Orson Scott Card: Ender's Game

"Alai suddenly kissed Ender on the cheek and whispered in his ear, "Salaam." Then, red-faced, he turned away and walked to his own bed at the back of the barracks. Ender guessed that the kiss and the word were somehow forbidden" (69).

Ender's Game is unmistakably flawed. At first riveting, it gradually becomes self-indulgent and forced, until it ends in a convoluted afterthought. At 324 pages, it is also the first book of any length I have read through without stopping in many years. I could not have put it down if it were on fire.

In my youth, as mentioned elsewhere in a blog accessible from this point, I lived in a world of fantasy, both conscious and un-, in which there were certain central themes. My sleeping dreams, much like my waking ones, found me the aloof leader of a team of my peers whom I treated with a sense of noblesse oblige, invariably engaged in some noble task. I distinctly remember two such dreams in particular.

I trace the first to the age of six or seven. My first grade class and I were engaged in a game of tag in my backyard. When tagged in this dream, I became injured, and was taken by my teammates to the gardening shed where I was bandaged and fed mashed potatoes by a girl named Autumn, whom I still remember .

In the second, from some later age, I am similarly engaged in a contest with my peers, but this time we have a plush headquarters. We are called upon to best a team of rivals. The leader of these opponents was a dark version of myself, an athletic, soccer-playing, seemingly indigent Latin. The finalevent, between this leader and myself, was breakfast-making. I won with a delicious cinnamon toast. My sleeping mind didn't really know how to make cinnamon toast, so my dream self affixed the spices to the toast with spit. When I woke up, I remained infatuated with this mysterious doppelganger, and I made a point of learning how to make cinnamon toast for real. My waking fantasies largely mirrored this pattern. I always was in charge of a group of my peers, but unfulfilled and incomplete, searching for a complement.

In short, flawed though it is, Ender's Game is a magical realization of every element of my childhood--and even adolescent--fantasies. It is as though I myself wrote the book, not the ironically homophobic Orson Scott Card. As I read that "Salaam", that kiss, I wept, gasping. That moment is all I have ever wanted in life, I exaggerate not.