The Enderverse

On the data. This is a branch rather than a sequence, which is the single most useful thing to know before starting. Ender's Game (1985) is the trunk. After it the series goes two ways at once. Speaker for the Dead (1986) jumps three thousand years forward and follows Ender as an adult; it is a slow, talky book about guilt, anthropology and a colony world, and it is a different kind of novel from the one that precedes it. Ender's Shadow (1999) instead goes back to the beginning and tells the events of Ender's Game again from Bean, a starving child from Rotterdam who arrives at Battle School by a different road. Card has described it as a parallax rather than a sequel or a prequel. Each branch then runs four more books: the Ender line through Xenocide and Children of the Mind, the Shadow line through Shadow of the Hegemon, Shadow Puppets, Shadow of the Giant and Shadows in Flight. The two lines do not need each other and can be read in either order or singly. They converge exactly once, in The Last Shadow (2021), which resolves both and is the only book in the list that assumes you have read the other branch. Which branch to take second is a matter of taste and the two branches suit different readers. Speaker for the Dead is the book Card has said he wanted to write in the first place, and it is the more admired of the two lines; it is also the one that loses people, because it discards the school-and-battle machinery entirely. The Shadow books stay on Earth and turn into geopolitical thrillers about Peter Wiggin's rise and the wars between nations after the Formics are gone, closer in feel to the first book but pointed in a very different direction. A reader who bounces off Speaker for the Dead has not run out of series; they have taken the wrong fork. Story order on this page is relative rather than dated. The books do not fix a consistent calendar, so the numbers only order the titles against each other. Ender's Shadow sits alongside Ender's Game because it covers the same months. A War of Gifts sits inside Ender's Game, at Battle School during a single Christmas. Ender in Exile (2008) is the awkward one: it begins inside the final chapter of Ender's Game, runs through Ender's decades of colony travel, and ends where Speaker for the Dead begins, so it overlaps the Shadow books in time while belonging to the Ender line. It was written twenty-three years after the book it continues and adjusts a few details to fit the Shadow books written in between. Children of the Fleet (2017) is set at the renamed Battle School shortly after the war; it was meant to open a new Fleet School series and no second book has appeared. First Meetings is a collection rather than a novel: three stories in the 2002 Subterranean Press edition, four in the 2003 Tor edition, including the original 1977 Analog novelette that became Ender's Game. It has no single place in the timeline and is listed outside it. The Formic Wars prequels, written with Aaron Johnston, cover the two invasions that happen before Ender is born. Earth Unaware, Earth Afire and Earth Awakens are the First Formic War. The Swarm and The Hive are the Second Formic War, the one Mazer Rackham ends, which Ender's Game refers to constantly. The concluding third volume, The Queens, has been announced since the trilogy was named and has no publication date; because it has no confirmed year it is not listed as an item. That leaves the Second Formic War unfinished in print, which is worth knowing before starting it. The prequels are for readers who already like this world and are not a starting point, whatever their position in chronology suggests. One film exists. Ender's Game (2013), directed by Gavin Hood, compresses years of Battle School into what plays as a few months, ages the children up considerably, and cuts the Peter and Valentine subplot on Earth almost entirely. It made back little more than its budget, arrived alongside boycott campaigns over the author's public statements on unrelated matters, and no sequel was made. Talk of a television version has surfaced periodically and nothing has been ordered. Everything else in this world is on the page: the Formic Wars comics from Marvel and the Ender's Game Alive audio play are adaptations of listed books rather than new story, and are not listed separately.

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