People have recoiled when I reveal myself in their presence as a Card lover. Card, the Mormon? Card, the baby killer? (More of that later). Sometimes it seems to be the ultimate faux pas in the hard-headed, unsentimental scene that tries to be British SF in the early 'nineties.

Orson Scott Card, as even my cat knows, is a Mormon. He is also an American, and he's proud of both. These attributes in combination aren't necessarily a good thing in producing SF — you could cite Battlestar Galactica, and I would agree — but, then, Battlestar Galactica is a crap space opera, whereas Card is a highly talented playwright-turned-SF writer.

Where does the difference lie? They start from the same roots and they both deal with living legends-in-the-making. And BG, if you recall, was basically about the search for a Promised Land, i.e. Earth, which is how Mormonism got started. Where they come apart is that Card accepts the existence and validity of other viewpoints and stocks his stories with rounded, developed, believable, human characters, with emotions and thoughts and feelings like you or me. BG, even leaving out the tacky special effects and less respect for the laws of physics than Star Trek, got stuck right from the start with being The American Way in Space, starring Pa Cartwright as the Patriarchal Sage (no change there) and what's-his-name from Streets of San Francisco as Number One Space Jock. Oh, please.

Card also knows something about decent plotting, which helps.

Not that Card preaches. He's a practicing, church-going Mormon but he keeps it out of his writing; he doesn't go riding to the rescue with the Gospel thinly disguised as SF ("Say, Doc, I know you've already explained it, but how does this vicarious redeeming sacrifice of Christ work again?"). His two most on-going protagonists, Ender Wiggin and Alvin, are specifically not Christian; they are at the very best agnostic. In Xenocide, Ender's sister Valentine is asked if she is a believer. Her reply is, "I'm a suspecter." Instead, Card lets the worldview of his religion inform and colour his writing, following in the tradition of Walter Miller et al. Maybe Mormons hold up Card's books as definitive Mormon allegories the way that evangelical Christians do with C.S. Lewis — I don't know (would anyone who does care to elaborate?). I do know that non-Mormons can read and enjoy just as much.

Card is aware of religion — it doesn't matter which one. Whatever your views, whatever your background, we all live in a world that was shaped by religion. Keep your eyes peeled and count the number of churches, used or unused, that you pass by on a normal trip to work or the shops. Spot the dog collars in the crowd. We have a religious heritage, like it or not, that stretches back for thousands of years. And yet, so many authors ignore it all together — or, if they must include a religion at all, either misrepresent an existing one or invent an implausible one. Card doesn't. It's one more piece of reality that he adds to his fiction, and his fictitious worlds are that one bit more complete for it.

Card is also aware that his religion makes him an outsider. He admits that, try as he might, he is more comfortable surrounded by Mormons than by gentiles (his word, not mine). It's this outside view that gives his writing a freshness and an askew view of the world that marks it out.

Finally, consider the worldview of both mainstream Christianity and Mormonism. A world full of human beings, created in the image of God; who have fallen into sin through their own fault; who are capable of the most astounding atrocities; and yet who can be redeemed if they only face the facts of what they have done. Card forces his characters — and readers — to face the truth, in all its glory, unclouded by hypocrisy or guilt. Refreshing, in an age when more and more of everything that goes wrong is Someone Else's Fault. And it's all covert. The redemptive processes, the coming of the character to terms with what's going on, are all internal, known only to the character and to the reader.

Take Ender Wiggin, star of Ender's Game, Speaker for the Dead and, lately, Xenocide. Ender starts as a member of an army of children, which he was either born into (the novella) or conscripted into at the age of six (the novel). Either way, his capacity for moral development has been, shall we say, stunted. He develops into a master strategist and a vicious little sod — his winning tactic is generally to strike below the belt with overwhelming force and he manages to kill at least one other boy this way in a fight.

It is not surprising that he becomes . . . well, a xenocide. He wipes out the one known sentient alien race, the Buggers (a name that only Card would give his aliens. In fact, only Card would have a hero called Wiggin). After all, they had launched an unprovoked attack on the first human ships to encounter them and every indication is that they intend to carry on attacking Earth's colonies and — who knows? — Earth itself.

Actually, the Buggers had long ago regretted the attack; a hive race, they hadn't realised that each human is an individual (only their Queens have this kind of self- identity — the drones are just drones) and that each human death means robbing the universe of a unique entity (They therefore have a slightly higher estimation of the value of individual humans than humans do; Card doesn't come out and say this, but it's there). They want to stop the war and are still desperately looking for a way to communicate this fact to the humans when the xenocide happens. When this is eventually found out retrospectively, after the xenocide, young Ender goes from being the saviour of mankind to the enemy of the world and his mere name becomes the ultimate curse (people say "Ender" in the same way Zaphod Beeblebrox might utter "Belgium". That bad.).

But can Ender actually be blamed? He was manipulated by his (adult) officers at every turn, and he thought the battle he was fighting was just a simulation. Even if he had known, like everyone else he believed that the Buggers were the enemy, and having been so thoroughly indoctrinated as a child-soldier (he is only in his early teens at the xenocide) he was in no position to make moral judgements.

Humankind was scared witless by the Buggers and wanted a hero, which they got. Say the Buggers had been ready to subjugate humanity. Would we humans have contentedly said, as we struggled beneath our daily load, "Ah, well, we're slaves to this merciless alien race, but at least we didn't commit xenocide to protect ourselves"?

I doubt it. So does Ender. He feels the need to atone, but he does it in the most low- key manner, by preventing a second genocide when another alien species is found (the Pequeninos, a.k.a. the Piggies in Speaker for the Dead) and simultaneously finding a planet on which to plant the sole surviving Bugger Queen egg. It's his own private mission, which he does without fanfare or show.

In The Ultimate Guide to Science Fiction, a well-known writer is quoted as saying Ender's Game "remains in essence a hyped-up power fantasy". Assuming this quote stands alone and hasn't been taken out of any kind of qualifying context, I'd have to disagree. Hammer's Slammers, now . . . that is a power fantasy. The Lensman stories are power fantasies. Ender's Game, if you look close enough, is the exact opposite; Card (as he often does) is following the age-old principle that if you want to write about a subject in a way that will stick in the reader's mind, write a story that overtly opposes the point you are trying to make. Anyone read Candide lately? It's a funny kind of power fantasy where everyone ends up as pacifists.

And that's one reason why I like Orson Scott Card.

The redemption thing has further implications. Card rarely has baddies per se. There are people who from time to time work against the hero of the story, but the only real baddy to be found in his novels is the Unmaker (a.k.a. the Devil, a.k.a. Entropy) of the Alvin tales, whose very nature is to destroy. Sometimes you think you've got a baddy pegged, only to find out you've got it wrong. Peregrino, the Bishop of Lusitania (a planet settled by Portuguese) in Speaker for the Dead could so easily have become a stock Authoritative Religious Figure, opposed to everything that the humanist Ender does. As it is, he and Ender manage to make their own quite plausible peace by the end of the book (helped by the fact that in helping the humans communicate with the indigenous Piggies, Ender has opened up a whole new mission field). Card judges his characters by their own internal standards, and they usually get given the chance to make good somehow.

You're never really sure what a Card character is going to do next, and whether or not you're going to like it. Palicrovol, one of the several viewpoint characters of Hart's Hope (a sword-and-sorcery fantasy world which got there long before Villains — you would really rather not live in this world) is a Duke who overthrows his not- very-nice, despotic king. Good! To consolidate his power, he forcibly marries and publicly rapes the king's 12-year-old daughter. Bad! Out of mercy, he doesn't have her killed. Good! And very, very stupid, because she grows into a very powerful enchantress who takes over his kingdom and who takes care to humiliate and spoil everything Palicrovol holds dear. And yet, she isn't such a bad ruler — her people don't especially like her, but then, they've never really liked any monarch (liking or disliking a ruler in this kind of world is a luxury that most people can't afford), and she does rule fairly and reasonably by the standards of the world they are in.

Spot the baddy? It's difficult. The characters weave around each other, veering from good to bad to good to bad . . . It keeps the readers on their toes.

Card has a reputation for being gruesome — for writing in lots of mutilation and torture and then being impervious to the overtones. It's stories like "Kingsmeat" and "A Thousand Deaths" that have done this for him, so let's look at one of them.

"Kingsmeat" is set on a colony world enslaved by a pair of aliens with a taste for human flesh. It is the habit of their species to land on a human world in pairs (setting themselves up as King and Queen, hence the title), waste it entirely, then move on to the next. Until they come to Abbey Colony, where a human known only as the Shepherd susses their game and comes to an arrangement. He will supply them with bits of people, just as much as they want to eat, painlessly removed from human donors, and — here is the best bit — leave the donors alive. Mutilated, maybe crippled, but alive. Individuals suffer but the colony lives on, albeit enslaved until the marines arrive.

After the liberation, the Shepherd unsurprisingly fails to win Abbey Colony's Man of the Year award. Yet they can't do away with him either, as they would like to. He was a Quisling, a collaborator, but he saved the colony. I won't say he escapes entirely unscathed. Read the story.

Card came under fire for this. One reader wrote to complain about him "relishing" writing about the Shepherd's removal of a woman's breast (he deals with it in one small paragraph). It's disturbing, it's uncomfortable. It's meant to be. It's meant to make the reader think, and ask "what would you have done?"

(By contrast, I recently tried to read Brian Lumley's Necroscope, a free copy picked up from Fantasycon. I couldn't get past the first chapter, with someone literally sucking the juices and essence out of a corpse. People say Card is gruesome?)

But, I suppose the question remains — why so much mutilation? Answer — I don't know. Could it be because Card believes in a fallen world? A world where it's not what happens to you in this life that you have to worry about? Or just a world where, frankly, shit happens? Like I said above, a world of fallen beings . . . Card is under no illusions as to just how unpleasant we humans can be if we put our minds to it, or even without especially putting our minds to it, and this is the result. Perhaps we've become so used to nastiness that he has to be this extra bit nasty, to make the point.

There isn't room to go into all Card's short fiction. It has been published in collections like Unaccompanied Sonata and The Changed Man, but you can find most of it in one place in Maps in a Mirror. This suffers a bit from the inclusion of his very early, non-SF "what I did in the holidays by O.S. Card" stories, but they're at the end in a section of their own and easily avoided. Read the rest of it instead. The original "Ender's Game" novella — far punchier than the novel, if suffering slightly from loose ends (but what the hey, it was his first published SF). "Kingsmeat" and "A Thousand Deaths" — see above. "Dogwalker" — Card's stab at cyberpunk. "I Put My Blue Genes On", which is as serious as the title suggests. "Eye for Eye", about a lad who you really wouldn't like when he's angry, because when he's angry he instinctively, uncontrollably, lashes out with the evil eye and gives you cancer . . . And who do adolescents get angry with the most? Yup, their loved ones . . .

And one of my all-time favourites, "Lost Boys" (first appearing in the October 1989 F&SF) — a ghost story starring the actual Card family plus a fictitious elder son, Scotty, which uses Card's own career as background detail. The Lost Boys in question turn out to be the ghosts of boys killed by a serial killer, and the fictitious Scotty is one of them.

This is where the "baby killer" tag comes in. There was an on-going, spiteful and unbelievably closed-minded correspondence in SF Eye over this, in which the readers apparently queued up to pour vitriol on Card's good name. The basic premise was that Card had written a story in which he fantasised about his son's death. Even leaving aside the interesting contention that writers necessarily fantasise about what they write, this just ain't so. Scotty's death occurs offstage and it takes a while to realise that this actually is a ghost we're talking about.

Even so, Card isn't oblivious to the implications of writing a story like this and saw fit to include an Afterword. "Lost Boys", he says, is actually about his youngest son, Charlie Ben Card, born mentally handicapped in fact and in fiction. Card Senior is the first to admit he has never had the pain of losing a child; what the story does is express in some part the pain of having a child with cerebral palsy — "a child who is not dead and yet can barely taste life despite all our love and all our yearning" (from Card's Afterword to the story).

That's what Card says and, not having made up my mind in advance that Card can do nothing right, I find no good reason to disbelieve him. One of the SF Eye letters mentioned above asked the question, "What the hell was Ed Ferman thinking, publishing that obscene story?" Perhaps the correspondent approached the question from the wrong end. Try it this way round. (1) Ed Ferman is an editor whose opinion we respect. (2) Ed Ferman has published this story. (3) Maybe there is something in it after all.

(The SF Eye correspondence changed from vitriolic to downright silly when one voodoo practitioner wrote in to complain that Lusitania, the planet in Speaker for the Dead settled by Brazilians, didn't have any voodoo practitioners in it. Card was insulting the voodoo religion! SF Eye might have felt this was silly, too; whatever it was, the correspondence closed soon after.)

Card will admit to being influenced by other writers (and name one SF writer who isn't), but when other people's influences do turn up, he takes them and wrings them and makes them his own. The Ender stories are space opera (as is Songmaster in a far stronger form), but flashing starcruisers and ray guns are the last thing on his mind. They are positively anti-war. Ditto the Worthing stories (collected into The Worthing Saga, previously published as Hot Sleep, Capitol and The Worthing Chronicle). This was the earliest stuff he wrote and he borrows shamelessly. The planet Capitol, centre of the Empire, entirely built over . . . sound familiar? And a hidden race of telekinetic/ telepathic/whatever mutants, always on the run from the powers that want to stamp them out . . . also sound familiar? And how about the one lone planet in the galactic boondocks carrying the flag of civilisation after the Empire falls . . . But read them, and see a universe of real people, in real situations, coming to terms with their world.

I haven't really dealt with overtly Mormon influences. Well, there's the fact that Mormonism is a highly communal religion that grew up in the untamed frontier, and most of Card's characters find their peace in frontier-type, small communities. Big empires always fall or are, if not the bad guys, then the undesirables. Comfort and luxury are seen as bad for the soul — it's through suffering that characters find their strength.

More specifically, the Alvin stories are said to be reworkings of the life of Joseph Smith — I'll come to them in a moment. Myself, I'd say his most overt celebration is The Folk of the Fringe; a collection of shorts of which my favourite is "Pageant Wagon", about a roving troupe of thespians who are keeping alive just the idealised American spirit that you would expect to see in a post-holocaust people looking back at a supposed Golden Age. The premise is: after the nuclear holocaust (which wasn't actually much, but enough to knock civilisation out), the Mormons are the only social group in the USA with enough get-it-togetherness to start rebuilding things. Card talks about this society in a range of stories which describe both the growth of the Mormon hegemony and, as the climate changes, the flowering of the West (the descriptions of a half-submerged Salt Lake City are almost Ballardian, though you probably need to know your Utah to get the full benefit). The last story is both climactic and a bit of a let-down with its elements of fantasy, but the message is clear: the people of North America have abused their divine mandate to make good with the world they have been given (very Mormon, the idea of North America being given to its peoples by divine right), and now must make way for an upstart South American civilisation.

And Alvin. I don't see the Joseph Smith influences, to be honest, even if the overall tone is often downright Messianic, though it must be said that the Alvin tales published so far — Seventh Son, Red Prophet and Prentice Alvin — are the most clear-cut good vs. evil examples of Card's writing.

It's an alternate, early nineteenth century America. Britain is still ruled by a Lord Protector two centuries on and Bonaparte is an upstart French general sent out to the colonies to cool off. The Stuarts live in exile in the south. George Washington, Benjamin Franklin et al. are big names, but the United States never happened. And here is the big difference: the normal, everyday folk of America use a normal, everyday type of magic — charms, spells etc. Certain people have certain specialities — Dowsers, Torches and so forth. And once in a while, once in an era, a Maker is born — someone who can shape matter, whose overpowering urge is to create, to bring order and pattern out of chaos. The last Maker, theorises Miss Larner in Prentice Alvin, probably had the skill of turning water into wine . . .

Mormons also believe that North America's original inhabitants were immigrants from the Middle East (Jerusalem, specifically), guided there by God thousands of years ago. This makes them pretty special and, sure enough, in the books the Indians (known as Reds) are the good guys — one of them is Alvin's most influential guru. Oh, there are those who just want to fight the whites, but they get the usual Card perception-shift treatment and emerge as goodies. At the end of Red Prophet some of the less-enlightened whites go on a killing spree of Reds and are punished by one of fantasy fiction's most truly horrific curses. Read the book.

America as the Promised Land (where the actual Americans need a lot of improvement). The idea that men can become Gods (the American Dream?!). The pioneering, frontier spirit. Oh, it's Mormon all right.

BUT — there is no preaching. It's Mormon influences, not a message. You don't have to buy it. And if anyone points out that until recently the Mormons had a less- than-enlightened attitude towards people of colour — well, so do a lot of people here. The bad guys. The good guys couldn't care less about colour. Card is a modern Mormon.

This isn't meant as a hagiography and I'll be the first to admit that Card has his faults. A tendency to use two words when one would do comes to mind . . . next down the list is his attitude to sex. Take the Alvin stories. These are fantasies that come like a breath of fresh air in the midst of the usual triple-decker brick-size epics that flood our bookshops but, apart from eighteen-year-old Alvin's occasional musing that, well, a girlfriend would be kinda nice, sex is either utterly irrelevant to the plot or it's cold- blooded and clinical. "Come on, Scott," the reader cries, "half your characters are teenagers for at least part of the story, and they don't give sex a thought?"

Or Josef, the homosexual character in Songmaster who talks so calculatingly about the contrasting percentages of how much he's attracted to men and how much to women. You get the impression that everyone he meets, man or woman, is judged and given a score and, if they make a certain grade, he's attracted to them. Still, it's a good effort from Card (who was plainly trying to wrap his braincells round the concept of this gay thing), considering that the official view of his religion on the subject would not look out of place on the Isle of Man. Songmaster even goes so far as to have a homosexual love scene which despite its off-putting (and climactic, but not in the usual way) ending is handled with sensitivity and tenderness.

And, in mitigation, Card is (to use his own words) a good little Mormon boy who saw the sixties through the wrong end, and if he wrote about the subject in any greater depth it would probably be a disaster. It also means that the characters can get on with the story in peace, and when they do fall in love you can actually feel glad for them.

Going into everything Card has ever written, which would be necessary to give a full, in-depth analysis of why I really like him, would need a book on the subject. I haven't mentioned Wyrms or A Planet Called Treason or his non-SF novel Saints at all, or gone into Songmaster in any depth, but I have mentioned what I think is the best stuff. Advice: start with the short fiction in Maps in a Mirror, go on to the Alvin stories, maybe graduate to the science fiction novels. Even if you're one of those to whom the very idea of starting on a series is anathema — well, I'm one too. I honestly feel that in this case it'll be worth it.

(c) Ben Jeapes 1991. Not to be reproduced without permission, but feel free to link to it.