7,957 words
posted:  august 29,  1998

[The material below is an edited version of a
discussion held at MIT on november 20, 1997.]

Speaker: My name is Matthew Ender and so. . . (APPLAUSE) You can imagine how many times I get asked if I've read your books. I know "Ender" is a really rare Lichtensteinian name, but I also think it could be the destructive Ender, like Alvin Maker, you know, Ender? Where did his name come from?

Card: It's there because I was 25 years old, 24 years old, and I was writing my first hard SF story and I didn't know how. I just knew there had to be rivets in it. And so, I thought, you know, "'End Game.' Well, let's give him a name that sounds like that. His name can't be 'End.' Well, what about 'Ender'?" That's where the name came from, and I was doing the stupid, amateur, novice sci-fi thing of giving. . . . Names are the most conservative aspect of language. So I have everybody speak normal English, but I give them weird names. Yeah, right. You know, it's the opposite of the way language actually functions, so it was just pure boneheadedness. I hope that that satisfies you. (APPLAUSE).

By the time I wrote the novel, I knew a little bit better and so I knew to have his real name be "Andrew" and make it a childhood nickname. You know, I'm embarrassed.

Speaker: This question's for Orson Scott Card. I'm not a science fiction reader. I don't read science fiction, but someone forced me to read Ender's Game, and it's part of like initiation into MIT. And I love it. And everyone I've ever talked to that's read it has absolutely loved it. And I think one of the large reasons is because so many people. . . .

Card: I, by the way, will be happy to provide you with copies of reviews to prove to the contrary that there actually are other views.

Speaker: Ok, well, my pool is limited. I think that a lot of the people that I've talked to have identified with Ender but the more people I've talked to, I've run across people and also read things from people who are convinced that they are Ender. (LAUGHTER)

Card: Kind of scary, isn't it? (LAUGHTER)

Speaker: Yes, and I'm sure you've gotten this response. I'm sure you've heard from many people that say, "Oh, I identified. It's an amazing book." But I also am sure you've heard from people that think that you're writing about them. And I was just wondering if you find this exciting or amusing?

And so I'm grateful when a story of mine provides for a need that somebody has. At the same time, the people who tell me that they've read Ender's Game ten or fifteen times, I think, "Well, there are other good books." And I wonder what hunger is being satisfied by that particular story, but I don't despise them for that. I'm just grateful that they found it in a relatively harmless way.

But sometimes. . . . I mean, the most disturbing letter I had is from a guy who--he sent me three letters first that consisted of just "Why? why? why? why? why? Oh, why? why? why? Oh, why?" etc. which obviously told me that I was dealing with a rational person. But when the real letter finally came, I understood the anguish he was going through because he was somebody who was really drawn to the torment and torture of children. He claimed in the letter that he had never done it, but for him Ender's Game was an extremely arousing book, because of how cruelly Ender's treated. And I wanted then to burn every copy of the book because I just thought, "Oh, I've written something that somebody who is tormented by this finds stimulating and it enhances his pleasure." It just made me ashamed of some of the scenes. I thought, "I didn't have to have Mazor Rakin be so physically violent with Ender." I was doing something metaphorical with it, and somebody's taking it as pornography. It just made my flesh crawl.

At the same time, my heart went out to this guy. He didn't ask for these desires. If he ever does exercise those desires, I hope they catch him and stop him. And I'm deeply sorry that my book could be used that way. But I never predicted it. I couldn't have predicted that it would be used that way.

So when we tell our stories, we're not responsible for the way they're used. We're responsible for the most likely usage of them. There's nobody who'll ever learn the facts of life about sex from my books. I've been accused by at least some Mormon readers of writing explicit sex in my books, and I think, "Gee, how did you ever have children"? But they seemed to have solved the problem. I understand that there's somebody, here at MIT, who has identified not with Ender but with Colonel Graff, and I think, "That's interesting." Colonel Graff was based on me, just a guy who's muddling through doing the best job that he can, who really is not up to the job he's been given, and who's fighting his waistline, because when he's tense, he eats too much. I just threw my life into Colonel Graff. And then I find somebody's using him for political purposes? And as a role model? And I just go, "What's that?". I can't be responsible for what people do with my work, but when somebody is just really hungry and reads it over and over again, I hope that what it's doing for them is good. That's all I can do is just hope that it's doing good.

The other question: I know you're a deeply religious person and I'm quite interested in the influence it had on books like Ender's Game and others of the non-explicitly religious books you've written.

Card: Let me answer the second one first. When I want to write openly about religion, I do. And I direct it at the Mormon audience. When I'm writing, sometimes I'll put little things in there that are like waving my hand to Mormon readers, and that's between me and them, but the book never hinges on that. It's never vital to know that. I try not to put religion overtly into most of my fiction, to put the religious ideas and my beliefs in it, because I trust that my real beliefs are going to emerge, no matter what. So why should I try to put them in overtly and turn my fiction into essays? My fiction's much more powerful when I'm not doing that.

But what was the other question? 'Cause it's really also to Joe Haldeman. The same thing's true of Forever War, you know. I have so many people who say to me, "Why can't you ever write anything as good as Ender's Game?," and I think, "Do you think I haven't tried? Do you think I'm so insane that if I knew how to write another book as popular as Ender's Game, I wouldn't do it?" I'd love to. That's what I thought I was doing with Song Master. That's what I thought I was doing with the Homecoming series. But I was wrong. They're not as popular. So I don't know what the trick is. The only thing I could do is write Ender's Game again, and I don't want to do that 'cause it's there. But Ender has been vedddy, vedddy good to me. So I don't mind that. If people love Ender's Game, that's great. I'm not gonna complain about that.

Besides, it's not like that's the only thing of mine that sells. I have readers for my other books. Every now and then somebody comes up to me and tells me that Heart's Hope is their favorite novel of mine. And I just think, "Well, what kind of sick person are you?" (LAUGHTER) But I'm proud of all my children, and if somebody loves one of my kids, that's great.

Speaker: What made you choose children as the instruments of the war, what made you choose children?

Card: 'Cause that's who we send off to war, children. I just made it more obvious. It was science fiction so I could make it more obvious. We send children off to war and they live in the world we create for them. And when we tell them war is bad, then they believe that. And if we tell them war is noble and righteous and you're saving society, saving the world for democracy, then they believe that. They believe the story we tell them and they die for it, one way or the other.

Speaker: I have a question about writing actually. When you create a story, you have this story-line you want to tell and generally you have a whole lot of really "out there" ideas that you want to convey. Do they ever get in the way?

Card: The ideas?

Speaker: The ideas and the story-line? Do they conflict? Do they always come together perfectly?

Steele: Sometimes, sometimes not. If they start to conflict this is when it's time to go down to the bar and have a drink and think about it.

Card: Well, that works for you guys who aren't Mormons! (LAUGHTER)

Steele: Well, then you open up a Pepsi.

Card: No, I just munch potato chips, that's what.

Steele: OK. OK. I'd go with the exception of stories that come to me immediately, and I know exactly what I'm doing from the get-go, like this one here. There's a long gestation process and this goes with short fiction as well as the novels. And part of that is figuring out what parts of the story work and what parts do not, which characters need to be there, which characters are completely superfluous. Sometimes I have to get into the story, like 100 pages or more, before I realize that this character is doing nothing but wise-cracking and walking around in circles. Then I have to go back at some point and take him out of there, just remove him, throw him out of the story, continue on. And this can go with other elements as well. So that's part of the creative process, to find out and analyze what works in the story and what does not.

And it's not an easy thing to do, and half the time when I begin to work on a novel, it crashes before the first 100 pages are up. When I say, "crashes," it means I suddenly realize "I don't know what this book is about. It isn't working. It's boring the hell out of me." That's when I call my agent and say, "Martha, I'm not writing this book. Better call the publisher and tell her that we're not going to be signing the contract on this thing." Martha, my agent, is used to this by now. I just did it to her again this last month. I'm surprised she's still my agent. I think she's surprised, too. But that's part of the process. It's very painful, but sometimes it feels like having root canal surgery over the course of 10 months. But that's part of the pain of it.

Haldeman: I'm a slow, cautious writer. I know people who've thrown away hundreds of pages. My friend, William Price Fox, is a Southern novelist and he writes about 20 pages a day. After dinner he writes 20 pages. And when he gets up in the morning, he takes about 10 pages out of that which he'll keep. He spends the morning re-writing the rough draft of the day before. And he was telling me he wrote a best-seller called, Ruby Red. And he had written about 200 pages of this thing when he realized that the wrong person was telling the story. He threw away 200 pages and started over. It takes me about a year to write 200 pages of a novel.

Card: Yeah, but see, you write the right 200 pages to start with.

Haldeman: That's exactly it. It's a different way of coming around to writing a novel because by the time I've written 200 pages, by god, I know they belong there. It's sort of like building a pyramid, slowly but surely I go up. But I've never had to do anything that drastic. On the other hand, it takes me two years to write a novel.

Card: I don't think I've ever thrown away 200 pages but I've thrown away more than 100 at a time. And I always figure I can write it again, and it'll be better the second time through. So I'm not bothered by that. That's why with questions like that, I always think, "Well, you really must go through a different writing process than I go through," because ideas are cheap. And what matters is character and relationship and society, and whether that's clicking. And if that's not working, then I throw it away and I go back and find a different point of view character. Or I find the angle of approach, or I find what's wrong with the people.

But as far as the scientific ideas, I don't write hard SF. I don't have to slide-rule this stuff. It doesn't have to work. I black-box everything, you know. My science is all in little black boxes. You stick the nickel in and you get the effect out. I just change the scientific stuff around until it fits the society I want to create.

Haldeman: It's not the ideas, the ideas are easy. All you have to do is read the "Scientist" every week, and you've got more ideas than ten people can use.

Card: But it's never the heart of the story. The heart of the story is always the people, and that's what I care about. That's what I'm working on.

Speaker: One of the recent controversies is that many artists are very concerned about copyright and maintaining the strength of copyright in a digital environment. I mean, you can say, "Well, I'm an author of books. People always want to sit around and read books under a tree or something like that, so I'll be OK." But the Web's much more convenient than a book, even, because you can load so many of them into it. Do either of you lie awake at night going, "Oh, my god, oh, my god," or do you have plans to deal with this?

Card: My publisher had to force me to stop putting my manuscripts up on-line. I was putting them up, and people were downloading them for free. But that's because I actually understand enough about the publishing business to know that what I need to find is a lot more readers. And if the Net can bring me more readers or if passing copies of my bulky manuscripts around, hand to hand, would get me more readers, that's fine with me.

The Net, the on-line stuff doesn't do anything that libraries haven't been doing for years--letting people pick up copies for free. And I'm not terribly worried about it because it's so darned inconvenient to download them. Now if they ever actually come up with a convenient book-reader--I doubt it, I don't think that the technology is possible because I think that the fundamental flaw is that it's always linear access, you know. Any device that can only display one page at a time, or even two pages at a time, can't compare with a book which you can flip back and forth conveniently. I just don't see it, and books are so darn cheap. I just don't see them dying. But, maybe, I'm wrong. You know, I could be wrong.

Haldeman: There was a book-reader demonstrated here last month that looks like a book.

Card: Really?

Haldeman: Yeah, it has pages that you turn, but you download them.

And it was absolutely hysterical. It goes to the outside and there's the actor wearing this big, clunky VR gear pantomiming turning the pages of a book.

Every now and then, you see technology which is introduced and that's very fancy and wonderful and very James Bond. And it is predicted to be the wave of the future, and it is put out there on the market and it absolutely goes nowhere. This is a very old story. You know, Beta-Max, 8-track tapes. The latest has been Entertainment VR, that is to say, VR helmets used for games and so forth. The two companies, I understand, that have put these things out have either gone bankrupt or have filed for bankruptcy. And the latest was the "Book Man" which came out a few years ago. I actually saw one in the store and played with it. And it reminded me of that "Saturday Night Live" skit because here you had this thing that was a palm-size computer and, it had an awful Air 11 novel loaded into it as the demonstrator. And it took you forever to scroll up and down the first page of the thing. And not only that, but when I looked at this thing, I realized, "Ye gods, I can't do with this what I would usually do with any Air ll novel," which is throw it across the room because I'd break the damn computer.

Card: They gotta have a little thing that you can run when you hate the book. You punch the "Kill" button and then you can watch it burn on the screen.

Haldeman: It sends a jolt of electricity to the author.

Card: Yeah, that's it. Boy, that's a technology I don't need. (LAUGHTER)

And this has been predicted as being the wave of the future for the last 10 years. And, yeah, you can download short stories--I put a couple of short stories on the Web. I haven't had anybody come up and want me to autograph one of my stories that have been downloaded. In fact, I've never run into anybody who's even read any of my stories that I've put on the Web. It's Edsel time, you know.

Card: I actually agree with you, but I'm gonna go ahead and state the other case anyway because I want to be down as being prescient, if it turns out we're wrong.

Steele: Yeah, the airplane'll never fly!

And there were really two of them. When the talkies first came out, they were still using a wax disk. That was how it was done. The film where the sound was recorded with light waves was already available. But the sound quality was so low, and the ambient light could add hiss to the sound, so they hadn't isolated it well enough yet. So the technology we use today, or the forebear of it, was there but they weren't using it. The main thing was they just got the sound quality up, and it was amplification that was the big battle. You know, if you were just sitting there with the Victrola horn pumping out the sound, it's not enough to fill a theatre. And so when they finally invented the amplifier, then we got the talking movies.

So, maybe, we're really just waiting for the right technology, waiting for the technology to finally catch up. At that point, I'm still not worried because the only thing that drove movies was content. Yes, for the first year of talkies, you put anything on with sound--and I mean anything. Just check out "Broadway Melody" of 1932, you know. It's a horrible, horrible film, but they put anything on. And it was great, because they were talking.

But after about a year, the people started going, "Yeah, well, so what's the story?" And they wouldn't look at silent movies but they also wouldn't look at bad talking movies. You know, you actually had to have a plot, you had to have acting, stuff like that.

And I think the same thing is going to be true with these books. If they actually do get virtual books, they're still gonna wanna read a great story and so the authors are still gonna have to get paid. And so if the authors end up getting so ripped off that they aren't making money at it, people will start catching on that they're not getting new books. People aren't stupid. They'll figure out a way to pay authors and they'll go along with paying it. It's the publishers that they don't want to pay. (APPLAUSE)

Because it's something that I have said now and then to my publisher, to his great annoyance. I love my publisher dearly. Tom Doherty is an honest man and a good book salesman, but I have pointed out upon several occasions that 100% of the value of my books comes from what I have put into it. I mean, this should be obvious. No matter what they do with the cover, no matter what they do with selling it, they are not adding value to the product. They're just adding the delivery system. And if the delivery system changes but the text is still there, I'm still safe. It's them--they're the ones who will be out of a job, not me.

Steele: The great quest of publishing has been trying to find a way to get writers out of the loop.

Speaker: Earlier you were addressing the idea of community and the idea of community and computers, Internet building communities. Recently we've had a lot of backlash against the Net. FOX TV did some diatribes against the Internet. "All Things Considered," on NPR, also took a swipe at it, saying people shouldn't discuss ideas over the Internet 'cause they are not qualified journalists. I was wondering if you guys would like to comment on this attempt to squelch the free exchange of ideas.

Card: Well, I mean, people who complain about unqualified people speaking because they're not qualified journalists, this is just so funny that it's hard to believe. I'm sorry. I listen to "All Things Considered," but please, excuse me. What qualifications do journalists have? Journalism school? Ha! Ha! (APPLAUSE) Pardon me.

Steele: But you're right.

Card: I mean, c'mon, let's face it. Anybody who tells a story is telling the news, is being a journalist. And so, you know, unqualified? Of course, there are unqualified opinions. Walk into any bar, and you'll hear unqualified opinions. That's what the Internet is. And it'll improve when we finally get people who realize that what the Internet needs is editors. Right now, everybody treats editing as if it were censorship. "Ah, you're censoring me. How can you remove my post?" Well, I'm removing your post because it's stupid and offensive. And this is my web-site, and if I find your post stupid and offensive and uninteresting to me or to my readers, my group that assembles, I'm takin' it off. And if you wanna have your freedom of speech, go speak on somebody else's web-site!"

So my feeling is what's needed is editing, and when you have really well-edited forums. . . . I mean, the "Letters" column in Harper's magazine is better than the content of most other magazines. And so I read Harper's magazine because, for heaven's sake, I'll be seeing good commentary coming back, even if I have to put up with Louis Lapham's maniacal diatribes in order to get it. That's what will drive content onto the Internet.

Card: I don't know. Every now and then, I go to the ocean and I pee against it, you know, and try to force the tide back. (APPLAUSE)

Steele: The Internet is like the electronic version of Speakers Corner in England. If any of you guys have been to London, I'm sure many of you have, and if you ever go to Speakers Corner, every raving idiot in the world comes in there and mouths off. I've seen something like that with "Lollapalooza" where they've had the tent, where they had a microphone, and anybody could get in there and rant for as much as they wanted to. And, you know, telling people, "No, please, don't go to this place; it's god-awful; you'll never learn anything" is absolutely ludicrous. People are gonna go there regardless.

You have to be a science fiction fan to really understand the allusion that I'm talking about here. It used to be that there were lots of fanzines that were published, and these things were done by mimeograph. And they were very cheap and inexpensive and they floated around. There was one that a guy named Ervin Coach published years ago called, "Maybe." And Ervin did not edit. He simply reprinted everything verbatim. He didn't go in there and correct anybody on facts or grammar or spelling. If you sent a letter to him, he simply printed it verbatim. And you stood or you fell on how well you did in that. When I was in high-school, I didn't know what a dictionary was so I never really bothered to--oh, I knew what a dictionary was, it was a thing that I sat on. And so, if you misspelled words and didn't know grammar, then you looked like an idiot. The people who did these types of things, readers disregarded their opinions. And those who could state their opinions well and so forth and obviously were in possession of solid facts, people paid attention to them. And that's the Internet. It's a big, damn fanzine. Pure and simple.

The Internet? We had the same kind of wave, you know. Everybody had to try it. You gotta get on-line. Gotta get on-line. And, you know, what did they have? Just a kind of glorified brochure rack with inferior printing. The Internet was boring. I didn't go on for two or three years because every time I did, it was just tedious. But there were people who were doing research. They were getting good value out of it. But they were getting that before the craze. And they're getting that still. And I used it for e-mail all the time. That's great, you know. E-mail's terrific because I need that. I don't need the brochure rack.

Well, now there are actually some web-sites that are becoming content-providers, that are becoming entertainment media, or that are allowing for a genuine community that I actually want to associate with. I now spend a little more time on-line. First of all, it's cool to be hip and on-line. But now everybody's on-line, so now it's cool to be above it. That's all.

Speaker: I think it's competition, that certain media have the ability to change the way people are thinking. You hear the same news stories on every TV station. On the Internet, although you hear the crazy, the idiotic and the interesting, you can address issues. People are exchanging ideas about issues.

Card: You gotta remember the news media are tied to networks that are fading. They are having more and more competition. FOX News is coming on and actually presenting a different point of view, so it's not so monolithic. The curve has always been, you read about it in Atlantic or Harper's, then a year later it's on NPR, and then six months later it hits the networks, the regular networks. I mean, that's the way most of the deep news stories go. You just add the Internet into the loop. But remember the Internet is 99% nonsense. Most of what you hear on there is silly rumors. But nobody can control it, nobody can fight it, because the Internet isn't one thing. It's whatever anybody puts up.

Speaker: I'm just wondering what drew the two of you to science fiction. You're not writing romance or mysteries.

Card: By the way, people keep saying the two of us, and there are two of us who read. But there are three science fiction writers up here. And four people who live in science fiction, so all of us have been drawn to science fiction.

Steele: That was the first thing that I think I remember reading. Actually, the first novel that I read was Rocketship Galileo by Robert A. Heinlein. When my sister went off to college in the late sixties, she pulled a very interesting ploy. She had been trying to get me to read books. I was only reading comic books and things like this and wasn't really reading anything at all. So she had been into reading SF. She was subscribing to "Fantasy" and "Science Fiction" and had a number of books. And so she hid them knowing that her eight-year old brother, as soon as she was out of the house, would go raiding her room, trying to find all the cool stuff that she had left behind. And that's how I found a box full of Bradbury and Jack Vance and Isaac Asimov and Heinlein and everybody else in the world.

And when I was about 15 years old I decided that--I had gone through the phases of wanting to be a fireman and a policeman and an astronaut and everything like that--and when I was 15 years old I decided, "Hey, I want to be a science-fiction writer." I consider myself extremely lucky that I am one of those people who actually grew up to be able to do what they wanted to do when they were a kid. It's a nice thing.

Haldeman: When I was in the 4th grade I got a Christmas present, a novel called, Rocket Jock by Philip St. John who was actually Lester del Rey. And I read through it. It was a really dumb science fiction novel, I know now. But I'd never seen anything like that and when I finished it, I just moved back to the first page and I read it again. And I must have read it ten times, over and over. I couldn't get my mind off of it. And I took it to school and read it under the desk. And I had a teacher named Mrs. Champers who was a saint because when she saw what I was doing, instead of just taking the book away from me, she brought me some good science fiction. (LAUGHTER/APPLAUSE) She asked her daughter what a fourth-grader might be able to understand and brought me some Heinlein juveniles and Asimov juveniles, and I was in seventh heaven. I was hooked actually, you know. I had a pusher now. I never recovered. I just always knew I'd write the stuff. I'd never thought I'd make a living at it. I guess by the time I was 40, I realized I was making a living at it.

Jenkins: All right, I guess I'm one of the media science fiction fans. I grew up in Atlanta during the civil rights era, segregated neighborhoods, segregated schools, and I turned on "Star Trek" on television, and what I saw was a vision of a future that had black people in it, that had Asian-Americans in it, that had Russians in it, that had a picture of a community that worked together. And that got me excited about a world larger than what I was seeing in my own neighborhood. And I guess I've always been drawn to a representation of a future that deals with the possibility of change, people getting along, of communities, and of imagining an alien as someone whom we need to know better. It developed slowly that I had written about science fiction and have become an avid reader of literary science fiction. But media science fiction is what hooked me and got me into science fiction.

But I was also reading Williamsburg novels. And Nortoffno Hall's The Bounty trilogy. Science fiction was just part of the world, but it wasn't the whole world, and it didn't come to me as any particularly special revelation. When I fell in love with the art of writing it was as a theatre person. I was writing plays, and it was acting that I loved, and directing--and musicals, musical comedy. It was Sondheim who was my hero, not Heinlein.

In the same era when everybody else was "grocking" and reading Stranger in a Strange Land, I was singing the score to Man of La Mancha. So I was a different kind of geek. But when theatre was proving to cost me more money than it made me, and I learned that to my great sorrow--I still actually owe some of that money; maybe, I oughta pay it. I needed to write something and I knew that science fiction had a short story market, and I tried writing some science fiction stories and some other things just as much. So I'd written 30 plays and two science fiction short stories, but when it was time to try to sell fiction, science fiction was the obvious market to try for me.

And I was so ignorant that I sent a woodsy story to "Analog." I'd never read an issue of "Analog." I didn't know what hard SF was versus soft SF. I'd read a little Zenna Henderson. I knew that it was in the science fiction section if you had people who could think to each other. So, you know, I had a story like that. And Ben Bova didn't like it, so I sent him Ender's Game 'cause it had rivets. So it sounds kind of cynical but it's not. I mean, I like science fiction, it's a wonderful audience, that's what it is. You can write to people in the science fiction audience and they'll follow you into really weird places.

And it allows a writer enormous power of clarifying things. Writing mainstream, in some ways, is harder because I don't have my tool box. There are so many things I can't do when I'm confined to reality. But I also enjoy writing mainstream stuff. The TV series that I'm doing a pilot for called "The Gate" is really much more-- the tagline, the joking tagline is "my so-called X-Files." But I'm much more interested in the teenagers in high-school and the culture and the transformations of their lives than I am in the cool sci-fi stuff, the men-in-black quotient of the aliens. And that's all that's really interested me in science fiction.

There are some hard SF writers that I've enjoyed, but they've never been transformative for me. It's the humanity in it that matters to me. So I count science fiction writers among my favorite writers and non-SF writers among my favorite writers. And I guess I've always just kind of felt that the fans that I meet who read nothing but SF, they must be hungry for something that I've never hungered for because I could never live on a diet like that.

Speaker: Do you have any opinions about the literary potential of hypertext?

Card: I have opinions on it, but I have opinions about everything whether I have information on it or not. (LAUGHTER) But my view of it is that it's exactly as interesting as a "choose your own adventure," meaning it's a game, not a story, because people traditionally have just rejected "choose your own ending" movies. Remember the movie "Clue"? Besides being a terrible movie, which really was a strike against it right there, people really hated the fact that you didn't know which ending you were going to get because when you come to a story, a fictional story, you're not reading it because it really happened. So what are you reading it for? You're reading it because it asserts something about the world, and if it doesn't assert an ending, why put yourself through that?

I don't think open-ended ones will ever work, because we go to stories because we want authority, not authority in the political sense, but authority in the sense of telling us why the characters do what they do and what it all leads to.

But in the sense that hypertext could be a way to follow many different threads through a story, I think it's cool. But the danger there is that you spend a lot of time writing threads no one will ever read. And I think the real best use of it is actually in games, not in fiction. But that doesn't mean that it won't happen and it won't work, and that I haven't toyed with the idea of doing it myself.

Steele: A few years ago, a noted literary writer, Robert Coover, wrote a novel called, The Public Burning, at a workshop class in which they were experimenting with hypertext fiction, in which everybody in there was working on all sorts of different threads and so forth. And he wrote an article that was published, as I recall, in the New York Times "Book Review" about how they had created this vast, mosaic novel that didn't follow a linear form but kind of spewed out in all directions. And Coover grandly proclaimed that this was the future of the American novel and that in a very short time, this is where all novels were going to be.

I think this is like, once again, this is Beta-Max time. Hypertext is going to be more applicable for, let's say, the development of role-playing games than as the future of the novel. There is a beginning and a middle and the end in that, and you can do several different variations, but at some point or another, it stops becoming a story and becomes something completely different.

Card: But not simultaneously. You can't have two story streams. Our minds aren't built to hear that. We can hear polyphony, but we can't follow the threads of. . . .

Steele: At a certain point, though, it breaks down. This is what I was trying to get at earlier that movies are movies, and books are books, and computer games are computer games. And now music is music. I mean, there are certain comparisons and there are certain places where it touches together, but they're still distinctly different forms.

Haldeman: That doesn't mean we won't eventually develop an aesthetic that appreciates this kind of polyphony in fiction- telling, but, right now, we don't have it. To me the analogy that occurs is the difference between the spoken epic, the chanted story that we had before writing, and the actual written story where you can stop at any time and go back and check things out. You can look ahead to see how it ends and so forth and so on--just a whole new dimension. And if you told somebody who had only heard stories that storytellers had spoken, he or she might not even understand what you were talking about when you tried to describe what a written story was about, why you would prefer it. And so when you talk about a hypertext, augmented text, it's hard for us to see why anybody'd want to do it. Every story exists as hypertext in the writer's original conception because what the writer does is go through and choose which story has the most authority, which story has the thing that makes people turn the pages. So, you know, it's just part of the writing process.

Card: When I want you to know what's going on over here, I don't make you push a button and go over there. I simply put a chapter in that's about what's going on over there. So I give it to you. It may look like it's in a linear fashion but I don't tell a linear story unless it happens to go that way.

Haldeman: The author has killed a thousand stories by the time he gets to the end of the story he's writing. And if you were to read the other 999, you might find that several of them were better for you but you aren't writing the story, so. . . .

I'm already working on a couple of projects that are games. They're visual because I think that works better than textual because there's so much slogging you have to do through text and you need to cut out. In order to have time value, you have to cut out the tritest, and sometimes the picture is worth more than a thousand words. I have a game that I'm developing called "House Cat," where the story is a murder mystery in a Victorian mansion, but you control only the cat. And it is impossible on one play-through to see all the scenes. You can go into rooms, but you get kicked out by the guy who's allergic to the cat. If a bird flies by the window, the cat takes off and does what cats do. And so it's meant to be distracting and difficult. It's a sort of an eavesdropped story. Will it work? I don't know, but it's kinda fun. Will it be the wave of the future? Unlike some people, I don't claim that anything's the wave of the future. I've read enough science fiction to know that we have no clue what the wave of the future is. But I just think it's gonna be a cool game, you know. I think it'll be fun to play. There's no winning, there's no losing. You watch it like soap opera. Or if you're a little kid, you play with the cat, and that's fine with me.

And I have another one that I've been developing where you start out with just a scene and you just click anywhere in the picture and you get characters. And you can move backward and forward in time through their lives. So it's a story of an entire community, and there's a lot of visuals. There's some mapping, and it's very complicated. And who knows? Maybe nobody will even want it.

And we're designing it so that there are hooks in the program so that other people can have their own stories, which is really kind of the thing that we're talkin' about. And there's a lot of text in it, and there's a lot of visuals in it. And it may just be a crock or it may be really good.

But you know what I think it all depends on? If people care about and believe in the story, just like it does with regular stories now. It's all about whether you understand it, care about it, believe in it. And if that works, then the medium will work.