Orson Scott Card's work of science fiction, Ender's Game, is the exciting and poignant tale of a genius, Ender Wiggin, whom the Government takes from home at an early age to mold into a military commander. From his turbulent childhood, to his days at the physically and psychologically taxing Battle School, to his conquest of the buggers and ultimate colonization of their world, the most essential and useful aspect of Ender's prodigious genius is his incredible empathic ability. From the portrayal of his early childhood in the novel's first chapters, it seems that Ender developed this empathic ability as both a physical and psychological defense against the many truculent characters in his life, such as his enemy in school, Stilson, and his older brother, Peter. The usefulness and necessity of Ender's empathy manifest themselves again at the battle school, where it helps Ender immeasurably to defeat his enemies, both in and out of the game room. Lastly, towards the novel's end, Ender's empathy takes on a much more universal significance when it first allows him to win the war for humanity against the buggers, and then at last is put to a more peaceful use, when Ender becomes a "speaker for the dead".
             From the very beginning of the novel, Ender's extraordinary empathic abilities are quite conspicuous. The first time the reader encounters Ender, in fact, he is making a very perspicacious observation about the way adults lie to children. A woman in charge of the maintenance of a monitor attached since birth to the back of Ender's head had told him that it was at last time for the monitor to come off, and that "it won't hurt a bit." Ender's response is a clear reflection of his empathic abilities. He ruminates, "It was a lie, of course, that it wouldn't hurt a bit. But since adults always said it when it was going to hurt, he could count on that statement as an accurate prediction of the future. Sometimes lies wer...