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

All of that began, really, with the stories I sold to The New Era that, unlike “I Think Mom and Dad Are Going Crazy, Jerry,” were never cleared for publication. And, though this story is definitely an early work of mine, and does not represent the level of skill and sophistication that Hatrack River Publications looks for in the books we publish, the story does represent the basic approach: humor, satire, along with an honest representation of LDS life.

“Gert Fram” was my first published fiction. I wrote it years after the first draft of “Ender’s Game”; in fact, I whipped it out in one night to meet a deadline for The Ensign magazine’s special fine arts issue in July of 1977. It is sentimental—but with sentiment that is deeply felt within the Mormon community. It is the most strongly Mormon of all my works, I think.

I had an uncredited collaborator on this story, by the way—Gert Fram herself. Gert Fram was the nom de plume of my then-future sister-in-law, Nancy Allen (now Nancy Allen Black). In her childhood she actually wrote all but the last of the Gert Fram books, exactly as they appear in this story; she, with a friend of hers, lived a pretend life as world-famous authors, and produced these books for each other. So, while the incidents of this story are entirely out of my imagination, the character of Gert Fram and the books she wrote are entirely the creation of the young Nancy Allen. I keep urging her to write the young adult novel Gert Fram, so that I can publish it with Hatrack River. Nancy remains the most madly creative person I’ve ever known, and if she actually wrote the book, I think it would be a work of genius.

It was for this story that I first used the pseudonym “Byron Walley,” which appeared as the credit line for all my fiction in the LDS magazines. It began for one of the traditional reasons: I already had my name too often in the July 1977 fine arts issue of The Ensign. Both an article and a poem appeared under my name. “Gert Fram” appeared under the name Byron Walley, and my play “Rag Mission” appeared under the name Brian Green. I liked the Byron Walley name and have used it ever since when pseudonyms were required.

Now, at last, you have come to the end of this book. The introductions and afterwords themselves amount to some forty thousand words—a slim novel’s worth of text. It is outrageous that I should imagine anyone would want to read all of this; and yet, whether or not you read the introductions and afterwords, I hope some people will read at least some of the stories, if only because it is there that some of my most heartfelt work has appeared. I have often said, in other places, that it is in the short fiction that you find the cutting edge of science fiction and fantasy. New authors show up there first; new ideas and techniques also tend to find their way into the magazines before the book publishers are ready for them, or before the writers are willing to invest a novel’s-worth of time in them.

Some of our best writers, of course, almost never write short fiction, like Tim Powers, or write it almost as an afterthought it seems, like Lisa Goldstein. Others, like Harlan Ellison and Ray Bradbury, write almost nothing but short fiction. But the fact remains that if you want to understand what science fiction is, you must read the short fiction— The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, voted on by the members of the Science Fiction Writers of America; The Hugo Winners, an anthology series edited and introduced by Isaac Asimov; Dangerous Visions and Again, Dangerous Visions, edited by Harlan Ellison, the definitive anthology of the sixties and seventies in science fiction. There you’ll see most of the history of science fiction unfold. There you’ll see the first blossoming and the freshest songs of most of the writers who created this field and keep it alive.

In these pages you’ve seen something far less interesting (to everyone but me and my mother): my personal history as a writer. Every step I’ve taken in my books began with a step taken in one or more of these stories. Every idea I’ve explored in my novels, I first broached in fiction in one of these tales. And if I have anything of value to say to you, I hope I’ve said it here.

Ender’s Game

The Folk of the Fringe

Saints Maps in a Mirror: The Short Fiction of Orson Scott Card

Songmaster

Speaker for the Dead

Wyrms

Seventh Son

Red Prophet

Prentice Alvin

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to real people or events is purely coincidental.

MAPS IN A MIRROR: THE SHORT FICTION OF ORSON SCOTT CARD

Copyright © 1990 by Orson Scott Card

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form.

A version of the afterword to Book 5: Lost Songs originally appeared as “Mountains out of Molehills” in Foundation: The Review of Science Fiction #45, Spring 1989.

A Tor Book

Published by Tom Doherty Associates, Inc.

49 West 24th Street

New York, N.Y. 10010

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Card, Orson Scott.

Maps in a mirror : the short fiction of Orson Scott Card / Orson Scott Card.

p. cm.

ISBN 0-312-85047-6

1. Fantastic fiction, American. 2. Science fiction, American.

I. Title.

PS3553.A655M37 1990

813’. 54—dc20

90-38896

CIP

Printed in the United States of America

098765432

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