Recommendations
Books Like Ender's Game
A child genius trained to command humanity's fleet — and the moral weight of what he does with that training
Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game drops Andrew Wiggin into Battle School at age six: a zero-gravity military training facility where children are evaluated for the role of humanity's supreme commander against the Formics, an alien species that has attacked Earth twice. The novel is about strategy and genius and psychological manipulation — and about what the people who need Ender to be what they've made him are actually doing to him. The ending, which reframes everything that came before, has been discussed in philosophy and ethics courses for 40 years. If the tactical puzzle-solving, the isolation-as-training theme, the moral weight of child soldiers, and the twist gripped you, these eight picks go to the same place.
- 1Buy
Ender's Shadow
by Orson Scott Card
Card's own parallel novel — the same events as Ender's Game from Bean's perspective. Bean is smaller and more dangerous than Ender, and the mystery of his origins adds a biological thriller element that Ender's Game doesn't have. Most readers who love Ender's Game love Ender's Shadow equally.
- 2Buy
Speaker for the Dead
by Orson Scott Card
The direct Ender's Game sequel — 3,000 years later, Ender is now the Speaker for the Dead on a planet with a newly contacted alien species. Completely different in tone from Ender's Game, quieter and more philosophical, but the moral weight of the original is what Speaker is built on.
- 3Buy
The Hunger Games
by Suzanne Collins
A teenager selected to fight to the death in a system designed to use her — Collins shares Card's interest in the relationship between the people who run survival games and the children who play them, and in what it does to those children to be very good at staying alive in a designed killing environment.
- 4Buy
The Maze Runner
by James Dashner
A boy wakes with no memory in a maze full of other boys who have organized a survival society — the same sense of children in a designed testing environment, trying to work out the rules of a game they didn't choose to play, is common to both. The adult architects' motivations are similarly ambiguous.
- 5Buy
A Psalm for the Wild-Built
by Becky Chambers
The philosophical bookend to Ender's Game — where Card asks what we're willing to do to win, Chambers asks what winning was actually for. Both are short, focused, and structured around a conversation about human purpose. Reading both in sequence is illuminating.
- 6Buy
Red Rising
by Pierce Brown
A young man embedded in the military institution that maintains a caste system, learning its rules in order to break them — Pierce Brown's training sequences and the way Darrow is shaped by the Institute track the same arc as Ender's training at Battle School.
- 7Buy
Old Man's War
by John Scalzi
Retired people can join the military if they accept new, young bodies — Scalzi's military SF comedy is the most tonally different recommendation here, but shares Ender's Game's interest in what the military does to the people it builds and what those people do with what they've been built for.
- 8Buy
Project Hail Mary
by Andy Weir
Hard SF built around a protagonist who is very good at thinking under pressure — Weir and Card both trust the reader to find competence compelling, and both build their central relationships around what two fundamentally different intelligences can accomplish when they decide to cooperate.
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