The Barnes & Noble Review Orson Scott Card's Ender Wiggin saga began more than 20 years ago with the publication of "Ender's Game," a novella that formed the basis for the enormously popular novel of the same name, which was followed, in turn, by three increasingly ambitious sequels: Speaker for the Dead, Xenocide, and Children of the Mind. Now Card returns to the source material of the series with Ender's Shadow, a "parallel novel" that recapitulates the central events of Ender's Game from a new, and very different, perspective. Ender's Game, first published in novel form in 1985, describes the relentlessly brutal education of Andrew "Ender" Wiggin, a preadolescent military genius believed to be humankind's last, best hope against the anticipated invasion of an insectile race of aliens called the Formics. As the novel opens, the Formics — popularly known as "the Buggers" — have already made two unsuccessful attempts to conquer and colonize Earth, and xenophobia now runs rampant, temporarily uniting a wide range of political and ideological factions. Ender, together with a handpicked group of gifted, if slightly less brilliant children, is conscripted and sent to a remote space station called the Battle School, where he participates in a series of war games that prepare him, by the age of 9, for the responsibilities of military command. Eventually, the games turn real, and Ender leads his youthful forces to a bitter and ironic "victory" over the Buggers. His chief lieutenant in the final series of battles — his shadow — is a brilliant,abrasive,undersize child known, simply, as Bean. Bean is both the hero and the focal point of Card's latest novel. Through him, we reexperience — and sometimes reinterpret — a familiar series of events.Obviously, large areas of Ender's Game and Ender's Shadow —