Ender's Game
Orson Scott Card · 1985
Card's 1985 novel remains the defining military SF story of its era and the sharpest exploration of a child simultaneously weaponized and innocent. Its final revelation is still one of SF's most powerful moral sucker-punches.
The case against
Every brutal thing Ender does gets engineered into innocence: he kills two children and the book absolves him before the bruises fade, since his heart was pure and the adults made him do it. That moral machinery flatters the bullied reader it was built for. Meanwhile two preteens conquer world politics by writing pseudonymous essays, a subplot implausible even before the internet existed.
Science Fiction & Fantasy · the Pro canon
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
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