Earth Unaware (First Formic War)

will see it and pick it up. It’ll go viral.”
    “How quickly?”
    “No telling. My guess is very fast. Once it gets momentum, it will explode. You want to tell the whole world aliens are coming? Here’s your chance.” She handed him the stylus. The windows in the holospace were all selected. Twenty vid sites on the nets. A large green button in the center of the holo was marked “send.” All he had to do was touch it.
    He thought of Father and Mother and Concepción and Mono and everyone back on El Cavador praying for him to reach this moment. This is what he had come for and nearly died for. This is what Toron had died for. He thought of Janda. He thought of her hand atop his, holding the stylus, too. He thought of the twelve billion people on Earth who were in for the wake-up call of their lives.
    “This better work,” said Victor. Then he reached out and pushed the button.

 
    AFTERWORD
    The story in this novel didn’t begin as a novel. It began as backstory to Ender’s Game, which was first published as a novelette in August 1977, and then later as a full-length novel in 1985. Backstory, by its definition, is everything that happened in the world of the story before the story begins. It’s easy to ignore backstory. It’s in the past, after all. Yet in the case of Ender’s Game, I’d argue that without the richly imaginative history that Scott Card gave his universe, the premise of Ender’s Game would have failed.
    Consider how the novel begins. Here you have this six-year-old kid with a medical device on the back of his neck—likely connected to his brain stem—that monitors his every action, thought, and conversation, all to determine if he has what it takes to be the next great military commander. It begs the question: What happened to the human race that led us to allow such an invasion of personal privacy or, for that matter, the use of innocent children for war? The answer, of course, is the Formics. Scott Card created a history for the world filled with alien invasions and do-or-die heroics in which the human race was nearly wiped out. In other words, he created a history on which the circumstances of Ender’s story could exist. And yet he only gave us as much of that history as we needed to know. We knew that the two conflicts were called the First and Second Formic Wars, and we heard whispers of pivotal events, such as the Battle of the Belt or “the scouring of China,” but the specifics of those wars and events were largely unexplained. Instead, Scott kept our eyes and hearts laser-focused on the story he was telling, the story of Ender Wiggin.
    Flash ahead to 2009. Marvel Comics has just published a ten-issue adaptation of Ender’s Game and a ten-issue adaptation of Ender’s Shadow. The response from critics and fans was overwhelmingly positive, and the praise was well deserved. The comics were beautifully drawn and extremely well written. Credit goes to Marvel, who showed their respect for and love of the original material by staying faithful to Scott’s original stories and by hiring some of the most talented creators in comics today to bring the stories to life. (Christopher Yost, Pasqual Ferry, Mike Carey, Sebastian Fiumara, Frank D’Armata, Giulia Brusco, Jim Cheung, Jake Black, and others.)
    Marvel wanted to do more and assembled a team to adapt Speaker for the Dead and Ender in Exile —both as limited-issue series. In addition, Marvel produced a few one-shot comics in the Ender universe as well. (One shots are stand-alone issues not part of an ongoing or limited series.) One such comic adapted Scott’s short story Mazer in Prison. Another told how Peter and Valentine initiated and then stopped the League War. Another told a completely original Valentine story. In short, the world of Ender Wiggin was thriving in comics.
    But Marvel wasn’t finished. They wanted to do more. And it was here that Scott Card made the proposition that would eventually result in the book you’re holding now. Scott essentially asked, “What if, instead of another adaptation, Marvel does an original series in the Ender universe? What if we told the story of the first two Formic wars? Why not bring all the backstory from Ender’s Game to life, with a completely new cast of characters?”
    Marvel said yes, and Scott and I agreed to write the series. I had been working with Marvel adapting Speaker for the Dead and Ender in Exile and writing a few one-shots. Scott had comic experience as