First Meetings

In the Enderverse

By: Orson Scott Card

Narrated by: Gabrielle De Cuir, Amanda Karr, Stefan Rudnicki

Length: 6 hrs and 20 mins

Publisher's summary

First Meetings is a collection of three novellas (plus the original "Ender's Game") that journey into the origins and the destiny of one Ender Wiggin.

"The Polish Boy", a novella written especially for this collection, begins in the years between the first two Bugger Wars when the Hegemony is desperate to recruit brilliant military commanders to repel the alien invasion. In John Paul Wiggin, the future father of Ender, they believe they may have found their man. Or boy.

In "Teacher's Pest", also written especially for this collection, a brilliant but insufferably arrogant John Paul Wiggin, now an American university student, matches wits with an equally brilliant graduate student named Theresa Brown.

It is many years since the end of the Bugger Wars in "The Investment Counselor". Ender's reputation as a hero and savior has suffered a horrible reversal. Banished from Earth and slandered as a mass murderer, 20-year-old Ender Wiggin wanders incognito form planet to planet as a fugitive, until a blackmailing tax inspector compromises his identity and threatens to expose Ender the Xenocide.

Also here is the original landmark "Ender's Game", which first appeared in 1977.

First Meetings is Orson Scott Card at the height of his considerable powers, featuring his most compelling character.

©2003 Orson Scott Card (P)2003, 2004 Audio Renaissance, a division of Holtzbrinck Publishers, LLC

Critic reviews

"Character, setting, plot: Card does them all right, and makes it look effortless....For newcomers to Ender's universe and long-time fans, this book will hit the spot and whet the appetite for more." (School Library Journal)
"Even those who are intimately familiar with the concepts of the Game from later Ender books will be struck anew by Card's virtuosity. His powerful voice and startlingly clear vision will draw many new readers into a lifelong love of science fiction. This accessible collection will impress even non-sci-fi buffs, besides being a must-have for Ender saga devotees." (Publishers Weekly) "These stories demonstrate the assured scene setting, apparently effortlessly sustained suspense, and moral preoccupation with the responsibilities of kinship and friendship that distinguishes Ender's entire saga." (Booklist)

Stop with all the music!!!!

Great book, this is a must listen if you've read Enders Game and Speaker for the Dead. My only complaint, dear god, they need to stop playing so much background music! I had to re listen to a couple parts because the music was so distracting!!!! Agh!!

All the back stories

When you read a book, sometimes you want to know how things came to be. First Meetings is the how it came to be you may be looking for.

Some New, Some Repeated

I really liked learning about John Paul and Theresa, as well as the first meeting between ender and Jane. I didn’t understand why we got the same story of ender in battle school and at Command school as we did in the original enders game. Felt like a waste. Also the music they had overlaid at different points in the audiobook was so loud that you couldn’t even hear the audio of the book itself. This book wasn’t really worth it.

Great addition to the storyline.

All was as good as the rest of the books except this audiobook had intro & exit music well into the narration performance which made it difficult, although not impossible, to hear the story. And some of the story overlaps Ender’s Game.

Overall, I enjoyed it just about as much. So, if you like the series, it’s a good listen.

Story and Characters a Plus

The story and character-building are typical of Orson Scott Card and very enjoyable. However that intro and exit music is a big enough bother to remove a star from the rating. You can't figure out what's happening in the story until the first parts are already over and you can listen to secondary details.

Background music ruins it

The narration is the usual cast for Orson Scott Card books, however, there is background music which comes in and makes it very difficult to hear at the beginning and end of each short story.

great stories but amateur production

for the love of god please cut the "music" out of this...these stories are too good to have minutes of it ruined because some 5 year old decided to play with a 1978 yamaha keyboard and it got overlayed over the narration so loud you cant hear the story

3 great stories, 1 not so much

If you've already read Ender's Game and the Shadow series, you'll love the first three short stories. I absolutely loved them. I wish it had stopped there.

The last one was mostly comprised of excerpts from Ender's Game with a handful of new scenes or dialogue thrown in. I have read and reread Ender's Game so many times, but this just felt mostly redundant.

After reading Ender's Shadow and knowing Bean's personality way better, I felt like the way he was portrayed here was jarring because he sounded so peppy and childlike and eager to please Ender... which is not at all how he actually was. Not a huge deal, but it definitely threw me out of the enjoyment

The biggest offense though--the one that prompted me to actually bother writing a review... Over and over, Mazer called Ender "Andrew Wiggins." Wiggins. With an "s" at the end. HIS LAST NAME IS "WIGGIN." HOW DO YOU MISS SOMETHING LIKE THAT? Why would they do that?? It's almost as bad as a movie director taking beloved character's names and deciding the pronunciations were wrong in the source material and changing them from "Aang" to "Ong" and "Sokka" to "Soh-kuh." Almost as bad... but not quite. Point is, every time Mazer said "Wiggins," I would halt what I was doing and stare at my phone like it had said something rude. And it just. kept. happening. Like, am I crazy? It's Wiggin, right? (It is. I looked it up multiple times to confirm because I thought I was going crazy.) Okay, rant over. I've had zero other complaints about the series so far, but this one (and really, just the last quarter of this one) needed a rebuke.

Great back ground

Enjoyed the filling of how the characters meet and sparing of the persona of them

Really good

I thought it was pretty funny when I read the reviews for this book when a lot of people were saying that they hated the inaccuracies of this book because it was Ender Wiggins instead of Ender Wiggin OSC talks about this in the introduction to the full length Enders game novel which I think Wiggin is better than Wiggins so this was pretty funny. I loved this book John Paul is probably one of my favorite characters throughout this whole Enderverse despite his little time in the novels. Good Job Orson Scott Card