Interview with Orson Scott Card

Q: Any news about the ENDER'S GAME movie? Any details you wish to share with your fans?

Still under option at Warner Brothers. I've written a script that I believe would make a great film. Hope they see it the same way.

Q: How would you like to be remembered as an author? What is the legacy you'll leave behind?

If I've pleased readers in my own time, that's all I can hope for. To have any of my works transcend my own era and continue to speak to future generations is merely a bonus, to be neither aspired to nor counted on.

Q: Do you have a different approach when it comes to writing fantasy or science fiction?

Do you mean a different approach BETWEEN those two genres, or different from others? If the latter, then both SF and fantasy require world creation that uses up a lot of expository space that contemporary novels don't require. Yet they also give a great deal of freedom to the worldmaker to hone and sharpen a society in order to make a clearer contrast with the present day.

Between sf and fantasy, though, the differences are paper-thin. If you're writing fantasy well, it will be as intellectually rigorous and inventive as science fiction -- perhaps more so, since every speck of belief in magic systems must be earned and re-earned throughout the book, while scientific speculations don't require as much support to be accepted by the reader.

Q: You frequently blurb novels by new authors such as David Farland and Brandon Sanderson. Is it important to you to give those newcomers a hand with a positive review?

I don't give newcomers a hand. I give honest comments on brilliant books. If they happen to be newcomers, that just makes me hate them more, even as I praise their books .

Q: L. E. Modesitt, jr. claimed that Tom Doherty is one of the most underappreciated men in fantasy. Do you agree with his assessment?

I don't think Tom is underappreciated by authors or booksellers. We know he's a wizard of a publisher -- working with him is the reward you get for writing well and treating people nicely. The general public may not know about him, but then why would they? The publisher's job is not to stand in front of his writers, blocking the view -- rather it's to put their work on the stage, well-lighted, curtain open, for the audience to admire, without ever noticing the publisher at all. If Tom Doherty were famous with the general public, it would be at the expense of the books he publishes. So he does not seek fame for himself.

Q: Honestly, do you believe that the speculative fiction genre will ever come to be recognized as veritable literature? Truth be told, in my opinion there has never been this many good books/series as we have right now, and yet there is still very little respect (not to say none) associated with the genre.

The last thing we need is the respect of the academic-literary establishment. Look how they've killed the readability of the books that follow their dogmas! Who wants them working the same ugly magic on our books? We made up our own rules, and our rules work better than theirs. The real question is when the academic literary establishment will finally realize that we do our job and their job better than they do.

One might even say that the very best of the literary writers -- Anne Tyler, Richard Russo, and now Diane Setterfield, author of the brilliant The Thirteenth Tale -- achieve many of their effects because they share some of the key values of the best of the fantasy writers: The willingless to let characters act nobly, an intensity-with-clarity in their language, and magnificently thorough and fascinating world creation.

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Interview by Patrick
fantasyhotlist.blogspot