Speaker for the Dead
Swept the Hugo and Nebula the year after Ender's Game did — an unrepeated double — and established the 'ramen/varelse' hierarchy of alienness that xeno-ethics discussions in the genre still borrow.
Book Entry · Science Fiction
What is Ender's Game about?
Earth, braced for the third Formic invasion, breeds its commanders young: Andrew 'Ender' Wiggin, six years old and a third child in a two-child world, is taken to Battle Station and forged in the zero-gravity Battle Room through escalating, deliberately unfair games — the teachers' one rule being that no one will ever help him. The ruthlessness that frightens Ender most in himself is precisely what the school is farming. The famous ending detonates the entire premise: the distinction between game and genocide, it turns out, was the curriculum's final deception. Expanded from the 1977 novelette.
Why it matters
Hugo and Nebula winner, one of the bestselling SF novels ever, on official reading lists from secondary schools to the US Marine Corps; filmed in 2013. Its child-soldier ethics seminar shows no sign of adjourning.
Where does it sit in the series?
From battle school to xenocide and three thousand years of atonement: Card's saga of Ender Wiggin, the child who won a war he wasn't told he was fighting.
In the Guide from The Ender Saga:
- Ender's Game (1985)
- Speaker for the Dead (1986)
Read next
Forever Peace
Hugo, Nebula and Campbell Memorial winner — one of the rare books to take all three; its remote-warfare and forced-empathy arguments only grow more current.
The Amber Spyglass
Whitbread Book of the Year 2001 — the first children's book ever to take the overall prize — and the most theologically audacious bestseller in the YA canon; the trilogy's capstone and lightning rod alike.