The Authorized Ender Companion (67 page)

Emmylou Haffner, student
Bruxelles, France

Sixteen years ago I was a senior in college. It had been a rough year. I had been diagnosed with a rare form of cancer and had dropped out of school so I could live at home. My life changed in unexpected ways. I had always been the link between my two best friends, but while I was gone they forged their own bonds of friendship, and I felt left out. And although it was true that I liked to flirt with almost anyone who would flirt back, it still hurt to find out that while I was gone another friend was spreading rumors about how I liked to steal other girls’ boyfriends. Not only was this untrue, but it was embarrassing, because my friend was beautiful. It would have been humiliating to even imagine stealing a boyfriend from her. Ironically, at about the same time, her roommate started dating one of my best friends, and he never spoke to me again. While I had cancer I also figured out what I wanted to do with my life, and it wasn’t what I was majoring in.

After Christmas, I was plunked back into my college life with nothing more than a huge scar on my leg to show that I had ever been gone. Somehow, everything was different though. I had a huge class load. I was determined to
graduate on schedule, so I could start graduate school in the fall. Although I thought of myself as smarter than average, I had never applied myself before. Everything that had seemed important about college seemed vaguely asinine now. I was having unexpected difficulties fitting back in, but these were my friends, and I loved them. Leaving college without healing my friendships would have left a bigger scar on my heart than the one on my leg.

Then someone handed me
Ender’s Game
. After I read it I started over and read it again and again.
Ender’s Game
became my manual for life. Ender’s struggle to forge a place for himself in Battle School helped me reshape my college experience. I read it when I was stressed about finishing my master’s thesis, the night before I got married, while I was pregnant, and again after my children were born. I held on to
Ender’s Game
like a lifeline when my husband and I moved across the country to Maine—my own personal transfer to Command School. I have it on my computer table right now as I struggle to edit my first novel.

I am amazed at the way that Ender has helped to define and shape my life. When I first read
Ender’s Game
, I was not much like Ender. I was too afraid to find my own limits. Ender was the missing balance in my life. I’m a natural born follower, but Ender has taught me not to fear my own uniqueness, because there is no excellence in merely doing what everyone else is doing.

Melanie Crouse, mother/author
South China, Maine

My dad was a very intelligent and quiet man. He provided a wonderful life and education for three, sometimes rowdy, girls. He loved the three of us in his own quiet way, but we never really had too much in common with him.

In high school, I was going through his two eight-feet-by-six-feet bookshelves each stacked three deep of sci-fi and fantasy books, when I asked him, “Would I like any of these books?” With a smile on his face he handed me
Ender’s Game
. It was like he was waiting for at least one of his children to love what he loved. When I finished, he asked what I thought about the story. That was the first time he ever asked what I thought about anything. We talked about the story and he recommended other books I could read.

We had finally found a common bond. It showed me we could talk about everything, not just books. The bond continued until the day he died. My
mom gave me those books after he passed, and I treasure them. They are my link to the world my dad loved.

Paige Wurtsbaugh, data auditor
Marion, Ohio

In graduate school, Eduardo, a friend from Argentina, gave me
Ender’s Game
as a gift with the inscription: “When I first read this book and Ender’s moral decisions, I thought about you.” Eduardo and I had had a number of important conversations about ethics and culture, so I valued his recommendation and eagerly approached the book, though I had read nothing written by this author before. When I started reading, I was hooked and found myself trying to squeeze in reading the novel while at work at my campus job in the library.

Since then I have read a host of other works by Card, attended his writing workshop in Virginia, and used his books (
Ender’s Game, Speaker for the Dead, Pastwatch
, and
Red Prophet
) in the classroom. I am in the process of writing a book that relates his work to that of C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, Gene Wolfe, and the TV show
Lost
. I hope that one day Eduardo will be able to read this so that I can again thank him for his gift.

Brett Patterson, professor of Theology and Ethics
Anderson, South Carolina

In December of 2005, I was sitting around my brother-in-law’s house waiting to enjoy Christmas dinner when I noticed this book sitting by the chair. I asked about it and discovered that it belonged to my teenaged nephew. He hadn’t read much of it but had picked it up at a bookstore a few weeks earlier.

I remember sitting there reading the first page, caught up in the chapter title “Third,” wondering at the abuse this little kid in the book was taking. I had never heard of Card, much less Ender. I finished the book in twenty-four hours (excluding Christmas dinner).

I’ve often reminded my nephew of this story because of the impact it had on me. I must have read a dozen different Card books since then. However, my nephew never finished
Ender’s Game
! I did give him
War of Gifts
for Christmas.

Cliff Thompson, University Theater professor
Henderson, Tennessee

At the time I read
Ender’s Game
, my life was the flip side of normal. Taking care of grandparents in my stepparents’ home, waking my brothers up for school because Dad was at work, and trying to develop some semblance of a relationship had taken over my sanity and was giving me little, if any, normal hold on my life. At best, I was a disillusioned teen trying to make sense of a mad world. My mother was an alcoholic and I tried to make the best of it by being the “good boy.” At best, I identified myself as a young adult, because who else my age would be dealing with this stuff? What I had done then, was to begin forming an identity of myself, but it had to be secret, something that gave me strength.

I don’t know exactly when, but my little brother brought home
Ender’s Game
because his history teacher recommended it. Since I was and still am an avid reader, I didn’t mind picking it up, because if I knew it was a good book, I would have it finished by tomorrow anyway. I was wrong—I finished it the night I picked it up. So profoundly had the tale of Ender gripped me, that I needed the companionship the book gave me. No one else could give it to me until then.

What
Ender’s Game
has given me is a moral compass so to speak. I don’t use the logic in it to make my decisions, but I do use the technique of thinking things out thoroughly and definitely, as Ender did, to make my decisions. I’ve learned that when you eventually are self-aware enough to develop your own beliefs, it’s okay that they be challenged or even dismissed if they have no moral value. I learned that responsibility is not just saying you’ll do something, but that you’ll do something and be the best at it that you can possibly be.

DJ Bookout, Special Ed paraprofessional
Newton, Kansas

I was twelve when I read
Ender’s Game
and stayed home sick to finish the book in one day. I loved the characters, and was fascinated by the games in the book. I knew very little programming at the time, but decided I wanted to make a video-game version of the Battle Room. I wrote to the author requesting further details, and treasured the reply greatly. At the time, almost all games were two-dimensional, but I wanted a fully three-dimensional simulation of the Battle Room. I taught myself trigonometry, projecting coordinate systems, sprite graphics, collision detection, all so I could relive that game.

I ended up getting my master’s degree in computer graphics, and today work for the Air Force, building a touch-table interfaced battlefield visualization system. Over the years my tastes have changed a little, and I am not so interested in playing the Battle Room as I once was. But I’m thinking about starting on something like the Fantasy Game . . .

Douglas Summers-Stay, computer research scientist
Bellbrook, Ohio

I first read
Ender’s Game
when I was in third grade, and immediately felt an extraordinary bond with Ender’s character. Like Ender, I was considered the smartest and most talented kid in the community and, also like Ender, I was under constant and considerable pressure from my teachers to achieve increasingly difficult goals, to the point of impossibility. Ender’s dual yet contradictory qualities of ruthless determination and empathetic gentleness are qualities that I always strove to balance in my own day-to-day life.

This has served me well later in life, both as a musician and a pilot. I recently finished writing an opera based around Ender Wiggin, chronicling his life from the time his monitor is removed to his final destruction of the Buggers. Now, an opera is a huge undertaking, even for a full-time professional composer. For me it was even more daunting, and yet once the seed of the idea sprouted in my imagination there was no turning back. Ender had inspired me to such great heights, and I needed to pay him back.

I had already written a few pieces either based on or dedicated to Ender, but this was a different animal altogether. I needed to do Ender proud, to give his story the power and energy that it so richly deserves. I spent more than a year studying every musical technique available to me and picking and choosing what felt right for Ender. Now I have over two hours of no-holds-barred emotional music ranging from Ender’s cautiously introspective reflection on his love for Valentine to the bombastic frenetic fury of the Battle School to Bean’s achingly poignant lament for the soldiers in the farflung human fleet. Only now, finally, two decades after I first read about Ender, can I finally say that I have created something worthy of the impact that he has had on my life.

Every moment of the music touches on the connection that Ender and I share, that bond that develops between a person and their most revered hero, even if he is an imaginary hero. Ender has shaped all aspects of my life, not so much by instilling certain qualities in me but by showing me that the
qualities I possess are worth having. He has helped me pursue and achieve my life’s ambition to fly for the Navy and he has helped me live as any decent person should: with grace, compassion, and honesty. More important than anything else, though, he has provided me a muse.

Music is my language, and Ender is my reason for speaking.

Joe Stephens, Navy pilot and composer
Pensacola, Florida

I gained a love of science fiction very early, thanks to my stepfather. Although I only saw him and my mother once or twice a year, it was a great enough impact that I began to seek out new works to satisfy my growing need for good stories.

When I visited one summer, he handed me a copy of
Ender’s Game
with a smile on his face. I had it read (twice-over) in a matter of days. When I finally had my fill, he and I sat in the living room for hours discussing all the intricacies of the young protagonist and his journey. The depth of that discussion, and the love of Ender and his companions, have propelled me into my adult life with a sense of wonder regarding the unknown. Do I walk through with the obvious paths at hand, or do I find an unusual, unexpected approach? And though my stepfather is long since gone,
Ender’s Game
will always represent in my heart a bond of understanding between parent and child, two followers of such an enduring story.

Katherine Stafford, college student
Hot Springs, Arkansas

Mom read sci-fi. We were merely her children, and we didn’t really care about sci-fi. That was before we encountered
Ender’s Game
, published in the August 1977 issue of
Analog
. I remember reading it, rapt, in my attic bedroom by the light of oil candles.

I really cared about Ender Wiggin, more than I cared about Luke Skywalker, to whom I was also introduced that summer of ’77. By the time Ender saved the world, he was about my age (I was a rising high school freshman). Ender was me like no individual I’d ever read in fiction. He was smart, he was an outcast, he was being manipulated by a system he didn’t understand. I gloried when he successfully carried the fate of the world on his shoulders.

I’m old now. But I can look back and see that I was changed by that story. I began to believe that my life could matter. I began to understand the terrible sacrifices that sometimes accompany meaningful success. I began to look at my siblings as people for whom I wanted to feel the loyalty Ender felt for Valentine, rather than merely the fear or disgust Ender felt for Peter.

I can’t go back and live a life where I didn’t read
Ender’s Game
to objectively measure the difference the story made in my life. But I do know the example of Ender Wiggin—boy, soldier, priest, man—made me a better person.

I count myself blessed that Mom read sci-fi.

Meg Stout, program manager
Annandale, Virginia

Ender’s Game
came home with me from the public library because it had cool spaceships on the cover and because the back promised a young boy rising up to lead an army of the future. My kind of material. I read it while on a family vacation to the North Carolina coast. It was the summer that spanned the gap between the watercolor cocoon of elementary school and the social minefield of middle school. I was eleven.

As we started out on our way to the ocean, I tackled the first page. I didn’t like it. There was no way to tell who was talking! When I pressed on I was startled by the brutality of the first chapter. This kid was the hero? My sympathy for Ender grew over the passing miles with the introduction of his siblings. I never forgave Peter Wiggin for that game of buggers and astronauts, even if Ender did. And then there was Valentine. In the beginning, I loved Ender because Valentine loved Ender.