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Trained as a warrior from childhood, Ender defeated the alien Buggers by destroying their home planet before he reached his teens. This earned him the name Ender the Xenocide ("Slayer of Aliens") and filled him with a grim determination to make more of his life.
Becoming known as the Speaker for the Dead, he preached his ethical views across space. On the planet Lusitania, he became a civic leader, a family man, savior of the local humans from the local aliens and vice versa, and finally restorer of the Buggers through finding their last Hive Queens.
However, this book opens with Ender definitely deep in alligators. His wife has left him, his family scattering, and the rest of the human race has learned that Lusitania holds the last Buggers. It also holds the descolada virus, essential to the life cycle of the Lusitanian natives but deadly to other life forms. Their response is to shut down the interstellar computer network Jane, through whom Ender is fighting the virus and maintaining faster-than-light travel, and to send a fleet to destroy the planet Lusitanian itself.
Also, Ender is dying.
Fortunately, the Speaker for the Dead has a few unusual resources for his last battle. From the Buggers he has learned the art of putting one's consciousness in other bodies, and he has done this with two, Peter and Valentine, named after his brother and sister. They spearhead the effort to cancel the fleet, and in the process both find mates. Their intrigues and courtships both contain a good deal of wit and some ingenious world-building.
Is this book always tightly written? No. Is it fully understandable to the reader newly come to Ender's tale? Not really. Will it make people want to go back and read the earlier books? Almost certainly.
The biological, technological, and mental evolution of humanity has been discussed in science fiction from its earliest days. Our ethical evolution has seldom been explored -- at least until now, when Card does it so splendidly in the tale of Ender Wiggin.
-- Roland J. Green
©1996, ProMotion, inc.