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INTRODUCTION

Itan introduction to Ender's Game After all, the book has been in print for six years now, and in all that time, nobody has ever written to ood book, but you knohat it really needs? An introduction!" And yet when a novel goes back to print for a new hardcover edition, there ought to be so besides the es as I fix the errors and internal contradictions and stylistic excesses that have bothered me ever since the novel first appeared) So be assured--the novel stands on its own, and if you skip this intro and go straight to the story, I not only won't stand in your way, I'll even agree with you!

The novelet "Ender's Game" was my first published science fiction It was based on an idea--the Battle Room--that came to me when I was six-teen years old I had just read Isaac Asiy, which was (more or less) an extrapolation of the ideas in Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roalaxy-wide empire in some far future time

The novel set , which is Asimov's most extraordinary ability as a fiction writer What would the future be like? Hoould things change? What would remain the sah you e the props and the actors, the play of human history is always the same And yet that fundae?) was tern-pered by Asienetic change, but through learned skills, are able to understand and heal the minds of other people

It was an idea that rang true withand beliefs: Hus may be miserable speci, become decent people

Those were soh my mind as I read Foundation, curled on my bed--a thin mattress on a slab of plywood, a bed my father had made for me--in my basement bedroom in our little rambler on 650 East in Orem, Utah And then, as so many science fiction readers have done over the years, I felt a strong desire to write stories that would do for others what Asimov's story had done for me

In other genres, that desire is usually expressed by producing thinly veiled rewrites of the great work: Tolkien's disciples far too often simply rewrite Tolkien, for example In science fiction, however, the whole point is that the ideas are fresh and startling and intriguing; you i their stories, but rather by creating stories that are just as startling and new

But neay? Asimov was a scientist, and approached every field of hu data, coh the implications of each new idea I was no scientist, and unlikely ever to be one, at least not a real scientist--not a physicist, not a cheift for h I relished the study of logic and languages, and virtually inhaled histories and biographies, it never occurred to me at the time that these were just as valid sources of science fiction stories as astronomy or quantum mechanics

How, then, could I possibly come up with a science fiction idea? What did / actually know about anything?

At that time las in Salt Lake City; he was nursing a hip-to-heel cast fro accident, however, and came home on weekends It was then that he hada church ave me Foundation to read Perhaps, then, it was natural for s military

To h, theits peak of American involvement I had no experience of that, except for Bill's stories of the , the humiliation of officer's candidate school, and his lonely but in many ways successful life as a noncom in Korea Far more deeply rooted in myBruce Catton's three-volume Army of the Potomac I remembered so well the stories of the coeneral capable of using McClellan's nificent army to defeat Lee and Jackson and St

uart, and then, finally, Grant, who brought death to far too many of his soldiers, but alsoaway at Lee, keeping hi out of reach It was because of Catton's history that I had stopped enjoying chess, and had to revise the rules of Risk in order to play it--I had co of war, and not just because of the conclusions Catton his of my own in that history

I learned that history is shaped by the use of power, and that different people, leading the same army, with, therefore, approximately the same power, applied it so differently that the are fro to panicked cowards ries at Gettysburg, and then, finally, to the disciplined, professional arn It wasn't the soldiers who changed It was the leader And even though I could not then have articulated what I understood of military leadership, I knew that I did understand it I understood, at levels deeper than speech, how a great military leader i extension of himself

So oneCarterville Road in the heavily wooded bottoms of the Provo River, I wondered: Hoould you train soldiers for co of new land-based weapons systems--as on my mind, after Foundation, was space Soldiers and commanders would have to think very differently in space, because the old ideas of up and down simply wouldn't apply anymore I had read in Nordhoff's and Hall's history of World War I flying that it was very hard at first for new pilots to learn to look above and below theht and left, to find the ene them in the air How much worse, then, would it be to learn to think with no up and down at all?

The essence of training is to allow error without consequence Three-dimensional warfare would need to be practiced in an enclosed space, sooff to Jupiter It would need to offer a way to practice shooting without risk of injury; and yet trainees ere "hit" would need to be disabled, at least teeable, to simulate the different conditions of warfare--near a ship, in the midst of debris, near tiny asteroids And it would need to have some of the confusion of real battle, so that the play-coid and for anda in our modern military

The result ofwas the Battle Room, exactly as you will see it (or have already seen in) in this book It was a good idea, and so if ever there is avery much like it has already been used in various ahout America)

But, having thought of the Battle Roo the idea into a story It occurred to me then for the first ti co how to find a character and a story to tell around that idea Asi The Decline and Fall, still had no story; his genius--and the soul of the story--ca the psychohistorian Hari Seldon the god-figure, the plan-maker, the apocalyptic prophet of the story I had no such character, and no idea of how to make one

Years passed I graduated froh School was discontinued with the class of 1968) and went on to Brighay y is unspeakably boring co the books by Thor Heyerdahl {Aku-Akuy Kon-Tiki), Yigael Yadin (Masada), and Ja Potsherds! Better to be a dentist than to spend your life trying to put together fragments of old pottery in endless desert landscapes in the Middle East