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Synopsis

Setting

In the book, humankind experiences large-scale confrontations with a largely unknown alien race called Formics (often referred to as "buggers") who nearly wipe out humanity. As a result, humankind enters a shaky alliance to combat the Formics with the formation of an international military unit, the International Fleet (IF). In the futuristic setting, humankind develops interstellar travel, faster-than-light communication (derived from the ansible from Ursula K. Le Guin's works), various new weapons and defense mechanisms, and control over gravity. Earth is governed by three separate bodies, the Hegemon, Polemarch, and Strategos, which compete for dominance during the war.

Most of the story focuses around the Battle School, a space station used as a military training complex for children. The IF tests all children on Earth and selects the brightest for the Battle School for military training. Students are organized into forty-one man armies and assigned to conduct simulated battles in micro gravity (called "null gravity" in the book). Upon graduation, students move on to either Tactical School, Combat School, Pre-Command School or Command School with three years in Pre-Command. The Battle School forms in response to the need of highly skilled officers for the wars against the Formics, and most of the officers in the IF pass through the school at one time.

Plot summary

In the novel's opening, the government selects Andrew "Ender" Wiggin for training at the elite Battle School. At Battle School, the commander Hyrum Graff publicly recognizes Ender as the most intelligent attendee. This acknowledgment causes other students to resent Ender, isolating him from most of the other children. Ender soon ranks among the school's elite child soldiers, eventually achieving the school's top rank. Even after his success the other children continue to ostracize him. Ender attempts to escape his isolation and frustration in various ways, but experiences little comfort until he receives a letter from his older sister Valentine, reminding him of his reasons for attending Battle School in the first place.

The Battle School brass soon promote him to commander of a new army in the school's zero-gravity wargame league. He molds his young soldiers into an undefeated team, despite working with an inexperienced army. Ender's army implements innovative tactics, abolishing old methods like the use of formations in the battle room.

The Battle School administration promotes Ender to Command School ahead of schedule. In command school, and under the tutelage of Mazer Rackham, the legendary hero of the Formic wars, Ender plays a game very similar to the Battle Room, where he commands ships in a 3-D space battle simulator. His subordinate officers are fellow students advanced early from the battle school who later become known as "Ender's jeesh." Each day the games become increasingly grueling, and Ender is slowly worn down to exhaustion. Waking and sleeping blend together as Ender nearly loses his sanity, though still maintaining his military innovation and leadership.

Ender's "final exam" consists of a scenario where bugger ships outnumber Ender's fleet a thousand to one near a planetary mass. Ender orders the use of a special weapon, the Molecular Disruption Device, against the planet itself, destroying the simulated planet and all ships in orbit. Ender makes this decision knowing that it is expressly against the respectable rules of the game, hoping that his teachers will find his ruthlessness unacceptable, remove him from command, and allow him to return home.

Soon after Ender's destruction of the "simulated" Formic fleet, Rackham tells him that all the simulations were real battles taking place in Formic space. After Ender realizes that he is responsible for the destruction of an entire race, the guilt of the genocide sends him into a coma.

When Ender recovers, his sister Valentine explains that he will not be allowed to return to earth because his special skills are too dangerous to fall under the control of his feared brother Peter. He is made Governor of the first human colony on a Bugger world and they leave together on the first colony ship. While scouting out locations for future cities, Ender discovers a message from the Formics—expressed in the form of terrain matching that of the key fantasy game Ender played while in school—that leads him to an unborn Formic queen who can communicate with him through a psychic link. She explains that her race was initially unaware that humans were sentient creatures. The Formic defeat in the Second Invasion awakened them to humanity's true nature, and they resolved not to attack Earth again. With direct communication impossible between the species, the only connection they were able make was with Ender's dreaming mind, but he did not know he was fighting a war.

Ender realizes that the Formics left this one Queen for Ender to find, forgive and take to a new home. Leaving out the fact that one 'Bugger' still lives, Ender writes a book in the Queens voice under the pseudonym "Speaker for the Dead" entitled The Hive Queen, wherein he tells the story of the Formic race.