Formics, usually referred to by the informal and derogatory term, "buggers," are an insectoid alien species from the Ender's Game series of science fiction novels by Orson Scott Card.

The Formics share a single hive-mind directed by a queen. If the queen dies, all the Formics in the hive lose all will and intelligence and will die shortly afterwards, much like an ant colony. The Formics are able to communicate instantaneously via philotes; through studying the Formic technology leftover as wreckage from the Formic Wars, humans learned to harness faster-than-light communication via the ansible. They live in vast underground colonies in complete darkness.

In the novel Ender's Game, Ender Wiggin unknowingly commits xenocide, destroying their homeworld, and wiping out all the Formics except for a single queen egg. The initial reaction at the destruction of all of the Formics was jubilation on the part of humanity. However, following the release of Ender's book, The Hive Queen , under the psuedonym of The Speaker for the Dead, humanity came to realize the destruction as a xenocide, and Ender's name was vilified. Ender eventually finds the only remaining egg on the colony world that he is sent to colonize. The Formics placed the egg on the colony world in a landscape terraformed to match the outlay of the landscape in a psychoanalytical game that Ender played in Battle School, so that he would recognize it. Ender finds a place for the egg to hatch on Lusitania, a Catholic Portuguese colony world, allowing the Formics another chance at life.