Orson Scott Card's Three-Decade Run

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Orson Scott Card's Three-Decade Run
January 21, 2011
By TOM SHIPPEY
The Wall Street Journal

Orson Scott Card, one of the greats of contemporary science fiction and fantasy, is best known for two long story sequences. The series that began with 1985's "Ender's Game" (11 books, counting its spin-off "Shadow" series) stars a young hero fighting, initially, against an alien race known as the Formics. The "Alvin Maker" books (six so far, begun in 1987) are set in an "alternate-history," frontier America where folk magic still works. Now Mr. Card has almost simultaneously brought out two books, each starting a fantasy series.

Mr. Card tells us that "The Lost Gate" (Tor, 384 pages, $24.95) has been more than 30 years in gestation; what held him up was working out a proper magic system. To do that, you not only have to show magic working but also have to explain why, for the rest of us, it doesn't. You can have the witches and wizards off to one side of the mundane world, for instance, keeping themselves hidden, as in the "Harry Potter" books. Or you can have old divinities still functioning at a reduced level, as in Neil Gaiman's "American Gods." Or you can set the tales in a different world entirely, as with Ursula Le Guin's "Earthsea." Anything, so long as there is a system of some kind to give the story a spine.

Mr. Card employs bits of each strategy. In "The Lost Gate," Danny North is a member of a magic family whose leaders call themselves things like Thor, Odin and Freya. Long ago, the Norths came from another world, along with other families, setting themselves up here as the gods of the Norse or the Greeks or the Persians. It means, to quote a bit of Mr. Card's brilliant opening sentence, that Danny grew up "surrounded by fairies, ghosts, talking animals, living stories, walking trees, and gods who called up wind and brought down rain."

All the members of the North family have magic talents, such as being a "beastmage" or a "windmage" (able to control animals or weather), except for poor Danny. He seems to be what J.K. Rowling would call a "squib," little better than an ordinary no-Talent person or "muggle"—Mr. Card calls them "drowthers." It turns out, however, that Danny has the rarest talent of all, to be a "gatemage," and this is deadly dangerous. Long ago, Loki, the trickster god of the Norse, closed all magical gates, including the return gate to their home world of Westil. Anyone who can open the gates again will gain great sorcerous power, and the other families are intensely afraid of this.

Danny goes on the run, trying to survive in hardscrabble America. Meanwhile, on Westil itself, it looks as if the long imprisonment of Loki the Gatethief is coming to an end. In future volumes one can expect the two worlds to start to interact, as they did in Philip Pullman's "Dark Materials" trilogy. Mr. Card is giving a kind of tour of fantasy possibilities while integrating them into his intricately imagined system of magic. One of the system's charms is that it explains such a lot: what ghosts are (the fading "outselves" that mages can project), what fairies are (playful creations that mages make from trash, plants and petals), and why all Indo-European gods have such strong family resemblances. The hints of real history behind the families are especially enticing: I look forward to learning more.

Mr. Card's "Pathfinder" (Simon & Schuster, 672 pages, $18.99) is another "boy on the run" story, this time about Rigg, a child who lives by trapping in the forests of a world called Garden and who can see "thin shimmering trails" traced in the air where people and animals have been. But then the man he calls Father dies, his community drives him out and he is forced to flee. Rigg turns out to be a prince in hiding, in a society where a revolutionary council is close to executing all royals. In exile he finds helpers—a friend who can go back in time, a sister who can make herself invisible—but the world of Garden becomes more and more mysterious. Where, exactly, is it? What are the "Walls"? What is the significance of numbers like 19 and 11,191? Why can Rigg see everyone's "paths" but Father's?

As with "The Lost Gate," there is a parallel narrative in "Pathfinder," and it is a classic science-fiction one, not fantasy at all. An experiment with interstellar flight has had unexpected results, which are causing temporal aberrations on Garden. Rigg's life as a trapper helps him to understand that on Garden there are two unrelated sets of animals that cannot interact, even as predator and prey. The set that includes humans has been "superimposed" on the native set by a longpast experiment in "terraforming," which came close to xenocide. In future volumes Rigg will no doubt confront this decision, made by computers, just as the hero of "Ender's Game" had to make amends for his own unwitting near-genocide of the Formics.

"Pathfinder" is billed as a book for young adults, while "The Lost Gate" is not, but the designations could easily be swapped. This just shows what a lot of good work there is in the young-adult and fantasy fields these days. No wonder the two together are making such an impact on the movie industry, including not just the "Narnia" and "Harry Potter" films but Mr. Gaiman's "Stardust" and the upcoming two-part adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien's "Hobbit."

Could Mr. Card's complex explanations and quasi-technologies, like the gate-transits of "Lost Gate," be made visual? It would be a challenge. It may be that Mr. Card is just too literary, too devoted to skill on the verbal level, to make the medium-shift—but then, they said that about Tolkien. What Mr. Card does especially well, perhaps because of his Mormon upbringing and beliefs, is deal with "folk of the fringe," to quote one of his own titles—folk very much like us muggles, sharing nearly all of the disabilities of our humanity, but commanding just that magic something extra that we all wish we had too.
—Mr. Shippey's latest book is "The Shadow-Walkers: Jacob Grimm's Mythology of the Monstrous" (Brepols).