Orbit Books in the UK has acquired the prequels for Ender’s Game and revealed the UK covers today.
Earth Unaware:
And here is the cover for Earth Afire:
Both books will be released in the UK on June 4, 2013.
Thanks to a tip from co-author Aaron Johnston for this!
Source: Orbit Books
Today is the release date for Ender’s World, an anthology of essays written by various authors about Ender’s Game. I’m still picking my way through the book and will hopefully have a review ready this week. Keep reading to find out how you can enter to win a free copy from EnderWiggin.net and Smart Pop Books!
Here’s a synopsis:
Go deeper into the complexities of Orson Scott Card’s classic novel with science fiction and fantasy writers, YA authors, military strategists, including:
Ender prequel series coauthor Aaron Johnston on Ender and the evolution of the child hero
Burn Notice creator Matt Nix on Ender’s Game as a guide to life
Hugo award–winning writer Mary Robinette Kowal on how Ender’s Game gets away with breaking all the (literary) rules
Retired US Air Force Colonel Tom Ruby on what the military could learn from Ender about leadership
Bestselling YA author Neal Shusterman on the ambivalence toward survival that lies at the heart of Ender’s storyPlus pieces by:
Hilari Bell
John Brown
Mette Ivie Harrison
Janis Ian
Alethea Kontis
David Lubar and Alison S. Myers
John F. Schmitt
Ken Scholes
Eric James StoneAlso includes never-before-seen content from Orson Scott Card on the writing and evolution of the events in Ender’s Game, from the design of Battle School to the mindset of the pilots who sacrificed themselves in humanity’s fight against the formics.
Free excerpts from the book can be found here.
If you’re interested in winning a free copy, simply comment on this post and tell me what part of the book you’re most looking forward to reading. Is it a particular author’s take? Is it the new content by Orson Scott Card? Or do you simply eat up anything Ender’s Game?
After you’ve commented, log in your entry in the Rafflecopter widget below. This will enable you to get extra entries through other methods. I do check anyone who enters via comments and if you win and there’s no comment by you, I draw someone else, so no cheating!
Thanks to a tip from co-author Aaron Johnston, we now know that the title for the final book in the First Formic Trilogy will be EARTH AWAKENS.
If you haven’t yet read the first book, it’s currently on sale for $10 on Amazon. The paperback version is available for pre-order and will be out April 30. Book 2, Earth Afire, will be available on June 4, 2013.
Ender’s Game author Orson Scott Card Q&A from Andy Lindsay on Vimeo.
In a video Q&A produced for Tor Books, author Orson Scott Card talked about his personal favorites in books, movies, authors, and tv shows. A couple of questions centered around Ender’s Game:
With Ender’s Game you’ve written young characters who appeal strongly to adult readers. What’s your secret for engaging both YA and adult readers?
If I knew that I would do it every time because not every book appeals to everybody. But I always try to appeal to everybody. I always aim at the widest possible audience. But the truth is the only difference between young readers and older readers is young readers are patient with one kind of bad writing and older readers are patient with another kind of bad writing. I try not to do bad writing. I try to write as clearly as I can, a story that I care about and believe in and then hope that there are readers that will care about it and believe in it as well.
Why did you decide to use a young boy as the protagonist in a book about a great war between humanity and aliens?
Gotta remember, this started as a short story and I had no plan for a book at the time. The story idea that I had was the Battle Room, a safe place to train people for zero gravity combat, for thinking in zero g. I had that since I was 16 years old, but I had no story and I knew I had no story until I was in my early 20s and I finally realized, no, the time to train people for space combat is not when they’re adults, not when they’re 18 or 19 years old, they have too many gravity bound habits. You gotta grab them when they’re kids. When I realized that they were children, that they would be starting with 6 and 7 year-olds, taking them away from their families, then I had a story. And that’s when I wrote Remember the enemy’s gate is down. But when I started that short story I had no idea that it would ever be a novel. I had no idea how it would end. I didn’t even know that it would ever leave the Battle School and go to another place and involve a wider war so I just used a placeholder alien. The standard giant insect alien from science fiction. It was a MacGuffin, nothing more, so it’s not a book about a war that happens to have a child as the protagonist, it’s a book about a child that happens to have a war as a setting.
Ender’s Game has often been cited as a good book to read by readers who are not fans of science fiction. Why do you think it appeals to both fans and those who do not usually read science fiction?
I think it’s because I’m in the latter category. When I was growing up, science fiction was part of my reading, but only accidentally. I read everything. I was reading classics. I was reading historical fiction, romantic fiction, I read whatever was interesting at the time. A lot of non-fiction as well. But science fiction was valued not because of the genre itself, I never thought of myself as a science fiction reader, I simply loved certain science fiction writers. So I first discovered Heinlein and Norton in junior high library and devoured everything that they had written in book form at that time for the juveniles, the young adult fiction. THen in college I discovered Ray Bradbury, Isaac Asimov and loved them for the things that they taught me and Larry Niven came the last of all, but those writers are the ones that I think shaped me as a science fiction writer. But, they were never the majority of my reading. I was as likely to be excited about other authors as I was about them. So I think that I bring to writing an awareness of both the inside and the outside. I know enough about science fiction to write, to use the tropes, to use the techniques and methods of science fiction, but then I’m also writing to people like me who are not committed to the field. I’m not writing to insiders. I feel like I’m starting from ground zero. I write for a bare stage, I’m a playwright before I’m a writer of fiction and I write for Shakespeare’s stage. I write for Shakespeare’s audience really, people who expect to have the actor’s words tell them everything that they need to know, so that results in a kind of writing that is very spare. I only tell you what you need to know. I wrote 250 audio plays when I was starting out in my career. This is truly voice alone storytelling, so that only what the character’s say to each other is going to convey the meaning and the setting, everything. So that’s the way that I write. I make sure that all the information is present in the story. I don’t expect you to already bring to it a full knowledge of this or that novel, this or that tradition in science fiction. I make everything self contained and I make it very spare. That’s why people who try to abridge my work despair. There’s nothing there for fluff or decoration. It’s there because it’s functional in the story.
Source: Andy Lindsay on Vimeo
Although it’s been an exciting week for me as a fansite admin who got to release some extremely cool exclusive content for the Ender’s Game movie, the timing of the release is admittedly a bit unfortunate.
To explain, a couple of weeks ago, DC Comics announced that Orson Scott Card would be writing a chapter in an upcoming Superman anthology. Petitions flared up online and, as it has in the past, discussion after discussion emerged about his very vocal opposition to gay marriage.
As the owner of this site, I can’t deny that the subject of Orson Scott Card’s vendetta against homosexuality makes me feel all kinds of things. Awkwardness. Embarrassment.
Shame.
So why do I still do what I do? To be honest, I do it for my fellow fans. I know that people out there love Ender just as much as I do and fansites serve a very special purpose: being a specialized resource for a niche topic. A gathering place for you to nerd out over a story that resonated through you enough to make you truly feel.
I became a fan of Ender’s Game in maybe 1991 or 1992. At that time my family had no internet and so all I knew about the author was from those little bios in the backs of books that 12 year-olds pretty much never read. In short, I knew nothing but his name and hometown and therefore freely fell in love with the story of Ender and his journey through Battle School. It was at least a decade before I began to hear about his personal views and I found it so confusing. The Ender books seemed so compassionate and loving, even towards a fictional species that humanity had been taught to fear and despise.
It’s become a trend at this point that anytime something from the Ender’s Game movie is released, comments are either riddled with or overwhelmed by talk of boycotts and sometimes disgust for the movie. I understand the people who say they refuse to buy a ticket because that’s their choice, but I worry about direct protestations against the film and the actors later down the line.
It’s worrisome because I can’t seem to shake my connection to Ender and his story and it troubles me to see people taking the flamethrower aimed at Card and pointing it at Ender instead. Will people eventually turn on Asa Butterfield, Hailee Steinfeld, and Aramis Knight? The thought of protesters shouting at Asa Butterfield brings to mind an eerie parallel to what might have happened upon Ender’s homecoming post-war.
Card has said that he hasn’t even read the movie’s script, so it’s not as if he’s been hovering over the movie’s production. So will the hard work of hundreds be wasted because of the man who created the story the movie is based on?
The Hollywood Reporter recently published a piece on the controversy building around the film, talking to some studio executives for input.
“I don’t think you take him to any fanboy event,” says one studio executive. “This will definitely take away from their creative and their property.” Another executive sums up the general consensus: “Keep him out of the limelight as much as possible.”
Ender’s insiders already are distancing themselves from the 61-year-old author. “Orson’s politics are not reflective of the moviemakers,” says one person involved in the film. “We’re adapting a work, not a person. The work will stand on its own.”
Author involvement in marketing seems to be an emerging trend now with the hyper popularity of social media, which can make one wonder if author involvement is now an essential part of the marketing engine of a film or TV series.
JK Rowling was fairly accessible throughout the decade of Harry Potter films. George R. R. Martin announced official Game of Thrones casting choices on his Livejournal. Cassandra Clare, author of the Mortal Instruments series is very active online, teasing her book fans with tidbits and teases from the movie. Fans of the newly released Beautiful Creatures could follow author Kami Garcia around the world as she attended events for the movie. Hugh Howey maintains a regular blog and vlog, which likely won’t change if Ridley Scott goes into production for Wool. Do I even need to mention Twilight author Stephenie Meyer? It’s no secret that author involvement drives fans wild with glee.
So with that in mind, can a film succeed without its author around to help promote their book’s movie adaptation? Of course it can.
The Lord of the Rings movies probably made enough money to buy a country and build a Middle Earth set to scale and Tolkien was long dead. Hunger Games author Suzanne Collins is so private she did one interview with Entertainment Weekly, published a letter reviewing the film, and attended the premiere yet did zero interviews. The movie brought in close to $700M worldwide and sold 3.8M DVDs in its first weekend.
However, intentionally keeping Card out of the movie’s marketing limelight will be more awkward than a simple shift of focus to the actors. San Diego Comic Con is fast approaching and with a new Enderverse book being released just a month prior, the odds are good that Card will be in attendance, just as he was last year. His co-author Aaron Johnston has already said he’s going. So it might look terribly odd that the movie’s author is at the Con, probably sitting in Hall H, yet not sitting on the panel. Later this year, will he walk the red carpet at the premiere or just go straight into the theater? Or will Summit just give him his own private viewing?
That might be what needs to happen to ensure that none of the anger directed at Card bleeds over to the cast. The kids worked their butts off and with the exception of Asa, Hailee, and Moises, this is their biggest role yet. For many of them, it’s their first feature film. And while I’d admire teenagers who can handle intense negative publicity indirectly pointed at them, I don’t think any of the cast should be made to feel ashamed of being in Ender’s Game. It’s their time to shine and they deserve praise and recognition.
What it boils down to is that given the way the film’s digital media has thus far never failed to attract the attention of those wanting to shout down the movie, I agree that they’ll need to keep him out of the limelight as much as they can. Hopefully in the end, despite the inevitable guilt by association, Summit can channel some Ender Wiggin and lead their movie to a box office haul worthy of Dragon Army.
The above is an opinion piece and the views expressed are my own. I am not associated with Summit Entertainment or Lionsgate.
Orson Scott Card, author of Ender’s Game, will be the Author Guest of Honor at the sci-fi fan convention MystiCon taking place later this month in Roanoake, VA.
The convention, which is being held this year from February 22-24 at the Holiday Inn Tanglewood, is an old get together that began back in 1980 and was recently revived in 2010.
Registration is still open. Smart Pop Books will be in attendance and will be giving out Ender’s World themed buttons to promote their new book, which will be released this April.
For those of you that have been waiting for a paperback version of the First Formic War prequel series by Orson Scott Card and Aaron Johnston, the book is now available for pre-order and will ship around April 30, 2013.
Here’s the synopsis of the novel:
A hundred years before Ender’s Game, humans thought they were alone in the galaxy. Humanity was slowly making their way out from Earth to the planets and asteroids of the Solar System, exploring and mining and founding colonies.
The mining ship El Cavador is far out from Earth, in the deeps of the Kuiper Belt, beyond Pluto. Other mining ships, and the families that live on them, are few and far between this far out. So when El Cavador’s telescopes pick up a fast-moving object coming in-system, it’s hard to know what to make of it. It’s massive and moving at a significant fraction of the speed of light.
But the ship has other problems. Their systems are old and failing. The family is getting too big. There are claim-jumping corporates bringing Asteroid Belt tactics to the Kuiper Belt. Worrying about a distant object that might or might not be an alien ship seems…not important.
They’re wrong. It’s the most important thing that has happened to the human race in a million years. This is humanity’s first contact with an alien race. The First Formic War is about to begin.
You can read my review of the book here.
Last June, publisher Smart Pop Books sent out a call for fan questions to be submitted to Orson Scott Card for their anthology Ender’s World, which is due for release this coming April. Some of you posted your questions here on EnderWiggin.net while others posted on the Smart Pop website.
A good number of those questions were answered in the book, but without names attached and one fan is trying to change that by working with Smart Pop to collect names to include with the questions. If you were one of the individuals that posted a question and you posted under a pseudonym, please email EC Spencer at wiggine@gmail.com using the email address you used when posting your question and give her your name. If your question got included, it could mean a free book for you, so be sure to jump on this!
Time is of the essence, so act fast! If you can’t remember if you asked a question, you can see the original post on Smart Pop here.
This past July, I reviewed Earth Unaware, the Ender’s Game prequel novel by Orson Scott Card and Aaron Johnston. The book did a lot of foreshadowing for Ender’s Game and was, in the end, an enjoyable read for me. The only problem was that it was obviously incomplete and felt more like a “Part 1” than a “Book 1”. Thankfully, the next book is slated for release next June.
Titled Earth Afire, the book picks up right where Earth Unaware left off. The synopsis is below and contains SPOILERS for the first book.
100 years before Ender’s Game, the aliens arrived on Earth with fire and death. This is the story of the First Formic War.
Victor Delgado beat the alien ship to Earth, but just barely. Not soon enough to convince skeptical governments that there was a threat. They didn’t believe that until space stations and ships and colonies went up in sudden flame.
And when that happened, only Mazer Rackham and the Mobile Operations Police could move fast enough to meet the threat.
Earth Afire can currently be pre-ordered on Amazon.com.
Source: SF Signal
So now that Entertainment Weekly has pushed out the exclusive first look at Ender’s Game, much of the world that wasn’t aware that this movie is in the can and ready to come out in about 11 months is now aware and with that has come what I think some of my fellow fansite admins have been dreading along with me: people immediately declaring against the film because of author Orson Scott Card.
When I first read Ender’s Game, I was probably 11 or 12 years old. I was in the sixth grade. It was around 1991 and my parents eagerly shoved it into my hands, wanting me to read their favorite book and come back to them and talk about this fascinating little boy Ender.
I couldn’t help it, I was hooked. I loved Ender. He was a savior, a soldier, and unbeatable yet kind, vulnerable, and ever so small. Reading the book again earlier this year I couldn’t help but look over at my six year old son and imagine what it must have been like for Mrs. Wiggin, to live in a world where your third child is “requisitioned” and can be taken away at a moment’s notice with hardly any time to prepare.
My household didn’t get internet until 1996, so the idea of the nets that Valentine and Peter built their reputations on seemed very high tech science fiction to my little tween brain. It also meant that I had no idea who Orson Scott Card was other than an intimidating name on a book cover I’d come to love so much.
Now that I’m firmly plugged into the internet, it’s been a little rough to find out more about the real man behind the Battle School because my own beliefs really don’t line up with his. Back when I started this site last year, when I first heard about Alex Kurtzmann and Bob Orci taking it on, I had to pause a minute. Did I want to do this? Did I want to create a site dedicated to a movie based on a book written by a man very vocal in the media about his anti-gay and political sentiments? In the end, it came back to Ender Wiggin.
I couldn’t deny how much I loved this character Card had created. I couldn’t shake off the excitement I felt 20 years ago reading about kids my age responsible for the fate of the Earth, written so well that they felt real. It’s rare nowadays for me to latch on to characters in a similar way; a sure sign of a great character writer.
And so today, over a year after I started this site and over six months after I visited the set in New Orleans, I felt saddened by the comments that began popping up on EW.
I hope it tanks. OSC is an asshat.
Scott Card is a serious homophobe. Pass.
That bigot won’t be getting any of my money.
Saddened because after spending a whole day with the people behind the movie, without Orson Scott Card in sight, I found them all to be really, truly nice people just as passionate about the book as the people they’d invited onto their set. We met members of the cast and even parents of the cast. I don’t know what their personal beliefs are, but they’re entitled to them, just as I’m entitled to mine and Card is entitled to his. I certainly don’t think any of these kids deserves to be treated as though they’re Orson Scott Card himself.
So that’s been a fear in the back of my mind for a while. Is this movie going to crash and burn because of its author? Will people protest the premiere? I don’t really know. I certainly hope not.
To wish for this movie’s failure is to wish a failure upon not just Card, but on a huge cast of young actors and a crew of hundreds. Sure, it’s Card’s story, but in my humble opinion, the movie “belongs” to those who made it. Their performances will make or break this movie and that’s what we should be examining come next November.
So while the opinions of Orson Scott Card may not match my own, I’ll continue to support this film, its cast, and its crew.
I support Ender Wiggin.
Thanks to an EnderWiggin.net reader, we got a tip that there are a series of videos from a book signing that Orson Scott Card did earlier this month for his book ‘Ruins‘ which was released on October 30. The signing was held at a Barnes & Noble bookstore in Orem, Utah.
In this first video, Card jokes about how he was offered a part that involved cool uniforms, but insisted that he’s improving the look of the movie by only appearing by voice as a pilot on a shuttle as Ender and Graff.
He goes on to reiterate what he said in a previous interview about how few scenes are in the movie from the book but this time says there are NO scenes from the book in the movie.
There are no scenes from the book in the movie, and there are no scenes in the movie from the book, but that’s actually not a surprise. That’s pretty much the way my scripts were too because Ender’s Game is an unfilmable book. That’s something we learned 20 years ago.
I find this particularly confusing, as if there are no scenes from the book in the movie, then what exactly is going to happen in this movie called ‘Ender’s Game‘? It certainly sounds like it follows the story. Perhaps he means that there are no lines from the book in the movie?
If you filmed every scene it would be a four and a half hour movie, and I don’t care how much you love Ender’s Game, four and a half hours is a long time to sit in a theater. We also discovered very quickly that one battle in the Battle Room is one too many. You gotta see it happening, but it’s like watching Quidditch. How exciting was that? You already know how it’s gonna come out, you just wanna see them fly around a little bit, bingo it’s over. And that’s kind of how Battle Room is. It’ll look great, but we’re not going to follow these battles closely.
Looks like I’m going to have to agree to disagree with Mr. Card on this one because I really preferred watching Quidditch over reading Quidditch! I also don’t really think that one Battle Room scene is necessarily enough to appease not just fans, but newcomers. Summit will of course want non-book fans to come to see the movie and I’m not entirely convinced that one or even no battle would make the point of Battle School clear to these viewers.
In the second part, Card talks a bit about how Harrison Ford is in person, mentioning that he’s a very shy, quiet person who goes off into a corner once the cameras are off. He goes on to talk about meeting the other kids and how they suffered doing their wire work, but ended up being in the best shape of their lives.
He touched more upon the script and how they went with Gavin’s script over his.
Here’s the thing about movie. It’s going to be different from the book. It has to be. It couldn’t be filmed the way it was, the way the book is. And so what I’m hoping is, it’s brilliant. I would love it if Gavin’s script was really good. Now I did a reading of the script that I was really proud of, but you could lose your job greenlighting a film scripted by the author. That’s just the truth. And you can’t lose your job over greenlighting a film scripted by the director. So they went with the one where nobody loses their job, whether it wins or loses.
He goes on to tell his fans to go see the movie once and if they love it, bring their friends back and if they don’t, bring their friends back to show them how awful it is. Still, he sounds confident about how things will turn out. “I am very hopeful that it’s going to be terrific.”
Later, Card takes questions from fans and the first one is actually one that I’d been dying to know as well, so it was great seeing this asked.
I read Ender’s Game back when I was 17 in the 80s. The thing that really grasped me is that in it you talk about the internet, you talk about laptops, wireless internet, chatrooms, […] and identities online. What gave you the insight?
The novel by 1985, while the internet was not open for public access yet, there were services like […] and Delphi. I had been on bulletin boards, I knew about flame wars. I mean there was all kinds of stuff like that.
Despite his answer, I still found the things he described in Ender’s Game to be very prescient in that the desks he “created” in the 80s are now the tablets of today. (not laptops imo)
There are three more videos that you can watch here: Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5
Source: Donovan Heap via Roko
Orson Scott Card’s latest Ender novel Earth Unaware: The First Formic War, co-authored by Aaron Johnston, was released last week on July 17 and my review copy came in the mail just a couple of days later.
A hardcover book of 364 pages (excluding the Afterword), Earth Unaware is an official Ender’s Game prequel that brings us the story of humanity’s very first encounter with the Formics. Earth Unaware has interesting and well fleshed out characters, a steady pace, and great foreshadowing for Ender’s Game. The book is split into three separate storylines and two of them eventually intertwine to provide you with a thrilling and terrifying ride through the Kuniper Belt.
First there’s the El Cavador storyline, told mostly from the perspective of Victor Delgado, a brilliant 17 year-old free miner mechanic on his Venezuelan family’s mining ship, the El Cavador. You start off meeting Victor at a time of painful loss, as his closest cousin and best friend Alejandra, nicknamed Janda, is “zogged” or married off to another clan early to an Italian clan the Delgados have been trading with for the past week because they sense that the two cousins are falling in love. (this chapter can be read as a sample on Tor.com) For her sake, Victor chooses not to say goodbye and instead immerses himself into his work.
That’s soon interrupted when Janda’s younger sister Edimar, an apprentice in the ship’s crow’s nest called The Eye, spots something in the distance that by her calculations is decelerating. The conclusion they both come to is that it’s an alien starship headed for Earth. They notify the ship’s captain immediately and with only the departed Italian ships and one corporate mining ship within communication distance, they send off messages in the hopes that they reach them.
The second storyline follows that of the Makarhu, a corporate space mining ship led by Lem Jukes, son of Ukko Jukes, who is the wealthiest man in the galaxy and president of Earth’s largest corporate mining company Juke Limited. Lem is on a mission for Juke Limited’s R&D division to test the outrageously expensive prototype “glaser” or gravity laser to hopefully provide them with a revolutionary way to mine minerals out of asteroids. The Makarhu is the corporate ship nearest to the El Cavador.
Impatient and eager to return home with good news, Lem is plagued by delays and an overcautious lead scientist and after their first test on a “pebble” or small asteroid, he makes the call to head to a much larger asteroid nearby. The problem is that it’s being mined by the Delgado clan. Not to be discouraged, Lem suggests the unethical practice of “bumping” the El Cavador from the rock and taking it for themselves. This begins a terrible conflict between the two ships, with what’s presumably a Formic ship quickly approaching.
Back on Earth, we follow Captain Wit O’Toole, head of the elite peacekeeping force known as the Mobile Operations Police or MOPs for short. Recruiting from the most elite military forces on the planet, Wit’s visit to the New Zealand SAS base is where we get our first glimpse of young Mazer Rackham. The downside is that while Wit’s story is interesting and entertaining, he parts ways with Mazer early on in the book and his story fails to tie into the meat of the story in a relevant manner and in the end Wit only serves as backstory for what’s obviously another book to come.
Victor makes for a fascinating young adult character with admirable qualities and a deeply rooted loyalty to his family and a “home” he’s never even seen in Earth, since he is space-born. Lem could have been a typical rich kid character, but thankfully, he’s a reluctant non-hero with ethics and the yoke of his father muzzling his full potential. This makes him a much more complicated and therefore interesting man.
You see shades of Ender’s Game throughout, but most notably with the glaser, which is obviously the prototype for what eventually becomes the Little Doctor. Wit O’Toole’s elite force leads one to believe that he’ll eventually help form the International Fleet, since his MOPs are a global force that do not answer to individual governments and strive to keep harm from coming to civilians. The climax of the novel brings you thrills similar to the Battle Room and you can’t help but think that this influenced how they trained the students in the school.
I’d been struggling through Children of the Mind when Earth Unaware landed on my desk and I finished the book in a quick three days, being a bit slow to start since I’d already read most of the first chapter online. Once I got a bit deeper in, however, the story and characters pulled me in until I couldn’t put it down. It’s a very strong novel for what I presume will be a set of prequel books. My only wish was that Captain Wit had tied in better with the main storyline.
If you’ve been waiting to buy the book until you read reviews, consider this review one that urges you to pick up the book immediately. While decidedly different from Ender’s Game, Earth Unaware is a quality novel and overall a highly entertaining read.
Earth Unaware was provided to me by Tor Books. I was not paid to write this review. All opinions expressed above are my own.
Authors Orson Scott Card and Aaron Johnston will be doing a book signing for ‘Earth Unaware‘ at Barnes & Noble at the Friendly Center in Greensboro, NC tonight from 7:00 PM.
Here’s the synopsis for the book:
A hundred years before Ender’s Game, humans thought they were alone in the galaxy. Humanity was slowly making their way out from Earth to the planets and asteroids of the Solar System, exploring and mining and founding colonies.
The mining ship El Cavador is far out from Earth, in the deeps of the Kuiper Belt, beyond Pluto. Other mining ships, and the families that live on them, are few and far between this far out. So when El Cavador’s telescopes pick up a fast-moving object coming in-system, it’s hard to know what to make of it. It’s massive and moving at a significant fraction of the speed of light.
But the ship has other problems. Their systems are old and failing. The family is getting too big. There are claim-jumping corporates bringing Asteroid Belt tactics to the Kuiper Belt. Worrying about a distant object that might or might not be an alien ship seems…not important.
They’re wrong. It’s the most important thing that has happened to the human race in a million years. This is humanity’s first contact with an alien race. The First Formic War is about to begin.
Earth Unaware was released yesterday, July 17. In the book ‘Ender’s Game’, Greensboro, NC is Ender Wiggin’s hometown.