Ender's Game

Take what pleasure you can in the interstices of your work, but your work is first, learning is first, winning is everything because without it there is nothing.

Fiction, because it is not about somebody who actually lived in the real world, always has the possibility of being about ourself.

never in my entire childhood did I feel like a child. I felt like a person all along—the same person that I am today. I never felt that I spoke childishly. I never felt that my emotions and desires were somehow less real than adult emotions and desires.

Apparently Mazer meant it when he said he meant to break Ender down—and forcing him to play when tired and sleepy was just the sort of cheap and easy trick Ender should have expected.

azer wakened him before morning; the clock said 0340, and Ender felt groggy as he padded along the corridor behind Mazer. “Early to bed and early to rise,” Mazer intoned, “makes a man stupid and blind in the eyes.”

eople were crazy for a while there. Mistreatment of children, negligent homicide—those videos of Bonzo’s and Stilson’s deaths were pretty gruesome. To watch one child do that to another.”

nd it had to be a child, Ender,” said Mazer. “You were faster than me. Better than me. I was too old and cautious. Any decent person who knows what warfare is can never go into battle with a whole heart. But you didn’t know. We made sure you didn’t know. You were reckless and brilliant and young. It’s what you were born for.”

Ender grabbed Mazer’s uniform and hung onto it, pulling him down so they were face to face. “I didn’t want to kill them all. I didn’t want to kill anybody! I’m not a killer! You didn’t want me, you bastards, you wanted Peter, but you made me do it, you tricked me into it!” He was crying

over. Beat them. Ender didn’t understand. “I beat you.”
Mazer laughed, a loud laugh that filled the room. “Ender, you never played me. You never played a game since I became your enemy.”
Ender didn’t get the joke. He had played a great many games, at a terrible cost to himself. He began to get angry.
Mazer reached out and touched his shoulder. Ender shrugged him off. Mazer then grew serious and said, “Ender, for the past few months you have been the battle commander of our fleets. This was the Third Invasion. There were no games, the battles were real, and the only enemy you fought was the buggers. You won every battle, and today you finally fought them at their home world, where the queen was, all the queens from all their colonies, they all were there and you destroyed them completely

All dreams. If there was love or pity for him, it was only in his dreams.
He woke up and fought another battle and won. Then he went to bed and slept again and dreamed again and then he woke up and won again and slept again and he hardly noticed when waking became sleeping. Nor did he care.