I have to admit that I wasn’t interest in Ender’s Game until I saw a preview for the upcoming movie.  My Sci-Fi go to growing up was Robert Heinlein and I never found anyone else too appealing in the genre.  I just finished the trilogy by Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game, Speaker for the Dead, and Zenocide.  The first two books are pretty good and worth the time, but I think the last book would be better in an abridged format.  Card says in a 20th anniversary edition interview, that he wrote Ender to get to Speaker for the Dead, which was the book he really wanted to write.  This shows.  Speaker for the Dead is a very imaginative book with good pacing and characters and ideas.  Zenocide descends into a thinly veiled vehicle for the author to put forward his personal “theory of everything.”  It is boring and the characters are flat.  The first book is really the best example of Sci-Fi storytelling and is worth the read – I just wish I could have avoided falling into the trilogy trap.  The movie will represent a significant departure from the book – it can’t be helped due to the interior nature of the story telling in Ender’s Game, but Card was integral in adapting the book to the screen and it may not be a total bomb…we’ll have to wait and see.

Cover of Ender’s Game (Ender Quartet)