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First Meetings
hen "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 among 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 years 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 War 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 is Orson Scot Card writing at the height of
his considerable powers about his most compelling character.
Copyright © 2005 Orson Scott Card
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