End Game for Ender's Game?

I first heard of Orson Scott Card in 1977. That fall an acquaintance of mine came into the office of the magazine I worked on in college and announced that he'd had his first story published in the August 1977 issue of the science fiction magazine Analog. It was a novelette called "Ender's Game."

I congratulated my friend, who we'll call "Plucky." I remembered the story and had been unimpressed: it was a kid story, and I hated kid stories. It was typical adolescent wish fulfillment, which I found uninteresting and unmemorable. Not wanting to offend, I wracked my brain to find something inoffensive to say and came up with, "Wasn't that published under the name Orson Scott Card?"

Yes, Plucky said, and he launched into the story of how he came up with the pseudonym. He'd met with Ben Bova (the editor of the magazine at the time) in the Analog offices in New York. Bova reached into a desk drawer and pulled out some cards and pieced the name together. Voila! Instant pen name.

Several months later the nominations for the 1978 Hugo Awards were published in Locus magazine, along with pictures of the authors. It turned out Plucky had lied about the whole thing: he wasn't Orson Scott Card. When I mentioned this story to others who knew him they said, "That's why his nickname is Plucky."

"Ender's Game" didn't win the Hugo that year. But the novelization did in 1986. It was optioned by various movie studios, and finally Ender's Game is a major motion picture, starring Harrison Ford, to be released this fall.

Which has caused Orson Scott Card to reappear on my radar. It turns out that Card is a Mormon and staunch opponent of gay marriage. He's been railing against homosexuality for years. And now people who object to Card's never-ending vilification of the gay and lesbian community are calling for a boycott of his movie. Card's response:

By Monday evening, Mr. Card was issuing a public plea for tolerance of his views — “with the recent Supreme Court ruling, the gay marriage issue becomes moot,” he noted in a statement to the Entertainment Weekly Web site — in response to a planned boycott that had burst into prominence only the day before, when The Huffington Post published an article about a Web site called Skipendersgame.com.

Card sure does have a lot of gall. In an impassioned diatribe against gay marriage, abortion, no-fault divorce, adultery, and RICO laws applied to anti-abortion terrorists, he wrote in 2008:

Because when government is the enemy of marriage, then the people who are actually creating successful marriages have no choice but to change governments, by whatever means is made possible or necessary.

It sure does sound like Card was calling for the violent overthrow of the government should gay marriage be legalized. It was just fine for Card and the Mormons to spend millions of dollars to write their intolerance of gays and lesbians into the California constitution. But now that Card stands to lose millions of dollars if the movie flops, he pleads for tolerance of his reactionary views. Because five geezers in Washington made the very core of his moral and religious beliefs moot.

But everything about the Mormon high-horse about homosexuality rankles: a major pillar of Card's Deseret diatribe was his impassioned defense of monogamy. But the very basis of the Mormon faith is polygamy. Many Mormons still practice polygamy, with some taking child brides and going to jail for it. There are even TV shows about it.

Polygamy is required to maximize the number of descendants males can have so that they can achieve maximum godhood. More descendants = more power. The Mormon Church was forced to redact all that when the big bad federal government made polygamy illegal. But that's why Mormons have scoured genealogical records the world over for people to baptize, going so far as to posthumously baptize Jews killed in concentration camps. Why? So that Mormons can get their own planets to be gods of. According to the Mormons, God was just a regular Joe from a planet named Kolob. We can all be gods (well, at least us men) if we knock up enough women. Screwing your way to godhood!

Now that sounds like the plot of another award-winning science fiction adolescent wish-fulfillment novel.