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

The truth is this: The girl in the story brought joy and love into the lives of others, and when she left her body (however you interpret her leaving), she lost the power to do that. I would give almost anything to see my Charlie run; I wake up some mornings full of immeasurable joy because in the dream that is just fading Charlie spoke to me and I heard the words of his mouth; yet despite these longings I recognize something else: You don’t measure whether a life is worth living except by measuring whether that life is giving any good to other people and receiving any joy from them. Plenty of folks with healthy bodies are walking minuses, subtracting from the joy of the world wherever they go, never able to receive much satisfaction either. But Charlie gives and receives many delights, and our family would be far poorer if he weren’t a part of us. It teaches us something of goodness when we are able to earn his smile, his laughter. And nothing delights him more than when he earns our smiles, our praise, and our joy in his company. If some cyborg starship passed by, imaginary or otherwise, offering to trade bodies with my little boy, I would understand it if he chose to go. But I hope that he would not, and I would miss him terribly if he ever left.

This story is a bit of whimsy, based in part on some thoughts about censorship and in part on the experience of knowing Doc Murdock, a fellow writing student in Francois Camoin’s class. Doc really did support himself at times by gambling, though the last I heard he was making money hand-over-fist as a tech writer. Couldn’t happen to a nicer guy.

I almost never consciously base characters on real people or stories on real events. Part of the reason is that the person involved will almost always be offended, unless you treat him as a completely romantic figure, the way I did with Doc Murdock. But the most important reason is that you don’t really know any of the people you know in real life—that is, you never, ever, ever know why they do what they do. Even if they tell you why, that’s no help because they never understand themselves the complete cause of anything they do. So when you try to follow a real person that you actually know, you will constantly run into vast areas of ignorance and misunderstanding. I find that I tell much more truthful and powerful stories when I work with fully fictional characters, because them I can know right down to the core, and am never hampered by thinking, “Oh, he’d never do that,” or, worse yet, “I’d better not show him doing that or so-and-so will kill me.”

And, in a way, “Prior Restraint” is proof that for me, at least, modeling characters on real people is a bad idea. Because, while I think the story is fun, it’s also one of my shallower works. Scratch the surface and there’s nothing there. It was never much deeper than the conscious idea.

By the way, this story was a long time making it into print. I wrote the first version of it very early in my career; Ben Bova rejected it, in part on the grounds that it’s not a good idea to write stories about people writing stories, if only because it reminds the reader that he’s reading a story. His advice was mostly right, though sometimes you want to remind readers they’re reading. Still, I liked this idea, flaws and all, and so I sent it off to Charlie Ryan at Galileo. He accepted it—but then Galileo folded. Charlie wrote to me and offered to send the story back. I knew, however, that I wouldn’t be able to sell it to Ben Bova or, probably, anybody else. So when Charlie suggested that he’d like to hang onto it in case someday he was able to restart Galileo or some other magazine, I agreed.

It was almost a decade later that a letter came out of the blue, telling me that Charlie was going to edit Aboriginal SF, and could he please use “Prior Restraint”? By then I was well aware of the relative weakness of the story, particularly considering the things I’d learned about storytelling since then. It might be a bit embarrassing to have such a primitive work come out now, in the midst of much more mature stories. But Charlie had taken the story back in the days when most editors didn’t return my phone calls and some sent me insulting rejections; why shouldn’t he profit from it now that things had changed? As long as the story wasn’t too embarrassing. So I asked him to send me a copy and let me see if I still liked it.

I did. It wasn’t a subtle piece, but it was still a decent idea and, with a bit of revision to get rid of my stylistic excesses from those days, I felt that it could be published without embarrassing me. I don’t know whether to be chagrined or relieved that nobody seemed to be able to tell the difference—that nobody said, “‘Prior Restraint’ feels like early Card.” Maybe I haven’t learned as much in the intervening years as I thought!

The genesis of this story is easy enough. I was living in South Bend, Indiana, where I was working on a doctorate at Notre Dame. One of my professors was Ed Vasta, one of the great teachers that come along only a few times in one’s life. We both loved Chaucer, and he was receptive to my quirky ideas about literature; he also wrote science fiction, so that there was another bond between us. One night I was at a party at his house. After an hour of everybody grousing about the stupidity of Hesburgh’s choosing a high school teacher named Gerry Faust as the football coach, we got on the subject of tarot. Ed was a semi-believer—that is, he didn’t really believe in any occult phenomena, but he did think that the cards provided a focus, a framework for bringing intuitive understanding into the open.

Kristine and I are both very uncomfortable around any occult dealings, partly because we are very uncomfortable with the sort of people who believe in the occult. But this was Ed Vasta, a very rational man, and so I consented to a reading. I remember thinking that the process was fascinating, precisely because nothing happened that could not be explained by Vasta’s own personal knowledge of me; and yet the cards did provide a way of relating that previous knowledge together in surprising and illuminating patterns. The experience led me to write a story, combining tarot with my then-new obsession with computers. The story itself is a cliche, a deliberately oedipal story by an author who thinks Freud’s notion of an Oedipus complex is an utter crock. It’s one of the few times that I’ve ever mechanically followed a symbolic structure, and for that reason it remains unsatisfying to me. What I really cared about were the ideas—the computer and the tarot cards—and I have since explored the interrelationship between storytelling computers and human beings in such works as my novels Ender’s Game and Speaker for the Dead.

This story began very recently when Lee Zacharias, my writing teacher at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, mentioned that suicide stories were common enough among young writers that she despaired of ever seeing a good one. I remembered that when I was teaching at Elon College the semester before I had gotten enough of those suicide endings to make the pronouncement to my students that I hereby forbade them to end a story with suicide. It was a cop-out, said I—it was a confession that the writer had no idea how the story really ought to end.

Now, though, I was feeling a bit defiant. I had said that suicide stories were dumb, and now Lee was saying the same thing. Why not see if I could write one that was any good? And why not make it even more impossible by making it first person present tense, just because I detest present tense and have declared that first person is usually a bad choice?