Xenocide

Continues on from Speaker for the Dead. Valentine and her family arrive on Lusitania, even as Starways Congress' Fleet bears down on the planet with the M.D Device. Ender is struggling under the impending doom from the Fleet, the adaptable and destructive descolada, the diplomacy between the three sentient species and the problems within his own family.

Introduces Han Qing-jao, Han Fei-tzu and Si Wang-mu, who live on the Taoist Chinese world of Path. They are given a mandate to discover the whereabouts of the Lusitania fleet after Jane hid it. Raises issues of servility, as well as the nature of religion and faith when it has been engineered into you.

Orson Scott Card expands on his idea of the philotes, indivisible particles that join and create everything real. They use this idea to permit instantaneous starflight by shifting to the Outside and back In. Possible relations to string theory? The concept of an auia, the spirit philote which represents an individual - controlling a network of smaller auias in cells etc. resembles a physical soul. Provides mechanism for Jane's emergence, and for the transfer of memories in the pequenino lifecycle.

Ender