As a friend of mine living in Germany informed me, Ender’s Game has already started to play in some markets, and the United States release is coming up this week. With that in mind, I thought I’d return to the novel once more. In the days before The Hunger Games and Battle Royale made the idea of children murdering each other part of mainstream entertainment, the combination of very young characters and serious violence was one of the more provocative and controversial elements of Ender’s Game. Young Ender Wiggin is only six years old when he beats another child to death, and he subsequently kills another kid with his bare hands while in Battle School. Orson Scott Card described one reader who criticized the book for unrealistic depiction of children by noting that “it was important to her, and to others, to believe that children don’t actually think or speak the way the children in Ender’s Game think and speak.” He went on to write that the simplest explanation for why the children in the book don’t think and act the way (some) adults expect children to think and act is that they don’t think of themselves as children. As Card put it, “Never in my entire childhood did I feel like a child. I felt like a person all along.” The concept of childhood is a common theme for the child soldiers in the book. One of Ender’s earliest friends at the Battle School,…
