Orson Scott Card, Ender's Game

Presumably someone else has made the point already about Orson Scott Card's masterpiece, Ender's Game: currently, America's most ballyhooed high school basketball player is a Canadian named Andrew Wiggins. You ballin punks who haven't heard of this fricking amazing SF novel? The kid who just might save humanity, Ender, is named Andrew Wiggin, and you can't hardly find him on Google anymore.

Strange days, indeed.

My god, but this book tricked me. For so long, so long, it's about the travails of an impossibly young, impossibly talented kid, regularly facing torments and abuse, regularly put into impossible situations. Contented, that's how I felt, contented at the thought I was reading a novel that SF readers appreciated for making sense of their own childhoods: NOT that SF readers' childhoods are worse than those of other kids, though maybe they are, what do I know, but I'm seriously comfortable with the idea that most of us still need to make more sense of our childhoods than we think we do.

In other words, I mean to slight neither the novel nor its readers in making this claim. Adults need books about children, perhaps more than children do, so I was going along happily thinking that this was one of those books, lovely in its pain, freeing in its depiction of Ender's absolute captivity.

And then the book exploded, went three kinds of sideways, ended slowly and remarkably, did things I could not have expected.

Things I'll never tell you about, newbie.

You've read it? You know me personally? Why yes, I just might be prepared to buy you a meal just to get enough time to talk it over properly.

You haven't read it? Well, consider yourself warned. It's past time, and if you read one more breathless Andrew Wiggins column from some corporate shill on Yahoo! Sports before you meet Andrew Wiggin in Ender's Game, don't blame me.