Throughout Speaker for the Dead and the other books in the Ender’s series, Ender seeks to atone for his accidental genocide against the formics by cultivating empathy for cultures that others regard as irreconcilably alien. The importance of cross-cultural empathy is portrayed through the complex relationships between humans and other sentient species they encounter—the formics, pequeninos, and Jane—and it demonstrates that while humans are naturally judgmental, they can overcome their biases by deliberately seeking to understand other groups.

The formics were the first intelligent alien species that humans encountered, and humans nearly destroyed them because they could not communicate with the foreign species. Formics are biologically different than humans; one hive queen provides the consciousness for thousands of drones, and they communicate through the philotic system in a process that can be likened to telepathy. These biological differences led to the xenocide during the Bugger War, for which Ender blames himself. Ender feels that the only way he can atone is to care for the last hive queen’s cocoon and restore her population, but first he has to create the conditions in which killing formics in the future would be deemed unethical. He does this by writing

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