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Acknowledgments

FOREWORD

This book is, strictly speaking, not a sequel, because it begins about where Ender's Gains, and also ends, very nearly, at the sa of the sas, only from the perspective of another character It's hard to knohat to call it A companion novel? A parallel novel? Perhaps a "parallax," if I can move that scientific term into literature

Ideally, this novel should work as well for readers who have never read Ender's Game as for those who have read it several ti you need to know from the novel Ender's Game that is not contained here And yet, if I have achieved oal, these two books complement and fulfill each other Whichever one you read first, the other novel should still work on its own merits

For rown in popularity, especially ah it was never intended as a young-adult novel, it has been eroup and by many teachers who find ways to use the book in their classrooms

I have never found it surprising that the existing sequels--Speaker for the Dead, Xenocide, and Children of the Mind--never appealed as strongly to those younger readers The obvious reason is that Ender's Game is centered around a child, while the sequels are about adults; perhaps more important, Ender's Game is, at least on the surface, a heroic, adventurous novel, while the sequels are a completely different kind of fiction, slower paced,with theer readers

Recently, however, I have coap between Ender's Game and its sequels leaves plenty of rooinal In fact, in one sense Ender's Game has no sequels, for the other three books make one continuous story in themselves, while Ender's Game stands alone

For a brief ti up the Ender's Game universe to other writers, and went so far as to invite a writer whose work I greatly ad with in's companions in Battle School As we talked, it becain ould be Bean, the child-soldier whom Ender treated as he had been treated by his adult teachers

And then so else happened The ht be the one to write such a book, and notfinished riting about "kids in space," as I cynically described the project, I actually hadin the intervening dozen years since Ender's Ga that Neal and I can work together on so, I deftly swiped the project back

I soon found that it's harder than it looks, to tell the same story twice, but differently I was hindered by the fact that even though the viewpoint characters were different, the author was the same, with the same core beliefs about the world I was helped by the fact that in the intervening years, I have learned a few things, and was able to bring different concerns and a deeper understanding to the project Both books come from the same mind, but not the same; they draw on the same memories of childhood, but from a different perspective For the reader, the parallax is created by Ender and Bean, standing a little ways apart as they h the same events For the writer, the parallax was created by a dozen years in which er ones were born, and the world changed around s about human nature and about art that I had not known before

Now you hold this book in your hands Whether the literary experie For ain into the saed this time, and if it has not been turned exactly into wine, at least it has a different flavor because of the different vessel that it was carried in, and I hope that you will enjoy it as much, or even more

--Greensboro, North Carolina, January 1999

Part One

URCHIN