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The Hive Queen was a novel written by Andrew Wiggin under the pen name "Speaker for the Dead".[1]
History[]
Publishing[]
Published around the year 43 AX, The Hive Queen was a story of the life of the Hive Queen of Shakespeare, the Formics as a species and how they were different from what most humans thought of them.[1]
Andrew's sister, Valentine Wiggin, encouraged him to follow her example as Demosthenes and publish it with a pseudonym instead of his real name. The book was published but not copyrighted, so anyone could make copies of it.[1]
Legacy[]
Many years after they were published, The Hive Queen and The Hegemon began to be sold as one volume. The two books were considered scripture or "holy writ' to many people.[2]
The book changed people's opinions on the Formics, and on Ender Wiggin. The Formics became tragic, unable to be communicated with and so were destroyed; on the other hand, Ender became a monster, the Xenocide, who annihilated an entire sentient species without a second thought.[3] Ironically, Ender wrote the book that turned him into a monster and his name into an epithet.