Ender's Game series

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The Ender's Game Series (or simply Ender Series) is a series of science fiction books by Orson Scott Card, started with the short story "Ender's Game", which was later expanded into the novel Ender's Game. It currently consists of eight novels and one short story collection (a ninth novel is in the works). The first two novels in the series, Ender's Game and Speaker for the Dead, each won both the Hugo and the Nebula awards, and the two books were among the most influential science fiction novels of the 1980s. It has been referred to as the Enderverse.

Chronology of Enderverse stories. Numbers in brackets are year of first publication. Question marks indicate a work that has be announced but not yet published.

[edit] Ender's Game

Ender's Game is set in a future where mankind is facing annihilation by an aggressive alien society, an insect-like race known colloquially as "Buggers" but more formally as "Formics." The central character, Andrew "Ender" Wiggin, is one of the child soldiers trained at Battle School (and eventually Command School) to be the future leaders of the protection of Earth. The year is roughly 2165 A.D.

[edit] Sequels

Card went back and expanded the short story into a novel after realizing that he wanted to use Ender as a main character in another novel, Speaker for the Dead. That novel takes place three thousand years after Ender's Game, although due to relativistic space travel Ender himself (now using his own name, Andrew) is only 35, making him only 15 years older than he was at the end of Ender's Game. While the first novel was soft science space opera with armies and space warfare, Speaker for the Dead and its two sequels Xenocide and Children of the Mind are more philosophical in nature. They deal with the difficult relationship between the humans and the "piggies" (or "pequeninos"), and Andrew's attempts to stop another xenocide from happening (after the one caused by himself in the Bugger War). Currently a prequel book to Speaker for the Dead, named Ender in Exile, is planned on being made as well. It is said to be about Ender meeting a character from the Shadow series.

[edit] Shadow series

Starting with Ender's Shadow, four more novels have been released which tell the story of the people whom Ender left behind — this has been dubbed the Shadow series (also known as the "Bean Quartet"). Ender's Shadow is a parallel novel to Ender's Game, telling many of the same events from the perspective of Bean, a mostly peripheral character in Ender's Game, while Shadow of the Hegemon, Shadow Puppets and Shadow of the Giant tell the story of the struggle of world dominance after the Bugger War, in which the Battle School children, as well as Ender's brother, Peter Wiggin, are involved. Currently a sequel book to Shadow of the Giant, named Shadows in Flight, is planned on being made as well. It is said to finish the Enderverse as a whole and explain some unanswered questions.

[edit] Short stories

The book First Meetings features the original Ender's Game short story as well as three short stories by Card set in the Ender universe:

• "The Polish Boy" about Ender's father, John Paul Wiggin;
• "Investment Counselor" about Jane, the artificial sentience from Speaker for the Dead and its sequels (first appeared in Far Horizons);
• "Teacher's Pest" about the first meeting of Ender's parents.

Card's new webzine, Intergalactic Medicine Show will feature a short story from the Enderverse in each issue:

• "Mazer in Prison," a story of Mazer after winning the invasion of the buggers;
• "Pretty Boy," the story of Bonzo Madrid;
• "Cheater," the story about one of the other members of Ender's jeesh, Han Tzu a.k.a. Hot Soup;
• "Gloriously Bright," the story of Han Qing-jao.