Game, I forced the audience to experience the lives of these children from that perspective--the perspective in which their feelings and decisions are just as real and important as any adult's.

The nasty side of myself wanted to answer that guidance counselor by saying, The only reason you don't think gifted children talk this way is because they know better than to talk this way in front of you. But the truer answer is that Ender's Game asserts the personhood of children, and those who are used to thinking of children in another way--especially those whose whole career is based on that--are going to find Ender's Game a very unpleasant place to live.

Children are a perpetual, self-renewing underclass, helpless to escape from the decisions of adults until they become adults themselves. And Ender's Game, seen in that context, might even be a sort of revolutionary tract.

Because the book does ring true with the children who read it. The highest praise I ever received for a book of mine was when the school librarian at Farrer Junior High in Provo, Utah, told me, "You know, Ender's Game is our most-lost book."

And then there are the letters. This one, for instance, which I received in March of 1991:

Dear Mr. Card,

I am writing to you on behalf of myself and my twelve friends and fellow students who joined me at a two-week residential program for gifted and talented students at Purdue University this summer. We attended the class, "Philosophy and Science Fiction," instructed by Peter Robinson, and we range in age from thirteen through fifteen.