Orson Scott Card - (Ender Wiggin #1) - Ender's Game
When humanity is under threat from an alien race, Ender Wiggin, at the age of six, leaves his family on Earth to journey to the Belt. There he enters Battle School, where his life is strictly disciplined by mind games and computer mock-battles fought in deadly earnest. Instinct, compassion and genius make Ender unequalled. But while he trains, the invasion approaches fast. And Ender will be pushed to the limits of endurance, for he is a unique destiny...
Ender's Shadow is being dubbed as a parallel novel to Orson Scott
Card's Hugo and Nebula Award-winning Ender's Game. By "parallel," Card
means that Shadow begins and ends at roughly the same time as Game, and
it chronicles many of the same events. In fact, the two books tell an
almost identical story of brilliant children being trained in the
orbiting Battle School to lead humanity's fleets in the final war
against alien invaders known as the Buggers. The most brilliant of
these young recruits is Ender Wiggin, an unparalleled commander and
tactician who can surely defeat the Buggers if only he can overcome his
own inner turmoil.
Second among the children is Bean, who
becomes Ender's lieutenant despite the fact that he is the smallest and
youngest of the Battle School students. Bean is the central character
of Shadow, and we pick up his story when he is just a 2-year-old
starving on the streets of a future Rotterdam that has become a hell on
earth. Bean is unnaturally intelligent for his age, which is the only
thing that allows him to escape--though not unscathed--the streets and
eventually end up in Battle School. Despite his brilliance, however,
Bean is doomed to live his life as an also-ran to the more famous and
in many ways more brilliant Ender. Nonetheless, Bean learns things that
Ender cannot or will not understand, and it falls to this once pathetic
street urchin to carry the weight of a terrible burden that Ender must
not be allowed to know.
Ender and Valentine Wiggin are brother and sister who both share the gift of genius. The monstrous Starways Congress has sent a warfleet to their home planet of Lusitania, containing two alien species and the deadliest virus ever known. They have also issued the order to destroy the planet.
Xenocide is the third installment of the Ender series. On Lusitania, Ender found a world where humans and pequeninos and the Hive Queen could all live together; where three very different intelligent species could find common ground at last. Or so he thought. But Lusitania also harbors the descolada, a virus which kills all humans it infects, but which the pequeninos require in order to transform into adults. The Starways Congress so fears the effect of the descolada, should it escape from Lusitania, that they have ordered the destruction of the entire planet and all who live there. The Fleet is on its way and a second Xenocide seems inevitable, until the Fleet vanishes.