Science fiction at its best

I am Orson Scott Card's newest fan. I don't know why it took me so long to find these amazing novels; but I am glad I did. I just finished the second novel in the Ender Wiggins saga called Speaker for the Dead.

But if you are going to read Card, start with the first: Ender's Game. I could not believe what an interesting and compelling novel this was. Sci-fi is panned by most readers of "serious fiction" because it tends to be scenario driven, rather than character driven. But truly great sci fi does both. It puts compelling characters into scenarios that force them to act in especially revelatory ways. Good sci fi reveals something about how what it means to be human is always going to be pressed against, depending upon the circumstance. And in Ender's Game, the circumstance is the conviction that the world is about to come to an end at the hand of the "buggers" an alien life form that looks like insects but are a lot more advanced than humans. I will say this: if this one line is all that I had heard about the novel, I would have thought that there was no way I could like it. It sounds about as trite as it comes. But then you open to the first page and you realize what a good writer can do with that scenario. He can put a child prodigy into it, a child who is the hope of his race, a child who is as deep emotionally as he is intellectually. Suddenly there's a story--and this one even has a great twist at the end. Read it. It's great.