'You let him beat you until you couldn't fight him,' said Valentine. 'Only when you knew you couldn't hurt him did you let yourself feel that survival instinct. So don't give me any more of this crap about how you're still the same evil person who killed those other boys. You proved that you could win by deliberately losing. Done. Enough. Please don't pick a fight with anybody again unless you intend to win it. All right? Promise?'
'No promises,' said Ender. 'But I'll try not to get killed. I still have things to do.'
AFTERWORD
I never meant this book to go this way. I was supposed to spend a few chapters getting Ender from Eros to Shakespeare and on to Ganges. But I found that all the real story setting up the confrontation on Ganges took place earlier, and to my own consternation, I ended up with a novel which mostly takes place between chapters 14 and 15 of Ender's Game.
But as I wrote it, I knew this was the true story, and one that had been missing. The war ends. You come home. Then you deal with all the things that happened in the war. Only Ender doesn't get to come home. He has to deal with that, too.
Yet none of this material was «missing» from the original novel, any more than anything was missing from the novelette version before the novel was written. If, at the end of chapter 14, we had then had Ender in Exile, neither story would have worked. For one thing, Exile is partly a sequel to Shadow of the Giant — that's where Virlomi's, Randi's, and Achilles/Randall/Arkanian's stories are left hanging, in need of this resolution. For another, Ender's Game ends as it should. The story you've just read works better as it is here — in a separate book. The book of the soldier after the war.
Except for one tiny problem. When I wrote the novel Ender's Game back in 1984, my focus in the last chapter, chapter 15, was entirely on setting up Speaker for the Dead. I had no notion of any sequel between those two books. So I was rather careless and cavalier with my account of Ender's time on the first colony. I was so careless I completely forgot that on all but the last formic planet, there would have been human pilots and crew left alive. Where would they go? Of course they would begin colonizing the formic worlds. And those who sent them would have at least allowed for that possibility, sending people trained to do whatever jobs they anticipated would be necessary.
So while the meat of chapter 15 of Ender's Game is exactly right, the details and timeline are not. They aren't what they should have been then, and they certainly aren't what they need to be now. Since writing that chapter, I have written stories like 'Investment Counselor' (in First Meetings), where Ender meets Jane (a major character in Speaker) when he is legally coming of age on a planet called Sorelledolce; but this contradicted the timeline stated in Ender's Game. All in all, I realized, it was chapter 15 that was wrong, not the later stories, which took more details into account and developed the story in a superior way.
Why should I be stuck now with decisions carelessly made twenty-four years ago? What I've written since is right; those contradictory but unimportant details in the original novel are wrong.
Therefore I have rewritten chapter 15 of Ender's Game, and at some future date there will be an edition of the novel that includes the revised chapter. Meanwhile, the entire text is online for anyone who has ever bought or ever buys any issue of my magazine Orson Scott Card's Inter-Galactic Medicine Show (oscIGMS.com). I have linked it to that magazine because every issue of it contains a story from the Ender's Game universe. My hope is that if you buy an issue in order to read that revised chapter, you'll also sample all the stories in that issue and find out what an excellent group of writers we've been publishing there.
But rest assured that nothing significant is changed in that chapter. You have not missed anything if you don't read it.
In fact, the most important purpose for that revised chapter is to keep people from writing to me about contradictions between the original version of chapter 15 and this novel. So if you're content to take my word for it that all the contradictions are now resolved, you won't need to look it up online.
In preparing this novel, I had to venture back into old territory. It's not just that I had to fit in with Ender's Game (where that was even possible). This story also had to fit in with every casual decision I made in Ender's Shadow, Shadow of the Hegemon, Shadow Puppets, Shadow of the Giant, Speaker for the Dead, Xenocide, and Children of the Mind, not to mention all the short stories.
There was no way I had the time or the inclination to reread all those books. It would just depress me to notice all the things in all those books that now, being a better or at least more experienced writer, I would like to change.
Fortunately, I had the aid of people who have read my fiction more carefully and more recently than I have.
First and foremost, Jake Black recently wrote The Ender's Game Companion, in which he deals with every event, character, location, and situation in all the Ender novels and stories. He was a consultant on this book (as he is on the Marvel Comics adaptation of Ender's Game) and vetted everything.
And in preparing his book, he also had the help of Ami Chopine, a writer in her own right, who also has been the mother superior and/or nanny of PhiloticWeb.Net, and Andy Wahr (alias «Hobbes» on my website at Hatrack.com), who also helped me directly by answering many questions I had in preparing to write this book. I hope I never have to write an Ender novel without their help; and in the meantime, I count them all as good friends.
I also have the benefit of a community of kind people and friends at http://www.hatrack.com, whom I exploit mercilessly as a resource. As I set out to write this novel, I had several questions I needed to have answered. If I had never addressed the issue in any of the books, I needed to know that; if I had, I needed to know what I had said so I could try not to contradict it.
Here is the original request I posted at Hatrack.com:
I can't trust my memory about details in Ender's Game and the Shadow books, and I'm afraid that in writing Ender in Exile I might be contradicting some points in the EG universe. Perhaps someone can help on the following questions:
Who decided Ender should not come back to Earth, and why? Peter was involved, but I think he gives different motives from what Valentine and/or the narrator of EG specifies.
I think there's already a contradiction between EG and the Shadow books (Giant?) about the circumstances surrounding Ender's governorship and who commanded the colony ship. But was it already fully resolved? That is, Mazer was announced as commander of the ship, but then didn't go? I remember that in conversation with Han Tzu, this was solved (after Hatrack citizens helped by pointing out the contradiction in the first place!).
I'm referring to that last chapter in EG, but what I can't do is ferret out details from the four Shadow books or any stray references elsewhere in EG or the Speaker series. I'll be grateful for any reminders people can give me of details from this time period — from the end of Ender's last battle to the arrival on his new colony world, not just what happens to Ender, but what happens to Peter and Valentine, Mazer and Graff, and the world at large.
I had valuable responses to this cri de coeur, from C. Porter Bassett, Jaime Benlevy, Chris Wegford, Marc Van Pelt, Rob Taber, Steven R Beers, Shannon Blood, Jason Bradshaw, Lloyd Waldo, Simeon Anfinrud, Jonathan Barbee, Adam Hobart, Beau Pearce, and Robert Prince. Thank you to all of them for plunging back into the books to find the answers to my questions.
In addition, Clinton Parks found an issue I hadn't even thought of, and sent my staff this letter:
I know you guys probably got this already, but I wanted to put it out there just in case. Did you remember that there was a discussion in 'Shadow of the Giant' where the first colony's name is revealed as «Shakespeare»? It stuck in my mind cause I wondered why Ender would name his colony that. Anyway, I just wanted to be vigilant and send a reminder. Take care!
This was, in fact, a real contradiction — elsewhere, I definitively stated that the first colony was named Rov. That's because in writing those earlier books I did not have the resource of a community of generous readers, or didn't think to ask for their help as I should have, and so thought up cool new ideas for things that I had already dealt with in earlier books, but forgot about in the years that followed.
This, too, I have resolved.
I was once a professional proofreader. I know from experience that even the brightest, most careful readers,
