Card (World 44)
Orson Scott Card
(1951 – ; first SF publication, 1977) is one of the most prolific authors included here. The first of Card’s stories I read were
Hot Sleep: The Worthing Chronicle
(which combines telepathy, which is feared, and memory recording, which is dangerous) and
A Planet Called Treason
(where banished rebels develop the ability to generate extra organs — and then sell them). These two convinced me that I wanted to keep an eye out for more of his stories, which has led to plenty of other stand-alone novels and short stories, plus several series. His best known series include the Tales of Alvin Maker (magic-based pre-revolutionary alternative U.S. history, starting with
Seventh Son
; technically fantasy, but definitely worth mentioning), the Homecoming Saga (a world of exiled humans ruled by the Oversoul AI, which decides it is time for its people to recreate space travel and return home to Earth), and the series for which he is best known, beginning with
Ender’s Game
. This premise reads like a juvenile story — a young boy, Ender Wiggin, is conscripted to learn and practice war games — but the war and the games turn out to be very real. The consequences of Ender’s exceptional skill in
Ender’s Game
are accurately foreshadowed in the titles of the next two stories in the series:
Speaker for the Dead
and
Xenocide
.
A Hive-Queen Cocoon
In the final chapter of Ender’s Game , Ender commits to finding a new world for a hive-queen of the Formic race he has conquered. Until he can do so, the queen remains a pupa in a cocoon, the cocoon that the world of Card exports throughout the galaxy.