My brother and I were arguing over Ender's Game.

He had read, what seemed to him, a compelling essay on the structure of its narrative. The thrust was that at every level the violence towards Ender leads to greater defensive violence; and lures the reader into sympathy for a genocide. The attacks on Ender parallel the reasons he is heroic to kill a race.

My observation was that this would be interesting if he had any choice.

The general structure of war fiction ( and military SF ) is to treat the soldier as a hero; as someone who makes courageous choices. But generally soldiers are given as little choice as possible. Because otherwise those seeing the Somme for the first time would return to their wives in Kansas ( or Hamburg ) at the first chance.

In some cases the choice to kill or die is simply the structure; dump a bunch of guys on Omaha beach, withdraw landing craft, and let them choose to die on the beach or kill and advance.

Other times its even more overt. The German officers shooting anyone seen retreating from the push into Stalingrad; or the choice in WWI to shell one's own trench if it wasn't vacated during a push into no-man's-land.

In that regard Ender's Game is fascinating. Because at the same time he seems heroic nothing in the story objectively shows him having a choice, right down to the one that makes him a genocide.

Dante