My post The Best Science Fiction Books of All Time  from a few weeks ago got 100+ comments with some amazing suggestions. I’d read a bunch of them, but I discovered a lot of new things to read.

One that appeared over and over again that I hadn’t yet read was Ender’s Game  by Orson Scott Card. I gobbled it down last night and this morning while trying to shake the holiday cold that decided to inhabit my body.

Awesome. It exceeded my expectations. As I got into it, I saw threads of lots of other writers, including Asimov and Heinlein, woven through the book. But Card took the story and made it his own, combining it with a classical coming of age story that reminded me of plenty that I read when I was a kid. He wasn’t bashful about mixing young with old, kind with brutal, human with non-human, with a dash of politician in the mix. If you’ve read Suzanne Collins The Hunger Games Trilogy you can see where a lot of her ideas came from.

I calibrate scifi with the date published. Ender’s Game was published in 1985 so the PC was already out in the world. Card did a good job with the computer tech, although there was still too much paper communication for critical things. His computer gaming / war simulation stuff was fascinating and well done, in a way that was very accessible to a reader of any age. And his space travel – like most science fiction – was fine, but still a fantasy for the human race in 2012.

I just downloaded Speaker for the Dead and expect I’ll get to it in a couple of days after I read Vernor Vinge’s Rainbows End , another often recommended book that for some reason has slipped through my fingers so far.