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

I usually plan out a story before I write it, but this one grew during the process of writing it, starting with the most skeletal of concepts: how hard it would be to deal with a great warrior in areas that had nothing to do with war. I thought, Just because a guy can slay a dragon doesn’t mean you want him to marry your daughter.

So the tone of the story was tongue-in-cheek, at first. But the farther I got into it, the farther I moved away from satiric farce and the more I became a believer in the tale. I had no idea, going into it, what would happen when Bork reached the dragon. The dragon’s eyes were the inspiration of the moment. But for me the story came alive when I had Bork admit that he was afraid, and the dragon’s eyes dimmed. It came out of my unconscious mind; it was almost an involuntary reaction; but I knew at once that this was the heart of the story and all the rest was just fumbling around till I got there.

Still, I thought it was pretty entertaining fumbling-around, so I left most of it in. I keep meaning to revise the story completely and sell it as a young adult fantasy. I even have an editor who’s interested in it. Someday, when I have time, it may exist in that more refined form. It could never exist in worse form than its first publication. Somewhere between galleys and the printer, somebody swapped two whole sections of the story. The published form was incomprehensible. It was years before it was reprinted anywhere, so I could set the text to rights; and when it was published in Cardography, the text was so riddled with typographical errors that I felt like it still hadn’t been well published. This time, I hope, we got it right.

This story’s first draft was written as a love letter to a young lady who is now happily married to someone else—as am I. In that incarnation it was an allegory of our relationship as it seemed to me. After it became clear that my understanding of our relationship was hopelessly wrong, I still had the story—and, on rereading it, realized that there might be some truth in it beyond the immediate circumstances of a faded romance. So, when my then-editor at Berkley (my once-and-never-again publisher) told me she wanted a story of mine for an anthology called Berkley Showcase, I dusted off “The Princess and the Bear,” restructuring and rewriting it completely. It is meant to sound like a fairy tale—not the Disney kind of fairy tale, where cuteness swallows up anything real that might be in the story, but the kind of fairy tale where people change and hurt each other and die.

During my time at The Ensign, I started developing a fantasy world based on the idea that different magics are acquired by serving different aspects of nature. There’d be stone magic and water magic, a magic of tended fields and a magic of forests, ice magic and sand magic. I still have many stories in that world that still haven’t ripened enough to be ready for telling—but one, this bleak tale of revenge that destroyed the avenger, ripened almost immediately.

In a way, it’s a rewrite of “Ender’s Game”—a precursor of the way I revised the meaning of that story when I made it into a novel in 1984. The similarities are obvious: the child who is taken from his family at an early age and schooled in the arts of power, which he then uses to destroy the enemy of his people. But what I knew—and what “Ender’s Game” did not adequately convey—was the self-destruction inherent in total war. Even when the enemy is helpless to strike back, total war destroys you. World War I clearly showed that, for the nations that waged total war (America did not) emerged from their vindictive “peace” talks with the drops of blood from the next world war already on their hands. The only reason that America did not, after World War II, suffer the same moral blight that undid France and Britain after World War I was the Marshall Plan and Douglas MacArthur. When the war was over, we rejected the idea that it had to remain a total victory. The Marshall Plan in Europe and Douglas MacArthur’s astonishingly benign occupation of Japan went a long way toward redeeming us. At this writing it remains to be seen whether we will ever recover that moral stature. Certainly that’s not the rhetoric I hear from our supposed leaders about Vietnam or Panama or even the countries of Eastern Europe that lost the Cold War.

There is an ironic footnote to “Sandmagic.” When I wrote it, I was still quite new in my career, and had no perspective yet on my own work. I thought it was something of a miracle when anything I wrote sold, so I had no idea whether I had written a good story or not. My best guideline, had I only known it, was Ben Bova. I sent everything I wrote to him first. What I didn’t realize was that he bought every single publishable story that I wrote. So the result was that all the other editors were seeing only unpublishable stories. It’s hardly a surprise that they didn’t share Ben’s enthusiasm for my writing. Given a lead time of a year or more between selling a story and seeing it published, they had seen a lot of really bad stuff from my typewriter before they ever saw any of my better work in print in Analog.

One editor, however, seemed to think of himself, not as a protector of authors, allowing only their good work to come before the public, or even as a teacher of writers, helping them to do better because of his advice, but rather as one of the furies, wreaking hideous vengeance on any author who dared to submit to his magazine a story that did not meet his standards. And if that author’s cover letter dared to state that he had sold several stories to Ben Bova at Analog, why, that author was certainly uppity.

But I think I would have had no ill treatment from this editor had it not been for the fact that he kept the first two stories I sent him for more than a year with no response. I sent him letters. I finally telephoned him. Nothing happened. He was a dead-end market.

Then I finished “Sandmagic.” I was already getting much better at knowing what I had written; I knew that “Sandmagic” had some strength to it. I also knew that it was completely wrong for Analog. So, for once, I would not be sending the story first to Ben. I thought of sending it to Ed Ferman at Fantasy and Science Fiction, but it didn’t seem like the kind of thing he ran, either. But there was this other magazine, this bottom-of-the-line magazine, that did publish some heroic fantasy. So I thought I’d give him one more try. I called him up and told him who I was. By now I was on the Hugo ballot for “Ender’s Game” and for the Campbell Award. I mentioned the stories he’d had for a year. I reminded him of the earlier contact. I asked him if it was worthwhile sending him the fantasy story I had just finished. “Send it, send it,” he said. And, uh, if I didn’t mind, why not send along copies of the earlier stories, too.

By then I knew the earlier stories were losers. I shouldn’t have sent them along. I also knew this editor was incredibly lazy, and both the other stories were much, much shorter than “Sandmagic.” That should also have warned me off—he was sure to read them first. But I dutifully duplicated them and sent them along with “Sandmagic.”

What I got back was the most vicious piece of hate mail I have yet received. It was so cruel that by the end I could no longer take it personally. I knew he was wrong to tell me that I had no business writing science fiction—the Hugo ballot was pretty good consolation on that point—and I also knew he was hardly the one to tell me about what was and was not professional. Nevertheless, I thought it was a churlish thing for an editor to do. After all, he was the one who had kept my stories for a year without response. Any sense of proportion and grace would have required him to apologize to me, not excoriate me.