A Parting Summary

Xenocide thoughtfully continues Orson Scott Card's Speaker series and is a worthy sequel to the series' second novel, Speaker for the Dead. Over three thousand years have elapsed on Earth since the human-bugger wars detailed in the first novel, Ender's Game. Having been sentenced to planet destruction by the Starways Congress, the human colonists of Lusitania search for a way to avoid their fate and also to solve a host of other problems they are facing, not the least of which is the virulent descolada virus that infects the entire planet and is continually adapting itself in order to destroy humans and their fragile colony.

The novel opens on the remote planet Path where the upper caste (ruling class) called "the godspoken" try to live their lives according to the principles of "the Path." The godspoken are chosen from the inhabitants...