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

I don’t call this a flaw in the film, but rather a limitation of the cinematic form; and Cameron would certainly dispute my conclusion that the book is “truer.” Perhaps this idea is merely my way of making the book my own even though the bulk of it is a retelling of someone else’s story. One thing is certain, however—if this novel transcends the limitations of most novelizations, it is because I went back to the time before the story and added new material that transforms the meaning of the events in the film when we finally come to them.

Even my Tales of Alvin Maker— Seventh Son, Red Prophet, Prentice Alvin, and the yet-unpublished Alvin Journeyman and Master Alvin —began as a shorter work. As I studied the works of Spenser with Norman Council at the University of Utah, I determined to attempt for my people something of what he accomplished for his: create a verse epic in the vernacular. Of course it was a mad enterprise from the start. Who reads long poems anymore, especially narrative poems? Especially poems written in a folky mountain-country voice:

But there’s something about great works of art like The Faerie Queene that makes the beholder long to go and do likewise. In awe of Spenser and yet ambitious to learn from him, I wrote my way many stanzas deep into the story, until I reached a sort of conclusion when Alvin and his friend Verily Cooper tried out Al’s golden plow in the rich soil near the banks of the Mizzippy. At that point I gave the poem an ending—after a fashion:

At that point, exhausted, I set the poem aside, uncertain where the story should go from there.

Though “Prentice Alvin and the No-Good Plow” won a Utah state fine arts contest, I never did get back to the poem, except to revise it slightly for forthcoming publication in a Mormon journal. Still, the story of it hung with me, in part because, in true Spenserian manner, it is an elaborate allegory for some of the most important tales of the epic of my own people; in part because I fell in love with that hill-country voice and the American frontier magic I had devised for the story. Here was a fantasy that was completely American—no elves, no dragons, no European myths and legends, and the setting was a log cabin, not a castle, and the people wore homespun and hunted with muskets instead of donning armour to go a-pricking with lance and sword. I wanted to go back and finish it.

The opportunity came in 1983, when I finally realized that while long narrative poems have no particular audience, long fantasy novels—or trilogies—do. The language would be daring, for fantasy, as would the setting, but at least the ordinary-looking paragraphs between ordinary-looking book covers would reassure the audience that this story would be accessible.

I wrote an extended outline of the trilogy (supposedly starting with Prentice Alvin) and sent it to Barbara. Tom Doherty bought this one and a story collection as well. (He then had six of my books under contract though not one had yet been published. His faith in me—an author whose books, up to then, had never earned out their advances—was extraordinary, and will always be appreciated.)

When it came time actually to write the Alvin Maker books, I began as I did with every other expansion and adaptation: I started the longer version before the beginning of the original story. I didn’t dream at the time that I wouldn’t reach the events of the narrative poem until the middle of the third volume, but the introductory chapter became the novel Seventh Son, and the chapter in which Alvin was captured by Indians became the novel Red Prophet, so that by the time I finished Prentice Alvin in 1988, the world had grown so full and the characters so numerous that at times I despaired of containing the whole thing in any finite number of books.

Nevertheless, it was the story that I had begun back in graduate school, even though the text had changed, the characters had been transformed, and the world had grown wider and stranger than I had ever imagined at first. Yet it’s hard for me to imagine that I ever thought the story was complete, as far as it went. There was so much more possibility; in writing the first version of it I had thought I was completing the story, but in fact I was merely essaying the first rough draft, the first bare outline of what the tale could be.

I think perhaps that’s the case with all my work. At the time I write it, I think it’s complete, I think I have discovered all its possibilities and now an sharing them with an audience. But the stories that are best, that are most alive to me, I can’t leave them alone. They keep growing whether I like it or not. I keep imagining them without regard for the fact that they have already been written down, published, reviewed, and remaindered.

I’m not “expanding” shorter works at all, I think. I’m merely returning to unfinished acts of imagination, warming myself at fires that only burn the hotter for having lain dormant during all the intervening years. Each tale finds its own occasion to come to life and grow again, and what I’ve been learning is not so much how to expand novelettes as how to tell stories more fully than ever before.

Does the process end? I’d like to think so. There are plenty of new stories to tell, and I don’t have any older works that cry out to me for further development.

Except that I just finished a short story called “Lost Boys” that I once envisioned as a novel of contemporary horror. Since it’s the most autobiographical piece I’ve ever written, I know I could expand on it considerably simply by mining my own life—and so who knows? Maybe a trend that began quite accidentally will continue deliberately.

This story was my second science fiction sale. It is a one-idea story—something that I have since learned is not a terribly good idea. The idea? Heart transplants were big news back in the late seventies; I wondered what might happen if, far from rejecting the transplant, the host began to find itself being replaced by the growing cells of the transplanted organ. It would certainly solve the problem of rejection. However, I had neither the scientific knowledge to make the idea really plausible, nor the skill as a writer to make the question of human identity transcend the nonsense science. The result is a story that was more a placeholder in Analog than a particular standout.

Unlike “Malpractice,” “Follower” actually represents a trend I would pursue later in my career. The thriller-story structure isn’t for me, but the motif of a child who has a twisted relationship with adults is a strong one in my work. When I submitted this to Ben Bova, he told me it was all right as far as it went—but it simply didn’t end. He suggested an ending to me. I liked it, wrote it just as he suggested it, and sent it back. I didn’t alter a word of the first part of the story in order to make the ending work. Then, when the story came out, I was repeatedly told by friends and kin alike that they had guessed the ending almost from the beginning of the story. Ironic that I didn’t guess it—I had to wait for Ben to give it to me!