Earth Awakens (The First Formic War)
In volume three of the the First Formic War series—a prequel series set a century before Card’s classic Ender’s Game—the alien invaders have landed on Earth. Mazer Rackham and his Mobile Operations Police comrades pull off a high-risk mission to stop the mass slaughter in China. Meanwhile, in space, Victor Delgado, who risked his young life in the first novel in the series (Earth Unaware, 2012) to warn Earth of the impending invasion, is risking it again, this time by infiltrating a Formic vessel and trying to find a way to neutralize the alien creatures. But has he been set up by Lem Jukes, the conniving son of a mining-company president who’s feeling mistreated by his powerful father? With a nice balance of violence and political machination, the novel will definitely please readers of the first two books in the series—a series that, it should be pointed out, isn’t merely a spin-off of Ender’s Game and its numerous sequels. Even if there had been no Ender’s Game, the First Formic Wars novels would still pack the same considerable wallop.      HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Card remains among the biggest names in contemporary science fiction, and his latest will be published to a legion of eager fans. --David Pitt