Feature: Orson Scott Card Interview (page 2) for PC on GamePro.com.

Feature: Orson Scott Card Interview (page 2)

Feature by STARDINGO | 03/05/2004 | 15:35:11 PM PST

GP: Do you have any say in who?s getting cast? When I first heard Ender?s Game movie, I thought, oh wow, child cast?that?s going to be really tough.

OSC: When you think about it, we?ve never had more than one excellent child actor working on a film at a time, ever. We need at least two outstanding ones, and preferably about five. And we?re not talking faces, like Mark Lester in Oliver, or Macauley Calkin in Home Alone. We?re talking about real actors, like Elijah Wood, or Henry Thomas or Haley Joel Osment. We need somebody really extraordinary, and we need the miracle to happen three, four, five times. So good luck to us. But what voice do I have in casting? It?ll be interesting to see. The ultimate voice is always the people putting up the money, and that ain?t me.

GP: How many Ender books are left?

OSC: There?s one more Shadow book after Shadow Puppets, Shadow of the Giant; and at the end of that one, Bean is gone. There is one more book after Children of the Mind that ties together the Shadow books and the Speaker books 3,000 years later. It?ll be fun to see how that goes. And there?s always the chance of me going back and doing my Mazer Rackham book, I?ve wanted to do it for a long time

GP: I had heard originally that was the original concept for the script, which later became Ender?s Game merged with Ender?s Shadow?

OSC: Yeah, that?s what it is. In fact, the real struggle was to keep it from becoming just Ender?s Shadow. Because the character Bean is so?well, he?s just kinda cool and so it would have been very tempting to make it just his movie. But it?s not, and in my script anyway, it?s Ender?s movie, absolutely. But Bean is really important in it.

GP: Do fan requests or does fan advice ever show up in your work?

OSC: Sometimes, whimsically, just for the fun of it. Like my new Alvin book which is coming out this fall, The Crystal City. We had a convention called Ender-Con last summer, and for the Ender trivia contest winner, the promise was that they?d get a cameo in one of my books?which is easy to do. But the thing is, the place I chose for the cameo, I fell in love with the character I was using, and so this guy ended up with his character being one of the major figures in the book. So was I using a fan suggestion? In a sense?the guy had a clubfoot as a kid, and it took a lot of therapy and surgery to deal with the lameness, and so I used that for the character. And so I used a couple of bits from his life, but that kind of thing is pretty rare. Every now and then, though, I?ll follow a suggestion. The title of my novel Children of the Mind was a fan suggestion, that sort of thing.

GP: How much is left of the Alvin series after The Crystal City?

OSC: One more book. It?s in the same position the Shadow books are in. One more. One more after the one that?s out.

GP: Is that a little scary?

OSC: No, no! I?m ready, I?m ready. I?ve got a lot of books under contract that I want to write. I mean, I?ve got two more Pastwatch books, I?ve got to finish my Lovelock series. There?s more to do.

GP: I?d love to see more Pastwatch. To be honest with you, when I first saw that in the store, Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus, I was a little worried, I remember thinking ?that doesn?t sound like it?s a good idea.? But then I read it, it was brilliant.

OSC: I?m glad you like it! I think that was my best science fiction novel.

GP: It was amazing, that one made me cry several times

OSC: Cool?well, thank you! I appreciate that, thanks for being a generous reader.

GP: Do you have any favorite characters in your own books?

OSC: The truth is, by the time I?m done with them, every character is my favorite. I can?t spend time with them without sort of falling in love with them. Even the horrible ones, like Calvin in the Alvin Maker books, or Achilles in the Shadow books. I?m really gonna miss Achilles in the next book. It was kinda cool to have him driving things.

GP: Have any other favorite books? Anything you?re reading now really rocking your world?

OSC: Well, I?m reading constantly. I just finished reading Sean Russell?s 4-book series set in a kind of a weird fantasy world that?s kind of like 18th-century England. Really cool, cool book?I loved that. And I just finished the Kate Remembered book by A. Scott Berg about Katherine Hepburn. I just read lots of different things.

Beans and Ender, two tastes that go great together GP: Looking back, is there anything you?ve regretted or wished you could change in a book?

OSC: Oh, of course. I?m a better writer than I was when I started, but I forgive myself for those errors because I just did the best I could with whatever book I was working on at the time. Every book is its own set of problems; so even though you learn a lot from each book, it doesn?t really help you solve the unique problems to the next book. And so you have to really keep plugging away, and hope you find solutions every time.

GP: Do you ever look back at the first book in a series and wish you had written a plot contingency for, say, Book 9 in a series?

OSC: Well, I?ll tell you, while there weren?t mistakes in Ender?s Game, when I was doing Ender?s Shadow I sure hated being stuck with some of those scenes word for word. Because by the time I got to when the books converged, I really knew Bean way better than I did back in Ender?s Game. I had no plans ever for doing a parallel novel, so I didn?t leave any hooks in which to attach the character of Bean. And so it was like writing a novelization, stuck with someone else?s dialog?only it was me, 15 years before, a different guy, not as good a writer.

GP: Back to Advent?what?s your take on the story?

OSC: Well, I?m still working on it, and there?s changes being made. Not in the flow of the room-to-room, level-to-level passage, but in terms of what it means and how the characters are shaping up. I?ve got a fun relationship going between the brothers, and the real challenge is making the girlfriend character into somebody?our route in her is not as easy to handle in the flow of the game. So let?s see how I solve that particular problem. The alien species, I?m trying to make them so they feel like real living creatures, and that?s another challenge. A lot of times, aliens function the way Englishmen do in American movies from the ?30s and 40s, they?re all just sort of formal and speak in an accent, and that?s about as far as you go. When you think about how aliens function, it?s never a good idea to have two of the same species in the same project because how do you tell them apart? My goal is to make it so they become every bit as vibrant characters as humans.

Many thanks to Orson Scott Card for his time. For more information on Advent Rising, check out the November issue of GamePro when it hits stands.