Ender in Exile

2008 novel by Orson Scott Card

Ender in Exile is a science fiction novel by American writer Orson Scott Card, part of the Ender's Game series, published on November 11, 2008. It takes place between the two award winning novels Ender's Game and Speaker for the Dead. It could also be considered a parallel novel to the first three sequels in the Shadow Saga, since the entirety of this trilogy takes place in the span of Ender in Exile. The novel concludes a dangling story line of the Shadow Saga, while it makes several references to events that take place during the Shadow Saga. From yet another perspective, the novel expands (or replaces) the last chapter of the original novel Ender's Game. On the one hand, it fills the gap right before the last chapter, and on the other hand, it fills the gap between the last chapter and the original (first) sequel (both named Speaker for the Dead). Ender in Exile begins one year after Ender has won the bugger war, and begins with the short story "Ender's Homecoming" from Card's webzine Intergalactic Medicine Show. Other short stories that were published elsewhere are included as chapters of the novel.

One year after the Buggers (Formics) were defeated and the Battle School children have returned to Earth, Ender is still unable to return with them because there would be wars over which country would keep Ender to use for its own ends. Ender is offered the governorship of the first human colony to be planted on one of the Buggers' former worlds, a planet that will eventually become known as Shakespeare. His sister Valentine decides to accompany Ender on his journey because she is sick of being controlled by her older brother, Peter, and because she wants to restore the relationship with Ender that she had lost when he left to go to Battle School. On their way to the Shakespeare colony, Valentine begins writing her History of the Bugger Wars books while Ender has an unspoken power struggle with the captain of the ship, Admiral Quincy Morgan. There is also a romance between Ender and a girl named Alessandra. Once the ship lands on Shakespeare, Ender, who had spent much of his trip learning the names and lives of the colony's residents, takes charge of the colony and wins the colonists over. Ender serves as governor of Shakespeare for a few years. Near the end of his time as governor, Ender and a young boy from the colony named Abra go to find a site for a new shipment of colonists. Ender wants the new settlement to be far enough away from the other settlements that there will not be competition between them right away, and so they can develop separately. In the process of finding a location for the new settlement, Ender stumbles upon what seems to be the equivalent of a note from the Buggers. It is a structure made to look like a game he used to play in Battle School. When Ender investigates, he finds the living pupa of a Bugger Hive Queen that is fertilized and prepared to make hundreds of thousands of offspring upon its maturation. The find leads Ender to write his first book as the Speaker for the Dead. The book, titled The Hive Queen, tries to look at the Bugger wars and their eventual destruction from the point of view of the Buggers. Later, Peter Wiggin, nearing the end of his life and knowing that Ender wrote the story, asks him to write one for him for when he dies. This book becomes known as The Hegemon. After this, Ender resigns as governor and leaves the colony for another called Ganges. The leader of Ganges is Virlomi. Here he encounters Randall Firth, who believes himself to be the son of Achilles de Flandres, and even refers to himself by the name Achilles. Randall spreads propaganda accusing Ender of xenocide in an attempt to discredit Virlomi and get revenge against Peter Wiggin, who he believes is responsible for his father's defeat. Randall tries twice to meet with Ender and discredit him somehow. On the second visit, his plan is to cleverly provoke Ender into killing him so that people will see how violent and dangerous he is, but Ender does not attack. Instead Ender tries to convince Randall that he is not Achilles' son, but that he is in fact the son of Bean and Petra; hence where he gets his gigantism from. Eventually, Ender manages to convince Randall of his parents' identity by allowing Randall to brutally defeat him in a one sided fistfight, the entire time asserting that he could never hurt his friends' child. Randall ends up changing his name to Arkanian Delphiki amidst his guilt for Ender's horrifying wounds. After Ender heals a bit, he, Valentine, and the Hive Queen pupa board a starship to go to a new place.

According to Card while he was writing the short story "The Gold Bug," he started to think about how Ender got to the colony. As a result, he came up with a story idea which involved a power struggle between Ender and the ship's captain. However, since Card did not want the story to be only about Ender and the captain he decided to put a mother and daughter on the ship. When he first began writing about Alessandra and Dorabella Toscano, it was supposed to have been the opening for that story, but as he sat down to plan the scenes, they developed into a story of their own, which became the short story "A Young Man with Prospects," published in February 2007 and later incorporated into the novel as chapter 5.