The Authorized Ender Companion

THE
AUTHORIZED
ENDER
COMPANION

By Orson Scott Card from Tom Doherty Associates

Empire

The Folk of the Fringe

Future on Fire
(editor)

Future on Ice
(editor)

Invasive Procedures
(with Aaron Johnston)

Keeper of Dreams

Lovelock
(with Kathryn Kidd)

Maps in a Mirror: The Short Fiction of Orson Scott Card

Orson Scott Card’s InterGalactic Medicine Show

Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus

Saints

Songmaster

Treason

A War of Gifts

The Worthing Saga

Wyrms

THE TALES OF ALVIN MAKER

Seventh Son

Red Prophet

Prentice Alvin

Alvin Journeyman

Heartfire

The Crystal City

ENDER

Ender’s Game

Ender’s Shadow

Shadow of the Hegemon

Shadow Puppets

Shadow of the Giant

Speaker for the Dead

Xenocide

Children of the Mind

First Meetings

Ender in Exile

HOMECOMING

The Memory of Earth

The Call of Earth

The Ships of Earth

Earthfall

Earthborn

WOMEN OF GENESIS

Sarah

Rebekah

Rachel & Leah

From Other Publishers

Enchantment

Homebody

Lost Boys

Magic Street

Stonefather

Stone Tables

Treasure Box

How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy

Characters and Viewpoint

WRITTEN BY
JAKE BLACK

--THE AUTHORIZED ENDER COMPANION

Copyright © 2009 by Hatrack River Enterprises

All rights reserved.

A Tor Book
Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC
175 Fifth Avenue
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.

The authorized Ender companion / Orson Scott Card and Jake Black.—1st ed.

    p. cm.

ISBN 978-1-4299- 6348-0

1. Card, Orson Scott—Handbooks, manuals, etc. 2. Wiggin, Ender (Fictitious character)—Miscellanea. 3. Wiggin Peter (Fictitious character)—Miscellanea. I. Black, Jake. II. Title.
PS3553.A655Z74 2009
813’.54—dc22

2009031592

First Edition: November 2009

Printed in the United States of America

0  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1

To

Michelle and Jonas—my companions forever

and

Ian and Cathy—my parents

—J.B.

Introduction by Orson Scott Card

How to Use This Book

The Ender Encyclopedia

Ender’s Time Line

Ender’s Family Tree by Andrew Lindsay

Getting Ender Right: A Look at the
Ender’s Game
Screenplay Development by Aaron Johnston

The Technology of
Ender’s Game
by Stephen Sywak

Friends of Ender

Acknowledgments

I needed this book to exist, for my own selfish purposes. It’s just a bonus that Tor is publishing it so you can have it, too.

I need it because the Ender books are a series I never intended. When I first wrote the novelette
Ender’s Game
back in 1974, I had no thought of its ever becoming a series. I felt lucky that I had managed to turn it into a story.

All I had was the battle room, the orbiting Battle School, the ansible (borrowed from Ursula K. Le Guin’s word for a faster-than-light communications device), and the fact that kids were using a “simulator” to control distant fleets of starships.

Ten years later, when I set out to write the novel version of
Ender’s Game
, I was primarily using it to set up
Speaker for the Dead
. It’s not that I was careless or lazy with
Ender’s Game
; I was simply paying most attention to the elements of the novel that I needed for
Speaker
.

If I had known how often I’d come back to the world of
Ender’s Game
—and, most specifically, Battle School and the war—I would have taken more care to jot down all the choices that I made, so I could refer back to them later.

Instead, I invented things on the fly and forged ahead. I remembered the choices I had made long enough not to contradict them within
Ender’s Game
, but not for a single moment longer. (I long ago discovered that, having filled my brain with excessive reading as a child, I had no room for new information. I certainly wasn’t going to give up any of my memories of those early books!)

The sequels to
Speaker—Xenocide
and
Children of the Mind
—did not refer back to the events in
Ender’s Game
very often, and when they did, I relied on memory alone. I take no pleasure in rereading my own fiction—I keep rewriting it in my head, conforming it to the skills and concerns of my present self instead of trusting in that younger self who wrote the original. So when I can avoid rereading, I do.

As I wrote these books, however, time passed and the world changed. The Internet (with the World Wide Web) was not available to the general public when I had Peter and Valentine change the world by writing anonymously on “the nets.” But there were services like Delphi and CompuServe.

I got on Prodigy when it appeared, because its graphical user interface (GUI) made it friendly enough for my family to use, and there I first began to talk to readers of my books. Prodigy was a nightmare, however, because they policed the forums so rigidly that I could not answer questions about “Orson Scott Card” in first person!

So I quickly migrated to America Online, where I formed a user group called “Hatrack River” and began to discover how much better some of my readers knew my books than I did! America Online eventually jettisoned us—they wanted higher numbers than I could attract—and we migrated to the Web, where we still are (all my websites can be found by going to
http://www.OrsonScottCard.com
).

One thing remained consistent in all our websites: When I couldn’t remember some detail when writing in any of my series, I could post a question to my readers and somebody would come up with the answer so quickly that there is no way I could have found the same information myself!

While my other series—The Tales of Alvin Maker, Homecoming, Empire, Women of Genesis—were intended to stretch across several books, the Ender books are an accidental series. (The Shadow books, within the overall Ender series, were planned as one long story.) I had no overarching plan. I did not systematically develop the universe in which all the stories take place.

As a result, the Ender universe was not consistent. At the end of one book, thinking I was wrapping everything up, I would send one character off on a voyage; then in a later book, forgetting I had done so, I would have him conveniently hanging around on Earth.

I would give some obscure character a family, and then later forget that I had done so and give him a different family or make him childless. Then that minor character would become important, and I had to decide which set of facts I was going to go with.

When I set out to write
Mazer in Prison
, I couldn’t remember if, in all the mentions of him in all the books and stories, I had ever bestowed on him a wife and children. My readers soldiered through my books and got me the information I needed—but how much easier it would have been if the information had already been collected into a single database, where I could look up “Mazer Rackham” and find out every speck of information that I needed.

This book is the fulfillment of that wish. I met Jake Black through other unrelated projects, and he became both a friend and a reliable resource. When I talked to Beth Meacham at Tor and got the go-ahead to bring this book into being, Black was the obvious first choice to take the lead in researching and writing the book. But we continued to use and rely on information we got from the participants in our online community. (They have been credited in each book they helped me with.)

On a purely volunteer basis, the kids at Philotic Web (
http://www.philoticweb.com
) created a time line that I often used as a resource when writing Ender stories. That time line has now been added to this book.

Stephen Sywak long ago analyzed the Battle School as I had described it and determined a possible shape for the thing. While the artists creating the Marvel version of
Ender’s Game
and
Ender’s Shadow
have a pretty free hand in what they design, I have referred to Sywak’s work when thinking about story possibilities. Naturally, I asked for his permission to include his ideas here.

For many years we had a “Virtual Battle School.” It was not a game; rather it was a kind of on-the-fly collaborative fiction, where characters of the participants’ own invention would interact in a large ongoing story.

It happened that some of these fanfiction writers had their characters break into the ventilation system of Battle School and start wandering through the ducts. Such a thing had never crossed my mind, but the idea was too good to ignore, so in a kind of homage to my readers, I sent Bean into the ducts in the book
Ender’s Shadow
.

This back-and-forth between author and readers is not really all that new. Writers and readers have long corresponded, and it’s a foolish writer who does not listen to the fans of his books. I don’t always do what my readers wish, but I never reenter a series now without taking into account the story threads they care about and wish to see resolved.

That’s because in my mind I do not write in isolation. In fact, I do not “write” at all. I conceive of myself as telling my stories orally to an (imaginary) audience that has gathered around the fire after the day’s work is done. I type fast enough that my writing really does come out at the speed of speech, and scientists now assure us that written language is still processed through the aural speech centers of the brain, being perceived as sound rather than as visual images. (We might imagine visual images from the “sounds” we “hear,” but they do not come from and are not related to the marks on the page, which merely cause us to know which sounds to “hear.”)

When I am actually telling a story or making a speech to a live audience,
I interpret the audience’s responses continuously. If I can sense (through movement, coughing, etc.) that they are bored, I move on to a more interesting topic; if I can sense hostility or doubt, I make my statements more clear—or soften them, if that is appropriate; and when they are paying close attention, then I know I am providing something they’re enjoying, and I keep on doing it. All good speakers do this; and when my readers write to me or post their responses or concerns online, it’s the next best thing to having them there listening as I tell the story.