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  Tor Books by Orson Scott Card

  Note: Within series, books are best read in listed order.

  —–

  ENDER UNIVERSE

  Ender Series

  Ender Wiggin: The finest general the world could hope to find or breed.

  Ender’s Game

  Ender in Exile

  Speaker for the Dead

  Xenocide

  Children of the Mind

  Ender’s Shadow Series

  Parallel storylines to Ender’s Game from Bean: Ender’s right hand, his strategist, and his friend.

  Ender’s Shadow

  Shadow of the Hegemon

  Shadow Puppets

  Shadow of the Giant

  Shadows in Flight

  The First Formic War Series

  One hundred years before Ender’s Game, the aliens arrived on Earth with fire and death. These are the stories of the First Formic War.

  Earth Unaware

  Earth Afire

  Ender novellas

  A War of Gifts

  First Meetings

  The Authorized Ender Companion by Jake Black

  A complete and in-depth encyclopedia of all the persons, places, things, and events in Orson Scott Card’s Ender Universe.

  THE MITHER MAGES SERIES

  Danny North is different from his magical family. And when he discovers his gift, it is greater than he ever imagined—which could earn him a death sentence.

  The Lost Gate

  The Gate Thief

  THE TALES OF ALVIN MAKER SERIES

  Visit the magical America that might have been, marvel as the tale of Alvin Maker unfolds.

  Seventh Son

  Red Prophet

  Prentice Alvin

  Alvin Journeyman

  Heartfire

  The Crystal City

  HOMECOMING SERIES

  Earth has been rendered uninhabitable. But it is still vital.

  The Memory of Earth

  The Call of Earth

  The Ships of Earth

  Earthfall

  Earthborn

  WOMEN OF GENESIS SERIES

  Fiction exploring the human side of Biblical women.

  Sarah

  Rebekah

  Rachel & Leah

  THE COLLECTED SHORT FICTION OF ORSON SCOTT CARD

  Experience Card’s full versatility, from science fiction to fantasy, from traditional narrative poetry to modern experimental fiction.

  Keeper of Dreams

  The Changed Man

  Cruel Miracles

  Flux

  Monkey Sonatas

  STAND-ALONE FICTION

  Hart’s Hope: dark and powerful fantasy.

  Lovelock (with Kathryn Kidd): a startling look at the ethics of bioengineering.

  Pastwatch: In this novel of time travel, can the past be changed?

  Saints: a novel of the early days of the Mormon Church.

  Songmaster: an SF classic and a haunting story of power and love.

  The Worthing Saga: the tale of a seed ship sent out to save the human race.

  Wyrms: the story of a young woman’s journey to confront her destiny, and her world’s.

  The Folk of the Fringe: when America is destroyed, it’s up to those on the fringes to rebuild.

  —–

  www.tor-forge.com

  CONTENTS

  Tor Books by Orson Scott Card

  ENDER’S GAME

  Acknowledgments

  Introduction

  1. Third

  2. Peter

  3. Graff

  4. Launch

  5. Games

  6. The Giant’s Drink

  7. Salamander

  8. Rat

  9. Locke and Demosthenes

  10. Dragon

  11. Veni Vidi Vici

  12. Bonzo

  13. Valentine

  14. Ender’s Teacher

  15. Speaker for the Dead

  SPEAKER FOR THE DEAD

  Introduction

  Some People of Lusitania Colony

  Pronouncing Foreign Names

  Prologue

  1. Pipo

  2. Trondheim

  3. Libo

  4. Ender

  5. Valentine

  6. Olhado

  7. The Ribeira House

  8. Dona Ivanova

  9. Congenital Defect

  10. Children of the Mind

  11. Jane

  12. Files

  13. Ela

  14. Renegades

  15. Speaking

  16. The Fence

  17. The Wives

  18. The Hive Queen

  XENOCIDE

  1 - A PARTING

  2 - A MEETING

  3 - CLEAN HANDS

  4 - JANE

  5 - THE LUSITANIA FLEET

  6 - VARELSE

  7 - SECRET MAID

  8 - MIRACLES

  9 - PINEHEAD

  10 - MARTYR

  11 - THE JADE OF MASTER HO

  12 - GREGO’S WAR

  13 - FREE WILL

  14 - VIRUS MAKERS

  15 - LIFE AND DEATH

  16 - VOYAGE

  17 - ENDER’S CHILDREN

  18 - THE GOD OF PATH

  PRONUNCIATION

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Copyright

  CHILDREN OF THE MIND

  Acknowledgments

  1. “I’m Not Myself”

  2. “You Don’t Believe in God”

  3. “There Are Too Many of Us”

  4. “I Am a Man of Perfect Simplicity!”

  5. “Nobody Is Rational”

  6. “Life Is a Suicide Mission”

  7. “I Offer Her This Poor Old Vessel”

  8. “What Matters Is Which Fiction You Believe”

  9. “It Smells Like Life to Me”

  10. “This Has Always Been Your Body”

  11. “You Called Me Back from Darkness”

  12. “Am I Betraying Ender?”

  13. “Till Death Ends All Surprises”

  14. “How They Communicate with Animals”

  15. “We’re Giving You a Second Chance”

  16. “How Do You Know They Aren’t Quivering in Terror?”

  17. “The Road Goes On without Him Now”

  Afterword

  ENDER IN EXILE

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  AFTERWORD

  ENDER’S GAME

  ORSON SCOTT CARD

  “Card understands the human condition and has things of real value to say about it. He tells the truth well
—ultimately the only criterion of greatness. Ender’s Game will still be finding new readers when ninety-nine percent of the books published this year are completely forgotten.”

  —Gene Wolf

  “A gripping tale of adventure in space and a scathing indictment of the military mind. Recommended.”

  —Library Journal

  “The games are fierce and consistently exciting. The cast… offers memorable characters…. And the aliens leave an intriguing heritage to mankind.”

  —Locus

  ENDER’S GAME

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to real people or events is purely coincidental.

  ENDER’S GAME

  Copyright © 1977, 1985, 1991 by Orson Scott Card

  Introduction copyright © 1991 by Orson Scott Card. First published in Phoenix Rising.

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form.

  A Tor Book

  Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC

  49 West 24th Street

  New York, NY 10010

  www.tor-forge.com

  Tor® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Card, Orson Scott.

  Ender’s Game / Orson Scott Card.

  p. cm.

  “A Tom Doherty Associates book.”

  ISBN 978-1-4299-6393-0

  ISBN 0-312-93208-1 (hc)

  I. Title.

  [PS3553.A655E5 1991]

  91-9908

  813' .54—dc20

  CIP

  For Geoffrey,

  who makes me remember

  how young and how old

  children can be

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Portions of this book were recounted in my first published science fiction story, “Ender’s Game,” in the August 1977 Analog, edited by Ben Bova; his faith in me and this story are the foundation of my career.

  Harriet McDougal of Tor is that rarest of editors—one who understands a story and can help the author make it exactly what he meant it to be. They don’t pay her enough. Harriet’s task was made more than a little easier, however, because of the excellent work of my resident editor, Kristine Card. I don’t pay her enough, either.

  I am grateful also to Barbara Bova, who has been my friend and agent through thin and, sometimes, thick; and to Tom Doherty, my publisher, who let me talk him into doing this book at the ABA in Dallas, which shows either his superb judgment or how weary one can get at a convention.

  INTRODUCTION

  It makes me a little uncomfortable, writing an introduction to Ender’s Game. After all, the book has been in print for six years now, and in all that time, nobody has ever written to me to say, “You know, Ender’s Game was a pretty good book, but you know what it really needs? An introduction!” And yet when a novel goes back to print for a new hardcover edition, there ought to be something new in it to mark the occasion (something besides the minor changes as I fix the errors and internal contradictions and stylistic excesses that have bothered me ever since the novel first appeared). So be assured—the novel stands on its own, and if you skip this intro and go straight to the story, I not only won’t stand in your way, I’ll even agree with you!

  The novelet “Ender’s Game” was my first published science fiction. It was based on an idea—the Battle Room—that came to me when I was sixteen years old. I had just read Isaac Asimov’s Foundation trilogy, which was (more or less) an extrapolation of the ideas in Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, applied to a galaxy-wide empire in some far future time.

  The novel set me, not to dreaming, but to thinking, which is Asimov’s most extraordinary ability as a fiction writer. What would the future be like? How would things change? What would remain the same? The premise of Foundation seemed to be that even though you might change the props and the actors, the play of human history is always the same. And yet that fundamentally pessimistic premise (you mean we’ll never change?) was tempered by Asimov’s idea of a group of human beings who, not through genetic change, but through learned skills, are able to understand and heal the minds of other people.

  It was an idea that rang true with me, perhaps in part because of my Mormon upbringing and beliefs: Human beings may be miserable specimens, in the main, but we can learn, and, through learning, become decent people.

  Those were some of the ideas that played through my mind as I read Foundation, curled on my bed—a thin mattress on a slab of plywood, a bed my father had made for me—in my basement bedroom in our little rambler on 650 East in Orem, Utah. And then, as so many science fiction readers have done over the years, I felt a strong desire to write stories that would do for others what Asimov’s story had done for me.

  In other genres, that desire is usually expressed by producing thinly veiled rewrites of the great work: Tolkien’s disciples far too often simply rewrite Tolkien, for example. In science fiction, however, the whole point is that the ideas are fresh and startling and intriguing; you imitate the great ones, not by rewriting their stories, but rather by creating stories that are just as startling and new.

  But new in what way? Asimov was a scientist, and approached every field of human knowledge in a scientific manner—assimilating data, combining it in new and startling ways, thinking through the implications of each new idea. I was no scientist, and unlikely ever to be one, at least not a real scientist—not a physicist, not a chemist, not a biologist, not even an engineer. I had no gift for mathematics and no great love for it, either. Though I relished the study of logic and languages, and virtually inhaled histories and biographies, it never occurred to me at the time that these were just as valid sources of science fiction stories as astronomy or quantum mechanics.

  How, then, could I possibly come up with a science fiction idea? What did I actually know about anything?

  At that time my older brother Bill was in the army, stationed at Fort Douglas in Salt Lake City; he was nursing a hip-to-heel cast from a bike-riding accident, however, and came home on weekends. It was then that he had met his future wife, Laura Dene Low, while attending a church meeting on the BYU campus; and it was Laura who gave me Foundation to read. Perhaps, then, it was natural for my thoughts to turn to things military.

  To me, though, the military didn’t mean the Vietnam War, which was then nearing its peak of American involvement. I had no experience of that, except for Bill’s stories of the miserable life in basic training, the humiliation of officer’s candidate school, and his lonely but in many ways successful life as a noncom in Korea. Far more deeply rooted in my mind was my experience, five or six years earlier, of reading Bruce Catton’s three-volume Army of the Potomac. I remembered so well the stories of the commanders in that war—the struggle to find a Union general capable of using McClellan’s magnificent army to defeat Lee and Jackson and Stuart, and then, finally, Grant, who brought death to far too many of his soldiers, but also made their deaths mean something, by grinding away at Lee, keeping him from dancing and maneuvering out of reach. It was because of Catton’s history that I had stopped enjoying chess, and had to revise the rules of Risk in order to play it—I had come to understand something of war, and not just because of the conclusions Catton himself had reached. I found meanings of my own in that history.

  I learned that history is shaped by the use of power, and that different people, leading the same army, with, therefore, approximately the same power, applied it so differently that the army seemed to change from a pack of noble fools at Fredericksburg to panicked cowards melting away at Chancellorsville, then to the grimly determined, stubborn soldiers who held the ridges at Gettysburg, and then, finally, to the disciplined, professional army that ground Lee to dust in Grant’s long campaign. It wasn’t the soldiers who changed. It was the leader. And even though I could not then have articulated what I understood o
f military leadership, I knew that I did understand it. I understood, at levels deeper than speech, how a great military leader imposes his will on his enemy, and makes his own army a willing extension of himself.

  So one morning, as my Dad drove me to Brigham Young High School along Carterville Road in the heavily wooded bottoms of the Provo River, I wondered: How would you train soldiers for combat in the future? I didn’t bother thinking of new land-based weapons systems—what was on my mind, after Foundation, was space. Soldiers and commanders would have to think very differently in space, because the old ideas of up and down simply wouldn’t apply anymore. I had read in Nordhoff’s and Hall’s history of World War I flying that it was very hard at first for new pilots to learn to look above and below them rather than merely to the right and left, to find the enemy approaching them in the air. How much worse, then, would it be to learn to think with no up and down at all?

  The essence of training is to allow error without consequence. Three-dimensional warfare would need to be practiced in an enclosed space, so mistakes wouldn’t send trainees flying off to Jupiter. It would need to offer a way to practice shooting without risk of injury; and yet trainees who were “hit” would need to be disabled, at least temporarily. The environment would need to be changeable, to simulate the different conditions of warfare—near a ship, in the midst of debris, near tiny asteroids. And it would need to have some of the confusion of real battle, so that the play-combat didn’t evolve into something as rigid and formal as the meaningless marching and maneuvers that still waste an astonishing amount of a trainee’s precious hours in basic training in our modern military.

  The result of my speculations that morning was the Battle Room, exactly as you will see it (or have already seen it) in this book. It was a good idea, and something like it will certainly be used for training if ever there is a manned military in space. (Something very much like it has already been used in various amusement halls throughout America.)

  But, having thought of the Battle Room, I hadn’t the faintest idea of how to go about turning the idea into a story. It occurred to me then for the first time that the idea of the story is nothing compared to the importance of knowing how to find a character and a story to tell around that idea. Asimov, having had the idea of paralleling The Decline and Fall, still had no story; his genius—and the soul of the story—came when he personalized his history, making the psychohistorian Hari Seldon the god-figure, the plan-maker, the apocalyptic prophet of the story. I had no such character, and no idea of how to make one.