House of Card: Ender’s Game and Speculative Fiction as a Vehicle for Religio-Political Values

Speculative fiction, through its explicit engagement with possible futures of the present world, represents a unique opportunity for writers and readers to connect present-day cultural concerns to possible futures. Speculative fiction allows authors to set characters in worlds created by misguided values present in the world of the reader, providing a platform to “break” and remake that world through critique. By examining not just the world that an author has created but also the trajectory of its creation, we can gain insight into the author’s understanding of how religion and politics interact and impact history. Using works from Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game canon as a case study, this article argues that speculative fiction can serve as a vehicle for cultural values and is thus useful to historians of American religion.