Ender's Game (Ender's Saga, #1)

by Orson Scott Card

“Yes. I wasn’t the first person to suggest it, but I was the first person to believe it. And something else. Something so childish and stupid that the xenobiologists laughed me to silence when I said it after the battle. The buggers are bugs. They’re like ants and bees. A queen, the workers. That was maybe a hundred million years ago, but that’s how they started, that kind of pattern. It’s a sure thing none of the buggers we saw had any way of making more little buggers. So when they evolved this ability to think together, wouldn’t they still keep the queen? Wouldn’t the queen still be the center of the group? Why would that ever change?” “So it’s the queen who controls the whole group.” “I had evidence, too. Not evidence that any of them could see. It wasn’t there in the First Invasion, because that was exploratory. But the Second Invasion was a colony. To set up a new hive, or whatever.” “And so they brought a queen.”