Two sf novels about the human race

I recently finished rereading Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card. Child geniuses train at a special school to command the Earth's space navy to defeat aliens and save the human race. Read it; it won the Hugo and the Nebula (the top two science fiction/fantasy awards) for its qualifying years, 1986. The only parts that feel a bit dated are, first, that the Cold War never ended, and second, two bloggers take over the world (this story was written as if the Internet existed and everyone used it all the time). The physics is also nonsense, but oh well.

I also recently read Spin by Robert Charles Wilson. The Spin makes time pass slowly in close proximity to Earth, scientists try to save the human race from being engulfed by the sun in 40 Earth-years. Read it; this is a newer novel that is up for the Hugo this year. The physics, again is nonsense.

The common thread in these novels is a certain sense of the human race and our Earth as small in the grand scheme of things. Ender's Game plays around with the morality of killing or being killed, and what atrocities we are willing to commit to ensure our survival as individuals and as a species. Spin, on the other hand, emphasizes how the human race is in the grip of forces it can no longer control. In a sense they call into question whether humanity is special, whether our species deserves to go on or to succumb to the inescapable logic of natural selection, natural extinction.

Novels like this can make you feel small as a human being; crushed, or humbled, in the face of time and space. You feel like your story is really insignificant, like the days and years of your three-score and ten are whipping by unstoppably. The present moment is so short, so ephemeral an opportunity to make our mark on existence for good, or evil, or physics.