Orson Card - Maps in a Mirror - The Short Fiction of Orson Scott Card

In the years since, I have found a much deeper love and stronger commitment than anything I ever imagined in those days. But when I was exploring the idea of time travel, and thought of an ironic story in which two people, unknown to each other, both journey back in time to have a perfect night together, my mind naturally turned to that moment of impotent frustration when I realized that this young lady and I, had I but acted a bit differently, might have ended up together. Since it’s much easier to use real events than to make up phony ones, I stole from my own life to find, I hoped, that sense of bittersweet memory that is the stuff of movie romances.

Cyberpunk was all the rage, and I was driving home from ArmadilloCon, the science fiction convention held in Austin, the see of the bishop of cyberpunk, Bruce Sterling. I had long had an ambivalent feeling toward cyberpunk. Bruce Sterling’s ideas about science fiction fascinated me greatly, if only because he was the one person I could hear talking about science fiction in terms that weren’t either warmed-over James Blish and Damon Knight or stolen from the mouldering corpse of Modernism that still stinks to high heaven in the English departments of American universities. In short, Sterling actually had Ideas instead of Echoes.

At the same time, I could not help but be a bit disgusted at what was being done in the name of cyberpunk. William Gibson, though quite talented, seemed to be writing the same story over and over again. Furthermore, it was the same self-serving story that was being churned out in every creative writing course in America and published in every little literary magazine at least once an issue: the suffering artist who is alienated from his society and is struggling to find out a reason to live. My answer is easy enough: An artist who is alienated from his society has no reason to live—as an artist, anyway. You can only live as an artist when you’re firmly connected to the community to whom you offer your art.

But the worst thing about cyberpunk was the shallowness of those who imitated it. Splash some drugs onto brain-and-microchip interface, mix it up with some vague sixties-style counterculture, and then use really self-conscious, affected language, and you’ve got cyberpunk. Never mind that the actual stories being told were generally cliches that were every bit as stupid and derivative as the worst of the stuff Bruce Sterling had initially rebelled against. Even if the underlying stories had been highly original, stylistic imitation and affectation are crimes enough to make a literary movement worthy of the death sentence.

So, being the perverse and obnoxious child that I am, I challenged myself: Is the derivativeness of cyberpunk the source or a symptom of its emptiness? Is it possible to write a good story that uses all the cliches of cyberpunk? The brain-microchip interface, the faked-up slang, the drugs, the counterculture… Could I, a good Mormon boy who watched the sixties through the wrong end of the binoculars, write a convincing story in that mode—and also tell a tale that would satisfy me as good fiction?

One thing was certain—I couldn’t imitate anybody else’s story. It was the language, the style that I was imitating. So I had to violate my own custom and start, not with the story, but with the voice. With a monologue. The first two paragraphs of Dogwalker were the first two I wrote, pretty much as they stand now. The plot came only after I had the voice and the character of the narrator pretty well established.

I got the thing done soon after returning home, and sent it off to Gardner Dozois at Asimov’s. I expected the story to get bounced. I had a mental picture of Gardner staggering out into the hall at Davis Publications, gagging and choking, holding out the manuscript as if it were a bag of burning dog dung. “Look at this. Card is trying to write cyberpunk now.” Instead, Gardner sent me a contract. It rather spoiled my plans—I expected to use the story as my entry at Sycamore Hill that summer, but since it had sold I couldn’t do that. The result was that I ended up writing my novella “Pageant Wagon” during that workshop, so it wasn’t a total loss.

In the meantime, however, Gardner never published “Dogwalker.” He held it two-and-a-half years before I finally sent a note pointing out that our contract had expired and if they didn’t have immediate plans to publish it, I wanted it back to sell it elsewhere. At that point they seemed to have suddenly remembered that they had it, and it was scheduled and published barely in time to be included in this book.

In a way, though, Gardner did me a favor—perhaps on purpose. By holding the story so long, he had seen to it that “Dogwalker” appeared in print after the spate of cyberpunk imitations was over. The story was not so clearly pegged as derivative. And though it was clearly not like a “typical Card story” on its surface, it could more easily be received as my work than as pale-imitation Gibson. Thus was I spared the fate of appearing as pathetic as, say, Barbra Streisand singing disco with the BeeGees.

For a short time, Kristine’s and my favorite restaurant in Salt Lake City was the Savoy, a purportedly English restaurant that nevertheless had wonderful food. We brought friends, we went alone—we did everything we could to make that restaurant succeed. Furthermore it was always crowded. And six months later, it was out of business.

It happens over and over. TV shows I like are doomed to cancellation. Authors I fall in love with stop writing the kind of book I loved. (Come on, Mortimer and Rendell! Rumpole and Wexford are the reason you were born! As for you, Gregory McDonald, write Fletch or die!) Trends in science fiction and fantasy that I applaud quickly vanish; the ones that make me faintly sick seem to linger like herpes. For one reason or another, my tastes are just not reflected in the real world.

That’s what gave rise to this story. Unfortunately, I never let the story rise above its origin. I have learned since then that I shouldn’t write a story from a single idea, but rather should wait for a second, unrelated idea, so that out of their confluence can come something truly alive. The result is that this story bears the curse of most of science fiction—it is idea-driven rather than character-driven, which means that it is ultimately forgettable. That doesn’t mean it’s valueless—I hope it’s kind of fun to read it once. But you’ll certainly not be rewarded for reading it again. You already received everything it had to offer on the first reading.

Jim Baen wrote an editorial in Galaxy magazine in which he called on science fiction writers to stop writing the same old “futures” and take a look at what science was doing now. Where, for example, were the stories extrapolating on current research in recombinant DNA?

I was still working at The Ensign magazine then, and Jay and Lane and I took this as a personal challenge. Naturally, in the tradition of young sci-fi writers, I mechanically took the idea of gene-splicing (I’d been reading Scientific American like a good boy, so I could fake it up pretty well), carried it to an extreme, and served it up in a stereotypical plot about two nations in a life-and-death struggle—only one of the nations doesn’t realize that the other one was wiped out long ago and that its struggle is now against the very world they have destroyed. As a let’s-stop-messing-up-the-world polemic, I think the story still holds up pretty well. As an artful story, it’s definitely a work of my youth. Recombining DNA has been treated far better since then, both in my own stories (Wyrms, Speaker for the Dead) and in the works of writers who’ve done the subject more justice. (I think particularly of the magnificent work Octavia Butler has done with Dawn, Adulthood Rites, and Imago.) If you want proof that I was but an adolescent playing at fiction-writing, you have only to look at the title, a bad pun on a fun-but-dumb popular song that was, I believe, written as the theme music for a jeans ad.