Scanned from FAR HORIZONS (edited by Robert Silverberg) [story 03]

THE ENDER SERIES
Orson Scott Card

Ender"s Came (1985) 
Speaker for the Dead (1986)
Xenodde (1991) 
Children of the Mind (1996)

When I first started writing science fiction, I conceived a series of stories about a family with heritable mental powers, and the first stories I wrote had a rural setting. I got nice rejection letters but no sales. It was Ben Bova at Analog who explained why: They felt like fantasy! This baffled me at first-weren't Zenna Henderson's stories of "The People" considered science fiction? Then I realized that the true commercial distinction between science fiction and fantasy is: Fantasy has trees, science fiction has rivets! If I was going to sell to the s-f magazines, I had to write stories with rivets in them!
Back when I was sixteen and had just read Asimov's Foundation trilogy, I decided I wanted to write an s-f story, too. At the time (1967) the Vietnam War was raging, and my older brother had just finished boot camp, so military things were on my mind. I put a science-fiction spin on the problem of training troops: how would you train soldiers to fight in three-dimensional space? I remembered Nordhoff and Hall's novel about World War I flying aces and the problem of training pilots to stop looking for enemy aircraft only in the horizontal plane, and realized the problem in null gravity would be greatly compounded by the lack of a clear up and down. Old habits of gravity-based life would have to be trained out of the soldiers. The result of my thought experiment was the battle room, a hundred-meter cube of null-gravity space in which various obstacles could be set up, and in which teams of trainees would do mock battle in space suits that showed where and how badly a soldier had been hit by "enemy" fire.
And that was it. A good idea, I thought, but I had no notion at the time of how to turn it into a story. Who was the hero? Where did I go from there?
Years later, when I determined to write a riveted-and, I hoped, riveting-science-fiction story, I remembered the battle-room concept, and, on the lawn outside the Salt Palace in Salt Lake City, while I waited for a friend who was taking her boss's children to the circus, I opened my notebook and wrote the first sentence of a story I called "Ender's Game": "Remember, the enemy's gate is down."
What made the story writable for me was the decision that the trainees in the battle room would be children, in a future world where military aptitude could be discovered at a very early age, and children were taken from their parents to give them training in tactics and strategy while they were still young enough for their minds to be malleable. The story that resulted was my first science-fiction sale, bought by Ben Bova, and it appeared in the August 1977 issue of Analog (the same month that my first non-s-f story, "Gert Fram," appeared in the Ensign magazine of the LDS Church).
Years later, working on a project called Speaker for the Dead, I found that the story didn't come alive until I realized that the hero of the story should be Ender Wiggin. In order to set up the novel Speaker, I had to rewrite the original story as a novel; thus the novel Ender's Game came into existence only so I could write the novel Speaker for the Dead. I never planned a series, and unlike most series the second novel was a completely different kind of science fiction from the first. Instead of a military novel, it was anthropological; and Ender was now an adult with a complicated hidden past.
Then a third project, long on the shelf, came to life when I realized that it would make a good sequel to Speaker-but this time the book would be yet a third kind of science fiction, the novel of metaphysical speculation. Eventually divided into two books, this work became Xenocide and Children of the Mind. I daresay there has been no series of novels starring the same character whose volumes have been more disparate in theme, story, and genre. And yet through all four volumes the character of Ender Wiggin struggled to resolve personal and moral dilemmas that carried over from book to book.
Those dilemmas were resolved at the end of the fourth book. I plan to write more novels in the same universe (one about Ender's brother, Peter, and another about Bean, a young companion of Ender in the first novel), but the story of Ender himself is finished-except for one small gap.
During the three thousand years between Ender's Game and Speaker for the Dead, during which Ender journeyed from planet to planet, using lightspeed time dilation to skim through time without living in any decade very long, he somehow acquired a computer-based companion named Jane, who is second only to Ender in importance in the last three books of the series. The story now before you is an account of how they met.
-Orson Scott Card