Interviews with OSC • PreAP- Mr. Card Responds -- Sterbenz's Student Blog 7 April 2011 • Buggers and Pathfinders–Orson Scott Card -- Interview with David Steffen 25 January 2010 • OSC Interview at National Review Online 2008 • Q&A with Orson Scott Card -- The full interview text June 2006 • E3 2005 Orson Scott Card Interview 2005 • OSC Interview by John C. Snider. April 2005 • Ender's Game Q&A 2004 • Ender's Game questions from a student in Singapore 2004 • Interview with Sonja 2004 • MBA Class Interview - Dartmouth College 2004 • Orson Scott Card interview in French 2003 • OSC interview about Advent Rising. Interview at gamepro.com September 19, 2003 • OSC interview with a French magazine August 2003 • OSC answers questions about achieving a successful film based on a book 2003 • If you speak Polish, here's an interview with OSC published by the magazine Esensja 2002 • Interview by Kristin Galetta and Justin Goldner October 2002 • Interview from Poland January 17, 2002 • Questions from Playwriting Student Darren Pine April 2001 • Various Student Interviews With OSC  1  |  2  |  3 • Publishers Weekly Talks with Orson Scott Card November 2000 • A Conversation With Orson Scott Card - by Claire E. White September 1999 • CARD'S GAME: An Interview With Orson Scott Card - by Scott Nicholson 1998 • An Interview With Orson Scott Card - by Jeff Duke 1997 • AOL Interview January 19, 1994

OSC Answers
Because I wrote the novel version of Ender's Game in order to provide the proper setup for the novel Speaker for the Dead, which takes place three thousand years later when Ender is completely grown up, Ender's Game never had a proper sequel -- that is, it never had a novel that completed some of the questions and issues raised by the first book.

When I realized that Bean would make a good protagonist, the obvious thing to do was begin in Battle School and write a story that begins in parallel with Ender's Game, but then continues with the story of what happened on Earth while Ender was off in space heading for a distant colony world. Once I began writing the Shadow books, Bean's story (and Petra's, and Peter's) took on a life of their own -- I began to think of them as just as interesting to me as Ender was fifteen years ago. I hope my readers feel the same way.

OSC Answers
Actually, in my books the heroes are PEOPLE. But people usually begin as children. All I do is refuse to skip the most formative years of a person's life. Basically, I structure most of my books as biographies, beginning and childhood and going on to death. But multi-volume series stretch that biography over more books, so in the early book or books, the character remains a child.

Most of the important aspects of a person's character manifest themselves when the character is quite young. And few people are able to make substantial change in their own character when they're older. Most of the time all we manage to do is change our role in life -- change the way we interact with other people. That can be interesting, of course, as indeed most fiction deals with such matters. But I find that I have to go back into the character's childhood to show who the character REALLY is. It's as if I try to explore the actor rather than the role the actor plays.

OSC Answers
I think I showed that it caused a lot of emotional damage. To take a way a child's childhood causes many repercussions in years to come. But the intention, in Ender's Game, was to exaggerate what we already do in time of war -- we take our children -- at 17 or 18 instead of 7 or 8 -- and train them to submerge their own survival instinct, and train them to kill in obedience to their officers. They go to war and those who are actually in combat see and do terrible things. Then we expect them to come home and lead normal lives. The miracle is that most of them do. And children recover from terrible experiences in childhood, most of the time. They lead normal lives -- but with problems and pain inside them that they carry with them forever.

OSC Answers
It's hard to write a character who is smarter than the writer. <grin> Oddly enough, I'm often criticized because these genius kids "don't talk like real children." Well, first, they DO talk like real children -- apparently these critics haven't talked to kids very much about anything that matters to them. And, second, they're supposed to be really smart children. So of course their vocabulary and mastery of language will be at a higher level than some adults. But that's how it is in the real world.

OSC Answers
Everything that a storyteller truly believes shows up in his stories. A portion of what a person truly believes can be defined as "religion." It has neither more nor less influence on his storytelling than his other beliefs.

I speak, not of superficial beliefs -- opinions that you know might be wrong -- but rather of core beliefs, things you believe so thoroughly that it doesn't occur to you that you might be wrong. The beliefs you build your life on. We all have millions of such beliefs, ranging from our faith in gravity to our trust in what certain people tell us. We might be wrong about many of them. But we believe them so intensely that there is no way to tell a story without revealing those beliefs.

So I can easily avoid superficial aspects of my religion in my writing, and I do, because there's no reason to use my stories for propaganda, it would just interfere with their power. But on an unconscious level, what I truly believe will, of course, show up in my work.

OSC Answers
Russia is a young nation that is hungry for greatness. So is Poland, but a different kind of greatness.

But Russia has more people. More sense of entitlement. Poland wants to be left alone. Russia wants to be respected. Russia wants to GROW. That makes them potentially great -- and potentially frightening. Will Russia "catch up" with the west? Of course. Whenever it wants to. What role will Poland play? A lot depends on the danger Poland is in, and the kind of nation Russia is at the time of crisis.

What I'm most interested in, though, is Poland as a young country. Of course Poland is very old, but in fact what has happened since the late 1980s makes Poland very young as a country that can control its own destiny and what it will become. I doubt that my fiction will invent anything half so interesting as what the Polish people make of their own nation.

OSC Answers
I don't use string theory at all. I do keep up on the scientific literature to a degree, but I don't have enough math even to understand string theory. What I use in Children of the Mind is old-fashioned metaphysics, using metaphoric explanations that, AFTER I wrote it, have been taken by some people as being related to the metaphors used to explain string theory. No connection.

I read a lot of science, but I read far more history. THAT is what a writer of any kind of fiction has to be thoroughly versed in. Because what we storytellers write about is human beings, and it's a foolish writer who attempts to do it without a thorough knowledge of what people have done over the millennia.

OSC Answers
I don't believe there is even the slightest possibility of Artificial Intelligence as a genuinely sentient being. The only we we'll ever create A.I. is by redefining "intelligence" to include whatever it is we teach our machines to do. But if by "intelligence" you mean true sentience, a true person, those who claim it is possible are laughably ignorant of what computers do, or what the human mind does, or both.

OSC Answers
Haven't seen it. Don't want to. Looked boring and silly, and from what I hear, it was.

OSC Answers
It was just a silly fad. It's already over. The important uses of TV and film are as storytelling media. It is storytelling that human beings hunger for, and always will. TV, film, and literature tell stories differently. But they still tell stories - why people do the things they do.

OSC Answers
We're negotiating with Miramax on Ender's Game. I have other projects in the works -- Enchantment is under option with a producer. And I just completed a twelve-minute comedy. I hope to have it up online as streaming video in a few months. Check out my websites -- www.hatrack.com and www.frescopix.com.