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Orson Scott Card (born August 24, 1951) is a prolific and best-selling author working in numerous genres.

Card's launch in the publishing industry was with science fiction books (Hot Sleep and Capitol) and later the fantasy book Hart's Hope. However, he remains best known for the seminal novel Ender's Game, which has remained popular since its publication in 1985.

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. Card continued the series with Xenocide, Children of the Mind, Ender's Shadow, Shadow of the Hegemon, Shadow Puppets, and the 2005 release of Shadow of the Giant. Card has also announced a 'Christmas in Battle School' book, a book that connects the "Shadow" series and "Speaker" series together, and a book that takes place after Shadow of the Giant and before Card's short story "Investment Counselor". Furthermore, Card recently announced that Ender's Game will soon be made into a movie (see Ender's Game (film)).

He 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.

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."

Some of his novels have stories explicitly drawn from scripture or church history. For example, Stone Tables is about the life of the Biblical prophet Moses. His Women of Genesis novels address the lives of Old Testament women Sarah, Rebekah, Rachel, and Leah, while The Folk Of The Fringe stories and Saints are about Latter-day Saint pioneers. In some of his other writings the influence of his Mormon beliefs is less obvious. For example, parallels can be made between Card's Homecoming and Alvin Maker sagas and the story line in the Book of Mormon and the life of LDS founder Joseph Smith, Jr.

In addition to his novels and short stories, Card has had an active career as a nonfiction writer. He helped create the scripts for the "Dramatized Church History" series radio play type productions telling the story of the LDS church from its inception to the mid 1980s.

During the 1980s he wrote many technical articles and columns, primarily for Compute!'s Gazette and Ahoy!, two magazines covering Commodore home computers.

Early life

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.

Family

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 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.

Career

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, 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, The 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 The 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. He 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 6 books) allowed him to return to freelancing.

In 2005, Card accepted a permanent appointment as "distinguished professor" at Southern Virginia University in Buena Vista, Virginia, a small liberal arts college with a Mormon atmosphere. (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.

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, he 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.

In the fall of 2005, Card also launched Orson Scott Card's Intergalactic Medicine Show (*). He edited the first two issues, but found that the demands of teaching, writing, and directing plays for his local church theatre group made it impossible to respond to writers' submissions in a timely manner; former Card student and experienced freelance writer and editor Edmund Schubert became the new editor as of 1 June 2006.

Personal views

Political Writing

Card is also active as a critic, political writer and speaker. Shortly after the September 11, 2001 attacks Card began to write a weekly "War Watch" (renamed to "World Watch" and then to "Civilization Watch", then back to "World Watch") column for the Greensboro Rhino Times, as well as an "Uncle Orson Reviews Everything" column, both of which are archived on Card's websites. Card is a vocal supporter of George W. Bush, the war on terror, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the USA PATRIOT Act, and U.S. support of Israel. However, in the afterword written in 2000 for the second book in the Shadow series, Shadow of the Hegemon, he refers to the Clinton administration's retaliation against al Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan after the U.S. embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania as "unprovoked" and "immoral".

Political Identification

Card identifies himself as a Democrat, which he asserts is because he is pro-gun control/anti-NRA, is highly critical of free-market capitalism, and believes the Republican party in the South continues to tolerate racism. Card encapsulated his views thus:

"Maybe the Democrats will even accept the idea that sometimes the people don't want to create your utopian vision (especially when your track record is disastrous and your "utopias" keep looking like hell)... The Democratic Party ought to be standing as the bulwark of the little guy against big money and rapacious free-market capitalism, here and abroad. After all, the Republicans seem to be dominated by their own group of insane utopians -- when they're not making huggy-huggy with all those leftover racists from the segregationist past." *

He has described himself as a Moynihan Democrat, and later as a "Tony Blair" Democrat, saying he has to look outside the U.S. for someone representative for his views now that Moynihan has died and the Democrats oppose Bush. He has written columns condemning extremist liberals as being part of what's wrong with America, and praises Zell Miller for trying to save the Democratic Party. During the 2004 election Card wrote many articles supporting the Bush/Cheney ticket, criticizing John Kerry, and lambasting his own state's senator, John Edwards, as being absurd, insincere, and an opportunistic shill. Prior to the 2004 presidential race, Card had written that his state needed to regain control from people like Edwards and advocated running a strong primary opponent against Edwards should he run for reelection to the Senate.* He has also been a staunch defender of Fox News, stating that he likes his news to share an "American" viewpoint. Card also publicly endorses children of illegal immigrants receiving in-state college tuition rates and is opposing tax cuts and unfettered deregulation.

Morality

Consistent with his beliefs as a Latter-day Saint, he is opposed to pre-marital sex (castigating Smallville for interjecting sensuality into a teen-oriented show) and same-sex marriage (believing homosexual acts to be a sin, and homosexual marriage to be a perilous experiment on the core social institution).

Environment & science

Although he supports government-funded research into alternative energy sources and the phasing out of fossil fuel use, Card has also frequently criticized precipitous action on global warming, and has voiced the suggestion that scientific evidence against global warming is suppressed because global warming has become an academic orthodoxy that discourages opposing evidence. His short story "Angles" also features scientists fearing to pursue research because it would run counter to scientific dogma. Similarly, he has voiced distrust of Darwinism as dogma in opposition to Intelligent Design (which he also distrusts, for entirely different reasons). While criticizing scientists for claiming that Darwinism explains "completely how evolution works," Card also acknowledged that "real science does not—and never can—prove or even support" Intelligent Design. **

Gay Rights

Card's views on homosexuality, as conveyed in some of his non-fiction writing from more recently in his career, have generated a certain amount of controversy in the community of science fiction fandom. As a member of the LDS Church, Card believes that homosexuality is a violation of the law of chastity and that active homosexuals, as well as all others who violate this law, must repent. Card is opposed to gay marriage. This dichotomy of "hate the sin" (homosexuality) and "love the sinner" (people he considers goodhearted but misguided who commit what he considers the sin of homosexuality) has confused many as to how a writer who sometimes portray gays positively in his fiction can be so virulently opposed to the gay-rights movement in his nonfiction writing. He believes it is not evil to be attracted to members of one's own gender, but that it is wrong to act on that attraction. Card has written two different depictions of homosexual characters finding happiness by entering an opposite-sex marriage – one in his Shadow series, and one in his Homecoming series, in which a gay man living within a tiny community of space colonists chooses to marry a woman and have a child in order to "rejoin the web of life" and perpetuate the human race in the new world.

Card has made many comments about homosexuality that are viewed as homophobic by the GLBT community and those who support gay rights:

“The argument by the hypocrites of homosexuality that homosexual tendencies are genetically ingrained in some individuals is almost laughably irrelevant. We are all genetically predisposed toward some sin or another; we are all expected to control those genetic predispositions when it is possible,” wrote Card in an essay defending the right of the Mormon Church to declare what is and is not a sin for its members. The "hypocrites" refer to people who purport to be Mormon but deny the authority of the church's prophet on this subject. “The hypocrites of homosexuality are, of course, already preparing to answer these statements by accusing me of homophobia, gay-bashing, bigotry, intolerance; but nothing that I have said here — and nothing that has been said by any of the prophets or any of the Church leaders who have dealt with this issue — can be construed as advocating, encouraging, or even allowing harsh personal treatment of individuals who are unable to resist the temptation to have sexual relations with persons of the same sex” (Sunstone 14:1 February 1990: 44).

Card remarks in that same column that for most gay people whom he knew as a theatre student, "their highest allegiance was to their membership in the community that gave them access to sex." He also writes, in the same essay, that he believed that where they then existed, "Laws against homosexual behavior should remain on the books," and "Those who flagrantly violate society's regulation of sexual behavior cannot be permitted to remain as acceptable, equal citizens within that society" (ibid).

These quotes were taken from an essay he wrote in Sunstone, a magazine read primarily by doctrinally liberal members of the LDS church. There are some who maintain that the comments refer solely to Latter-day Saints who openly engage in a homosexual lifestyle, despite the church's policy that such acts are sinful and to be avoided; however, others point out that he talks about "laws" and mentions in the same essay "This applies also to the polity, the citizens at large", a comment that is clearly not confined to members of the LDS church.

Trivia

Selected bibliography

Pre-Ender's Game works

The Ender saga

The Shadow series

The Tales of Alvin Maker

The Homecoming Saga

The "Women of Genesis" series

Other post-Ender's Game works

Plays

  • Posing as People (2004) (three one-act plays based on short stories by Card, first production directed by Card)

Non-fiction works

Books on writing

  • Characters and Viewpoint (1988)
  • How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy (1990)

Columns

  • Civilization Watch (formerly known as War Watch or World Watch) for the Rhinoceros Times (an independent Greensboro, NC newspaper)
  • Uncle Orson Reviews Everything for the Rhinoceros Times (an independent Greensboro, NC newspaper)
  • Hymns of the Heart for Meridian Magazine * (an LDS online magazine)

Other projects

Awards

See also

External links

About Orson Scott Card

By Orson Scott Card

Fan Sites

Other

Living people | 1951 births | American fantasy writers | American novelists | American science fiction writers | Hugo Award winning authors | Nebula Award winning authors | Latter Day Saints | LGBT rights opposition | Same-sex marriage opposition | Latter Day Saint art and culture | People from Greensboro, North Carolina | People from Washington | People from California

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