Ender's Game series

Ender's Game is a serie written by Orson Scott Card that has won may SF literature awards and in my opinion no movie was yet made to be better than the book.

I have read the following novels in chronological order,  and loved every bit of it:
Earth Unaware
Earth Afire
Earth Awakens
Ender's Game
Ender's Shadow
A War of Gifts
Shadow of the Hegemon
Shadow Puppets
Shadow of the Giant
Ender in Exile
Shadows in Flight
First Meetings
Speaker for the Dead
Xenocide
Children of the Mind

4 more books are forthcoming.

The universe that Orson Scott Card created is so wonderful and complex it makes you dizzy. The most popular book is of course Ender's Game, but this is the simplest and easiest of them all. It tells how Ender grew up, about his family, about his training and how he was able to defeat the formics, by understanding them.

But if you read only this, it's like never leaving the house, never going into an adventure, a holiday or even the neighbor city. My personal favorites were Speaker for the Dead and Xenocide. They talk about how humans colonized a planet where some strange beings were living. They called them "piggies" and tried to communicate with them.

I had a lot of food for thought in these books. The piggies were interesting life forms. They had several development levels. The females were very small and gave birth to some kind of larvae, then died. The ones who were not fertile were called "mothers" and took care of the larvae. The males developed to maturity and they were the "workers". The most brave and respected were granted the honor to be killed and berried into the ground. From here they grew into a tree that could communicate with the others, a symbol of wisdom. This final state of evolution was called "thinkers" and it was only for the most worthy. The female larvae were put on the tree branches and this is how they were fecundated, and the circle of life continued.

What I thought it was interesting is how amazed they were that humans were born as "workers" in their understanding, and died and all was over.

It made me stop and think. We also have workers and thinkers. We have the opportunity to be both workers and thinkers in our life. So we should stop and think from time to time:
- Who are we?
- Do we like what we are?
- Can we change something for the better?

Also interesting were the political conspiracies done by world powers that used Ender's colleagues as weapons, the religious wars and the details and specifics that Orson Scott Card created for each country. It was interesting to read this book now and make a parallel with what is happening in the world. It is scarily close...