rom short stories to epics, from religious dramatizations to glimpses of modern-day fears, there is not one aspect of the sci-fi/fantasy world that Orson Scott Card has not touched upon. With his soon-to-be-released novel, The Crystal City (the sixth in the Alvin Maker series) and the preproduction of his first novel-to-film translation (Ender's Game, the work for which he is most widely known), Mr. Card likes to stay busy, but always has time to keep up on his weekly Web site updates, and even has time to do some interviews. We are lucky enough to be one of them.
His first published work, Listen, Mom and Dad (1978), was surprisingly a children's book. His first step into sci-fi was "Capitol," most of which can be found in The Worthing Saga. Though several of his works were put out to great reception, it wasn't until 1985, when Ender's Game was published (the full novel was based on the 1977 novella of the same name), that he struck gold. Ender brought him the Nebula Award in '85 and the Hugo, Hamilton-Brackett and SF Chronicle Readers Poll Award in '86. He followed up Ender with three sequels, each earning critical acclaim. Other works of note are two epics, The Tales of Alvin Maker and Homecoming. His work has been translated into several languages, including (but not limited to) Catalan, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Slovakian, Spanish and Swedish.
Card is a devoted husband and loving father of five children, each of whom is named after a famous literary figure: Geoffrey, Emily, Charles, Zina Margaret and Erin Louisa (named for Chaucer, Bronte and Dickinson, Dickens, Mitchell and Alcott.) He has degrees from both Brigham Young University and the University of Utah, and worked in the mission field in Brazil for two years with the Mormon church. He currently resides in Greensboro, N.C. His Web site can be found at hatrack.com.
Some of your earlier work (Folk of the Fringe, Worthing Saga) was published as similarly themed short stories. Do you anticipate doing more in the future?
Card: That's the sort of thing that just comes up sometimes—I find a milieu that I like well enough to explore it from different angles. Now, though, I tend to do it at novel length—hence the Alvin Maker stories and the Shadow books.
I may be dating myself, but what was your inspiration for Treason?
Card: Treason is still in print? I'd like to think people can still discover it as a "new" book even now [grins]. Like most of my books, it came from two unrelated ideas. One was the idea of people growing body parts the way we do piercings and tattoos today—so you show up at the party with an extra breast or an arm or a nose. But I had no story to go with that. I
also doodle maps, and had drawn one where, on a whim, I started naming the countries with surnames of different nationalities, and then wondered, how could a world get nations with such names? Combining the two gave me the idea of a world where people have developed different skills, knacks or traits, and where each nation is descended from a founder from our universe.
When do you expect the next chapter in the Tales of Alvin Maker out?
Card: I just finished writing The Crystal City, the sixth novel, which will be published in November. There will be one more after it, called Master Alvin. I have also
written a couple of standalone Alvin stories for the Legends anthologies. The first one, "Grinning Man," in which Alvin meets Davy Crockett, was in Legends I, and the new one, "Yazoo Queen," in which Alvin meets both Jim Bowie and Abe Lincoln on a trip down the Mizzippy
River, will be in Legends II [both edited by Robert Silverberg].
Regarding the Tales of Alvin Maker, what was your inspiration for taking a part of history and showing how things could have been so different?
Card: This isn't really "alternate history" in the sense that if someone had made a different choice all of history might really have been changed. Here, the "change" is that the magic people believed in actually works—so it's a fantasy rather than an alternate history. Still, I'm having a great deal of fun twisting up American history and yet trying to be true
to the great themes and dilemmas that gave shape to our country.
You have an obvious love for both history and religion. What do you do to "study up"?
Card: Now and then I have to do research on a particular place or time—for instance, for Crystal City I had to research what was going on in New Orleans in 1825.
Not so I could duplicate history, but so I'd know the kind of thing that would be available in such a polyglot city. But most of my "research" comes naturally—I read history constantly and voraciously and have all my life. In fact, I tell my writing students that they shouldn't major in English in college—they should just read all the books and poems and stories and form their own opinions. What they should major in is history, because that's where you learn not only all the varieties of human society and human behavior, but also how negotiable the issue of causality is, and how many different plausible reasons for things to happen can be advanced from the same set of evidence. It's the best training there is for a fiction writer in any genre, but is especially essential for writers of science fiction, so they can know enough to step outside the bounds of their own culture, at least a little bit.
You make no mystery of your personal religious beliefs. How do you choose whether or not to inject them into a story?
Card: I never consciously inject my own beliefs into a story. Rather, I let my characters express what they believe. People keep thinking that I'm preaching my own religion when I have a character speak about his or her beliefs, but it just ain't so. Instead, I trust that my own deepest beliefs will emerge in my fiction without my being aware of it at the time. Sometimes I find out what I really think by re-reading what I wrote and seeing how a story took shape and realizing what was important to me, unconsciously, while I was writing it.
I think when a writer consciously inserts his own ideology—about religion or politics—into a story, then it will be consciously received by the reader, and probably limit his readership only to those who already agree with him. Whereas a writer who trusts his own unconscious mind to express his deepest beliefs will end up with stories where the belief system is only subtly interwoven ... and thus has a much greater chance of influencing readers. However, of course, the writer runs the risk of having his books influence people toward what he really believes rather than toward what he believes that he believes—and, trust me, there is usually a wide gap between those two things in most people.
The majority of your work deals with an alternate past or a distant future, not a whole lot touching down on the current time frame. What inspired you to write a story like Lost Boys that takes place in the (relatively in comparison) modern world?
Card: Lost Boys, Treasure Box, Homebody and Enchantment
are all set in contemporary America. Strange lands and cultures are wonderful to invent or visit in my fiction, but sometimes I have stories to tell in my own time and place. I'm just glad when a publisher is willing to take a chance on a writer who is moving "out of genre."
Were any of those characters based on you and people in your life?
Card: Lost Boys is intensely autobiographical. So much so that it became too emotional, and I will never do it again. While the climactic events never happened in our family, most of the lesser details did, and the oldest son was based on my oldest son, Geoffrey [who
is very much alive and designing electronic games in Seattle]. Imagining his death was too painful; it was only bearable because at the time I had not yet lost a child. Now I could never write that book. So I guess I'm glad it's already written. ...
As with both Homebody and Lost Boys, do you plan on doing any more work based in the present world?
Card: I have two books under contract with Del Rey. One of them is set in a black middle-class neighborhood in L.A., where magic breaks out into the world and the people in this neighborhood have to get it back under control without much outside help. The other is based
on a story I wrote for an anthology of modern dragon stories, in which dragons have taken up residence in the electrical current in modern houses. This story turned out way cooler than I had ever hoped, and I love the characters, and it just cried out to be made into a book that carries the story much farther along.
Similar to what you have done with Bean, are there any plans for the individual stories of other characters from the Ender Saga? Can we expect also a prequel (if I may be so bold) about Mazer Rackham?
Card: I had thought of doing separate books on other characters, but it turns out they're weaving themselves into the Shadow books already. There might be room for books about what happens to many of them after they go off to colony worlds (after Peter succeeds in becoming hegemon), but I can't see writing any others that follow the pattern I followed with
Bean—a parallel story interweaving with the previous books. By now, the Shadow books belong as much to Petra and Alai and others as to Bean.
As for a prequel about Mazer Rackham, I've been toying with that off and on for years. We'll just have to see if there's a book in his life. I have done some prequel stories—one about where Ender's father gets recruited for Battle School but gets out of it, and one where Ender's father and mother meet. They're in the slim collection First Meetings, which is coming out this summer from Tor. Graff shows up in those. But Mazer Rackham is his own set of problems. One real problem is, in the book he's half Maori; in the film, he probably won't look that way at all, since the actor will be chosen for box-office clout, not apparent ancestry. That would complicate people's acceptance of a prequel about a character who is nothing like the image they'll be familiar with from the film.
With Sarah, you wrote from a women's perspective. What motivated you to choose a woman's point of view, and what research did you do to be as convincing as possible?
Card: Women are human. I write about humans by studying history, knowing the people and communities around me, and imagining as thoroughly as possible the bits that I haven't experienced myself. I have always written about female characters as readily as males. Sarah
isn't my first book with a female protagonist, either. Wyrms is centered on a woman named Patience. And I use female characters' viewpoints constantly in the Homecoming series—about as much as male viewpoints—and quite often also in the Alvin Maker books. I have always felt free to get inside any character's viewpoint if it's necessary for the telling of the tale.
Nobody asks Anne Tyler if she does special research to write about her male characters [grins], and so it should be no surprise when a male writer can create convincing female characters. The truth is, however, I've always fit in well with communities of women, and so have a lot of experience to draw on. My real problem is trying to write convincingly about macho males who fish and drink beer and watch sports on TV. That takes real imagination on my part, because I've never hung out with those guys.
How did the creation and actual writing of Sarah influence Rebekah?
Card: I planned it as a series from the start. The only connections are that they're both drawn from Genesis, the same research helped with both, and the same writer wrote them. Sarah and Rebekah are very different women who led very different lives.
What is your overall opinion of the publishing world these days?
Card: It's following the same cycles as always—big corporate mergers reduce the competence of the editorial staff as they become overworked and are constantly second-guessed by marketing types, who are always looking for last year's bestseller. Therefore there's always room for new startups or for small publishers to make a move for the big time. Then, of course, there's the fads. E-books ... books on demand ... each of these has a niche, but they aren't going to replace the regularly published book for the simple reason that they aren't as convenient and don't give the same sense of pride of possession that a physical book, well printed, can give. E-books, however, are the perfect way to get scholarly monographs cheaply into "print" and widely available. I foresee a day when all college and community libraries will have copies of all scholarly books just a few clicks away from the scholars who need them, without having any publisher risk more than the cost of editing and putting it out online. Apart from that, the publishing world is just the normal collection of heroes and rascals. But the spectacularly bold ones, and the spectacularly wicked ones, left for the movie business long ago ...
Do you feel the Internet is a good place for beginning writers to get their start?
Card: For now, at least, publishing in print is still the big time, and any story you put out electronically doesn't feel as if it had been truly published. That may change, but I don't see it yet—most attempts at online fiction publishing fail. But online is a great way to establish writing workshops that remain about the writing instead of about the personalities in the group. I run writing workshops for free (supervised by Kathleen Woodbury, may her name be blessed), and there are many other writers who get together electronically to critique or collaborate. And when you're a real beginner and your stuff isn't publishable anyway, why not put it up online to get a response that might help you understand what you're doing wrong? Though, in
truth, writers learn far more from reading other people's failed manuscripts than from any critiques they might get of their own flawed work.
You wrote the musical Barefoot to Zion with your brother Arlen. What music do you enjoy listening to, and do you use it to inspire your writing?
Card: I listen to music constantly when I write—all kinds. It's hard for me to write in silence. But I'm quite eclectic—few genre boundaries keep me out. I have collections of country, classical, Brazilian MPB, vocal jazz, folk, lots of rock and pop from the '60s on
forward, Broadway, film, even some opera, though that's a taste I've come to only lately and with
misgivings. Rap, unfortunately, doesn't function as music for me—it demands attention like shouted poetry, only as poetry it rarely scans well and the topics are usually boring. Anyway, I can't write with rap on—too distracting. But I cycle through many other kinds of music.
Some writers have said that they've had difficulty getting their works published unless it takes place in a particular world they created previously with success. Have you come across any of this with say, the Ender series?
Card: My Ender books sell better than my other books, so naturally my publisher is happy to see a book that he can put the name "Ender" on. But I have a great publisher in Tom Doherty, who is willing to go with me into risky off-brand ventures. I also have found some
other publishers willing to take a chance on nongenre books, like the Women of Genesis published by Shadow Mountain and my contemporary fantasies now published by Del Rey. I have some mainstream literary novels in my head, too—but those will probably be published under a pseudonym, because in li-fi the fear of writers who have done well in other genres is so paranoid that unless you find a way to be "cool," like the cyberpunks (li-fi people are absolute suckers for coolness, as if they were still in junior high), it's almost impossible to break in without some kind of disguise. In other words, when I do write li-fi, I won't announce it's me until after I win the Pulitzer.
That was a joke, by the way.
You've noted that your favorite book is The Lord of the Rings. As someone who has written an epic yourself, and one that is becoming a movie, how do you feel about the film adaptation of Tolkien's world?
Card: Ender's Game isn't an epic. It's just a novel. Alvin Maker might be an epic, and Homecoming certainly is—but nobody's making movies out of those. I think the adaptation of LOTR is superb so far—faithful without being tedious—and it is matched in recent memory only by the adaptation of the brilliant novel Holes. Both achieved their greatness, as movies, because they were written and directed by people who didn't believe all that screenwriting-class crap, or at least didn't allow it to destroy stories that
didn't have to rely on such pathetic crutches for their structure.
Is religion portrayed as well as it could be in science fiction?
Card: Science fiction, by and large, is religious fiction, precisely because it takes place outside of any one particular religion. So when religion is dealt with overtly in sci-fi, it is usually dealt with only culturally rather than as a possible source of truth. For instance, my Folk of the Fringe is a series of stories set in a future Mormon culture—but it never,
not for a second, asks the reader to decide whether or not Mormon religion is somehow "true." However, most sci-fi that doesn't consciously use a particular religion as cultural background is in fact deeply concerned with the great religious questions. Sometimes it becomes extremely obvious, as in the movie Matrix, which is the most piously religious film since The Robe or Ben-Hur. Most of the time it's more subtle. But it's almost always there.
What's your writing regimen?
Card: When my wife tells me we're about out of money, I finish something. Otherwise, I avoid writing the way any sensible person avoids work when nobody's making you do it.
Is there something as a writer you'd like to accomplish that you haven't already?
Card: I'd like to write stories I haven't thought of yet. But that's what I've always wanted, and so far I've been able to keep thinking them up and writing them down. As long as I can keep doing that, and people still want to read them, I'll be happy with my career.
Back to the top.
