Orson Scott Card
Interview by Jay Gesin

Orson Scott Card was the first person to win the Hugo and Nebula awards two years in a row (for Ender's Game and its sequel, Speaker for the Dead). Since then, his writing has established him as one of the greatest sci-fi writers of the late 20th century. Aside from the Ender universe, Card created the Alvin Maker series, the Homecoming series, and a number of non-sci-fi books.

Card is very conscious of his readers and his position in science fiction. His website features a writing group area where people can gather and critique each others' work in small groups. He's also written two books on writing, Characters and Viewpoint and How to Write Science Fiction & Fantasy.

His new book, Shadow Puppets, continues the story of Bean, a secondary character from Ender's Game who turns out to have far more involvement in the story than first thought. It is the third book in a projected five-book series that began with Ender's Shadow and Shadow of the Hegemon.

Recently we asked Card via email about the new book, world politics, and his role in the writing universe.

BookSense.com: What is the role of science fiction in our culture?

Orson Scott Card: Traditionally, sci-fi has been seen as the predictor of future technologies, but we who write and read within this great new literary community broadened beyond those boundaries long ago. When the first Sputnik went up, it became clear that technology was going to catch up with science fiction sooner or later; and many science fiction writers of that time were already looking beyond technology -- and some of them beyond science itself -- to try to envision futures and alternate realities, alien cultures and human transformations that would help us see not only what we might become, but also what we already are in the infinite variety and yet relentlessly unchanging themes of human life.

So, today, when we speak of science fiction's role in our culture, there are two answers. Sci-fi movies remain the place where we see the spectacle of strange times and places, where impossible machines and creatures can be made to seem to live -- the place of magic.

Print sci-fi, however, has the far more potent role of preparing us, as a culture, not for any particular future, but rather for the fact that every single human being is riding a time machine into unpredictable futures one day at a time. The skills needed to thrive in an ever-changing world include the ability to grasp new realities, to notice changes and remember them, and to change our own role to fit the new rules. Those are precisely the skills acquired and practiced by those who write and read science fiction. It is the mental training ground that will keep our culture supple and adaptable, and therefore more likely to be able to survive whatever changes come.

You edited the "Masterpieces" book of best sci-fi of the 20th century. How has science fiction changed from the early masters of the genre to the current writers?

Originally, science fiction was about the science and technology. The characters existed only to discover or get trapped in or destroyed by or saved by the scientific principle or technological marvel at the center of the story. But the great masters of the field were the ones who moved beyond mere ideas and, without losing their hold on the scientific underpinnings of the genre, were able to introduce human dilemmas, cultural transformations, and the continuity of human character even in the midst of change. Asimov, Heinlein, and Clarke deserve their place in the pantheon of science fiction writers because they are the ones who broadened our field from a niche genre to a fictional tradition that could include, in a word, everything.

Since their time, some fine writers have opened the many doors these great writers led us to, discovering new passageways. At this point, the true answer to your question would be to list about two hundred writers and talk about how each one brought something new to the field, and then show how everyone who came after has used the tools each new writer put into our hands.

What matters most, though, is that the entire tradition of science fiction -- and all the tools each writer created in order to tell their own kind of tale -- are still present with us, and each kind of storytelling within the house of speculative fiction is still being practiced, still finding new readers. So, we haven't so much changed as elaborated, expanded, losing nothing while reaching for everything.

How do you describe the difference between literary fiction and sci-fi?

Literary fiction these days is a private conversation among people who have stopped caring so much about the story as about how well it is told. Speculative fiction is still very much story-centered, and while much of it is also private -- in the sense that there is much sci-fi that can only be read by people who have already read a lot of other sci-fi -- the best of the writers in both fields reach out to try to include new and untrained readers. The difference is that most sci-fi writers are in this category and are writing public, not private, fiction, while only a relative handful of literary writers are creating public fiction.

Are there any current writers you feel are advancing the genre?

"Advancing" is a value-laden word. Everybody changes the genre just by writing within it; by definition, each new writer expands the field. But let's not get caught up in the myth of progress. The transformation of a literary genre is rarely from bad to good, or good to better, but rather from this to that, from how we did it then to how we do it now. We no longer use the same literary tool-set as Jane Austen or Mark Twain or Charles Dickens, but we have not advanced, merely changed in what our audiences expect and how we communicate our stories to them. In a later generation, the readers of that day will have their own version of literature, and they will look back to our time and any writer of our day who seems to be leading toward what they value then will be viewed as having "advanced" the field. But it is not true. It is merely the preference of their time.

Shakespeare, too, was once viewed as rather an embarrassment within English literature; and each generation that values him seems to value him for being very much like them. We love what resembles us. So I could not begin to predict which writers today will be viewed, in the future, as resembling what future readers value in a writer.

How have you changed as a writer in the last 25 years?

My tool-set has expanded, of course, and there are themes I've become bored with and set aside, while there are others that I've become intrigued with as I learn more about life and the world around me. But fundamentally, I'm still telling stories about people caught in impossible moral dilemmas, and I'm still working with the transformation from child and adolescent life-roles into adulthood. I'm still drawn to stories about how communities form, thrive, and die. I suspect I always will be. I guess I'll have to leave it to readers to determine what changes they see in my work over time.

Tell me about EnderCon. What is it? How did it come about?

EnderCon is really just a big party we're throwing for Ender's 25th birthday. The short-story version of "Ender's Game" was published in the August 1977 Analog magazine, which appeared on the stands early in July of that year. We wanted to mark the occasion and invited those who cared about it to come along. Of course, at a regular birthday party you don't charge money, but then, we're also not expecting people to bring presents.

Some are, however. Janis Ian, who has been a friend for years now, is performing a free concert for EnderCon attendees on the first night, and offering a master class in the afternoon of the next day. Many others are bringing their expertise, not just on topics directly related to Ender's Game, but on many other areas that will be of interest to readers of the book.

We're also publishing a slim collection of three stories, called First Meetings, which contains the original short story of "Ender's Game;" a story called "Investment Counselor," which tells of Ender's first meeting with Jane; and a never-before-published story called "The Polish Boy," which tells of Ender's father.

We're meeting at Utah Valley State College because the price was right, the facilities excellent, and we have a lot of friends and family within a day's drive. For more information about the convention, people can sign on to my website.

Your book and William Gibson's Neuromancer really anticipated the Internet and its power as a communication tool. What do you like about the Internet? Any concerns or fears?

The best thing about the Internet is email. The telephone had virtually killed letter-writing; now it's back, and while the way we write letters is different, we have a written record of our conversations to a degree unmatched at any time in history. Also, it's wonderful to be able to assemble communities online, to be able to check on information without making a trip to the library, and to purchase items that are in such narrow niches that no one town could assemble enough customers to keep a physical shop in business.

The biggest danger is the fact that the Internet can carry poison as well as the lifeblood of communication. The soul-numbing, crime-feeding disease of pornography is the single biggest profit center on the nets right now, and nobody has the power or will to shut it down, even though it is destructive of every community poisoned by it. Compared to this, mere junk mail is merely an irritant. And the more reliant we become on the Internet, the more vulnerable we are to e-sabotage. Whatever a community or civilization values, its enemies will find ways to attempt to destroy.

A common theme in the Ender series is the relationship between the individual and his/her community. What responsibility does an individual have to his community?

Communities are what make human life possible. Our responsibility to our community includes giving up many personal preferences in order to do what is good for all; in extreme danger, that includes giving up our lives for the community as if all its members were our close genetic kin. At the same time, individuals have the responsibility to notice when the community is sick, weak, or failing, and to do their best to alert people and bring about change. And when a community is beyond saving, then the individual has the responsibility to leave and form a new community that is worth making these kinds of sacrifices for.

How do you feel about the idolization of the individual in American culture?

Vanity, vanity, all is vanity.

Speaker for the Dead dealt with a lot of population issues related to colonizing a new world that already had inhabitants. How do you feel about population growth here on Earth?

Overpopulation is a self-correcting problem. All the massive public solutions I see people advance are really about advancing their own religious faith (though usually they deny they even have a religion), and advancing the agenda of their own community at the expense of all others. Nobody in the world is starving to death because of overpopulation. Most of those who starve do so because of evil governments that care more for their own ambitions than for the people they are supposed to serve.

Before 9/11, you did a lot of research into the Muslim faith. What are your reactions to the tension between the Arab world and America?

Whenever a community that once dominated the world is faced with its own decline, there is anger and bitterness. There are several ways to respond. One is the Hitler approach -- to find somebody else to blame and then get the people to hate and kill the scapegoat. That seems to be the route that the Muslim world is embracing, and to the degree that becomes the driving force of the Muslim world, it makes them the enemies of civilization and of goodness and decency -- and they must be stopped, by force if necessary. It would be a terrible thing to have an all-out war between the Muslim world and the West, not least because I'm not at all sure which side would win. Living under the tyranny of the Islamicist fanatics would be horrible. But since the West is a civilization in rapid and eager decline -- corrupt and proud of its corruption -- and since the West has been busily fragmenting itself into tribes with little loyalty to the core values that created our civilization, I'm not sure we can assemble the will to win such a war. Add to this the fact that another resentful former-center-of-the-world culture, China, is waiting in the wings to exploit whatever weaknesses it finds in its rivals, and we have the potential for world transformations on the order of those that accompanied the fall of Rome or the rise of Alexander or the European conquest of America.

How has current world politics affected your writing?

Like everything else going on in the world around me, the issues that concern me show up in my writing whether I try to include them or not. In practical terms, the fact that I'm writing future geopolitics in the Shadow books means that I must posit some outcome to today's conflicts, and since I will be wrong at least in detail, if not in the broad strokes, I have to resign myself to the fact that my work will quickly become dated. However, I hope I have dealt with general principles and laws of the way nations enter into war and other forms of competition accurately enough that the stories will still have value even after the actual history of the world no longer fits what I have written.

I have to ask about the Salon interview in 2000. Rarely do people get a chance to respond to an interview once it's in print. But the Internet allows us to change those rules. Is there anything you would you like to say about that interview?

[The interviewer] quoted me accurately. She was very angry because she is a true believer in her religion, and since she doesn't think it's a religion, but merely "the truth," any challenge to it is taken as a dire threat to her conception of the universe. I leave it to readers of my work to determine which of us, me or my interviewer, is the one who is filled with ignorant hate and intolerance of people who are different.

How many books do you envision in the Ender universe?

I never envisioned one, let alone as many as now exist. Right now there are two more Ender books under contract. That might be all, or there might be more. I'll only write as many books in that world as I have stories I care about and believe in. After all, I have other worlds whose stories remain unfinished, and new worlds I want to explore. I just hope I love long enough to finish the books that are already under contract. Not to mention the films I hope to create.

Author photo by Bob Henderson, Henderson Photography, Inc.