Speaking With: Orson Scott Card by Frieda Carson Biblio.com Authors Photo Credit: Bob Henderson Henderson Photography, Inc.

This month we are quite pleased to include an interview with Orson Scott Card, bestselling American author, critic, and political writer. Since 1977 he has been publishing stories, novels and non-fiction. He work spans several genres, including poetry and plays, but he is primarily known for his science fiction. His novels Ender's Game and sequel Speaker for the Dead both won the Hugo Award and the Nebula Award, making him the only author (as of 2007) to win both of science fiction's highest honors two years in a row.

When did you first consider yourself a writer?

I still don't. I'm just me. When I write, I'm a writer. When I run, I'm a runner. If I define myself, it's as the father of my children, the husband of my wife, the son of my parents. But if you're asking when I first considered myself a professional writer of fiction, it was when I got that first check from Ben Bova at Analog for my sale of Ender's Game.

What's the biggest challenge you face as a writer?

It's my day job. So, being lazy, I resist doing it. Much more fun to play computer games or work in the garden or hang out with my family. Or teach classes at Southern Virginia University, which I do one semester out of four. However, nobody pays me for those things.

Your Ender's Game and Ender's Shadow series as well as other short stories in the Ender world all started with the novelette, "Ender's Game." Can you talk a little bit about what makes a novelette become a series of novels?

I only turned Ender's Game into a novel because the novelette was not sufficient to properly set up the novel Speaker for the Dead. I wrote the book version so that the final chapter would exist, in which Ender writes "The Hive Queen" and the "Hegemon" under the pseudonym Speaker for the Dead.

Then, in the midst of writing Speaker, my agent sold the "Ender trilogy" in England. That was the first thought I had of a sequel to Speaker, but I had had an idea for a book called "Philotes" which I had pitched to Jim Frenkel some years before. I thought: If the hero of "Philotes" was Ender Wiggin after Speaker for the Dead, it would finally work properly. Thus Xenocide was born...and split in half while I was writing it, leading to Children of the Mind. I was done then. Ender Wiggin was dead. But later, I wanted to open up the world to other writers, to create novels about the other kids from Ender's Game. Neal Shusterman was set to write a novel about Bean, but the offered money was simply too low for a professional who lived from his writing. Why was it so low? Because any book in the Ender universe not written by me was not likely to do anywhere near as well as books with my name on them as author. By then, I really wanted the Bean book to exist, so I wrote it myself, as Ender's Shadow. As with Xenocide and Children of the Mind, however, the book was too long for a single volume. So, quite accidently, I ended up with Ender's Shadow reaching its natural ending pretty much where Ender's Game ended--and thus I had a parallel novel. And in writing the three Shadow sequels, I expanded the storyline to follow Petra, Peter, Han Tzu, and Alai, as well as Bean, since their stories were so intertwined.

I realized that I had terrific stories to tell about Ender on his first and second colony worlds, and Bean's children after Bean dies. Thus I began the plans for Ender in Exile and Shadows in Flight.

This is a long way of saying that the whole Ender series grew like Topsy. Unplanned, unlooked for. Not like the Alvin and Homecoming books, which were conceived as series from the start--really, long continuous works in multiple volumes.

What keeps your interest sparked in writing stories and novels all set in the same world?

Let's be honest here: If the Ender books didn't make money, I wouldn't spend a lot of time thinking about the possibility of sequels. I mean, I know storylines for at least five more books in the Homecoming series, but there's low enough demand for another book in that series that I simply don't spend time developing them.

Still, I have never written (and will never write) an Ender sequel just for the sake of having "Ender" or "Shadow" in the title. If I don't have a story worth telling, then I can't write it anyway. I can't write a story I don't believe in and care about. Money might start me thinking about it, but money can't get me through the first sentence of chapter one. There has to be a story and characters, and at that point, it's exactly like writing any of my other books. Fundamentally, though, writing books in a series is never as satisfying as writing standalone novels--because, with the series books, you're never done. It just doesn't have the right kind of closure. With Enchantment, Magic Street, Homebody, and other standalones, I finished. That felt (and feels) good.

You've been publishing your science fiction and fantasy stories and novels since 1979. What's changed the most about those genres since then?

My first story appeared in the August 1977 issue of "Analog." In the intervening years, the magazines have shrunk in circulation to the point where they're barely noticeable. And fantasy--especially big, thick, non-Tolkienesque fantasies--have grown in popularity to the point where sci-fi is only a small portion of the books in the SF-Fantasy section of the bookstores. Partly, this is because sci-fi killed itself by following the cyberpunk fad; when that faded, so did the whole genre, because readers of other kinds of sci-fi often gave up on the whole field when that was almost all that seemed to get published. Partly it's because sci-fi has so penetrated the culture that the genre boundaries really aren't important any more--our tropes and themes show up everywhere. Partly it's because technology has caught up with us. We live in a sci-fi universe right now, and everyone takes it for granted. And partly it's because fantasy has become so very, very good--and lucrative--that the best new writers generally seem to enter the field through that portal.

How do you feel your Mormon ideology surfaces in your published fiction and political writing? Is is consciously expressed when you are working on a piece, or is it inextricable from the moment of conception?

What surfaces unconsciously is my entire worldview, which certainly includes much of LDS doctrine and philosophy. But it includes a lot of other things, too, derived from my lifelong reading of history, all my experiences in life, and all the philosophy I've read and thought up over the years. So while some readers notice Mormon ideas in my writing, there are Mormons who are bothered or even outraged by ideas that are definitely not traditional LDS views.

From time to time, I have used Mormon historical or scriptural or cultural sources, but these aren't Mormon ideology, they're plot elements. Rather like basing a book on the story of Job or on a Shakespeare play. My story "Hamlet's Father," for instance, is my perverse spin on Hamlet, just as the Homecoming books are my spin on the Book of Mormon. In neither case am I reproducing the ideology of the source; I'm merely spinning the plot and extrapolating story possibilities that never existed in the original.

Is there anything you'd care to share about your latest project?

I wonder which one we'd call "latest." I'm doing webisodes to help set up the new Tiberium computer game; I'm writing a new "Ender's Game" screenplay; I'm beginning my own Massive Fantasy Series called Mithermages (first volume, The Lost Gate, is nearly done); and I'm engaged in an ongoing project of translating Shakespeare into a modern-friendly version of Elizabethan English (Romeo & Juliet and Taming of the Shrew so far).

What authors have influenced and inspired you?

All of them that I've read. The ones I hate inspire me to avoid their mistakes. The ones I love inspire me to try to tell stories that will have similar good effects on readers.

What book are you reading now?

Just finished Holly Black's dark and powerful Tithe and James Maxey's Bitterwood and Dragonforge--all excellent (though I find it disturbing that Tithe is marketed as YA, which often aims as young as ten). In the past week I also read Sway by Ori and Rom Brafman and reread Can Poetry Matter? by Dana Gioia.