War and Aliens- Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card

Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card is the first book of a much larger series created by Card, and in my opinion is in the top 3 best books from the series, which has 19 books released so far. I have only read 9 of these books though, so I may not be the most qualified to determine if the first book is the best. In this blog, I want to talk about the basic premise of Ender’s Game and tell you if it’s worth reading all the sequels.

Ender’s Game follows the kid Ender throughout his education in Battle School, and then his education in Command School. His education in Command School is closer to the end of the book and has a lot of spoilers, so I’m going to mostly talk about his training in Battle School.

Battle School was created after the 2 Bugger Wars took place. The Buggers are basically aliens that look like bugs that invaded Earth twice. Humanity was able to barely make it out through these attacks alive, with the help of people like Mazer Rackham who helped win the second war by taking out the alien’s mothership. In order for humanity to be able to win the highly likely third war, it was decided that Battle School should be made in order to train young children into military leaders. After Battle School, there were a few other schools these children went to, including Command School, until they were ready to lead.

Bugger Hive Queen

Ender was 6 years old when he was invited (kind of forcefully) to join Battle School. He had to leave his mom, dad, loving older sister Valentine, and mean older brother Peter behind, and this made him very sad, as not only he was a little kid, but mostly because he loved Valentine because she was nice to him, unlike Peter. Ender was then taken to the shuttle that brought other kids (albeit much older kids, which caused him not to fit in as well) to the station, and from there his education took place. Ender excelled and was the best student, which caused him to have many supporters and enemies.

There is much more that happens in the story, but I want to not spoil the book. Anyway, the question I want to answer now is if you, the reader, should read the sequels if you read Ender’s Game. My answer is not all. In my opinion, you should probably read the first 3 books and maybe Ender’s Shadow, which is in the same time period as Ender’s Game, but instead from the perspective of one of Ender’s friends. 

The reason you shouldn’t read all the sequels is that it’s a huge time commitment with minimal gain. The books after the 3rd deviate a lot from the original book, which revolved around Ender. Don’t get me wrong, I do like some parts, but I feel like the books became cringier and less original as time went on. One of the cringy parts were relationships between characters that felt awkward and out of place.

Overall, I do like Ender’s Game a lot and some of the sequels that followed. You should probably read Ender’s Game and at least the 2 books following it.