Ender’s Game is a really fantastic space novel which touches on the morality of war, the behavioral development of teens, and what happens when these two things which do not end well when mixed actually do so. It’s also analogous to the relationship between the US and the rest of the world. I have friends who don’t like it at all when I tell them how the world sees their country, either out of disagreement or usually a begrudged acknowledgement followed by ‘you’re ungrateful and anti American’. When they say that my European family should thank the US for saving us in WWII, I tell them what happened to my grandmother’s house in Dresden. The city had a weapons plant in the center and the allies thought the best way to get the Germans to yield was to firebomb the city perimeter and then bomb everything inside. Dresden was raised, my grandmother homeless, and many citizens deed amongst the rubble. This is how the world sees the US, a warmonger with no regard for collateral damage so long as the objective was met. And so Ender’s Game recreated that event with its conclusion, the alien homeworld decimated and their entire species wiped out. Ender communicates how what he did was going too far, even for war. And with such belligerent leadership now in control of the US it made me shiver in fear when I heard the words ‘fire and fury’.
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