' work at the dinner table. Demosthenes manages to sweep the mob up into a frenzy over whatever (s)he mentions that week; meanwhile, Locke's well-considered messages of peace become popular with the intelligentsia, who begin to point to him as the one example that all sense isn't dead in the world.
When Ender ends the Bugger War, Peter sees his chance. Just as Earth jumps happily into a war, he proposes a peace treaty through Locke. Valentine has Demosthenes toss his/her weight behind it. The mob follows. The treaty is passed, and the Earth continues on with a fragile peace.
Valentine flees the planet to go spend the next decades of her life with the brother she can stand; Peter, as we find over the course of the Ender's Shadow series, efficiently moves himself into place as Hegemon of the World with the help of some of Ender's fellow Battle School graduates.
And advance to the characters. Hopefully less tl;dr.
For the sake of keeping this brief, I won't namedrop every character in the book, or we could be here for a while...
Battle School
Andrew 'Ender' Wiggin
"I don't care if I follow your rules. If you can cheat, so can I. I won't let you beat me unfairly — I'll beat you unfairly first."
The hero of the book, if there is such a thing. Like all the Wiggin children, Ender is fiendishly clever, ambitious, and observant. Although he's a brilliant tactician, his real talent lies in his ability to bring people together, to create loyalties and well-functioning hierarchies. Unlike most kids in Battle School, he has his eyes set more on making everyone better (so they can win the war) than on hoarding glory or taking credit, and the kids quickly pick up on that-- making him both the most beloved and the most hated person in the school.
He's serious, focused, and very emphatic, but the manipulative efforts of the people in charge of his life wind up making him angry, withdrawn and paranoid, too. He's capable of bantering with the rest of the boys, but with time, the distance between him and them becomes so great that he ceases being able to really fit in with anybody again.
He's perfect for the job of commander because he's both ruthless and kind, but it's this combination that also does him in by the end. He never quite gets over his murder of Stilson, Bonzo, and the Buggers, and by the end of the book, and into its sequels, it's that guilt and sense of responsibility that drives him.
Julian 'Bean' Delphiki
"Bean was a soldier, and if anyone had asked him what he wanted to be when he grew up, he wouldn't have known what they meant."
Bean is the closest thing to a confidante Ender has in the book. He, too, is one of the tiny geniuses from Battle School. The tiniest, in fact, which is what earned him the nickname-- but despite his size, he's the cleverest person in school, and second only to Ender as a commander because he lacks Ender's innate empathy.
While Bean makes several appearances in Ender's Game, he later went on to star as the titular Ender's Shadow, which followed the events of Ender's Game from his perspective. Bean has a huge intellect, but his is cold, calculated towards curiosity, and entirely wrapped up in the art of battle. It's only with the constant challenge of Ender, always just a step ahead of him, that he begins to learn to care a little bit. Later, he'll become Strategos, commander of Peter's military forces, but in Ender's Game, he's Ender's flexibly-thinking ace in the hole.
Alai
"Salaam, pinprick."
Alai is one of Ender's first friends in Battle School. When another boy called Bernard tries to take control of their launch (newbie) group, Ender rebels, splitting the group up in two. After a while, Ender realises that that's a very bad situation for a group to be in if they're going to work together. He reaches out to someone in Bernard's group, Alai-- and Alai becomes the glue that puts the launch group back together again.
Alai is really one of the boys, jocular and snarky, but he carries the weight of his (muslim) religion with him still. He gives Ender the strength to go on with a kiss on the cheek and an uttering of the word 'Salaam', which has a profound impact on the boy. However, after Ender gets promoted to the armies, he doesn't see much of Alai again until he goes to Command School.
Petra Arkanian
"Come, little boy. The battle room is ready. Petra's hands are steady. The enemy is deadly. Petra the poet, they call me."
"They also say you're crazy as a loon."
"Better believe it, baby butt."
Petra is the one girl of the group. She's toughened up to deal with that fact, earning herself a reputation as being crazier than most of the guys. She's also the best shot, possibly even in the entire school, and she's the one who teaches Ender to shoot. They meet when Ender makes the colossal beginner's mistake (in his opinion) of becoming friends with the outcast of his first army, while his commander hates him.
Eventually, Petra becomes one of Ender's staunchest supporters, and one of his most trusted commanders. As a result, he puts too much pressure on her when they're doing battle in Command School-- she winds up breaking down, adding to Ender's guilt and teaching him an important lesson about overworking his people.
Dink Meeker
"I'm not going to let the bastards ruin me, Ender."
Ender's platoon leader in his second army. Dink takes Ender in when nobody else will. He leads the one platoon in Rat Army that actually gets things done, making him personally responsible for the success of that army. He's the one who's most suspicious of the teachers leading the school and their plans, and who frequently warns Ender about them.
Dink's a good guy. A little naive, in his paranoid way, but he always wants what's best for everyone. He's just not quite socially gifted enough to know when it's good to mention things and when it isn't, putting Ender in a few nasty spots.
Bonzo Madrid
"Nobody hates like Bonzo."
Ender's first commander, the leader of Salamander Army. He has a big case of Spanish pride, and runs his army accordingly. Nothing is more important to him than discipline, and people doing things exactly like he wants them. When Ender starts disobeying orders that he feels are stupid, he comes into conflict with Bonzo. As Ender rises in the charts with his own army, Bonzo becomes angrier and angrier, eventually getting pissed enough to make an attempt on his life.
Instead, Ender skillfully uses his pride against him, maneuvers Bonzo into a one-on-one fight, and then slams the cartilage of his nose back into his... well, let's just say Bonzo winds up very dead at the end of it.
Colonel Graff
"I'll lie to him."
"And if that doesn't work?"
"Then I'll tell the truth. We're allowed to do that, in emergencies. We can't plan for everything, you know."
The man who tracked the Wiggins for a long time, got Ender into Battle School, was responsible for most of the manipulations directed towards him, and just basically fucked up Ender's life for the sake of the world. He eats when he gets stressed, and he's got the Nuremberg defense all lined up for when the public starts asking questions about everything they did to Ender.
Earth
Valentine 'Demosthenes' Wiggin
"Nobody controls his own life, Ender. The best you can do is choose to be controlled by good people, by people who love you."
Ender's sister, older than him by two years. She shares her brother Peter's lust for power, but at the same time, she has a kindness that's absent in him. Like the other Wiggin children, she's very much socially and intellectually gifted, and her 'knack' in that respect is being able to figure out what people like most about themselves, and flatter them endlessly to get what she wants. Val is very, very perceptive, and a little snarky in her own way. She succesfully managed to sweep up the masses with her Demosthenes character, even though Demosthenes was spouting Peter's viewpoints and not her own, and it made her more pragmatic than she already was.
When it comes down to it, Ender is the sibling she loves the most-- but she spends most of the book still on Earth, with her other brother who she kind of fears and hates, even though he grows on her. She comes back for Ender a couple of times throughout the book, and at the end, blackmails Peter into letting her and Ender flee into space. Far, far away from Earth.
Peter 'Locke' Wiggin
"The world is always a democracy in times of flux, and the man with the best voice will win."
The oldest Wiggin sibling, being four years older than Ender and two more than Val. Hence, Peter was the first hyperintelligent Wiggin child, his knack tending towards fear and intimidation. He's capable of finding what people hate most about themselves, what they fear most, and use it against them. He's also arrogant and cocky; he spent most of his younger years threatening to kill his siblings, leaving great big marks on their psyches (and in return, Val and Ender dubbed him 'slumbitch').
Peter is probably the most ambitious of the three, and definitely the most power-hungry. He expresses a wish to 'save humanity from destruction' by taking control of it himself, ruthlessly using Valentine to manipulate his way into higher political spheres. That's what leads him to being able to push the Locke Proposal, a treaty to shape a fragile peace between the nations of Earth, and to eventually become the Hegemon: ruler of all of Earth.
And why I love it.
I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one who fell in love with this book as a wee 'un, identifying with Ender to crazy amounts. An American friend of mine sent me the book when I was ten years old, I read it many times, and eventually lost it. Last year, I decided to pick up a copy again and reread it for old times' sake.
It remains still an amazing, interesting book. Being me, it's the themes of repression, manipulation, and the way Ender's damage permanently affects the way his mind works, as well as the question of guilt-- who's responsible for all those deaths Ender caused because of who the military wanted him to be-- that do it for me. When it comes down to it, it's a very, very textured book, about comradery, tactics, and isolation. I'd recommend it to just about anyone, which, duh.
Trust me, my big batch of TL;dr up there don't come near to showing off the awesome of the book.
Even if Orson Scott Card is batshit crazyflakes.
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Let's just say that in my opinion, beyond arguably Speaker for the Dead, they're only worth reading if you want to know how much drugs Orson started doing after his books started selling.
The many, many drugs.
*laughing* I'd gotten that impression after reading a couple of his magic-in-rural-America books-- glad to know it's not just me.
Will definitely be picking up the first book, in spite of that.
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not that EG doesn't already have kinda weird incestual and gay vibes going on.But it's a very good book. I say YAY to picking it up!