Ender in Exile

Plot

One year after the Buggers (Formics) were defeated and the Battle School children returned to Earth, Ender cannot return with them because countries would fight over him. He is offered the governorship of the first human colony on a former Bugger world, later called Shakespeare. His sister Valentine accompanies him, tired of being controlled by their older brother Peter and wanting to restore her relationship with Ender. During the voyage, Valentine writes her History of the Bugger Wars books, while Ender has an unspoken power struggle with the ship's captain, Admiral Quincy Morgan.

A romance develops between Ender and a girl named Alessandra. After landing, Ender, who learned the names and lives of the colonists during the trip, takes charge and wins them over. He serves as governor for several years. Near the end of his term, Ender and a young colonist named Abra search for a site for a new settlement, wanting it far enough from existing ones to avoid competition.

During this search, Ender finds a structure resembling a game from Battle School, which turns out to be a note from the Buggers. Inside he discovers the living pupa of a Bugger Hive Queen, fertilized and ready to produce hundreds of thousands of offspring. This find leads Ender to write his first book as the Speaker for the Dead, titled The Hive Queen, which presents the Bugger wars from the Buggers' perspective. Later, Peter Wiggin, nearing death, asks Ender to write a similar book for him, which becomes The Hegemon.

Ender then resigns as governor and moves to another colony called Ganges, led by Virlomi. There he meets Randall Firth, who believes himself to be the son of Achilles de Flandres and calls himself Achilles.

Original publication as short stories

Several chapters of the novel were originally published as short stories in Card's webzine Intergalactic Medicine Show. The story 'Ender's Homecoming' comprises the entire first chapter, unchanged except that the email message at the end was moved to the beginning of chapter 2. It was published in the January 2008 issue. 'A Young Man with Prospects' makes up the entire fifth chapter, with an added email at the beginning describing how the Toscanos were selected for the colony; this email was not in the original short story, which appeared in the February 2007 issue.

The story 'Ender in Flight' was published in the April 2008 issue and is spread throughout the book, spanning from the end of chapter 7 through the end of chapter 10, continuing in chapters 13 and 14, and finishing in chapter 16. An email from Admiral Chamrajnagar to Admiral Quincy Morgan is included in the book. 'The Gold Bug' was published in the July 2007 issue and reprinted in 2011 in the anthology Alien Contact; it was also adapted into an Ender comic and appears as a bonus in the Marvel Comics hardcover edition of Red Prophet: The Tales Of Alvin Maker.

Parts of 'The Gold Bug' occur in chapters 14, 15, and 16 of the book, though some parts, including a large portion of the beginning, are not included. While writing 'The Gold Bug,' Card began thinking about how Ender got to the colony, leading to a story idea involving a power struggle between Ender and the ship's captain. Not wanting the story to focus only on that struggle, he added a mother and daughter to the ship. When he began writing about Alessandra and Dorabella Toscano, it was intended as the opening for that story, but as he planned the scenes, it developed into its own story, 'A Young Man with Prospects,' later incorporated into the novel as chapter 5.