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

This story is one of the few I’ve written that began, not with the story idea, but with a sentence. “His dog and his doctor disagreed”—that was the phrase I tried to hang a story on. I know many a writer who does begin writing with an evocative sentence, but it rarely works for me.

This story began with a news story about some people who were murdered by a hitchhiker. I have never in my life picked up a hitchhiker or, for that matter, hitched a ride myself—my parents drummed that rule into my head before I could see over the dashboard of a car. But still, I began to wonder if there was some way that an unarmed driver could stop a murderous hitchhiker. It struck me that the only reason the hitchhiker’s weapon gives him power over the driver is that the driver still hopes that if he just goes along and does what he’s told, the hitchhiker will let him live. But what if the driver starts from the assumption that he’s already as good as dead, and his only goal is to make sure the hitchhiker doesn’t outlive him? Then all he’d need to do is smash the car into an overpass abutment and the hiker would have hitched his last ride.

That led to the thought that if you could once convince the hitchhiker that you were more dangerous than he was, then his behavior would be under your control. The tables would be turned.

The idea became a story when, instead of a crazed maniac killer, I decided the hitchhiker would be someone more innocent at heart. The result was this story, which appeared in a regional magazine and won a few laughs from a few readers before the magazine went out of business.

This story began as a conversation with a couple of dear friends, Clark and Kathy Kidd, as we were driving away from the Casa Maria restaurant in Tyson’s Corner, Virginia. We were joking about brand names that might tell what a product actually is, instead of completely unrelated names. “Tight-ass Jeans” instead of Jordache, for instance. Then I applied the idea to books and decided it was about time I wrote a novel called “F---ing Good Read.” But we decided that nobody would publish such a title, so we’d have to call it “Damn Fine Novel.”

I wrote the story the next morning, with the idea of submitting it to the graduate writing course I was taking at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. It ended up being a kind of twisted Escheresque literary joke, and as my wife pointed out when I read it to her over the phone, there was no way I could turn this story in to the workshop, since it absolutely ridiculed the kind of story that these students were trying to write. So instead of turning it in for a grade, I published it pseudonymously in the Green Pages section of my fanzine, Short Form. It marks the only time that I’ve used the “F-word” (as we Mormons call it) in my fiction; I hope that the necessity for using it here will be obvious.

There are three LDS Church magazines. While I was working for The Ensign, the magazine for adults, the offices of The New Era, the Church’s teen magazine, were in the suite just south of us, and the offices of The Friend, the Church’s children’s magazine, were in the suite just north of us on the twenty-third floor of the LDS Church Office Building. We saw the other magazines’ editors now and then, and got to hear them moan about how rare it was for them to get good fiction. So while Jay Parry and Lane Johnson and I were working on story ideas, we inevitably turned to trying to write stories that would meet the needs of The Friend and The New Era.

One of the results was “Billy’s Box,” a story in which I tried to realistically depict a very young child in a story that might appeal to slightly older children—and, I hoped, their parents.

The Mormon Church encourages its members to meet together as families in their own homes every Monday night. This story should make clear both what Family Home Evening is supposed to be—and what it more commonly is. This specific story, however, is based on some experiences of my brother-in-law, Scott Allen, when he was very young.

This story is a pretty faithful depiction of a real incident that happened on my mission to Brazil, when we taught a young boy to ride a bicycle. What I couldn’t convey in the story was the desperate poverty and ignorance of this family, and yet the powerful love that bound them together. They were good people, and for the first time I realized that it was possible for people to sleep packed into a room the size of a small conference table and still be decent, civilized human beings. Teaching the boy to ride a bicycle was such a pathetically small thing to do to help them—but it was something, and that was more than I had ever been able to do before. I think it was this family’s desperate financial condition that finally killed any remnant of allegiance to free market capitalism that I might still have had.

I wrote about a half-dozen stories for The New Era magazine during this time, and while the editor, Brian Kelly, bought several of them, to my memory only this one actually appeared in print—the others were somehow not quite “correct” enough for an official Church publication. This was not an issue of censorship. The Church leadership was the publisher, not some outside censor, and they had not only the right but the responsibility to make sure that what appeared in the Church magazines was exactly what they wanted to say to the members. In the meantime, though, there were things that needed to be said in some unofficial forum, not by way of criticism, but in order to show the great variety of possibilities for individual identity within the larger community identity.

Unfortunately, in LDS Church publishing at that time it seemed there were only two kinds of publisher: official or quasi-official Church publishing, which by definition could publish only the most narrowly acceptable kind of material; and the dissident press, which delighted in publishing things that were either so literary as to be unreadable, or so offensive and inflammatory that most Mormons could only perceive it as another form of anti-Mormon literature. What was missing was the loyal alternative press, by no means an opposition, but rather a more open unofficial press that could speak freely, but in ways that the Church membership would receive as coming from within the Church, not outside it.

I waited a long time for such a press to appear, believing that if it did, it would be quite successful. While I was waiting, I wrote a few works that belonged in that genre: Saintspeak: The Mormon Dictionary, a gentle satire that nevertheless affirms Mormon values and only criticizes the Saints where we tend to depart from those values; and Saints, a Mormon historical novel that gives a perspective that could never be published by the official LDS press if only because the official press is not free to imagine what thoughts might have passed through Joseph Smith’s head, or what words he might have whispered to his wife in bed. The response from the Church membership was all the proof I needed that there was a great hunger for this kind of writing among the loyal members of the Church. So this past year—1989—I used earnings from my science fiction that I could ill spare and launched my own publishing company, Hatrack River Publications, to bring out the kind of book that I thought was needed. It will take time to build an audience—we have no promotional budget and must rely on word of mouth—but our first two novels are doing very well, and in the coming year we expect to publish several more, including novel adaptations of some of my early LDS plays.