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

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Maps in a Mirror For the hundreds of thousands who are newly come to Card, here is chance to experience the wonder of a writer so versatile that he can handle everything from traditional narrative poetry to modern experimental fiction with equal ease and grace. The brilliant story-telling of the Alvin Maker books is no accident; the breathless excitement evoked by the Ender books is not a once-in-a-lifetime experience.
In this enormous volume are forty-six stories, plus ten long, intensely personal essays, unique to this volume. In them the author reveals some of his reasons and motivations for writing, with a good deal of autobiography into the bargain.
THE SHORT FICTION OF ORSON SCOTT CARD brings together nearly all of Card’s stories, from his first publications in 1977 to work as recent as last year. For those readers who have followed this remarkable talent since the beginning, here are all those amazing stories gathered together in one place, with some extra surprises as well. For the hundreds of thousands who are newly come to Card, here is a chance to experience the wonder of a writer so talented, so versatile that he can handle everything from traditional narrative poetry to modern experimental fiction with equal ease and grace. The brilliant story-telling of the Alvin Maker books is no accident; the breathless excitement evoked by ENDER’S GAME is riot a once-in-a-lifetime experience.
In this enormous volume are 46 stories, broken into five books: Ten fables and fantasies, fairy tales that sometimes tell us truths about ourselves; eleven tales of dread—and commentary that explains why dread is a much scarier emotion than horror; seven tales of human futures—science fiction from a master of extrapolation and character; six tales of death, hope, and holiness, where Card explores the spiritual side of human nature; and twelve lost songs.
The Lost Songs are a special treat for readers of this hardcover volume, for here are gathered tales which will not see print again. Here are Card’s stories written for Mormon children, a pair that were published in small literary magazines, a thoughtful essay on the writing of fiction, and three major works which have, since their original publication, been superseded by novel-, or more than novel-length works. First, there is the original novella-length version of Card’s Hugo and Nebula Award-winning novel, ENDER’S GAME. Then there is “Mikal’s Songbird”, which was the seed of the novel SONGMASTER; “Mikal’s Songbird” will never be published again. And finally, the narrative poem “Prentice Alvin and the No-Good Plow”—here is the original inspiration for the Alvin Maker series, an idea so powerful that it could not be contained in a single story, or a hundred lines of verse, but is growing to become the most original American fantasy ever written.
MAPS IN A MIRROR is not just a collection of stories, however complete. This comprehensive collection also contains nearly a whole book’s worth of
material. Each section begins and ends with long, intensely personal introductions and afterwords; here the author reveals some of his reasons and motivations for writing what he writes—and a good deal of autobiography into the bargain.
ORSON SCOTT CARD grew up in Utah and attended Brigham Young University, where he studied drama. Card’s early writing career was devoted to plays; he had his own theater company, which was successful for a number of years. Card spent his missionary years in Brazil, learning to speak fluent Portuguese. He now lives in Greensboro, North Carolina, with his wife and three children. From book flaps:

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I think they are already nonsense words to the children. But the poem first got passed word of mouth around Richmond when I was little, and living in Father Michael’s house. The children do not try to answer their song. They just sing it and do a very clever little dance while they sing. They always end the song with all the children falling down on the ground, laughing. That is the best way for the song to end.

Charlie brought the airplane straight down into a field, great hot winds pushing against the ground as if to shove it back from the plane. The field caught fire, but when the plane had settled upon its three wheels, foam streaked out from the belly of the machine and overtook the flames. Elouise watched from the cockpit, thinking, Wherever the foam has touched, nothing will grow for years. It seemed symmetrical to her. Even in the last moments of the last machine, it must poison the earth. Elouise held Amy on her lap and thought of trying to explain it to the child. But Elouise knew Amy would not understand or remember.

“Last one dressed is a sissy-wissy,” said Ugly-Bugly in her husky, ancient-sounding voice. They had dressed and undressed in front of each other for years now, but today as the old plastic-polluted clothing came off and the homespun went on, they felt and acted like school kids on their first day in coed gym. Amy caught the spirit of it and kept yelling at the top of her lungs. No one thought to quiet her. There was no need. This was a celebration.

But Elouise, long accustomed to self-examination, forced herself to realize that there was a strain to her frolicking. She did not believe it, not really. Today was not a happy day, and it was not just from knowing the confrontation that lay ahead. There was something so final about the death of the last of the engines of mankind. Surely something could be—but she forced the thought from her, forced the coldness in her to overtake that sentiment. Surely she could not be seduced by the beauty of the airplane. Surely she must remember that it was not the machines but what they inevitably did to mankind that was evil.

They looked and felt a little awkward, almost silly, as they left the plane and stood around in the blackened field. They had not yet lost their feel for stylish clothing, and the homespun was so lumpy and awkward and rough. It didn’t look right on any of them.

Amy clung to her doll, awed by the strange scenery. In her life she had been out of the airplane only once, and that was when she was an infant. She watched as the trees moved unpredictably. She winced at the wind in her eyes. She touched her cheek, where her hair moved back and forth in the breeze, and hunted through her vocabulary for a word to name the strange invisible touch of her skin. “Mommy,” she said. “Uh! Uh! Uh!”

Elouise understood. “Wind,” she said. The sounds were still too hard for Amy, and the child did not attempt to say the word. Wind, thought Elouise, and immediately thought of Charlie. Her best memory of Charlie was in the wind. It was during his death-wish time, not long after his suicide. He had insisted on climbing a mountain, and she knew that he meant to fall. So she had climbed with him, even though there was a storm coming up. Charlie was angry all the way. She remembered a terrible hour clinging to the face of a cliff, held only by small bits of metal forced into cracks in the rock. She had insisted on remaining tied to Charlie. “If one of us fell, it would only drag the other down, too,” he kept saying. “I know,” she kept answering. And so Charlie had not fallen, and they made love for the first time in a shallow cave, with the wind howling outside and occasional sprays of rain coming in to dampen them. They refused to be dampened. Wind. Damn.

And Elouise felt herself go cold and unemotional, and they stood on the edge of the field in the shade of the first trees. Elouise had left the Rectifier near the plane, set on 360 degrees. In a few minutes the Rectifier would go off, and they had to watch, to witness the end of their work.

Suddenly Bill shouted, laughed, held up his wrist. “My watch!” he cried.

“Hurry,” Charlie said. “There’s time.”

Bill unbuckled his watch and ran toward the Rectifier. He tossed the watch. It landed within a few meters of the small machine. Then Bill returned to the group, jogging and shaking his head. “Jesus, what a moron! Three years wiping out everything east of the Mississippi, and I almost save a digital chronograph.”

“Dixie Instruments?” Heather asked.

“Yeah.”

“That’s not high technology,” she said, and they all laughed. Then they fell silent, and Elouise wondered whether they were all thinking the same thing: that jokes about brand names would be dead within a generation, if they were not already dead. They watched the Rectifier in silence, waiting for the timer to finish its delay. Suddenly there was a shining in the air, a dazzling not-light that made them squint. They had seen this many times before, from the air and from the ground, but this was the last time, and so they saw it as if it were the first.

The airplane corroded as if a thousand years were passing in seconds. But it wasn’t a true corrosion. There was no rust—only dissolution as molecules separated and seeped down into the loosened earth. Glass became sand; plastic corrupted to oil; the metal also drifted down into the ground and came to rest in a vein at the bottom of the Rectifier field. Whatever else the metal might look like to a future geologist, it wouldn’t look like an artifact. It would look like iron. And with so many similar pockets of iron and copper and aluminum and tin spread all over the once-civilized world, it was not likely that they would suspect human interference. Elouise was amused, thinking of the treatises that would someday be written, about the two states of workable metals—the ore state and the pure-metal vein. She hoped it would retard their progress a little.

The airplane shivered into nothing, and the Rectifier also died in the field. A few minutes after the Rectifier disappeared, the field also faded.

“Amen and amen,” said Bill, maudlin again. “All clean now.”

Elouise only smiled. She said nothing of the other Rectifier, which was in her knapsack. Let the others think all the work was done.

Amy poked her finger in Charlie’s eye. Charlie swore and set her down. Amy started to cry, and Charlie knelt by her and hugged her. Amy’s arms went tightly around his neck. “Give Daddy a kiss,” Elouise said.

“Well, time to go,” Ugly-Bugly’s voice rasped. “Why the hell did you pick this particular spot?”

Elouise cocked her head. “Ask Charlie.”

Charlie flushed. Elouise watched him grimly. “Elouise and I once came here,” he said. “Before Rectification began. Nostalgia, you know.” He smiled shyly, and the others laughed. Except Elouise. She was helping Amy to urinate. She felt the weight of the small Rectifier in her knapsack and did not tell anyone the truth: that she had never been in Virginia before in her life.

“Good a spot as any,” Heather said. “Well, bye.”

Well, bye. That was all, that was the end of it, and Heather walked away to the west, toward the Shenandoah Valley.

“See ya,” Bill said.

“Like hell,” Ugly-Bugly added.

Impulsively Ugly-Bugly hugged Elouise, and Bill cried, and then they took off northeast, toward the Potomac, where they would doubtlessly find a community growing up along the clean and fish-filled river.

Just Charlie, Amy, and Elouise left in the empty, blackened field where the airplane had died. Elouise tried to feel some great pain at the separation from the others, but she could not. They had been together every day for years now, going from supply dump to supply dump, wrecking cities and towns, destroying and using up the artificial world. But had they been friends? If it had not been for their task, they would never have been friends. They were not the same kind of people.

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