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" 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" -- a novella 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 War 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, twenty-year-old Andrew Wiggin wanders incognito from planet to planet as a fugitive -- until a blackmailing tax inspector compromises his identity and threatens to expose Ender the Xenocide. Also reprinted here is the original landmark novella, "Ender's Game," which first appeared in 1977.