135
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Is anyone else not buying the Buggers' story?
There was never any doubt in the mind of the Formic Queens that humanity had an intelligence, they simply didn't understand that all humans, individually, had intelligence and individuality.
Formic ...
- 106k
85
votes
Why does Battle School train kids in physical combat when it's irrelevant to the ultimate goal?
It was more about the social structure and the zero-G aspect than about the physical combat
The purpose of Battle school was to build social/leadership skills and to identify who was better fit for ...
- 96.1k
79
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Accepted
What does Mazer Rackham (Ender's Game) mean when he says that the only teacher is the enemy?
Rackham is exaggerating a bit to make his point, but it boils down to this: Your allies will not think of everything they can do to destroy you because they do not want to destroy you. Your trainers ...
- 1,059
70
votes
Accepted
Why does Battle School train kids in physical combat when it's irrelevant to the ultimate goal?
In short: Battle School is a more effective, versatile, and multi-functional teaching tool.
Why not just have them play EVE Online or something that is already a computer simulation...
Command ...
- 1,840
62
votes
Accepted
Did Ender ever learn that he killed those two boys?
Yes. He saw videos of the fights and the aftermath.
And there was the matter of the court martial on the crimes of Colonel Graff. Admiral Chamrajnagar tried to keep Ender from watching it, but failed ...
- 718k
60
votes
Accepted
Is Ender's attitude shown to be wrong?
In-universe, the two are very much linked. I'm going to use passages from the novel, because even though many of the relevant passages exist in the film, some of the nuance is lost or truncated.
Ender ...
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52
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Is anyone else not buying the Buggers' story?
I believe you are right to question the Hive Queen's story. The first formic war could be chalked up to a misunderstanding by a terraforming crew, but the second invasion was war. We can't really know ...
- 4,529
52
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What does Ender's Game (the book) teach about strategy?
There are a few sets of tactics that Ender uses to achieve a significant battlefield advantage. They seem applicable to real warfare.
"The enemy's gate is down" (I) - Possessing high ground ...
- 718k
33
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What happened in this battle in Ender's Game?
Basically, the Dragon army claiming victory without actually disabling their opponents. The way the system worked was that, after defeating the opponents, you do the ritual on the gate to win. Despite ...
- 239k
31
votes
Did any of the fleet survive the final attack in Enders Game?
Using only Ender's Game as reference.
Oh yeah, also ... GIGANTIC SPOILERS HERE
Sadly, I do not have a copy of the book to hand, but it is made clear that the transport ships that brought the fighters ...
- 2,205
29
votes
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Why does Ender Wiggin win all the time if he is always outnumbered, weaker, and physically/materially inferior?
It's because he's a rare tactical genius who can come up with new schemes that are within the given rules, but are tactically novel, and he's ruthless due to his past abuse situation with Peter, which ...
- 239k
28
votes
What happened in this battle in Ender's Game?
Ender subverted Bee's expectations. Bee assumed that the true win condition wasn't merely the "victory ritual", but that the other army must be completely disabled first. That wasn't the ...
- 743
25
votes
Did any of the fleet survive the final attack in Enders Game?
The International Fleet was dispatched long before the book starts, and was sent to many different planets
Immediately after the second invasion, the IF began sending out ships, timed so that they ...
- 96.1k
25
votes
What does Ender's Game (the book) teach about strategy?
In addition to the military, Ender's Game is a great book for leadership in general. @Valorum made great points about its use in the military, but one thing that applies to both the military and the ...
- 549
24
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Why does Battle School train kids in physical combat when it's irrelevant to the ultimate goal?
The military needed a mad genius to direct the fleet, and they didn't know in advance how to detect this quality in their trainees. Computer simulations are limited by their programming and by the ...
- 17.5k
21
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What does Mazer Rackham (Ender's Game) mean when he says that the only teacher is the enemy?
He's basically saying that there is no experience like the real thing. The Formics are ALIEN. Anything a human being might do/think/scheme against your plans is going to be of marginal use because ...
- 211
19
votes
What did it mean in the actual battle when Ender froze his own legs to make shields?
He was not directing real armies until much later in the book
The point where Ender employes the leg freezing strategy is where he is still in Battle School, playing the zero-G laser tag "Battle ...
- 96.1k
16
votes
Is anyone else not buying the Buggers' story?
I guess the Bugger Queen's reasoning process can be conceived by analogy.
Imagine you are a schoolyard bully who routinely beats people up and steals their lunch money, but will never outright ...
- 1,475
16
votes
Accepted
Is the Descolada based on an actual virus?
No. The Descolada's pathology makes no sense for a real-world virus.
First of all, "changing random genes" would result in death from all the infected cells dying in the body long before an ...
- 17.3k
15
votes
Accepted
In Ender's Game, who fired the Little Doctor?
An unnamed pilot of a ship in Bean's squadron
In Ender's Shadow we get the final battle from the point of view of Bean, and there is some additional info given as to which ships actually fired it, ...
- 96.1k
12
votes
What does Ender's Game (the book) teach about strategy?
Focus on the real victory conditions.
At the end of battle school he pulls that formation attack, recognizing that it's not defeating the enemy combatants that matters, but the true victory is the ...
- 522
11
votes
Is Ender's attitude shown to be wrong?
I think it's more subtle than that.
First, you can't really post-hoc judge battle decisions that way: you can only judge whether or not you did the best you could with the information you had at the ...
- 1,846
10
votes
Is anyone else not buying the Buggers' story?
Short, direct answer, straight from the original novel:
We are like you; the though pressed into his mind. We did not mean to murder, and when we understood, we never came again. We though we were ...
- 5,143
10
votes
Did any of the fleet survive the final attack in Enders Game?
MORE MAJOR SPOILERS:
And, as the following books (Ender in Exile, Speaker for the Dead, etc) point out, the crews from those surviving ships help populate the formic worlds when the formics all died ...
- 11.8k
10
votes
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Is Ender's game inspired by 1984?
No
Orson Scott Card has said that he came up with the idea of the battle room when he was 16 and that he was trying to imagine how warfare would take place in the future.
The basic idea of the battle ...
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9
votes
Accepted
Are the other children on Eros during the final training and battles?
The other children were each in their own simulator
Mazer explained. He wasn't going to control ships anymore. "You've reached the next phase of your training. You have experience in every level ...
- 96.1k
9
votes
What is the Speaker for the Dead cover depicting?
Spaceships doing generic spaceshippy stuff
But I also hated the cover on my bestselling book, because the art came from a game sold in the UK and it depicted spaceships doing generic spaceshippy ...
- 96.1k
9
votes
Accepted
How old were Bean and Petra when they got married?
Petra was approximately 3 years older than Ender at the time Ender joined Salamander Army.
Bean is approximately 5 years younger than Ender, as he entered Battle School around the age of 4 and was ...
- 115k
9
votes
Is anyone else not buying the Buggers' story?
The two answers already given deal with the situation from the in-universe point of view. I would like to point out an another approach to this problem. That is - the perception of intelligence (since ...
- 1,299
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