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

At the time, Ben Bova was buying all the short fiction I wrote. But this story was too long for Omni, where Ben was fiction editor, and besides, I wanted to see if I could place a story in one of the prestigious annual anthologies. So I sent this one off to Robert Silverberg for his anthology New Dimensions. To my delight, he bought it. I felt validated; and I hoped that my career would get the kind of critical boost that appearing in New Dimensions or Orbit always carried with them. You didn’t sell a lot of copies, but people knew you were certified to be a respectable, serious writer of speculative fiction.

Then, to my dismay, the volume that “Holy” appeared in virtually disappeared. It fell into the cracks between two contracts. The following volume of New Dimensions appeared in paperback before the hardcover edition of the volume I was in appeared, so that my story was in a book that appeared to be outdated—a year old—the moment it appeared. Worse, it never had a paperback edition at all. The stories in that volume were never reviewed. To my knowledge, only a few people in the world ever knew that this story even existed. Its appearance in this volume is, in effect, its first real publication.

None of this, though, was Robert Silverberg’s fault—and I thank him again for taking my story seriously at a time when I was being dismissed as an “Analog writer” by the literary vigilantes of science fiction. But then, Silverberg has never been one to judge somebody else’s work by its reputation, when he has the opportunity to judge it on its own merits. May his tribe increase.

Somewhere along the line, this story collection got completely out of hand. It’s that age-old artistic decision of what to leave in and what to leave out. Some of the decisions were easy. All my Worthing stories would be part of an omnibus volume called The Worthing Saga, so I didn’t need to include any of them. And all my Mormon Sea stories would appear in the collection The Folk of the Fringe, so they wouldn’t need to be included in my general story collection, either. Even with those stories left out, however, no matter how I configured a reasonable-sized book, I was leaving out too many stories that I wanted to include.

So I settled on something not of reasonable size. I talked to my editor, Beth Meacham, and proposed that we release a single-volume hardcover collection, but then split it into two regular-length paperbacks. She thought it sounded weird but, being Beth Meacham, she didn’t reject it out of hand. Instead she thought about it until she liked the idea, and then went to Tom Doherty who also liked it, and voila —an egregiously oversized book was born. Because once the floodgate had opened, I pretty much included every story that I wasn’t actually ashamed of.

Which brings us to this part of the collection. Think of this as a bonus section, something that only buyers of the ridiculously expensive hardcover edition receive. It won’t be in any of the paperback volumes that bud off from this book. Only you will ever see it.

Why, you ask, are you so fortunate? It’s not as if this percentage of the book was free—you paid for the cost of the paper and typesetting of this part of the book as surely as you paid for all the rest. The thing is: As Beth and I looked over the list of stories that were going into Maps in a Mirror: The Short Fiction of Orson Scott Card, we realized that we were approaching the point where this book would be complete. It would be the volume of record. So why not go all the way? Why not include the stuff that was so weird or out-of-genre that it wasn’t going to appear anywhere else, ever.

I don’t want you to think, though, that we were completely indiscriminate in what we included. For instance, we didn’t include a single one of my two-dozen-or-so plays. Nor did we inflict on you any of my poetry except for “Prentice Alvin and the No-Good Plow.” There are more than two hundred audioplays and a couple of dozen animated videoscripts from my work for Living Scriptures that aren’t included. Nor have we reprinted here any of my dozens of review columns for Fantasy and Science Fiction or Science Fiction Review. There are also dozens of computer articles and computer game reviews that you are being spared. When you think of it, we were downright selective.

There is also one published bit of science fiction that isn’t included here. Between this book, The Worthing Saga, and The Folk of the Fringe, all of my ASF and fantasy short stories will be in print, except for a harmless little story called “Happy Head”

which appeared in—well, someplace. In that story I used direct brain-to-computer hookups before the cyberpunks did, but that’s about the only thing about the story that doesn’t embarrass me now, so even if you happen to find it in your complete run of—a certain magazine—I urge you to think of it as something written by an earnest young graduate student rather than anything I did. I think the editor bought it only because it had some interesting ideas in it, not because anybody could actually take it seriously as a story. Everybody’s allowed to have a mistake or two that appears in print. But I don’t have to cooperate in bringing it to your attention, no matter how much amusement you might get from it.

The works in this section fall into several categories:

I’ve had a long habit of adapting some of my shorter works into novels; the trouble with this is that the shorter works are essentially killed. Yet at the time I wrote them, “Ender’s Game,” “Mikal’s Songbird,” and the epic poem “Prentice Alvin and the No-Good Plow” represented my very best work. I had no idea they would ever be expanded on; they were meant to stand complete. Furthermore, both stories were nominated for awards and the poem actually won one. For historical interest if nothing else, we figured they ought to be in print somewhere. This is the place.

I’m not ashamed of these stories—they were the best I could do at the time, and they still hold up rather well. But they just don’t deserve the same standing as the stories that I still believe in; and I didn’t think the ideas were worth the effort of going back and rewriting the stories so they were up to snuff. So here they are, for such entertainment as they offer. And perhaps they’ll also provide some encouragement to young authors who will read them, smile brightly, and say, “If these could get published, anything can!”

Let’s face it—if this collection has any commercial viability, it’s as a collection of science fiction and fantasy stories. But that isn’t the only kind of story I write. And Beth and I thought you might enjoy getting a look at the sort of thing I write for other audiences. Many of the stories were originally aimed at the Mormon audience. Others don’t have any discernable audience on God’s green Earth. But we thought there was even a valid genre reason for including them in a collection of science fiction and fantasy: For some of you, at least, reading Mormon fiction will be the most alien experience you’ve ever had.

“Whatever your gravity is when you get to the door, remember—the enemy’s gate is down. If you step through your own door like you’re out for a stroll, you’re a big target and you deserve to get hit. With more than a flasher.” Ender Wiggins paused and looked over the group. Most were just watching him nervously. A few understanding. A few sullen and resisting.