Orson Scott Card

Orson Scott Card (born August 24, 1951) is a prolific and best-selling author, working in numerous genres. He is best known for his novel Ender's Game and its many sequels. Ender's Game and its sequel Speaker for the Dead were both awarded the Hugo Award and the Nebula Award, making Card the only author (as of 2006) to win both of Science Fiction's top prizes in consecutive years.

His writing is dominated by detailed characterization and moral issues. As Card says, "We care about moral issues, nobility, decency, happiness, goodness—the issues that matter in the real world, but which can only be addressed, in their purity, in fiction."

A member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (commonly called the LDS or Mormon Church), some of his novels have stories explicitly drawn from scripture or church history. His strong religious and political beliefs have often drawn the ire of science fiction fans, making him a provocative figure within the genre.

Orson Scott Card is descended from Charles Ora Card, a son-in-law of Brigham Young and founder of Cardston, Alberta, the first Mormon Pioneer settlement in Canada. Card was born in Richland, Washington; raised in Santa Clara, California, as well as Mesa, Arizona and Orem, Utah; served an LDS mission in Brazil; graduated from Brigham Young University and the University of Utah; spent a year in a Ph.D. program at the University of Notre Dame, and now lives in Greensboro, North Carolina.

He and his wife Kristine are the parents of five children: Geoffrey (a game designer at Amaze Entertainment as well as a published author in his own right), Emily (an actress, audiobook reader and producer, and writer, who adapted his short story "A Sepulchre of Songs" for the stage in Posing as People), Charlie Ben (deceased; his cerebral palsy shows up in some of Orson Scott Card's fiction, most notably the Homecoming series and Folk of the Fringe), Zina Margaret, and Erin Louisa (deceased). The children are named for the authors Chaucer, Brontë and Dickinson, Dickens, Mitchell, and Alcott.

Orson Scott Card began his writing career primarily as a poet, studying with Clinton F. Larson at Brigham Young University. During his studies as a theatre major, he began "doctoring" scripts, adapting fiction for readers theatre production, and finally writing his own one-act and full-length plays, several of which were produced by faculty directors at BYU. He also dabbled in fiction writing, beginning with stories that eventually evolved into The Worthing Saga.

After returning to Provo, Utah, from his LDS mission in Brazil, Orson Scott Card started the Utah Valley Repertory Theatre Company, which for two summers produced plays at "the Castle," a Depression-era outdoor amphitheater behind the then-active state mental hospital in Provo; his company's were the first plays ever produced there. Meanwhile, he took parttime employment as a proofreader at BYU Press, then made the jump to fulltime employment as a copy editor. In 1976, in the midst of a paid acting gig in the LDS Church's musical celebrating America's Bicentennial, he secured employment as an assistant editor at the Church's official magazine, Ensign, and moved to Salt Lake City.

It was while he worked at BYU Press that he first wrote the short story "Ender's Game" and submitted it to several publications. It was eventually purchased by Ben Bova at Analog and published in the August 1977 issue. Meanwhile, he started writing half-hour audioplays on LDS Church history, the New Testament, and other subjects for Living Scriptures in Ogden, Utah; on the basis of that continuing contract, some freelance editing work, and a novel contract for Hot Sleep and A Planet Called Treason, he left Ensign and began supporting his family as a freelancer.

He completed his master's degree in English at the University of Utah in 1981 and began a doctoral program at Notre Dame University, but the recession of the early 1980s caused the flow of new book contracts to temporarily dry up. Orson Scott Card returned to fulltime employment as the book editor for Compute! Magazine in Greensboro, North Carolina, in 1983, and has resided there ever since. In October of that year, a new contract for the Alvin Maker "trilogy" (now up to 8 books) allowed him to return to freelancing.

Orson Scott Card has since branched out into contemporary fiction, such as Lost Boys, Treasure Box and Enchantment. Other works include the novelization of the James Cameron film The Abyss, the alternate histories The Tales of Alvin Maker and Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus, the comic book Ultimate Iron Man for Marvel Comics' Ultimate Marvel Universe series, and Robota, a collaboration with Star Wars artist Doug Chiang. He has a new fiction novel coming out in November titled Empire about a near future civil war in the United States.

In 2005, Orson Scott Card accepted a permanent appointment as "distinguished professor" at Southern Virginia University in Buena Vista, Virginia, a small liberal arts college with a Latter-day Saint influence. (It is run by a group of LDS people, but unlike the BYU schools, is not owned by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.) Card has justified this action by citing his frustration with dismal teaching methodology for creative writing in most universities, and his desire to teach the techniques of effective fiction writing to writers whose values are more harmonious with his own. Card has worked closely with colleagues to develop new and effective ways to educate aspiring writers and has published two books on the subject. He was eager for the opportunity to apply these techniques in a university environment—his assorted workshops did not allow the follow-through he desired. Card splits his time evenly between writing and teaching.

Orson Scott Card has stated that one of the most important elements of writing is gauging reader interest. Writers can achieve this by training someone to serve as their "wise reader," who makes a note of every time attention flags, belief falters, or confusing text causes the reader to reread a passage. This allows the writer to identify weaknesses and find his or her own solutions to the problems. But he cautions that this "training" ruins the ability of this person to just go with the flow and enjoy good books, without constantly making mental notes of places where problems arise.

Likewise, Orson Scott Card points out the importance of developing ideas before they can become good stories, and fleshing out details of the world that may not be put into print at all. He refers often to the works of other authors - for example, in his 1990 book "How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy," he refers to Octavia Butler as an excellent writer of exposition, and quotes the opening paragraphs of "Wild Seed," a novel from her Patternist series, as an example of effective expository text.

Selected Bibliography

Early novels 

• Capitol (1978)
• Hot Sleep (1978)
• A Planet Called Treason (1978)
• Songmaster (1979)
• Unaccompanied Sonata and Other Stories (1980)
• Hart's Hope (1983)
• The Worthing Chronicle (revised edition of Hot Sleep and Capitol) (1983)
• Saints (originally published as Woman of Destiny) (1983)

The Ender saga 

• Ender's Game (1985)
• Speaker for the Dead (1986)
• Xenocide (1991)
• Children of the Mind (1996)
• First Meetings (collection of short stories) (2002)
• Mazer In Prison (Published online 2005)
• Pretty Boy (Published online in 2006)

 The Shadow series 

• Ender's Shadow ("parallel" novel to Ender's Game) (1999)
• Shadow of the Hegemon (2001)
• Shadow Puppets (2002)
• Shadow of the Giant (2005)

The Tales of Alvin Maker 

• Seventh Son (1987)
• Red Prophet (1988)
• Prentice Alvin (1989)
• Alvin Journeyman (1995)
• Heartfire (1998)
• The Grinning Man (short story, published in Legends) (1998)
• The Yazoo Queen (short story, published in Legends II) (2003)
• The Crystal City (2003)

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