Excellent Quotes: Ender's Game

My new doctor randomly recommended to me that I read Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card, famous adoptive son of Greensboro, NC. It wasn't quite as random as, "Stay off that foot, read Ender's Game, and call me in the morning," but we got to her interest in SciFi pretty quickly. To be fully transparent, I was probably carting around The Windup Girl at the time (you know, on the off chance that I would sit for just a brief minute in the Kaiser Permanente waiting room).

In any case, as the loyal reader knows, if I read it, woefully for you, I inflict it on you. So, prepare yourself for a quote from the Hugo and Nebula Award-winning novella cum novel:

"It was a hot summer afternoon in Florida when they landed. Ender had been so long without sunlight that the light nearly blinded him. He squinted and sneezed and wanted to get back indoors. Everything was far away and flat; the ground, lacking the upward curve of the Battle School floors, seemed instead to fall away, so that on level ground Ender felt as though he were on a pinnacle. The pull of real gravity felt different and he scuffed his feet when he walked. He hated it. He wanted to go back home, back to the Battle School, the only place in the universe where he belonged."

- Card, Orson Scott. Ender's Game. New York (NY): Tor (Tom Doherty Associates), 1991. P. 158.

PS - I read the 1991 "Author's Definitive Edition" complete with a very engaging introduction that acknowledged its obvious debt to Asimov and explicated some of its intent and meaning for Card and for some young readers. Plus it scored points for self-deprecating humor: "It makes me a little uncomfortable, writing an introduction to Ender's Game. After all, the book has been in print for six years now, and in all that time, nobody has ever written me to say, 'You know, Ender's Game was a pretty good book, but you know what it really needs? An introduction!'" Oh, and speaking of science fiction, Ron Glass (playing space preacher Shepherd Book) is the unusual black man with a pony tail. And rapper Freedom Williams was a black man with a pony tail. And his '90s hit with C+C Music Factory, "Gonna Make You Sweat (Everybody Dance Now)" deserves its own authors' definitive edition; now playing on iTunes.