First Meetings: In Ender's Universe

Front Cover
Macmillan, Aug 5, 2003 - Fiction - 208 pages
Welcome to the Enderverse.

When "Ender's Game" was first published as a novella twenty-five years ago few would have predicted that it would become one of the most successful ventures in publishing history. Expanded into a novel in 1985, Ender's Game won both the Hugo Award and the Nebula Award for Best Novel. Never out of print and translated into dozens of languages, it is the rare work of fiction that can truly be said to have transcended a genre. Ender's Game and its sequels have won dozens of prestigious awards and are as popular today among teens and young readers as adults.

First Meetings is a collection of three novellas-plus the original "Ender's Game"-that journey into the origins and the destiny of one Ender Wiggin.

"The Polish Boy" begins in the wake between the first two Bugger Wars when the Hegemony is desperate to recruit brilliant military commanders to repel the alien invasion. In John Paul Wiggin-the future father of Ender -they believe they may have found their man. Or boy.

In "Teacher's Pest"-a novella written especially for this collection-a brilliant but insufferably arrogant John Paul Wiggin, now an American university student, matches wits with an equally brilliant graduate student named Theresa Brown.

It is many years since the end of the Bugger Wars in "The Investment Counselor." Ender's reputation as a hero and savior has suffered a horrible reversal. Banished from Earth and slandered as a mass murderer, twenty-year-old Andrew Wiggin wanders incognito from planet to planet as a fugitive. Until a blackmailing tax inspector compromises his identity and threatens to expose Ender the Xenocide.

Also reprinted here is the original landmark novella, "Ender's Game," which first appeared in 1977.

Fully illustrated, First Meetings f0is Orson Scott Card writing at the height of his considerable power about his most compelling character.
 

Contents

TEACHERS PEST
59
ENDERS GAME
103
INVESTMENT COUNSELOR
165
Copyright

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About the author (2003)

Orson Scott Card is best known for his science fiction novelEnder's Game and it's many sequels that expand the Ender Universe into the far future and the near past. Those books are organized into the Ender Quintet, the five books that chronicle the life of Ender Wiggin; the Shadow Series, that follows on the novelEnder's Shadow and are set on Earth; and the Formic Wars series, written with co-author Aaron Johnston, that tells of the terrible first contact between humans and the alien "Buggers". Card has been a working writer since the 1970s. Beginning with dozens of plays and musical comedies produced in the 1960s and 70s, Card's first published fiction appeared in 1977 -- the short story "Gert Fram" in the July issue ofThe Ensign, and the novelet version of "Ender's Game" in the August issue ofAnalog. The novel-length version ofEnder's Game, published in 1984 and continuously in print since then, became the basis of the 2013 film, starring Asa Butterfield, Harrison Ford, Ben Kingsley, Hailee Steinfeld, Viola Davis, and Abigail Breslin. Card was born in Washington state, and grew up in California, Arizona, and Utah. He served a mission for the LDS Church in Brazil in the early 1970s. Besides his writing, he runs occasional writers' workshops and directs plays. He frequently teaches writing and literature courses at Southern Virginia University. He is the author many sf and fantasy novels, including the American frontier fantasy series "The Tales of Alvin Maker" (beginning withSeventh Son), There are also stand-alone science fiction and fantasy novels likePastwatch andHart's Hope. He has collaborated with his daughter Emily Card on a manga series, Laddertop. He has also written contemporary thrillers likeEmpire and historical novels like the monumentalSaints and the religious novelsSarah andRachel andLeah. Card's recent work includes the Mithermages books (Lost Gate,Gate Thief), contemporary magical fantasy for readers both young and old. Card lives in Greensboro, North Carolina, with his wife, Kristine Allen Card, He and Kristine are the parents of five children and several grandchildren.