Ender's Game

About the Ender's Game series

Andrew "Ender" Wiggin is six years old when he's recruited into Battle School, an orbiting military academy built to find and train the child who can save humanity from a third invasion by the alien "Buggers." Ender is a prodigy the adults running the program are willing to isolate, manipulate and break in order to shape into a commander — and the story is as much about what that does to a brilliant, lonely child as it is about the tactical war games he keeps winning. The final twist of Ender's Game recontextualizes everything that came before it and is one of science fiction's most famous gut-punches.

The sequels take a hard left turn from military SF into something slower and more philosophical: Speaker for the Dead jumps decades ahead to Ender, now an adult carrying the guilt of what he did as a child, acting as a truth-telling "speaker" at the funeral of a murdered scientist on a world with its own first-contact crisis. Xenocide and Children of the Mind continue that arc into questions of personhood, philosophy of mind, and genocide's aftermath. Ender in Exile, written decades later, is a direct sequel to Ender's Game that fills the gap before Speaker for the Dead begins. It's a series for readers who want SF that starts as a gripping child-genius war story and keeps getting stranger and more morally serious with every book.

How to read this series

The core saga is small: Ender's Game (1985), Speaker for the Dead (1986), Xenocide (1991) and Children of the Mind (1996) — read in that order, since each is a direct continuation of the last. Ender's Game stands alone perfectly well if you only ever read one.

Ender in Exile (2008) was published fifth but is set chronologically right after Ender's Game, filling the years before Speaker for the Dead — read it either right after Ender's Game for story order, or after Children of the Mind for publication order; either works, since it's a self-contained side story. A War of Gifts (2007) is a short holiday-themed novella set during Ender's time at Battle School, entirely optional and best read alongside Ender's Game itself. Orson Scott Card also wrote a large parallel "Shadow" series following Ender's Battle School classmate Bean (starting with Ender's Shadow), which runs alongside these books but tells a different story with a different tone; it isn't covered on this page.