Xenocide is the third book in Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game saga and is preceded by Ender’s Game and Speaker for the Dead. The series is best classified as dystopian science fiction; Ender’s Game, which has been adapted to film, is the most popular volume. Xenocide is set on two planets. The first, Lusitania, is inhabited by the Pequeninos and the descolada virus that is crucial to their life cycle but deadly to other species; the planet is also home to humans and the hive queen of the Formics—the last surviving member of her species after the events in Ender’s Game. The second planet featured in Xenocide is Path, a colony world inhabited by genetically modified, superintelligent humans who have a form of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) and are unaware of their modifications. The novel focuses on applying ethics and morality to science, defining intelligent life, and exploring issues of cross-species understanding and coexistence. The novel also explores religious and spiritual concepts that reflect Card’s intense interest in religion and spirituality.

This study guide uses the Kindle version of Xenocide (1st trade edition) published by Macmillan: A Tom Doherty Associates, in 1991.

Content Warning: The source material discusses and depicts violence and an attempted suicide.

Plot Summary

Qing-jao, a young girl living on Path, is determined to be “godspoken,” meaning that she communes with the gods by “purifying” herself—in her case, through handwashing and tracing woodgrain lines in floorboards. (These behaviors are later revealed to be a result of the genetic modifications that cause OCD to manifest among certain families on Path.) Her father, Han Fei-tzu, promises his wife on her deathbed that he will raise Qing-jao to obey the gods, and Qing-jao proves to herself to be an excellent student. Her final task on the way to becoming “godspoken” is to discover the cause of the disappearance of the Lusitania fleet, which is a group of starships accompanied by the M. D. Device—a weapon that can destroy a planet. (The fleet has disappeared en route to the planet of Lusitania.)

Before the events of Xenocide, a group of colonizing humans including Ender Wiggin arrived on Lusitania and established a small village called Milagre. The humans were forbidden to interact with the indigenous intelligent species, pig-like beings called Pequeninos. The humans also discovered that the Pequeninos carry a virus called descolada, which they need to survive but which is deadly to humans and to other alien species. Unbeknownst to most of the inhabitants of the planet, Ender found a distant location for the hive queen to reestablish her species. (During the events in Ender’s Game, the young Ender had unwittingly destroyed the hive queen’s species—the Formics or “buggers”—and he has since developed a strong admiration for the hive queen and her species. In Speaker for the Dead, the humans on Lusitania rebelled against Starways Congress, the leaders of humanity, by interacting with the Pequeninos against official policy and by refusing to send the primary offender, Miro Rebeira, Ender’s stepson who has a physical disability, to them for trial for his role in interfering with the Pequeninos. Starways Congress responded to this defiance by sending the Lusitania fleet, with the intention of destroying all of Lusitania with the catastrophic M.D. Device.

Valentine Wiggin, Ender’s sister, who writes political treatises under the penname Demosthenes, travels to Lusitania while writing political essays in an attempt to stop the Lusitania fleet. She connects with Miro, who comes to meet her ship, and Miro tells Valentine about the situation on Lusitania. He also introduces her to Jane, an intangible yet fully sentient being who was born of an interactive computer program that was intimately connected to the young Ender’s thoughts and experiences in Ender’s Game. Jane has since evolved into a much more complex being and now lives among the connections between the ansibles—the communication networks that allow humans to circumvent some of the restrictions of relativity by communicating instantly across vast distances of space. When Valentine and Miro’s ships arrive on Lusitania, they are met by Ender, his wife, Novinha, and Novinha’s other children: Quim, Grego, Quara, Ela, and Olhado. Novinha, Ela, and Quara are xenobiologists who study alien life; Grego is a physicist; Quim is a priest, and Olhado is a career father and a manager of a brick factory. Novinha and Ela are looking for ways to modify the descolada virus so that it will not harm other sentient species. However, Quara argues that the virus itself is sentient and that it would therefore be unethical to destroy or modify it in any way. She shares her research with the fathertrees—the male Pequeninos in their third life stage. One fathertree, Warmaker, develops the extremist view that the Pequeninos must spread the descolada across the universe as their religious mission. Quim travels to the dissenting forest of fathertrees to reestablish peace, but Warmaker forces Quim to die of the descolada virus. Upon hearing the news, Grego incites anger in the village and unintentionally creates a violent mob that takes revenge by massacring the innocent Pequeninos in the neighboring forest.

On Path, Qing-jao discovers Demosthenes’s true identity with the help of her secret maid, Wang-mu, and realizes that the AI program that Demosthenes uses to send essays is the same force that deactivated communications to the Lusitania fleet. Jane appears to Han Fei-tzu and tells him that the people of Path have been genetically modified with heightened intelligence accompanied with a variant of OCD that manifests as handwashing and other debilitating symptoms that the people misinterpret as communing with the gods. Han Fei-tzu believes Jane, but Qing-jao argues that Jane is a computer program and that Starways Congress has their best interests at heart. She sends a letter to Starways Congress telling them about Jane and the fleet. Communications are reestablished with the fleet, and Starways Congress makes plans for an ansible shutdown, which could kill Jane. Jane asks Han Fei-tzu and Wang-mu to help the researchers on Lusitania to discover a way to thwart the descolada virus, and, in return, Ela will help to find a cure for the genetically engineered OCD.

The teams of researchers start making breakthroughs when they work together. By talking with the hive queen, the researchers discover that Jane was created by Ender when he was in Battle School, which means that she will be injured but not killed by the pending ansible shutdown. The hive queen describes how hive queens of the Formic species are brought forth by calling their consciousness from someplace else. This inspires Grego to discover faster-than-light travel, which is accomplished by traveling to an adjacent dimension called Outspace then returning to the normal fabric of space-time.

As research continues, a Pequenino named Planter sacrifices himself to prove that the Pequeninos are intelligent without the descolada virus. Quara, who is still against killing and altering the virus, shares her research, and Ela creates a model for a modified virus called recolada and for a virus that would eliminate the OCD in the people of Path. Jane transports a small ship carrying Ender, Ela, and Miro into Outspace to test faster-than-light travel and to design the viruses they need, as they cannot create the viruses in their own dimension. While in Outspace, Ender accidentally creates a young Valentine (“Val”) and a young Peter. (The original Peter Wiggin is deceased; he was Ender and Valentine’s older brother, a brilliant yet Machiavellian person who rose to become Hegemon—the most powerful position on Earth—many years ago.) Also while in Outspace, Miro, who has brain damage and a speech disability due to events that occurred in Speaker for the Dead, creates a new body.

Ultimately, the descolada virus is killed and replaced with the recolada with no ill effects on the natural life cycle of the Pequeninos. However, the hive queen reveals that the original descolada virus had begun to adapt symbiotically. This information suggests that Quara was correct in her assertions that killing and recreating the descolada virus is unethical. Jane, young Val, and Miro search for safe places to take the Pequeninos and future hive queens to escape the Lusitania fleet. Peter travels to Path and delivers the virus to reverse the OCD. He also asks Wang-mu to join him in overthrowing Starways Congress. Han Fei-tzu releases the virus among the people of Path, and it reverses the OCD. People accept the story that the gods have honored Path by removing their need to purify themselves ritualistically, and all children are given equal education. Qing-jao, however, continues to reject the truth, and she traces woodgrains until her death, upon which she is named the God of Path. The novel ends with the Lusitania fleet still en route and Ender separated from his wife, Novinha, who secluded herself in a convent called Children of the Mind of Christ after Quim’s death.