Orson Scott Card is charming, thoughtful, and polite. So why is he rubbing people the wrong way?

What’s the secret behind the success of Ender’s Game, the sci-fi novel published 23 years ago that has sold well over two million copies? Don’t ask its author. “If I could repeat the success of Ender’s Game, I would do it every time,” says Orson Scott Card. But Ruth Ellen Cox Clark, who teaches children’s literature at East Carolina University in Greenville, NC, knows why the saga of a boy who saves the world clicks with today’s kids. “It’s so real,” she says. “When you think about it, what Ender goes through in Battle School—it’s not a lot different from what our middle schoolers go through in the hallways of their own schools every day.” There’s also something magical about the story, says Patty Campbell, one of the nation’s leading authorities on YA lit. And apart from Harry Potter, The Lord of the Rings, and Ender’s Game, Campbell can think of only two books that have a similar power over young readers: Catcher in the Rye and The Outsiders. “You just have to read them to be 'in,’” she says. Clark and Campbell are members of a committee that named Card the winner of this year’s Margaret A. Edwards Award for his outstanding contributions to teen literature, specifically for Ender’s Game and Ender’s Shadow (1999, both Tor), a companion tale. The honor, which includes a $2,000 cash prize, is managed by the Young Adult Library Services Association (YALSA) and sponsored by School Library Journal. Card, the magician behind both of these best sellers, is one of our nation’s most prolific—and contentious—authors.

Photograph by Jimmy Williams

Card’s reputation for controversy doesn’t stem from his fiction. It comes from his essays and columns, most of which appear in an independent newspaper in Greensboro, NC, where he lives with his wife, Kristine, and their 12-year-old daughter, Zina. (His son, Geoffrey, is a game designer in Seattle, and daughter Emily is an actress and audio producer in Los Angeles.) In fact, Card has so much to say that two of his six Web sites—The Ornery American (Ornery.org) and Hatrack River (hatrack.com)—are devoted in part to voicing his opinions. An all-purpose scourge, Card has used his columns to chide Barack Obama for his ignorance of small-town life and to characterize Hillary Clinton as a modern-day Machiavelli. (He voted for Obama in North Carolina’s Democratic primary election.) Card has blamed starvation in Africa on our conversion of corn to ethanol. He supports George Bush’s war on terror and the American presence in Iraq. While Card is neither a creationist nor a proponent of intelligent design, he has denounced scientists who snub colleagues whose conclusions on Darwinism contradict the dominant view. And the effort to close our borders to Mexican immigrants makes his blood boil. “This whole anti-immigrant thing is unbearable to me,” Card says. Yet none of his opinions have set off a backlash quite like his positions on homosexuals and same-sex marriage. An essay he wrote in 1990 for a Mormon audience argued that members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS) who engage in homosexual acts are practicing hypocrisy by flouting the church’s moral code, which forbids any extramarital sex. (An observant Mormon, Card is a descendent of Brigham Young, who presided over the LDS Church from 1847 to 1877.) Card went on to suggest that “[state] laws against homosexual behavior should remain on the books…. The goal is not to put homosexuals in jail,” he added, “[but] to discourage people from engaging in homosexual practices in the first place.” His foes have labeled him a homophobe—someone with an irrational fear or hatred of homosexuals. “Look,” Card says in his defense, “when I wrote that essay, the Supreme Court had upheld Georgia’s anti-sodomy law. That paragraph was intended to advocate the general nonenforcement of such laws, while keeping them on the books to indicate society’s disapproval.” (The U.S. Supreme Court struck down all such anti-sodomy laws in 2003.) In 2004, Card revived the controversy with a withering, Ender-like attack on the legalization of same-sex marriage. His main point, one he shares with his church, is that legalization “will do harm” to heterosexual marriage, children, and the family. “Nowhere near as much harm as we have already done through divorce and out-of-wedlock childbearing,” he wrote. “But it’s another nail in the coffin.” Card larded his argument with some quirky theories that many readers found hurtful. Soon he was being picketed and heckled at book readings and excoriated in print (including the pages of SLJ). “It’s just one of those things where I think, 'Why have I been singled out as your enemy?’” he says. “Why do some people call for a boycott of my books? I don’t make this a cause. I’m not attacking anybody.” But many of his readers think he is and find it impossible to separate Card’s fiction from his extracurricular pronouncements. There has been talk about some librarians boycotting the American Library Association’s convention in Anaheim this June because YALSA will be presenting Card with the Edwards Award. Anyone who meets Card after reading his essays is in for a surprise. I was. I met him in April at a convention of comic-book aficionados in New York City, where he was patiently autographing the “Ultimate Iron Man” series he wrote for Marvel Comics. The indefatigable explorer of good and evil in his books and the professional scold in his essays turned out to be, in person, somewhat of a pussycat—charming, tolerant of his interlocutor’s ignorance, and often funny. This was the man I found in his “Uncle Orson Reviews Everything” column, where he holds forth on big-box stores, women’s socks, films, showerheads, and anything else that strikes his fancy. It’s the man former YALSA President Bonnie Kunzel, who lauds Card as a consummate storyteller, met at a dinner party during one of his book tours. “He was a very human, very kind, gentle man,” she says, “very thoughtful, very affable, very polite.” The first thing I wanted to know was how Card is able to maintain his legendary output, which includes 61 books; 11 full-length stage plays and a half-dozen one-act plays; 312 half-hour audio plays, eight animated video plays and a comic book series; 29 technical pieces, mostly on games and computers; video games; and articles, essays, and dozens of newspaper columns. How the heck does he do everything? “My problem is I can’t,” he says disarmingly. “There are projects I’m dying to do, and sometimes their time passes. So you let some stuff go. And, of course, when you do, you take your advance and hope that your publisher still speaks to you.” Two full-time assistants help Card free up time for his many activities. So does the speed with which he composes his books. “When I write, I’m very, very fast,” he says. Total typing time, as opposed to thinking time, averages five weeks per novel. “I write a story as if I were telling it to a group of people whose interest I have to hold. So I don’t have time when I’m writing to indulge myself in description or lengthy asides. But the real work, the foundational work, the structural work, the skeleton of the story—that comes before I ever set words on a piece of paper. The thinking time can be years. Very rarely have I gone from idea to finished work very quickly.” From the start, Card was a greedy reader. Born in 1951 in Washington State, he grew up in California, Arizona, and Utah and was seldom without a book. Joseph Altsheler’s series of novels about American wars generated a lifelong fascination with military history. Bruce Catton’s three-volume Army of the Potomac, a gift from his parents on his 10th birthday, intensified his passion. Soon he was delving into military strategy, the art that Andrew “Ender” Wiggin and Julian Delphiki (also known as Bean) master as child geniuses and use to obliterate a race of insect-like aliens. Card’s interest in philosophy, one of the underpinnings of his work, began in junior high school. At the prompting of a teacher, he studied the Great Books, a list of must-reads created by the American philosopher Mortimer Adler. He went on to compete for a college scholarship against other young readers of the Great Books and won $1,000. “The money was quickly gone,” he writes in a brief autobiography on Hatrack.com, “but the reading was a lasting gift.” He also studied the Bible and the Book of Mormon, one of the sacred texts of the Mormon Church. The books helped shape his values. But later experiences led him to question some of the tenets of his church. “I approach church doctrine from the position my father taught me,” he says. “If there’s a conflict between science and religion, one or the other or both of them will change.” A church leader once told him, “You’ve written some things that set people’s teeth on edge. But your heart’s in the right place.” Card’s religious beliefs seep into his work, sometimes consciously, as when he writes specifically for a Mormon audience, which he does often; and sometimes, despite his best efforts to prevent it, into what he writes for a general audience. “You’re a Mormon, aren’t you?” he was told by some readers of A Planet Called Treason (1979; revised and renamed Treason in 1988, both St. Martin’s). “I am who I am,” Card says unapologetically. “My fiction is going to contain Mormon elements because that’s how I grew up. I’m a believer. That’s the universe I live in. But I’m not preaching. My fiction includes many religions, not just my own, and I try to be fair to all of them.” Card credits his mother’s love of performing for his infatuation with directing and writing plays. He was a theater major at Brigham Young University. After two years in Brazil as a Mormon missionary, he returned to Provo, UT, and founded a short-lived theater company. The theater failed after one successful season—he blames his inept management skills—leaving Card with a debt he was unable to pay off with his small salary as a copy editor for an LDS Church magazine. To raise more money, he would steal time during working hours to write stories. “I would lock my office door and write short stories and do my work and then come out with finished [magazine] work faster than anyone else,” he says. “I felt guilty about it, and I still do. It was a stolen pleasure. But it became my living, it’s my job, and now the only stolen pleasures are the things I do instead of working.” One of the first of his stories to get into print was “Ender’s Game,” published in 1977 and rewritten as a novel eight years later. Recognition came fairly early for Card. In 1978, the World Science Fiction Convention presented him with the John W. Campbell Award for best new writer. Since then, many other prizes have come his way, including the Nebula and the Hugo, the two most coveted awards in the science-fiction and fantasy universe. Ender’s Game took the Nebula in 1985 and Speaker for the Dead (Tor, 1986) in 1986. The Hugo—the sci-fi and fantasy equivalent of an Oscar—went to Card for Ender’s Game in 1986 and Speaker for the Dead in 1987. That was the first and only time one writer has won both awards in two consecutive years. Two more Hugos came Card’s way—one for the novella “Eye for Eye” in 1988, and another for his nonfiction book How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy (Writer’s Digest, 1990) in 1991. And this year, of course, he won the Edwards Award, which came to him as a shock. “I never thought of myself as a YA writer,” he says. “Which is why the Edwards Award is so astonishing to me and I’m so gratified. Because it means that the kids chose me; I didn’t choose them. Kids take home my book and read it as if it were meant for them. They take possession of it. That’s the kind of response writers dream of.” Today, Card’s many projects are as varied as ever. He’s writing Ender in Exile for Tor, his longtime publisher, and a fantasy tentatively called The Lost Gate for Del Rey. Keeper of Dreams, a collection of 22 of his stories, was published this spring. A collection of stories by contributors to the online magazine Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show (www.intergalacticmedicineshow.com) will appear in August. And that’s just the beginning. Marvel is bringing out the comic-book version of Ender’s Game in the fall. Card is working with a Utah company to develop video games that take place at the Battle School he introduced in Ender’s Game. And of course there are columns to be churned out, classes to be taught, and plays to be written and directed. Will he ever slow down? Not likely, says the 57-year-old author. “We could live a happy lifestyle on Ender’s Game royalties—as long as we fired all our employees and traveled a lot less. But then, the employees help deal with the need to stay in contact with the outside world. And the income beyond Ender’s Game allows me to do things like put on plays (which make no money), publish books from time to time with my publishing company [Hatrack River], take a semester to teach at Southern Virginia University [a Mormon school] every other year, and have a little money for good causes now and then. “Plus”—and this will come as good news to his grateful fans—“I like writing.”

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Eric Oatman has written about wikis, evidence-based research, and other head-scratching topics for SLJ.