Ender's Game

Ender's Game is a science fiction novel by the American author Orson Scott Card, published in 1985 and expanded from an earlier novelette. It opens the Ender's Game series, and the Hugo and Nebula awards both went to it and to its sequel, Speaker for the Dead. The setting is a future in which humanity faces the insect-like Formics, an aggressive alien society, and the central figure is a child soldier being trained to lead the defence.

Earth has survived two wars with the Formics and is preparing for a third. Andrew Wiggin, called Ender, is the third child in a family allowed a third only because the government asked for one, and the tests say he might be the commander the fleet needs. He is taken to Battle School in orbit, where the training is run as a series of games and the adults in charge are willing to break a six-year-old to find out whether he can think under pressure.

Ender is good at the games, and he keeps being isolated on purpose so that he has to rely on himself. The Formic invasion had been stopped decades earlier by Mazer Rackham, who rammed the alien queenship at what everyone believed was the cost of his life. His sister and brother are still on Earth, and both of them have plans of their own for his future.

The series continues in several directions, with parallel books following other characters from the same war. The first novel establishes Battle School, the Formics and Ender's own command training, and it is written as one continuous story rather than the opening of a sequence that requires the later books.