How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy by Orson Scott Card Read Free Book Online

gridworks and obstacles changing from game to game, so the trainees could simulate fighting among spaceships or the debris of battle.
    I imagined that they would play with small handheld lasers, while wearing suits of body armor that would serve a double purpose-to protect them against damage from collisions during mock battles, and also to electronically record when someone scored a hit on your body. If you were hit in the leg, your leg would become immobile; if you were hit in the head or body, your whole suit would freeze. But you would remain present in the battle, drifting just like a corpse, serving as one more obstacle or bit of cover.
    This was in 1968. I didn’t get around to writing the story “Ender’s Game” until 1975. That’s because the battleroom wasn’t a story, it was merely a setting-and not a complete milieu, either, since the soldiers training there wouldn’t be in the battleroom twenty-four hours a day. There had to be a whole universe built up around the battleroom, and I was too young and inexperienced to know the questions that had to be asked.
    In 1975, 1 asked them. Who was the enemy they were training to fight’ Other humans? No, aliens-and cliche aliens at that. Bug-eyed monsters. Our worst nightmares, only now they were here in real life. And who were the trainees? Not combat soldiers, I decided, but rather people being trained to pilot starships into battle. The point was not to learn hand-tohand combat, but rather to learn how to move quickly and efficiently, how to plan, how to take and give orders, and above all how to think threedimensionally.
    And then I asked the question that made all the difference. I knew that, having gladly missed out on combat in Vietnam, I hadn’t the experience to write about the lives of men in combat. But what if they weren’t men at all? What if they were children? What if the starships they’d be piloting were actually billions of miles away, and the kids thought they were playing games?
    Now I had a world: humans fighting off alien invaders, with children as the commanders of their fleet. There was still a lot of work to do, but it was a simple matter to come up with my main character, the young child whose genius in threedimensional combat in the battleroom would make him the ideal choice to command the human fleet.
    Notice, though, that I didn’t have even the seed of a good science fiction
    story until after I had a clear idea of the world in which the story would take place.
    The same thing is true of fantasy. Another personal example:

    I like to draw maps. That’s how I doodle when other people are talking, by drawing coastlines and then putting in mountains, rivers, cities, national boundaries. Then, if the map that results intrigues me, I begin to make up more information-which nations speak the same language, what their history has been, which nations are prospering, which waning.
    In 1976 I was cast in a musical comedy playing in Salt Lake City. We rehearsed in an old building downtown that was scheduled for demolition to make way for the new Crossroads Mall. In one corner of the rehearsal area there was a pile of junk-broken chairs, tilting shelves, stuff that was utterly useless. But amid the garbage I found a ream of onionskin paper of an odd size, larger than normal. I can’t let paper like that go to waste! So I brought it home and saved it.
    Now it’s 1979. I’m living in a house in Sandy, Utah, working on the first draft of my novel Saints. I’m also on a radical diet losing about a billion pounds. My wife and son are down in Orem, Utah, living with her parents so they can take care of her and Geoffrey while she recovers from a miscarriage; I can’t do it because I have a deadline to meet. So I’m hungry, tired, and lonely.
    One night, exhausted from writing, I wander around the house and find that ream of outsize paper, saved all those years and never used. I grab a few sheets and head upstairs. The TV goes on, I lie on the