Showing results by author "Orson Scott Card" in All Categories

First Meetings is a collection of three novellas (plus the original "Ender's Game") that journey into the origins and the destiny of one Ender Wiggin.

High above Earth orbits the starship Basilica. On board the huge vessel is a sleeping woman. Of those who made the journey, Shedemei alone has survived the hundreds of years since the Children of Wetchik returned to Earth.

From the end of the 18th century, Americans traveled west to find new homes and new lands. They brought with them the magics of plain people. It is from these roots of the American dream that award-winning writer Orson Scott Card has crafted what the Charlotte Observer called "a uniquely American fantasy." Using the lore and the folk magic of the men and women who settled a continent, and the beliefs of the tribes who were here before them, Card has created an alternate frontier America.

Laz is a side-stepper: a teen with the incredible power to jump his consciousness to alternate versions of himself in parallel worlds. All his life, there was no mistake that a little side-stepping couldn’t fix. Until Laz wakes up one day in a cloning facility on a seemingly abandoned Earth. Laz finds himself surrounded by hundreds of other clones, all dead, and quickly realizes that he too must be a clone of his original self.

Young Alvin returns to the town of his birth and begins his apprenticeship with Makepeace Smith, committing seven years of his life in exchange for the skills and knowledge of a blacksmith. But Alvin must also learn to control and use his own talent, that of a Maker, or else his destiny will be unfulfilled.

Living in a peaceful, prosperous African-American neighborhood in Los Angeles, Mack Street is a mystery child who has somehow found a home. Discovered abandoned in an overgrown park, raised by a blunt-speaking single woman, Mack comes and goes from family to family, a boy who is surrounded by boisterous characters and yet deeply alone.

When Runnel leaves his mountain valley to head for the great city of the water mages, he has no idea of his own magical talents. But he soon finds that without meaning to, he complicates and then endangers the lives of everyone he comes to know and care about. For when it comes to magic, there are rules and laws, and the untrained mage-to-be must be careful not to tap into deep forces and ancient enmities. Otherwise, other people might end up paying the price for his mistakes.

In a post-apocalyptic America, Jamie Teague helps a group of travelers make their way past the murderous Bushwhackers. Jamie comes to find that the strangers are Mormons headed for Utah to avoid being massacred. Knowing that they will die without his help, he agrees to take them as far as his cabin.

This story is included in Orson Scott Card's collection The Folk of the Fringe.

Years after a war that destroyed America, Sam Monson, the governor of the state of Deseret, negotiates a peace treaty with a woman out of his past - on behalf of the son he left behind.

This story is included in Orson Scott Card's collection The Folk of the Fringe.

Peggy is a Torch, able to see the fire burning in each person's heart. She can follow the paths of each person's future, and know each person's most intimate secrets. From the moment of Alvin Maker's birth, when the Unmaker first strove to kill him, she has protected him. Now they are married, and Peggy is a part of Alvin's heart as well as his life. But Alvin's destiny has taken them on separate journeys.

In this thrilling sequel to Seventh Son, Alvin Maker is awakening to many mysteries: his own strange powers, the magic of the American frontier, and the special virtues of its chosen people, the Native Americans. Alvin has discovered his own unique talent for making things whole again. Now he summons all his powers to prevent the tragic war between Native Americans and the white settlers of North America.

A shattering childhood tragedy left Quentin Fears devastated. But the wealthy, enigmatic recluse has experienced the extraordinarily unexpected: love at first sight, with Madeleine. Now he must meet his new wife's family. A bizarre, dysfunctional collection of extreme characters, they are guarding a secret both shocking and terrifying, as is Madeleine herself. And suddenly Quentin Fears must prevent his dream woman from unleashing an ageless malevolence intent on ruling the world.

Too long to be a short story, too short to be a novel - welcome to the surprisingly potent world of the novelette. The award-winning magazine Orson Scott Card's Intergalactic Medicine Show has been an online haven for this powerful form of storytelling since 2005. Now its editors have selected their all-time favorite science fiction novelettes from the magazine's eight-year history and reprinted them together in one big book of listening pleasure.

alaxy. Humanity was slowly making their way out from Earth to the planets and asteroids of the Solar System, exploring and mining and founding colonies. The mining ship El Cavador is far out from Earth, in the deeps of the Kuiper Belt, beyond Pluto. Other mining ships, and the families that live on them, are few and far between this far out. So when El Cavador's telescopes pick up a fast-moving object coming in-system, it's hard to know what to make of it. It's massive and moving at a significant fraction of the speed of light.

How do you systematically destroy a child with love? It's not something that any parent aspires to do, yet a surprising number come perilously close to achieving it.

When little Zanna's oldest brother died just before Christmas, she was left with the gift she had made for him - a picture that only he would have understood. Every Christmas, Zanna's gift is brought out and displayed as a way of including their lost brother in the celebration. This is the story of the life of that family, and of the many gifts they gave each other that could only be understood with love.

Only a few nuclear weapons fell. But in the chaos of famine and plague, there existed a few pockets of order. The strongest of them was the state of Deseret. The climate has changed, and the lake has filled up. There, on the fringes, brave, hardworking pioneers are making the desert bloom again.

Grâce à Ender, le Porte-Parole des Morts, Lusitania est devenue une planète indépendante où Piggies et humains cohabitent tant bien que mal. Les Doryphores, eux, ont décidé de migrer... et risquent de propager sur d'autres mondes le virus de la Descolada, indispensable à la survie des Piggies mais mortel pour l'humanité.

Nearly 100 years before the events of Orson Scott Card's bestselling novel Ender's Game, humans were just beginning to step off Earth and out into the Solar System. A thin web of ships in both asteroid belts; a few stations; a corporate settlement on Luna. No one had seen any sign of other space-faring races; everyone expected that First Contact, if it came, would happen in the future, in the empty reaches between the stars. Then a young navigator on a distant mining ship saw something moving too fast, heading directly for our sun.

Science fiction is rare in theatrical form, but with Posing As People, three unforgettable sci-fi stories by Orson Scott Card are adapted into powerful stage plays by three different writers.