Enders In Exile

have to
kill to do it."
    "Wow," said Valentine.
"You've just discovered the survival instinct. Everybody else has known
about it for years."
    "There are people who
don't have that instinct, not the same way," said Ender, "and we give
them medals for throwing themselves on grenades or running into a
burning house to save a baby. Posthumously, mind you. But all sorts of
honors."
    "They have the
instinct," said Valentine. "They just care about something else more."
    "I don't," said Ender.
"Care about anything more."
    "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