Orson Scott Card

Orson Scott Card: The Boy Who Committed Genocide by Accident

The question came to him in his teens, prompted by Asimov's *Foundation* books and a brother in the army: how would you train soldiers to fight in microgravity? The answer required children. "Adults would already have so many gravity-centered habits," Card reasoned, "that it would be very hard for them to train them to completely rethink their way of relating to space." Ben Bova rejected the story he built on that premise. Card revised it, Bova bought it in June 1976, and *Analog* ran "Ender's Game" in August 1977. Nearly fifty years later it remains one of the most read and most argued-over books in American science fiction.

Mormon Pioneer Stock

He was born on 24 August 1951 in Richland, Washington, the third of six children of Peggy Jane Park and Willard Richards Card, and a great-great-grandson of Brigham Young. The Latter-day Saint inheritance was not incidental decoration; it supplied the communitarian instincts, the interest in prophecy and covenant, and the recurring structure of a chosen child bearing an unbearable responsibility that runs through almost everything he has written.

Brazil, Theatre, Debt

He served an LDS mission to Brazil from 1971 to 1973 and graduated from Brigham Young University in 1975 with a degree in theatre, where his plays were staged. He took a master's in English at the University of Utah in 1981 under François Camoin and Norman Council, and started a doctorate at Notre Dame before abandoning it to write full time. In 1976 he went to work as an assistant editor at *Ensign*, the LDS Church magazine, which published his first piece of fiction, "Gert Fram," in July 1977 under the pseudonym Byron Walley.

Ender

The novel version came fast — the first chapters in a week, the rest in three more while he was on tour promoting a different book. Tor published *Ender's Game* in hardcover in January 1985, a date Card chose so the paperback would land during awards nomination season rather than being buried by a December release. The calculation worked. *Ender's Game* took both the Nebula and the Hugo for Best Novel in 1986. *Speaker for the Dead*, its very different sequel, did it again the following year, making Card the only person to have won a Hugo and a Nebula in consecutive years.

The Machine

What followed was volume. *The Tales of Alvin Maker* began in 1987, an alternate-history American frontier saga. The Homecoming Saga transposed the Book of Mormon into interstellar science fiction. The Shadow series retold Ender's story from other angles. *Lost Boys* (1992) turned domestic horror on a family much like his own; *Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus* (1996) sent time travellers to intervene in 1492. He has published more than fifty novels and forty-five short stories, and collected further Hugos and Nebulas along the way, including both for "Eye for Eye" in 1988 and a Hugo in 1991 for the manual *How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy*.

Teacher

Card takes the pedagogy as seriously as the fiction. He teaches English at Southern Virginia University, runs "literary boot camps" and "Uncle Orson's Writing Course," and has judged the Writers of the Future contest since 1994. His craft books — *Characters & Viewpoint* (1988) and *How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy* (1990) — are standard equipment for a generation of genre writers. Brandon Sanderson, Stephenie Meyer, Dave Wolverton and Lindsay Ellis are among those who name him as an influence. His papers went to BYU's Harold B. Lee Library, opening to researchers in 2007.

He has also worked well outside prose: co-producing the 2013 film of *Ender's Game*, writing dialogue for video games including *The Secret of Monkey Island*, *The Dig* and *Advent Rising*, and scripting comics such as *Ultimate Iron Man* and *Dragon Age*.

The Politics

Card described himself as of 2020 as a Moynihan or Blue Dog Democrat, and insists he is "not a conservative" — he favours liberal immigration policy, gun control and the abolition of capital punishment — while having supported John McCain in 2008, Newt Gingrich in 2012 and Donald Trump in 2016.

The rupture with much of his readership came over homosexuality. A 1990 essay, "A Changed Man: The Hypocrites of Homosexuality," argued that laws against homosexual behaviour should be kept available for use "when necessary to send a clear message." After 2003 he said he had "no interest in criminalizing homosexual acts," but in 2008 he wrote that heterosexually married people would "act to destroy" a government that legalised same-sex marriage. He backed North Carolina's Amendment 1 in 2012 and sat on the board of the National Organization for Marriage from 2009 to 2013. The consequences arrived in 2013: DC Comics shelved his *Adventures of Superman* story after the illustrator Chris Sprouse withdrew and a petition gathered more than 16,000 signatures, and the LGBT group Geeks OUT organised a boycott of the *Ender's Game* film, with Lionsgate publicly distancing itself from his opinions. His fiction drew fire too — *Songmaster* for a pederastic relationship, and *Hamlet's Father* (2008) for linking childhood sexual abuse to adult homosexuality, which *Publishers Weekly* condemned.

Family

He married Kristine Allen in 1977, the daughter of the historian James B. Allen. They had five children. Their son Charles, who had cerebral palsy, died at seventeen; their daughter Erin died at birth. The novels' preoccupation with damaged, gifted, endangered children is not an abstraction.

Why Orson Is Called a Genius

The specific gift is structural: Card designs moral traps. His central innovation in *Ender's Game* is to withhold crucial information from his protagonist rather than from the reader, so that a child annihilates an entire species while believing he is in a simulation — and the reader, who suspected, has to decide where the guilt actually sits. That is a genuinely difficult piece of narrative engineering, and it is what has kept the book at the centre of arguments about military ethics for four decades. Kirkus states the question it forces: "what would you do when your back is up against a wall and the perceived extinction of your own species is at hand?" The consecutive Hugo-Nebula double for *Ender's Game* and *Speaker for the Dead* has never been matched by anyone. Critics credited "conspicuous originality" in his early short fiction and found the Shadow books "executed with panache and skill." The teaching career is part of the case: few writers have transmitted craft as systematically.

The counter-case is blunt. The same critical record calls his early work "accessible and fast-paced" but "stylistically unremarkable," faults his characterisation — one reviewer dismissed Peter and Valentine in *Ender's Game* as "totally unbelievable" — and judges the later Ender sequels "overly prolonged." Fifty-plus novels, and the reputation rests almost entirely on a two-year window in 1985 and 1986. This is not prose genius; it is a plotter's genius, and a narrow one. And the moral seriousness the books insist upon sits awkwardly beside the public arguments, which is why many readers now decline the work altogether — a reputational fact that no amount of admiration for the 1985 novel makes go away.

Legacy

Recognition beyond the genre came with the Edward E. Smith Memorial Award in 1992 and, in 2008, both the American Library Association's Margaret Edwards Award for lifetime contribution to young-adult literature and the Whitney Lifetime Achievement Award. *Ender's Game* remains, as Kirkus put it, "an accessible and interesting read, even three decades after it was first published" — a book that outgrew its author's later notoriety and shows no sign of being displaced.

Achievements

• Notable work: Ender's Saga
• Notable work: The Tales of Alvin Maker
• Notable work: Homecoming Saga
• Educated at Brigham Young University, University of Utah and University of Notre Dame
• Worked as writer, novelist and science fiction writer