THE ENDER'S GAME VIDEO CONSOLE
In the corner a young lad is playing Ender's Game on a video console.
This is part of the description in the Rama Bar, and it refers to Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game.
An alien race is threatening to wipe out humanity in a massive war. Ender Wiggin is the child chosen to prevent this extinction of his own kind. At the age of six he leaves his family on earth and enters Battle School in the asteroid belt, where his life is strictly disciplined, consisting of mind games, computer wargames and mock battles fought against his fellow pupils, in deadly earnest.
Ender's genius at computer-programming, his killer instinct and his compassion combine to make him unique. He is pushed to the limits of human endurance to fulfil his destiny in the fast-approaching invasion which will decide the future of mankind.
Ender's Game is a fascinating story showing the manipulation of a child, turning him into a tool to serve a particular end, but in the process all but wrecking him as a functioning human being. It also has some fabulous sequences where Ender is playing computer games, including a kind of virtual world adventure game which I really want to play myself!
There are three sequels to Ender's Game. The first is Speaker for the Dead. This is not a traditional sequel, where more of the same happens; much of the book concerns characters and themes that were not in Ender's Game and the style of the book is quite different. However, Andrew Wiggin does play a vital role in the unfolding of events. If anything, Speaker for the Dead is even better than Ender's Game so I definitely recommend it.
Speaker for the Dead ends on a bit of a cliff-hanger, with disaster looming for the planet on which it is set; this is resolved in the third and fourth book, Xenocide and Children of the Mind. They were originally intended to be one book but there was so much to write, it wouldn't fit! Consequently, they feel like one book which appears in two volumes. Together they resolve all the loose ends from the first two books, and for that reason I recommend them; if you don't read them you'll be left not knowing how things work out! However they don't quite live up to the supreme brilliance of Ender's Game and Speaker for the Dead - but let's face it, that would be very hard!
