ender's shadow orson scott card

When you're lost, you can't get any loster.

This is my second newsletter article/book review with Bullying Prevention by speaker and author, J. Richard Knapp.  For more information on bullying prevention or to sign up for the monthly newsletter, see his website for details. Click here to look at a review from last month on Flowers for Algernon. Happy reading!


Survival of the Cruelest: Bean’s Manipulation of Street Bullies
In Ender’s Shadow: Orson Scott Card

“So we know that a lot of kids who should get a turn can’t even get in the line, because they’re pushed out.  And if we do manage to stop the bullies and let one of the little ones in, then they get beaten up afterward.  We never see them again.  It’s ugly.”
“Survival of the fittest.”
“Of the cruelest….”  ~page 20, Ender’s Shadow

The Ender’s series of books by author Orson Scott Card may be some of the best science fiction you’ve never tried.   Ender’s Game written in 1985 zoomed to the tops of best-selling fiction lists.  This story featured a brilliant boy named Ender who goes to Battle School to save the earth from an invasion of the Formics (also known as Buggers).  Ender receives a good dose of bullying, both from his brother while on earth and from fellow Battle School students in space.  How he deals with their aggressive and manipulative behavior is at times shocking (i.e. he kills another student in self defense.) but always interesting.

Ten years after the release of Ender’s Game, Orson Scott Card decided to try his hand at writing a companion novel called Ender’s Shadow that would follow another character during the same time period.  Bean is that character.  And, as with Ender, Bean has a lion’s share of bullies in his life.

Bean grows up on the streets of Rotterdam somewhere in the world’s not-to-distant future.  At four years of age his powers of observation are far superior to an average man’s.  He studies how social interaction works to people’s advantage and disadvantage.  He decides to enter into a ‘family,’ or gang, of children scavenging for food.  Quickly, he informs the current leader, Poke, that she needs to recruit an older, tougher bully to work for them and protect them.  The family, by force, coerces a lame boy named Achilles to be their ‘papa.’

Because [Poke] had picked, not just the weakest bully, the easiest to beat, but also the smartest, the one that understood how to win and hold the loyalty of others.  All Achilles had ever needed was the chance.  ~page 38, Ender’s Shadow

Under Bean’s strategic plan, Achilles flips the soup line politics on its head and smaller children are able eat instead of spending their days foraging for food.  The older bullies gather their own ‘families’ and it seems like civilization returns to the streets.  However, Achilles has a long memory and the willingness to wait.  He remembers how Bean, a four-year-old small for his age, once had power over him, a bully.  Bean knows he must escape Achilles before the bully can exact his revenge…

Both Ender’s Shadow and Ender’s Game are highly recommended reading for anyone who has ever felt small.  Although Bean and Ender both take extreme measures against their bullies; they cannot be faulted for cowering.  Is their confidence in the face of danger reckless or the smartest course of action?

Related Britty Bites: