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

I notice now, however, that some later interests of mine were already cropping up in “I Put My Blue Genes On.” For one thing, I actually put Brazilians in space. I was not the first to do it, but it was the beginning of my deliberate effort to try to get American sci-fi writers to realize that the future probably does not belong to America. Science fiction of the pre-World War I era always seemed to put Englishmen and Frenchmen into space; now, in this post-imperialist world, we think of that as a rather quaint idea. I firmly believe that in fifty years the idea of Americans leading the world anywhere will be just as anachronistic, and only those of us who put Brazilians, Thais, Chinese, and Mexicans into space will look at all prescient.

Of course, maybe I’m wrong about the specific prediction I’m making. But there’s another reason to open up science fiction to other cultures, and that is that science fiction is the one lasting American contribution to prose literature. In every other area, we’re derivative to the—well, not to the core, because in those areas we have no core. Nobody in other countries aspires to write Westerns, and nobody in Russia or Germany or Japan looks to Updike or Bellow to teach them how to write “serious” fiction. They already have literary traditions older and better than our so-called best. But in science fiction, they all look to us. They want to write science fiction, too, because those who read it in every nation see it as the fiction of possibility, the fiction of strangeness. It’s the one genre now that allows the writer to do satire that isn’t recognized as satire, to do metaphysical fiction that isn’t seen as philosophical or religious proselytizing. In short, it is the freest, most open literature in the world today, and it is the one literature that foreign writers are learning first and foremost from Americans.

Why, then, do science fiction writers persist in imagining only American futures? Our audience is much broader than these shores. And there are countries where our words are taken far more seriously than they are here. If we actually aspire to change the world with our fiction—and I can’t think of any other reason for ever setting pen to paper—then we ought to be talking to the world. And one sure way to let the world know we are talking to them is to put them—citizens of other countries, children of other cultures—into our futures. To do otherwise is to slap them in the face and say, “I have seen the future, and you aren’t there.” Well, I have seen the future, and they are there—in great numbers, with great power. I want my voice to have been one of the voices they listened to on their way up to be king of the hill. And, in “I Put My Blue Genes On,” I took my first step along that road.

What if the aliens don’t come to us in alien form? What if they come in a form we already recognize, that we already think we understand? Jay Parry and I toyed with the idea of telling this story differently—with the aliens coming in the form of an oppressed minority. American Indians or blacks, we thought. But the problems at the time seemed insurmountable—particularly the political problems. It’s a very tricky business, for a white writer to try to express the black point of view without being politically incorrect. It seemed to me then that there were things that black writers could say about and on behalf of blacks that white writers couldn’t, not without the message being taken wrong. In the years since then, I’ve learned that a writer of any race or sex or religion or nation can write about any other race or sex or religion or nation; he only needs to:

1. Do enough research that he doesn’t make an ass of himself.

2. Tell the truth as he sees it without pandering or condescending to any group.

3. Have a thick enough skin to accept the fact that he’ll be impaled with a thousand darts no matter how well he does at 1 and 2.

Being timid, Jay and I worked out the plot using animals that have been as firmly pegged in our human prejudices as any human group. Faithful, beloved dogs. Man’s best friend. All the same possibilities were there—the White Man’s Burden, the condescending affection (some of my best friends are dogs), and, above all, the rigid determination to keep them in their place.

In my review column in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, I wrote a diatribe deploring the 1980s trend of trying to turn sci-fi authors’ private worlds into generic brand name universes where other writers can romp. It began with Star Trek, and it was not part of anybody’s grand design. There were these Star Trek fans, you see, who got impatient with Paramount’s neglect of their heroes and began to write their own stories about the crew of the starship Enterprise. (In a way this was singularly appropriate: The original series was written and performed like somebody’s garage production anyway, so why not continue the tradition?) Legend has it that Paramount at first intended to sue, until it dawned on them that there might be money in publishing never-filmed stories about Kirk, Spock, and the other crew members of Wagon Train among the Cheap Interplanetary Sets. They were right, to the tune of many readers and many dollars. A new industry was born: Science fiction written in somebody else’s poorly imagined but passionately studied universe.

I suppose it was inevitable that publishers who weren’t getting any of those Star Trek bucks would try to turn other successful imagined futures into equally lucrative backdrops where one writer’s work would be as good as any others’. There ensued in the late 1980s a spate of novels set “in the world of---------,” in which journeyman writers who often didn’t have a clue about the inner truth that led the Old Pro to create his or her world tried to set their own stories in it. The result was stories that nobody was proud of and nobody cared about.

What was unspoken (I hope) was the true premise of all these worlds-as-brand-names books: The readers won’t be able to tell the difference. Here’s what they found out: Unlike the Star Trek audience, the readers of most science fiction can tell the difference and they care very much. Written science fiction has an author-driven audience. The real science fiction audience doesn’t want to read John Varley’s Dune novel or Lisa Goldstein’s Lensman novel or Howard Waldrop’s Dragonworld novel. (Well, actually, I would love to read Howard Waldrop’s Dragonworld novel, but not for any reason I’m proud of.)

So I laid down the law in my column: Writers should not waste their time or talent trying to tell stories in someone else’s universe. Furthermore, established writers should not cooperate in the wasting of younger writers’ talent by allowing their worlds to be franchised.

As soon as that column hit print, Martin Harry Greenberg mentioned to me that he was preparing a festschrift anthology commemorating Isaac Asimov’s fiftieth year in publishing, a book called Foundation’s Friends. And for this one anthology, Dr. Asimov was allowing the participants to set stories within his own closely-held fictional universes, using his own established characters. We could actually write robot stories using the three laws and positronic brains and Susan Calvin. We could actually write Foundation stories using Had Seldon and Trantor and Terminus and the Mule.

Suddenly I was sixteen years old again and I remembered the one story I wanted so badly to read, the one that Asimov had never written—the story of how the Second Foundation actually got started in the library at Trantor.