In Which April Reads Science Fiction?

I rarely read science fiction or fantasy.  I have had a lot of bad experiences with people handing me books and saying, "Ohmigosh you'll just love Griymadel's Castle.  Please read it, pleasepleaseplease."

And so I do.

In the land of Sorishan lived a plutarg named Griymadel.  She had been the most beautiful plutarg in all of the galaxy of Zenzenri, and had been the envy of all the morisin's sons.  Once every 6th millenia all the creatsures of the Zenzenri galaxy would gather in Sorishan to try and win the beautiful Griymadel's affections through a series of trials. The first trial included riding a mrrrigth as high as the tallest triahsh in the land....

 It sounds like an aspiring Dr. Seuss writer decided to take himself waaay to seriously.  Hey, hey, science fiction and fantasy writers!  I can make up not-real words, too!

So when I was in Savers with JennaRose about two months ago and she handed me a copy of Ender's Game, I was...hesitant.  It had a spaceship on it.  And weird, 80's-style font.  But, because she was a person whose literary opinion I respected, I decided to give it a whirl.  ...after I finished The Help.  But then I found The Hunger Games at Borders' going out of business sale for really cheap, and that novel sucked all of my Bad Literature Tolerance for a while.  So I bumpered the two with Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, as well as To Kill A Mockingbird.  By then, I was prepared for another disappointment, just in case.  No offense, JennaRose.

The story goes something like this:

It's the future.  In the future we decide that it is okay to send our six year old children into space to begin training for space-battle.  There is an enemy on the other end of the galaxy known as buggers who caused terror several years ago.  One little boy, Ender Wiggin, is shown to have especially strong military talents, and is pushed to the limits in every sense.  The adults running the space program purposefully isolate him, promote him within the camp very early, and give him battle practice upon battle practice that nearly breaks him.  Ender is exceedingly talented and basically a genius, and takes whatever challenges are thrown at him.  Because of his success, he struggles to be socially accepted, as his classmates become hatefully jealous of him.  As classmates threaten his life, teachers refuse to step in, as they consider this a part of Ender's training, too.

The main character is relateable in the sense that we have all felt like "the outcast" or "the loner" or "the misunderstood person."  Much like The Catcher in the Rye, this book is filled with angsty child-like emotions and little boy humor, so this novel would be perfect for a teenage boy. For anybody, though, the novel presents the overarching theme of misunderstanding other cultures and the purposes of war.  The shock sending six year olds to military training camps is quite shocking at the beginning of the novel, but glazed over by the middle.  You forget that that is inhumane very quickly.  What other terrors of battle do we forget about very quickly?  The children at the school refer to battle practice as "The Games."  How much has our culture been immunized from our own "games?"

Is it wrong that a car explodes on a computer screen and a little boy cheers?  Or that thousands of men and women in this country watch movies where kinky foursomes are funny?  Is something shocking simply because we haven't seen it enough, and, is it wrong to see certain things so much that we are immune to it?

Do we not send our six year olds to battle camps simply because it hasn't been done before?