Earth Awakens

Earth Awakens is a science fiction novel by the American writers Orson Scott Card and Aaron Johnston, published in June 2014. It is the third book of the First Formic War trilogy, a prequel sequence to Card's Ender's Game.

The First Formic War is set almost a century before the events of Ender's Game, at a point when humanity has only just begun to move off Earth: a thin network of ships in the asteroid belts, a few stations, and a corporate settlement on the Moon. Nobody had seen any sign of another spacefaring species, and the expectation had been that a first contact, if it came, would happen far away in the empty space between the stars. Instead an alien invasion begins in China. The Chinese government insists on meeting it alone as its losses mount, while Captain Wit O'Toole of the Mobile Operations Police and Mazer Rackham have managed to destroy one of the three alien landers, a first real human success won without official approval and with a nuclear warhead obtained without authorisation, which is why the two of them are being held by General Sima. An eight-year-old boy named Bingwen, whom Rackham saved during the fighting, works out how to get them released by spreading word online that they were acting on Sima's orders while giving Sima the credit.

The trilogy was written to fill in the years before Ender's Game, and its subject is a war fought by a species that is not yet organised for one, with the politics of the various national and corporate forces taking up as much of the story as the fighting does.