My job can be quite stressful. I work at least ten hours a day trying to cover four separate portfolios with little or no supervision or mentoring. While I have sometimes dealt with stress through intermittent bouts of marathon movie-watching or a Hulu binge during college, out here in the Marshall Islands, my media options are more limited.
So instead I reread the first three of Orson Scott Card's Ender's Series in a weekend in mid-July. The experience was quite cathartic and mildly entertaining. While I do not consider myself a big science fiction reader, I have enjoyed reading Card's work over the years. I first read Ender's Game in 1991 when it was published in book form. I have since revisited the books in the series a couple of times and have always enjoyed Card's introspective philosophy, very engaging dialogue, and thought-provoking ethical dilemmas. This time, I also appreciated the ever-increasing volume of each book in the series. Twelve hundred pages of science fiction was sufficiently motivating to reenter the real world.
The series follows the galactic adventures of a Messiah-like figure named Andrew Wiggin, aka Ender. In his youth, Ender is selected to attend an elite military training academy to help lead the human race against an invading alien species. In fact, Ender was conceived for that very purpose: his older two siblings proved either too aggressive or too compassionate for the position. Though only a child, Ender undergoes brutal training in modern warfare and is able to effectively lead a group of children towards ultimate victory.
In the subsequent book, three thousand years have passed and we find Ender wandering among multiple inhabited worlds, with light-year travel enabling his longevity. Given his remarkable perspective on the demise of an alien race and his compassion born of experiences far beyond his years, Ender has become something of a religious figure in human affairs. After all his wanderings, Ender chooses to settle in Lusitania, a recently-established colonial planet where a new form of alien life has been discovered. Once again, Ender is called upon to redeem the human race, though this time his effort is oriented towards saving rather than destroying the alien culture.
With two award-winning novels under his belt, Card then begins to push the limits of rationality and coherence in the third book. In Xenocide, Ender is still on Lusitania, fighting to prevent the Starways Congress from destroying the planet because of its fear of alien life forms. In the process, Ender and his gang discover that there are now four alien life forms in the universe, all of whom have their own motivations and conflicting world views. It takes all the efforts and wisdom of three thousand year-old Ender to keep the universe from civil war. But then...
There is a fourth novel, but I don't own it (and therefore didn't read it). And I think the only time I read it was in junior high, so I actually do not remember how the stories end. But the stories only tangentially matter insofar as they are the venue for Card to explore his philosophical ruminations on ethics, history, and philosophy. Ender's two siblings serve as an anthropomorphized Aristotelian dialogue while Ender is more akin to a Platonian Ideal Form. I enjoy the intellectual exercise of following Card's line of reasoning regarding human identity, the role of childhood, fear of "the other," and intelligence. And I enjoy Card's quick and witty character dialogue even more.
In short, the Ender's series is everything that scifi has to offer: grandiose philosophical discussions, dialogue full of descriptive adjectives and witty retorts, a unique view of mankind's future, and a complete fantasy world to which one can escape. More, Card cannot offer, limited as he is by the genre and the lack of reality to which one could anchor more substantive works.
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