The Ender Series is a series of science fiction books by Orson Scott Card, started with the "Ender's Game" short story, later expanded into a novel with the same title. It currently consists of eight novels and one short stories collection (a ninth novel is in the works). The first two novels in the series, Ender's Game and Speaker of the Dead, each won both the Hugo and the Nebula awards, and the two books were among the most influential science fiction novels of the 1980s. Fans often call the universe in which the series takes place the Enderverse.

Ender's Game

Ender's Game is set in a future where mankind is facing annihilation by an aggressive alien society, an insect-like race known colloquially as "Buggers" but more formally as "Formics." The central character, Andrew "Ender" Wiggin, is one of the child soldiers trained at Battle School to be the future leaders of the protection of Earth.

Sequels

Card went back and expanded the short story into a novel after realizing that he wanted to use Ender as a main character in another novel, Speaker for the Dead. That novel takes place three thousand years after Ender's Game, although due to relativistic space travel Ender himself (now using his own name, Andrew) is only 20 years older. While the first novel was hard science fiction with armies and space warfare, Speaker for the Dead and its two sequels Xenocide and Children of the Mind are more philosophical in nature. They deal with the difficult relationship between the humans and the "piggies" (or "pequeninos"), and Andrew's attempts to stop another xenocide from happening (after the one caused by himself in the Bugger War).

Shadow series

Starting with Ender's Shadow, four more novels have been released which tell the story of the people whom Ender left behind—this has been dubbed the Shadow series (also known as the "Bean Quartet"). Ender's Shadow is a parallel novel to Ender's Game, telling many of the same events from the perspective of Bean, a mostly peripheral character in Ender's Game, while Shadow of the Hegemon, Shadow Puppets and Shadow of the Giant tell the story of the struggle of world dominance after the Bugger War, in which the Battle School children, as well as Ender's brother, Peter Wiggin are involved.

Short stories

Card has also written three short stories set in the Ender universe: "The Polish Boy", about Ender's father, John Paul Wiggin; "The Investment Counselor", about Jane, the artificial sentience from Speaker for the Dead and its sequels; and "Teacher's Pest", about the first meeting of Ender's parents. All three have been published along with the original Ender's Game short story in the book First Meetings.