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

A closer examination of his letter revealed something else. He had clearly not read “Sandmagic.” All his comments were about the two shorter stories. All he said about “Sandmagic” was “the other one was just as bad.” Years later, when he shattered all sense of editorial ethics and published a review of those stories that he had read and rejected as an editor (would you submit your fiction to an editor known to do such a thing?) he again reviewed the shorter works in detail and dismissed “Sandmagic” so completely that I knew he had not read it.

As they say, doing well is the best revenge. I offered the story he was too lazy to read to Andrew Offutt for his Zebra anthology series Swords Against Darkness. He bought it, and within a few months it was picked up for a best-of-the-year anthology.

However, when I catch myself getting too smug, I do remind myself from time to time that the other guy’s evaluation of those two short stories was, when you strip away the invective, dead on. They were terrible stories. They don’t appear in this collection and, with luck, will never appear anywhere on this planet. But if the worst thing I ever do in my life is write some really bad stories while on my way to writing the ones I’m proud of, I’ll be very glad.

When I was writing my historical novel Saints (first published, over my bitter protests, as Woman of Destiny), I needed to include an example of the fiction writing of one of my main characters, Dinah Kirkham. Since she wasn’t a real person, I of course had no body of work to draw on, so I had to write, not an Orson Scott Card story, but a Dinah Kirkham story.

In that goal I failed—because, of course, it’s an impossible goal. The only kind of story I can ever write is an Orson Scott Card story. When Saints came out, with “The Best Day” imbedded within it, it did not sound like anything of mine that had ever been published. But I already had my epic poem “Prentice Alvin and the No-Good Plow,” which was my first attempt to bring fantasy into the American frontier; and beyond the American setting and flavor, the story is simply a fable, like “Unaccompanied Sonata” and “The Porcelain Salamander.” I can’t do such tales very often, because fables are devilishly hard to write—there is only one Jane Yolen in the world of fantasy, who can do it over and over. But it is one of the most satisfying kinds of tale to tell, because, finished, it makes such a tidy package. Being so complete and yet compact, it gives the author the delusion of having created something perfect, rather like a jewel-cutter, I think, who doesn’t have to see the microscopic roughness of his work. But if fabulists are jewel-cutters, we have a peculiar inability: We can rarely tell, while cutting our little stones, whether we’re working with a diamond, a garnet, or a zirconium.

Few of my stories begin with visual images; this one did. I can’t remember now if the idea sprang from the illustration that appeared in Omni magazine along with Patrice Duvic’s story “The Eyes in Butterflies Wings,” or whether I simply remembered my story idea when I saw that illustration. My mental image, though, was of a man awakening in the morning to find his blanket and bedsheets and the floor and walls of his room covered with butterflies, hundreds of different colors on thousands of wings, all moving in different rhythms and tempos so that his room looked like the surface of a dazzling sea. He arose and cast off his blanket, sending the room into a blur of colored flight, and began a journey with the butterflies trailing after him.

The image stayed with me for some time before I found the story to go with it. I had been toying with the science-fictional notion of creatures that consciously change their own genetic structure, and that transmuted to the idea of an alien creature that fought back against a human invasion by genetically adapting itself into a superior organism. What this had to do with the butterflies I cannot fathom, but for some reason I started trying to put the ideas together.

Had I been more sophisticated, I would have recognized the visual image as the seed of a tale in the South American magic realism mode. It did not belong with a science fiction idea. And the beginning of the story definitely has the mythic—no, fabulous—quality of magic realism. Indeed, the whole story retains that sense of not quite connecting with reality no matter how many details are provided, so that the science fiction aspects of the story are never clearly presented, or at least are not presented as science fiction, so that readers don’t know if what they’re reading is to be taken factually or magically. Thus the science fiction is swallowed up in the fantasy.

Years later I would recover the science fiction idea and use it in my novel Wyrms , where it is presented with absolute clarity, yet without losing all the magic. So it is possible to look at “A Plague of Butterflies” as a study for a later work. Yet it also stands alone, my one venture into a strange kind of voice that nevertheless pleased and pleases me very much.

I knew as soon as I had written it that this story was too strange for any of my previous audiences. At that time I received a letter from Elinor Mavor, who was then performing the thankless task of editing Amazing Stones, trying to keep that long-mismanaged and mis-edited magazine from going under. She was paying, as I recall, one pound of dirt upon publication. But I thought it was important to help keep the magazine alive, and about the only thing a writer can do to sustain a publication is to offer stories for publication. I had sent her a couple of poems, but now I had a story that would probably find no other home. I mailed it. She bought it. Just in time, too—it was almost immediately afterward that TSR bought the magazine and George Scithers took over as editor, which meant the end of my contributions to Amazing. (Scithers and I have a peculiar relationship. He only likes my stories after other editors buy them.)

To my knowledge, no living human being besides Mavor and me ever read this story. It is still the strangest fantasy I ever ventured to write. If you actually read it all the way through, you have significantly increased its number of readers.

Perhaps it is strange to have this clearly science fiction story in a fantasy collection, but I think it belongs here. The science fiction is only the frame, the outline of the story. Within it, the fables that the artificial habitat tells to itself are the meat of the story, and those are definitely fantasy, perfectly in line with the rest of the stories in Maps in a Mirror.

I first conceived the story in response to a call by Jerry Pournelle for contributions to an anthology of stories set in artificial habitats. Being perverse, I immediately determined to set my story in an artificial habitat that was, in fact, a living alien organism. I conceived of it as a hollow sphere of great size. Its shell would be composed of thousands—perhaps millions—of hollow cells, each one large enough to sustain a good-sized population of human beings in an Earthlike, self-renewing environment. The hollow interior of the creature would be a highly charged electromagnetic memory chamber that would serve as the creature’s intelligence, running the entire habitat and passing energy and resources as needed from one cell to another.