Ender's Game
8th Grade Literature

Summary:
Fifty years before the story takes place, the Formics attacked Earth. If not for the legendary Commander, Mazer Rackham, the human race would have been destroyed. To prepare for the next attack, Colonel Graff and the International Military are training only the best young minds to find the future hero. Ender (Andrew) Wiggin, a shy but brilliant six year old boy, is recruited to join this program. Arriving at Battle School, Ender quickly and easily masters difficult challenges and simulations, winning respect amongst his peers and teachers. Ender is soon chosen by Graff as the military's great hope, and he is promoted to Command School. Once there, he's trained by Mazer Rackham himself. He runs several “simulations” thinking he is training for when he became a commander himself, however, he is really directing real missions through a machine called an Ansible. While thinking he was running a simulation as a graduation battle, he attacks the Formics’ home planet, and annihilates the entire race. When he finds out that the whole thing was real, he goes into a state of depression. In the barren land outside command school, Ender sees a shape that resembles something he had seen in dreams, and in a psychological mind game. He goes to it, and sees a Formic queen pupa, and makes it his mission to find the Formics a new home planet.

Essay:
The novel Ender's game holds a variety of events and actions by different characters that are all due to a basic human characteristic: fear of the unknown. Due to these events, we can see that ender's eventual character growth is because of this antagonistic fear, because it ruled a great portion of his life.
Ender, the main character, lives in the continuous shadow of fear. He fears that he doesn't fit in with his peers, and he fears what they can do to him. This is demonstrated when he told Colonel Graff that he made the kids in the shuttle hate him. He fears that he will be rejected from the program; that he will dishonor his parents with having a third who was not accepted. He fears that his actions will not only hurt him, but affect others as well. All of this eventually causes him to change, to accommodate all these unknown factors.
The Formics are also a great example of how humanity tends to fear what is unknown. The Formics had not returned after the first and second invasions, however humanity's fear that they would return, stronger than ever, would force them to take the measures they deemed necessary to protect themselves. This led to the third invasion, in which they attacked the Formics' home planet. What caused them to believe that this was the only course of action? They believed this because the Formics were an unknown quantity. They did not know what their weapons were; they did not know how they communicated. It was unknown whether they would return, though they had not for the past 50 years.
Many supporting characters also contain fear. Ender's brother, Peter, lives in fear. Despite his act of being tough and strong, he fears that ender, his little brother, is better than him. He fears that Ender could do what he could not. Peter likes having power. He likes feeling control over his siblings, Ender and Valentine. He fears that if ender makes the program, he will be deemed less important, and his grip will fail. For that reason he created a pseudonym, Locke, and attempted to take over the world. Fear of the unknown is fueled by insecurity. We fear that we will lose what we are, or that something will come that we have no idea how to deal with. Ender feared that he would fail; that he would not be good enough and the human race would suffer because of it