Orson Scott Card published Ender's Game in 1985, and its central trick remains one of the cruelest in science fiction. Ender Wiggin is six years old when the International Fleet takes him from his family and enrolls him in Battle School, an orbital military academy designed to produce commanders capable of defeating the Formics. He is brilliant, empathetic, strategic, and entirely aware that the adults around him are manipulating him. What he does not know, what they deliberately ensure he does not know, is that the final simulation is not a simulation.

Ender commits xenocide at the age of eleven, believing he is playing a game. The adults who designed the program understood that Ender would never deliberately destroy an entire species, so they arranged for him to do it accidentally. Card built the novel around a moral argument that has not stopped generating debate: can you be guilty of an act you did not know you were committing? Dr. John Keegan of the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, writing on the psychology of combat, argued that the distance between a soldier and the consequences of violence is always a deliberate construction, that military systems exist partly to prevent soldiers from fully understanding what they are doing.

The Third Who Was Meant to Be Both

Ender is the third child in a family where the first, Peter, is a sociopath, and the second, Valentine, is a saint. The military selected Ender because he contains both: Peter's capacity for ruthlessness and Valentine's capacity for compassion. This combination makes him the perfect commander, someone who can understand his enemy completely and still destroy them. It also makes him the most tragic, because the compassion does not disappear after the war. It survives, and it forces Ender to spend the rest of his life carrying the weight of what his ruthlessness accomplished.

The Speaker for the Dead

Card's most humane decision was giving Ender a second life as the Speaker for the Dead, a figure who travels between worlds telling the true stories of the deceased. Ender cannot undo the xenocide. He cannot bring back the Formics. What he can do is ensure that they are remembered accurately, without the propaganda that justified their destruction. It is an insufficient atonement, and Ender knows it is insufficient, and he does it anyway because the alternative is silence.