Orson Scott Card
Popular Author, Speaker and Teacher
Brigham Young High School
Class of 1969
Will university students soon be writing papers examining the question, "What group of people wrote under the pen name of Orson Scott Card?" The list of OSC titles already produced is staggering, impossible to update, and already too many for three men to have written.
"Orson Scott Card" -- we'll write as if there is just one -- was born on August 24, 1951, in Richland, Washington. His parents left Washington to start up a sign company in San Mateo, California. Eventually his father switched careers and became an educator. Scott grew up the son of a college professor and always in the shadow of a university.
Books were always a part of his life, and he learned to read early. He was an intelligent child who got along better with adults than with the children around him.
He and his family lived in Salt Lake City, Utah while his father went to college. After that Scott spent most of his childhood back in San Mateo, California.
However, when Scott's father got a faculty job at Brigham Young University, they moved back to Utah, residing in Orem. He was a member of the Class of 1969 at Brigham Young High School, but when the school was closed at the end of the 1967-1968 school year, he went on to college a year early.
He had gotten in with the drama crowd at BYH, and he did so again at BYU. This is where he began writing stage plays. As he progressed, he developed an understanding for what moves an audience and gives them sympathy for his characters.
He graduated from BYU with a BA in Theatre and Cinema in 1975. He earned an MA in English at the University of Utah in 1981.
After he served a two-year church mission to Brazil, Card started a theatre company, which soon ended. Because his salary did not offset the loss, he decided to try to make some money by writing.
His first story, Tinker, was initially turned down, so he started another story. He wrote Enders Game in a notebook, in longhand, sitting on a lawn outside the Salt Palace, while a circus went on inside.
This time his story was purchased immediately. But at that time it was not yet a book, just a short story. It was published in the August 1977 issue of Analog. It came in second on the Hugo ballot, and he won the John W. Campbell Award for best new writer.
He wrote several more short stories, published collections of them, as well as several full-length novels. Enders Game, the story, became a novel, and was a remarkable success. It won both the Hugo and Nebula awards in 1985.
The next year he finished Speaker for the Dead which also won the Hugo and Nebula awards in 1986 and 1987.
Nobody had ever won the Hugo and Nebula awards for best novel two years in a row, until Orson Scott Card did it.
The third novel in the series, Xenocide, was published in 1991. The fourth and seemingly final volume in the series, Children of the Mind, was published in August 1996.
A new novel in the Ender's series, titled Ender's Shadow, was published in August 1999 -- but it is not a sequel. Instead, it returns to the events of Ender's Game and views them from the point of view of another character, a street urchin named Bean. Card discovers a new story in the midst of the old, when seeing it through other eyes.
A sequel to Ender's Shadow was published in January 2001 entitled Shadow of The Hegemon.
But Orson Scott Card's experience is not limited to one genre or form of storytelling. His contemporary novels Lost Boys, Treasure Box, and Homebody brought a powerful emphasis on character and moral dilemmas to the old-fashioned ghost story.
And his contemporary novel, Enchantment (April 1999 from Del Rey), is a romantic fantasy that has Sleeping Beauty being awakened by an American graduate student in Ukraine in 1991. The characters pass back and forth between Sleeping Beauty's world of ninth-century Russia and today's America, with the famous anti-hero of Russian folklore, the witch Baba Yaga, following close behind.
Card has broken new ground with each of his major works. The Homecoming Saga (the novels The Memory of Earth, The Call of Earth, The Ships of Earth, Earthfall, and Earthborn) are a retelling of ancient scripture as science fiction.
Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus is the sine qua non of alternate history novels, in which time travelers return to keep Columbus from discovering America -- or at least from returning to Europe after having discovered it. It will be followed by books that reinvision Noah's flood and the Garden of Eden -- in historically, culturally, and scientifically plausible ways.
Perhaps Card's most innovative work is his American fantasy series, The Tales of Alvin Maker. The first five volumes, Seventh Son, Red Prophet, Prentice Alvin, Alvin Journeyman, and Heartfire are set in a magical version of the American frontier. Two more volumes, The Crystal City and Master Alvin, will complete this reexamination of American history.
Card's works have been translated into many languages, including Catalan, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Slovakian, Spanish, and Swedish.
A dozen of Card's plays have been produced in regional theatre, including the musical Barefoot to Zion (written in collaboration with his composer brother, Arlen L. Card), which played to sold-out houses in Utah as part of the Church's sesquicentennial celebration of the arrival of pioneers into Salt Lake Valley.
His historical novel, Saints, has been an underground hit for many years, and Card has written hundreds of audio plays and a dozen scripts for animated video plays for the family market.
And his TV series concept, The Gate, was purchased by the WB network for development.
Meanwhile, Ender's Game is being developed for film. In March of 2006 it was announced that Warner Brothers and Card have extended their option on the film version of Ender's Game and Ender's Shadow, with Card himself writing a new draft of the screenplay. Work on the script is progressing. Card continues to work with his partners in Taleswapper and Chartoff Productions, where Lynn Hendee is the lead producer on the project. At Warner Brothers, Lynn Harris is the executive in charge of the Ender movie.
Also a teacher: Card has written two books on writing: Character and Viewpoint and How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy, the latter of which won a Hugo award in 1991.
He has taught writing courses at several universities, including a novel-writing course at Pepperdine. He has also taught at such workshops as Antioch, Clarion, Clarion West, and the Cape Cod Writers Workshop.
Because of his commitment to family he eventually announced that he would no longer be going on book tours, in part because they take too much time away from his family.
As a self-described orthodox member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, religion is important in his life. These factors make his stories not only interesting for their inventiveness, but also for their moral and ethical situations, with characters connected to the world through their families.
Orson Scott Card and his wife, Kristine Allen Card, are the parents of five children: Geoffrey, Emily, Charles, Zina Margaret, and Erin Louisa (named for Chaucer, Bronte and Dickinson, Dickens, Mitchell, and Alcott, respectively).
Card recently began a long-term position as a professor of writing and literature at Southern Virginia University.
He lives in Greensboro, North Carolina, with his wife, Kristine, and their youngest child, Zina Margaret.
So, is "Orson Scott Card" just one man? -- or three? or three dozen? We will leave this conspiracy theory question to future literature professors and their students around the world.
Books Published - Orson Scott Card(in reverse chronological order)
WORKS IN PROGRESS
COMPLETED, AWAITING PUBLICATION
PUBLISHED
~ The Changed Man (book 1, 1992)
~ Flux (book 2, 1992)
~ Cruel Miracles (book 4, 1992)
~ Monkey Sonatas (book 3, 1993)
Orson Scott Card of Hatrack River
BYH Biographies