Ender's Game

Special 20th Anniversary Edition

By: Orson Scott Card

Narrated by: Stefan Rudnicki, Harlan Ellison, Gabrielle de Cuir

Winner of the Hugo and Nebula Awards

In order to develop a secure defense against a hostile alien race's next attack, government agencies breed child geniuses and train them as soldiers. A brilliant young boy, Andrew "Ender" Wiggin lives with his kind but distant parents, his sadistic brother Peter, and the person he loves more than anyone else, his sister Valentine. Peter and Valentine were candidates for the soldier-training program but didn't make the cut - young Ender is the Wiggin drafted to the orbiting Battle School for rigorous military training.

Ender's skills make him a leader in school and respected in the Battle Room, where children play at mock battles in zero gravity. Yet growing up in an artificial community of young soldiers Ender suffers greatly from isolation, rivalry from his peers, pressure from the adult teachers, and an unsettling fear of the alien invaders. His psychological battles include loneliness, fear that he is becoming like the cruel brother he remembers, and fanning the flames of devotion to his beloved sister. Is Ender the general Earth needs?

But Ender is not the only result of the genetic experiments. The war with the Buggers has been raging for a hundred years, and the quest for the perfect general has been underway for almost as long. Ender's two older siblings are every bit as unusual as he is, but in very different ways. Between the three of them lie the abilities to remake a world. If, that is, the world survives.

Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game is the winner of the 1985 Nebula Award for Best Novel and the 1986 Hugo Award for Best Novel.

©1977, 1985, 1991 Orson Scott Card (P)2002 Fantastic Audio, an imprint of Audio Literature

Critic reviews

• Nebula Award Winner, Best Novel, 1985

• Hugo Award Winner, Best Novel, 1986

"'Intense' is the word for Ender's Game." (The New York Times)

Great book, one of my favorites

What made the experience of listening to Ender's Game the most enjoyable?

Having read a paper copy of the book a couple times I wanted to listen to it in this format. I enjoy this story and have read many of the books in the series. I think being able to experience it in audible form allowed me to revisit the story again.

A very solid story

A very solid story with great voice actors. With them the story really comes alive.

Ho Ender

Would you listen to Ender's Game again? Why?

enders game is awesome and very interesting from start to finish

Who was your favorite character and why?

ender

What does Stefan Rudnicki and Harlan Ellison bring to the story that you wouldn’t experience if you just read the book?

cool voices and several narator give it almost a episodic quality

If you were to make a film of this book, what would be the tag line be?

i think they already are

Any additional comments?

:)

I LOVE the story & narrator

First let me state I loved the book & have bought every other one in the series. The only issue I had was the narrators voice was a bit annoying to my ears at first. But eventually i got used to it. Though i must say his narration SKILLS are phenomenal, the gus got accents up the wazoo & I was fun hearing his take on the lingo of the boys in battle school. If I read it myself I would have never even noticed there was even a lingo with certain speech pattern. I'm sure OSC had his hand in this.
But I must say I love the full cast audio much better, they hired like 40 people to read different characters in the book, it was like listening to a play.

Excellent! Much Better Than The Movie

I actually saw the movie first, then read the book. Good choice. The book is so much more fun than the movie in most ways. Much more in-depth about Ender's training and time at school (which is the funnest part of the story imo). The only downside is that there is also much more about Ender's two siblings, which seem completely superfluous to the story. There really isn't any payoff to all those passages in the book that deals with them.

Oh well. I liked the reading, they story, and a really nice bonus is that Orson Scott Card has a pretty long, and very interesting interview at the end. I really enjoyed that part of it.