Orson Scott Card is one of the greatest sci-fi authors of all time. He s the author of Ender's Game, a massive franchise of books, a graphic novel, and a Hollywood blockbuster. In our conversation, we discuss why many sci fiction writers are entering new genres, what drove Scott to write an entire novel as a narrative response to Stephen King s Pet Cemetery, why the Force is the worst part of Star Wars, and attacks from critics on the themes of Ender s Game. Ben Shapiro is a writer, comedian, podcaster, and podcaster. His work can be found in The New York Times, The New Yorker, and The New Republic, and he is a regular contributor to The Hollywood Reporter, The Huffington Post, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. He is also the co-host of the radio show The Dark Side Of, and hosts the TV show The Late Show with Seth Meyers, and is a frequent guest on Comedy Central's Late Night with Stephen Colbert. He's also the host of the podcast The Night Shift, which he hosts with his wife, Amy Poehler, and his new show on HBO's The Late Night Show with Stephen King, which is on HBO s The Tonight Show with Rachel Maddow. Subscribe to the podcast on Apple Podcasts, wherever you get your shows, and wherever else you re listening to your favorite podcast. You can also become a supporter of the show by becoming a patron of The Weekly Standard, Rate/Review/subscribe, become a Friend of the Weekly Standard or join our FB page, and get 20% off the Dailywire, and much more! Subscribe and review the show on all of the great resources that Ben Shapiro loves to read and listen to, including The Ben Shapiro's newest book recommendations, The Dark Lord's newest podcast, The Secret Life of the world's best new books, The Realest Man on the Internet. Click here. Learn more about Ben Shapiro on his new novel, "Ender's Game." Watch the video version of his new book, "The Dark Lord" on Amazon Prime Video, "Mr. Scott Card's "The Force Is The Worst Partially Explained." Watch this episode of The Darkly Explained? on his YouTube channel, "Dr. John's Game of the Force"? Subscribe on Vimeo and subscribe on Audible and subscribe to his podcast, wherever else he's on it's available, right now!
00:00:04.000I write novels about humans, but humans begin as children.
00:00:07.000And my model was, I want to write novels as if they were biographies.
00:00:12.000Ender's Game is one of the biggest science fiction stories of all time.
00:00:16.000It won the Hugo and Nebula awards, those are two of the most prestigious sci-fi literature awards.
00:00:20.000It spawned a giant franchise of books, 19 of them, soon to be 20, as well as graphic novels, even a Hollywood blockbuster.
00:00:26.000To this day, it's still read and cherished by millions of readers 35 years after its release.
00:00:31.000This week, we're going to change gears with a different kind of guest.
00:00:34.000As many of you know, I'm a huge sci-fi fan and a bookworm, so we're talking with Orson Scott Card, one of the biggest names in the genre.
00:00:41.000The Ender's Game story starts with humanity's attempt to prevent the next great war with foreign invaders by having government agencies breed child geniuses and then train them as the ultimate soldiers.
00:00:50.000Aside from the foreign invaders being aliens, this future doesn't seem all that improbable.
00:00:54.000Scott's work is often set where he can imagine the technology and politics of the future.
00:00:58.000These days, sci-fi has been invaded by radical left ideology, writers focusing on social justice street credit rather than stories about the human condition.
00:01:06.000But Scott continues to challenge his readers and himself with a massive body of work, telling stories not just of sci-fi, but magic, fantasy, even religious fiction, and Shakespeare adaptations.
00:01:16.000In our conversation, we discuss why many sci-fi writers are entering new genres, what drove Scott to write an entire novel as a narrative response to Stephen King's Pet Cemetery, why the Force is the worst part of Star Wars, and attacks from critics on the themes of Ender's Game.
00:01:29.000I'm excited to welcome Orson Scott Carr to today's Sunday special.
00:01:41.000If you want to hear the bonus material behind the paywall, you need to go over to dailywire.com slash subscribe and become a member.
00:01:47.000There's going to be all sorts of good stuff over there.
00:01:54.000So why don't we start with the sci-fi genre itself.
00:01:58.000So most of the books that you've written are in the sci-fi genre.
00:02:00.000Why do you choose to write in that genre so much?
00:02:03.000Oh, do you want the short version or the long version?
00:02:07.000The real reason I started writing sci-fi was that back when I was starting to try to write, to make money, to try to pay off the debts of the theatre company I had started, because I was a theatre guy, I thought the only thing I could write that might make money would be science fiction, because if I tried to sell mainstream fiction to the New Yorker or women's fiction to Redbook, I was going to run up against the top writers in those fields.
00:02:35.000But with science fiction, you can't make very much money writing short fiction.
00:02:40.000So all of the short fiction writers that get introduced through the magazines, I knew that they quickly moved to writing novels from which they can make a living.
00:02:49.000So I figured the competition's always removing itself in the science fiction field.
00:02:54.000I'd read enough science fiction that I thought I could write it.
00:02:59.000I was close with the first few things I wrote, but then I wrote one that I thought was a surefire winner.
00:03:06.000I'd thought of it years before, and it was the short story version of Ender's Game.
00:03:10.000And even then, it still took a couple of years before it found its way into print.
00:03:15.000But then, ever since then, that's the place where my fiction has been welcome.
00:03:20.000I've written some things that are definitely not genre, and no one cares, because what the bookstores want is something that they can put in the same section with those books of mine that have have sold, and so it works better if I work within that genre.
00:04:18.000The description that I read that made the most sense to me is that in the world of fantasy, there is sort of an element of the mysterious that doesn't exist as much in the world of science fiction where everything is supposed to be explainable through reason.
00:04:32.000That is closer, that one, than the usual one, which is that science fiction is stuff that has not happened but is possible and fantasy is stuff that doesn't happen and isn't actually possible but we can imagine it.
00:05:01.000Time travel especially, because the string of causality is unbreakable.
00:05:06.000You can't move back to cause that which caused you.
00:05:09.000So it's arguable either way, but I learned the practical definition right away.
00:05:15.000I had written some science fiction stories, and I sent them off to Analog.
00:05:19.000And the new editor, John W. Campbell, had passed away during the time that my manuscript was in the mail.
00:05:26.000And so the new editor read a couple of drafts of stories that now are in my book, The Worthing Saga.
00:05:34.000And I knew they were science fiction, but what I got back was a letter saying, Analog publishes science fiction, and these are obviously fantasy.
00:06:04.000And if your story is illustratable with rivets, it's sci-fi.
00:06:09.000And if it needs trees to be effective, then it's fantasy.
00:06:14.000So when you're creating one of your books, do you start with the characters, or do you start with the plot, or do you start with sort of the world?
00:06:54.000And as soon as I get to that's dumb, then I know I'm probably on to something because I thought of something that doesn't make sense to me.
00:07:01.000And if I thought of something that doesn't make sense, it means it came out of my unconscious because my conscious mind is so flamingly rational that I don't come up with nonsense.
00:07:11.000So the nonsense, then you find a way to explain it.
00:07:33.000What about powers that barely do anything, but they do that thing?
00:07:38.000uh and and the kind of power that you could believe somebody might actually have somebody passing you on the street not wearing spandex might have a power like this uh the most absurd one is that there's a person who in this in this fictional world who knows when someone approaches whether they have an innie or an outie navel and uh this is meaningless absolutely meaningless until she realized that she can detect it even with people that she didn't know were there
00:08:08.000So nobody can sneak up on her because she knows the belly button before they get get close.
00:08:14.000So ends up having a somewhat practical use for her, but is absolutely trivial.
00:08:21.000There's I have a girl who can make people yawn.
00:09:01.000And those micropowers have spawned two novels so far.
00:09:04.000I expect to do more because I have such fun with them.
00:09:07.000Now it turns out that my hero always has something that's maybe a little bit more major than those Deliberately trivial examples, but it's just fun.
00:09:17.000So I started thinking about what micropower would make for an interesting story.
00:09:34.000And so it's not that you can say I lost my whatever and then he goes and finds it.
00:09:40.000It's that he finds something and he can bring it back except if it has any value.
00:09:46.000People are going to assume that the reason he knows where it is and who to take it to is he stole it from them.
00:09:52.000And so he spent his childhood, early childhood, learning the hard way that returning things to people brands you as a thief and gets you beaten up sometimes.
00:11:24.000But it's still very powerful because it's very realistic.
00:11:27.000That's the change that science fiction and fantasy have both made, is you can't just throw magic on the page and make it fantasy.
00:11:35.000You have to make it fantasy that would pass muster with a science fiction writer, because that's who's writing fantasy now, is mostly science fiction writers.
00:11:44.000And they got their training in the discipline of Always having to explain things so they make sense, so there's a logic, so there are rules.
00:11:52.000And so a good fantasy will explain its magic system in such a way that stories can arise out of it, because we know that not just anything can happen.
00:12:03.000I talked to Judson Jerome once, a poet who also wrote for Writer's Digest for many years, and I'd given him my novel Seventh Son, which is the first of my Alvin Maker fantasy series, and he handed it back to me.
00:12:15.000He says, ah, I said, Writing's fine, but when anything can happen, it doesn't matter what happens.
00:12:24.000And that is a true statement, but what he didn't know as a non-fantasy reader was how carefully I had set up the rules of what can and can't happen, so that by the time you're a quarter of the way into the book, the rules are there and they're set and I don't violate them through the next five volumes after that.
00:12:43.000And so he didn't know how to read fantasy, he was not schooled in that, and fantasy readers quickly school themselves.
00:12:52.000Nobody gives a class on how to read fantasy.
00:12:54.000You just read fantasies until you get it.
00:12:57.000And if the story is satisfying, great.
00:13:00.000And if they don't read something else.
00:13:05.000In just one second, I want to ask you about how detailed you get in sort of your outlining process and your prewriting process before you even sit down to write.
00:13:14.000But first, I want to give a moment to give a shout out to all of our advertising partners who help make this show possible.
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00:13:23.000So we appreciate everybody working together during this difficult time.
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00:14:28.000So when it comes to your actual writing process, how much do you do outlining and how much of it is you sort of have a rough idea of where you're going and then you sort of let the characters of the plot take you where you're going?
00:14:38.000I know writers who are both schools on this.
00:14:40.000And that's, in fact, there's more than one school.
00:14:57.000If I need faster than light travel, what is my justification for it?
00:15:01.000Because, you know, we have a grab bag of stuff that all science fiction writers use.
00:15:05.000Back in the 40s and 50s, in the Campbell era of science fiction, the writers were inventing all these things.
00:15:12.000Now we just shop from their shelves and take what we need.
00:15:18.000But that does involve a degree of outlining.
00:15:21.000When I have a character and I have perhaps an antagonist or an obstacle he needs to overcome or a goal, then I'll think of obligatory scenes, things that have to happen.
00:15:31.000And I have to then set up those scenes so they mean something, so that the reader will care.
00:15:35.000And so there's some planning that goes into it.
00:15:38.000I know writers who think like screenwriters, and they write out all the story.
00:15:44.000Not actually writing the prose of the story, but note cards with every important scene, the way screenwriters often do.
00:15:52.000And then they can shuffle these note cards around.
00:15:54.000And paste them in different places on the wall and, you know, in other words, their thought is all on the board.
00:16:02.000I can't do that because anything that I wrote for anything after Chapter 2 is going to be discarded as soon as I find out what's going on in Chapter 1.
00:16:15.000In chapter one, but what if one of my little bit characters that I use as a little placeholder just to get some exposition going turns out to be really fun?
00:16:23.000What if my nonce character is more interesting than my main character?
00:16:29.000I have been known to elevate nonce characters into major figures.
00:16:34.000Sometimes they'll replace somebody who was already in the outline and do the same jobs they needed to do, but later.
00:16:42.000Sometimes they just carve their own way in.
00:16:45.000But the process is pretty flexible, because by the time I'm nearing the end of any novel, The outline is now a relic deserving to be covered with dust.
00:16:58.000It has almost nothing to do with what I ended up writing.
00:17:01.000So I have to plan in order to get the confidence to proceed, but then I don't keep looking back at the outline.
00:17:08.000Now this is frustrating to editors who believe that they're supposed to receive the manuscript that was promised in the outline I gave them.
00:17:16.000Which is even more sketchy, and it's never happened yet that they've gotten that particular story.
00:17:23.000And I've seen an example, an early novel by Dean Kuntz, where it looked obvious to me that after developing a cast of amazing, wonderful characters the readers cared about, He caught up with the point in the outline where they all go into an alien spaceship together, and at that point he was just following the outline.
00:17:42.000And it didn't matter who any of the characters were.
00:17:44.000It's the same thing Stephen King did in The Stand.
00:17:46.000He set up this great cast of characters, and then because of his good Calvinist upbringing, it felt right to him at the very end that after all they did, it amounted to nothing, and the finger of God comes out of the sky and destroys the missile.
00:18:03.000And I just threw the book across the room.
00:18:06.000It was a hardcover, too, so that's an expensive habit.
00:18:08.000But it was just outrageous to me, because I am so not a Calvinist.
00:18:13.000And so, you know, we Mormons aren't Calvinistic, and so we believe that human activity actually matters to God, and therefore, He's not going to make it so that Everything we sacrificed was meaningless.
00:18:31.000I think it's unsatisfying to a lot of people that it just ends with God doing what he could have done in the first place and spared them an awful lot of trouble.
00:18:39.000But that's, you know, each author has to write from his own unconscious and from what feels right and true to him.
00:18:45.000And so I learned very early on that while I admire Stephen King and enjoyed many of his works, especially early ones, I had no desire to write anything that he would write, because I don't like horror, and I'm not sympathetic to it.
00:20:02.000If sales is your only measure, Pet Sematary is a much better book.
00:20:06.000But then again, Pet Sematary hit the shelves marked as written by Stephen King.
00:20:11.000And mine hit the shelves marked as written by Arson Scott Card and without Ender Wiggin in it.
00:20:19.000So, you know, it diminished its chances greatly, but still there are people who tell me that it's my best book, including myself.
00:20:28.000But, you know, it's one of those things where you don't get to pick what the public wants most, and you're just glad that they want anything.
00:20:36.000Let's talk for a second about the messaging in your book.
00:20:38.000So you mentioned that sometimes you'll read other books and you'll feel like there's a message that's being put out there that isn't good.
00:20:44.000By the way, I had the exact same reaction to the stand the first time I read it.
00:20:46.000I thought the first 400 pages of this are pretty breathtaking.
00:20:48.000And by the time we hit the end and everything just explodes, which has become sort of de rigueur for all of King's novels.
00:20:55.000It seems like the last 10 or so novels, basically a bunch of stuff happens and then just everything explodes at the end.
00:21:17.000But when it comes to deciding the messages in your novels, do you sort of let the novel bring the message forward, or do you start with the message in mind, and then you say, this is sort of what I want to establish via the novel?
00:21:30.000Well, I don't think any of my novels have anything you could call the message.
00:21:34.000There are people who think they know what it is, and they're always ridiculously wrong.
00:21:39.000I don't even know how they got their idea from my book, and I think, no, they just brought this idea with them and read what they wanted to read.
00:21:46.000But there are messages, sub-messages, that I'm aware of.
00:21:53.000For example, in science fiction, it's a requirement, really, of writing acceptable science fiction that you not have God be an actor.
00:22:09.000You can actually have God be an actor as long as you explain God as a giant computer or et cetera, et cetera.
00:22:15.000In real science fiction, you won't find anything as ridiculous as The Force, which just destroyed Star Wars for me because it's so mystical and silly.
00:22:28.000And so while I really loved the first movie and the second movie was pretty good, the more they get into the force, the less interested I am.
00:22:36.000And then it's like a sort of a Pablum, a milk-soaked graham cracker of a religion.
00:22:44.000And yet there are people for whom that has become their religion.
00:22:49.000So they're on baby food, and that's good.
00:22:51.000It's better to satisfy your hunger with something rather than nothing.
00:22:55.000But I realized that science fiction had character after character that had no upbringing, no family background, nothing.
00:23:51.000And my model was, I want to write novels as if they were biographies.
00:23:55.000And if they're biographies, I want to spend some time on the thing that biographies do worst.
00:24:01.000which is deal with the childhood of the figure that they're reporting on, because with rare exceptions, like Winston Churchill's letters home, begging his parents to come visit him or let him leave his boarding school, we don't have anything from children's childhood, from famous people's childhood.
00:24:28.000And it's hard to put together their childhood, but when I'm just making it up, I have a completely free hand.
00:24:36.000It's the nice thing that happened when James Cameron arranged for me to write the novelization of The Abyss.
00:24:44.000I asked him for permission to do backstory on the lead characters, and I said, that's what I do as a novelist, so I need that in order to know who they are.
00:24:53.000So he gave me the chance to write a couple of chapters before the beginning of the movie script.
00:24:58.000And he gave them to the actors to read.
00:25:32.000And in some ways better than the movie because he didn't get to finish the movie the way that he wanted to.
00:25:40.000They ran out of budget for some of the final special effects.
00:25:43.000And so what we end up with is it looks like a fiberglass bathtub joy rising out of the ocean instead of the shimmering surface that it was supposed to have.
00:25:51.000But when there's no money, you can't do the special effects.
00:25:55.000And so, you know, and some things were cut out of it that I thought were important.
00:25:59.000But he still, he kept the things that were most important to me.
00:26:02.000He understood the story the same way I did.
00:26:04.000And that's good, because it was a great script.
00:26:07.000That was back when Jim Cameron still cared about the characters and cared about the story.
00:26:11.000And so The Abyss ended up, for me, being a truer film than some of his later and bigger blockbusters where You know, come on.
00:26:21.000If he cared about Titanic, it would have had believable dialogue.
00:26:24.000Titanic is one of those few movies that's better if you turn the sound off, because then when you get to the sinking scene, it's magnificent.
00:26:32.000He did such a glorious job of making that real.
00:26:35.000You just don't want to have to hear the things people say.
00:26:55.000With that one, you can turn off the visual and listen to the audio and get a great movie.
00:27:01.000Because the dialogue is so good and the ensemble acting is so good.
00:27:06.000So, you know, you can make You know, both movies succeeded, but Titanic was a monster hit.
00:27:14.000And who knows, maybe audiences don't care about dialogue quality.
00:27:17.000I want to ask you about the development of Ender's Game.
00:27:20.000You mentioned that it started off as a short story, it had been in your head for a really long time.
00:27:24.000Where did the idea for Ender's Game come from, and then how did you move from a short story to a novel?
00:27:29.000Because that's a pretty massive Increase in in size and scope want to get to that in the answer that in just one second first When you're at work, you really don't think about your IT department that much but they are protecting your online safety and security Well now you're not at work now You're working from home if you're working at all and this means you need to protect yourself the best way to do this ExpressVPN It's the best online protection possible I've been talking about ExpressVPN on my show for a long time.
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00:28:27.000expressvpn.com slash ben that's e-x-p-r-e-s-s-v-p-n.com slash ben get an extra three months of expressvpn for free protect your internet today with the vpn i trust to keep my data safe that's expressvpn.com slash ben again expressvpn.com slash ben e-x-p-r-e-s-s-v-p-n.com slash ben okay so i was going to ask you a moment ago about the idea for ender's game where that came from and then how you went about moving it from a short story form to a novel form which is a pretty radical expansion uh
00:28:55.000The idea for Ender's Game actually began on my 16th birthday.
00:29:08.000One was Foundation and the other one was Second Foundation.
00:29:12.000They logically assumed that that was the first and second volume of the trilogy.
00:29:16.000But no, it's the first and third volume because of reasons that are clear when you read them.
00:29:22.000But I read Foundation and was blown away.
00:29:25.000It was the best science fiction I'd ever read.
00:29:26.000I'd been reading Andre Norton and Robert Heinlein's Juveniles, and this one took me up another level, as it did a lot of science fiction readers when it first came out in the magazines in the 50s.
00:29:38.000And after I was through reading that, I thought, I want to be able to write something like that.
00:29:43.000I want to be able to write science fiction.
00:29:49.000Well, my older brother was on leave from the military and was about to be stationed at Fort Douglas in Salt Lake, very close to our home in Orem.
00:29:58.000And he had come home from basic training and from Officer's Candidate School, full of stories about good things and bad things about the way that people were trained.
00:30:08.000And so I thought, how would you train people for war in space?
00:30:11.000And I remembered a book by Nordhoff and Hall, and I wish I could remember the title, but it's about Americans who joined the Lafayette Escalier in France during World War One.
00:30:25.000And one of the things that really stood out for me was that these new trainee pilots were warned that the way that most pilots died was that they didn't know to look in three dimensions.
00:30:38.000They would only turn their heads like this, and they wouldn't see, because the enemy that's going to kill you is going to come out of the sun.
00:30:45.000He's going to come from above and behind you.
00:30:49.000You have to have a three-dimensional sense.
00:30:53.000And I thought, okay, how do you train people to think three-dimensionally?
00:30:57.000And I invented in my mind the battle room.
00:31:00.000Uh, an enclosed space in which there's zero gravity and you train to move against, uh, likewise wargaming enemies.
00:31:11.000Uh, I invented a flash suit so that when your hits are recorded there can be no arguing, uh, and of course the walls around it were there so you didn't keep losing trainees as they drift off into space.
00:31:22.000Uh, you don't have to have anybody going out shagging flying humans and so, uh, uh, the The game idea was a great idea, but I didn't know how to turn it into a novel.
00:31:43.000I worked on it a bit, inventing new stuff, thinking of new things about it while I was on my mission in Brazil.
00:31:50.000When I came home, I was still mentally working on it now and then.
00:31:55.000But then when I got that letter from Ben Bova telling me that Analog publishes science fiction, and I was sending him fantasy, because there were trees in it, and I thought, okay, I know a sci-fi idea.
00:32:11.000And so I started writing it with no real plan.
00:32:16.000Except that I had decided that the soldiers who were being trained were children, because children are still young enough that they can really absorb the reorientation of three-dimensional space in a way that adults just can't.
00:32:31.000And so starting with children, 9, 10, 11, pre-puberty, I came up with a short story version of Ender's Game.
00:32:39.000But then when it was time to write the novel, what it is is that I had sold to Tor Books, who was a new startup fantasy science fiction line at that time.
00:33:28.000I went home, and here's the thing that I had already learned from taking a short story called Michael Songbird and turning it into a novel Songmaster.
00:33:36.000You don't have the short story be the first chapter of your book.
00:33:42.000In fact, you leave the book so that the climax of the short story is the climax of the book.
00:33:48.000You just go back earlier and you provide a better and different and richer and deeper lead up.
00:33:56.000to that climax, which is what Ender's Game is.
00:33:59.000Still leads to the same climax, except that after the climax, there's a long chapter in which we see what happens to Ender afterward, and it's the reason why he becomes the Speaker for the Dead.
00:34:30.000And so that technique of taking a short story and turning it into a novel by starting earlier, it's now kind of my hallmark.
00:34:37.000I've done that with other novellas, novelettes, and short stories, and it's the only way to go.
00:34:45.000I've watched the results when other people take their prize-winning short story and have it be chapter one, and usually the stuff they think of after suffers from bad sequelitis.
00:34:54.000Uh, the story really ended where they ended it in the first place.
00:35:29.000I learned it at Notre Dame with with good Catholic grad students along with me who nevertheless didn't act as if their religion mattered.
00:35:38.000But I found that if you keep questioning things and start casting doubt on things that they did not believe could be doubted, You find people's religion because they get angry.
00:35:50.000You find the thing that they believe that they don't realize might not be believed by other people, by intelligent people.
00:36:31.000And even when they are, it's not necessarily the version of my religion that I believe in.
00:36:36.000You know, if I were Jewish, and I were, let's say, conservative, And I made somebody Hasidic or I made somebody Reform, then it wouldn't necessarily be following my belief set, yet I would know something about the culture, at least what it is that I do that makes them both yell at me.
00:36:52.000And so, you know, if you're going to create a character, you need who has an existing religion.
00:36:59.000You have a responsibility to make it plausible.
00:37:01.000So in Speaker for the Dead, I made it a Catholic-centered colony, Brazilian.
00:37:07.000But in Brazil, you find that only a certain Not tiny, but a minority of the population is believing, practicing Catholic.
00:37:18.000A lot of people who are nominally Catholic are following, I can never remember the name right, Makumba is what comes to mind, but it's one where African gods have been assigned the names of saints.
00:37:31.000And it's essentially the African religion in disguise as Catholicism.
00:37:36.000The priests are aware of it, there's nothing they can do about it, so they just let those people come and take communion with the strict Catholics.
00:37:44.000But Brazil, while it takes pride in being the world's largest Catholic country, is not all that Catholic, except that this colony was founded with the idea of Catholicism at its core.
00:37:57.000If you come to this colony to live, you care about Catholicism.
00:38:52.000I would feel a great deal of trepidation.
00:38:55.000making a character of mine Jewish, especially Orthodox, because I've known enough Orthodox Jews to know how rigorous the demands are, what has to be kept in your head all the time.
00:39:24.000A very famous rock musician whose work I enjoy wrote a novel that had Mormons in it, and he wanted me to read it to maybe get a quote for the cover.
00:39:31.000And I started reading it, and within the first two chapters I thought, none of this could possibly happen.
00:39:38.000This is not the way Mormonism ever, ever, ever works.
00:39:43.000And so my best response was just silence because he couldn't revise the novel yet.
00:39:49.000But getting somebody else's religion wrong is a terrible faux pas.
00:39:55.000But showing characters who have a religion that they take seriously is, I think, a really good and useful thing.
00:40:03.000To a degree, Anne Tyler has tried to do that, Saint Maybe, and other books have people who are believers in a religion.
00:40:10.000The trouble is, when she wants us to take a religion seriously, she makes it more of mere Christianity than of any particular denomination.
00:40:36.000The mainline Christian churches, Lutheranism, Presbyterianism, they are, what can I say, losing members, shedding members.
00:40:47.000But the high-demand Protestant religions, the ones that actually expect you to live by rules, those are growing.
00:40:54.000And so, you know, it's just one of those things that when you belong to a religious culture that expects you to behave in certain ways in order to be a full-fledged member, it changes your life, it focuses your life.
00:41:10.000And so, you know, I've toyed with using Mormonism, but then I know no matter what I do, it's going to make Mormons mad.
00:41:17.000And I need to be able to go home from time to time and visit family.
00:41:21.000So it's just easier for me to use other people's religion.
00:41:25.000The one time I did use my own religion was the novel Lost Boys and a story collection called Folk at the Fringe.
00:41:34.000And in both of those, And there are Mormons who just hate them.
00:41:38.000You know, who's gonna write about a Mormon?
00:41:40.000Why couldn't he write about a good one?
00:41:41.000And I'm going, wow, all the things you hate are stuff that I actually did.
00:41:49.000But anyway, that's that's one of my minor messages.
00:41:51.000People have religion and the fiction writer who retreats from that is cheating himself and his readers.
00:41:57.000So let's talk for a second about your your experiences in the industry, because obviously you are religious.
00:42:04.000You are also politically conservative.
00:42:06.000You've written before about how bad a president you think President Obama was.
00:42:09.000I'm not sure exactly where you stand on President Trump, per se, but There obviously has been a long-time blacklist in Hollywood for people who are conservative.
00:42:19.000I wrote an entire book about the blacklist in the TV industry.
00:42:24.000My business partner, Jeremy Boring, ran Friends of Abe, which was the underground Hollywood organization for conservatives.
00:42:29.000So, how has your career been affected?
00:42:32.000Obviously, I know that you were, at one point, asked pretty publicly to do some comic books for DC, and then thanks to the outrage mob, that was cancelled.
00:42:42.000And, you know, that wasn't a big deal.
00:42:43.000The money was pathetic, but it was just fun, and I was collaborating with a very good writer, and we were going to have a good artist.
00:43:45.000They just don't have the power to green light a film.
00:43:49.000Because you get to that place in a Hollywood bureaucracy by avoiding trouble, by not sticking your neck out, and then you're given authority and power because they're running in terror.
00:44:05.000They are all afraid that they'll be like Mike Ovitz and find out when they leave their job they're nobody.
00:44:22.000I make so much more money from books than anybody makes as a Hollywood screenwriter.
00:44:26.000That sounds awful, but if you're out to make a living, screenwriters can make money just by getting hired for a job and then their script never gets used.
00:44:36.000So you can write your brains out for an entire career and never have a movie produced.
00:44:41.000Or, if it is produced, it bears no resemblance to the script you wrote.
00:45:48.000Has had the power as a novelist to insist that she gets the final say on casting and scripts and etc.
00:45:56.000And even then her power was limited, but at least she had the sense to know that.
00:46:01.000To know that there were things she just could not affect because they were the requirements of film.
00:46:06.000But so I'm not troubled by what's happened in filmdom or television land to my work.
00:46:13.000We did get a TV series put on by BYU Television, but then they had a management change and the series was dropped, even though it was getting really good responses.
00:46:23.000It's one of those things where if it didn't grow in their garden, they're not interested.
00:46:28.000And so, you know, those things happen.
00:46:31.000But I once had a TV series that was going to pilot and The guy who was the showrunner to me, basically he had made a demand.
00:47:34.000And I was already running into resistance before I ever made any political statements just because I am a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and CESO served a mission for the Mormon Church.
00:47:48.000It gave me fluency in Portuguese, which has been useful, but it is not a credential that anybody is impressed with in the world of literature either.
00:47:58.000I run into people who assume, even within the Mormon Church, who assume that in order to become a writer, I must have lost my faith.
00:48:06.000You know, so I've gotten letters like this, your book Saints gave me a picture of Joseph Smith, so believable, so real, it was so wonderful, it increased my belief in him.
00:48:22.000It's just taken for granted in our culture that if you're an intellectual, and especially if you make a living doing intellectual stuff, you can't possibly be a believer, because if you're an educated person, you must have left faith behind long ago.
00:48:38.000I'm a very well-educated person, and it only brought me closer to my faith by rational means as well as by felt spirituality.
00:48:50.000So in a second, I want to ask you, About the movement in sci-fi away from, I would say, interesting things and toward a very specific brand of politics, which is pretty obvious to anybody who follows the sci-fi genre, particularly if you look at the books that actually end up with reviews in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal.
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00:50:12.000So let's talk for a second about what feels increasingly like the decline of the sci-fi genre as it is taken over by social justice warriors.
00:50:22.000I've been reading sci-fi literally all my life.
00:50:24.000If a good new sci-fi novel comes out, I'm the first to get it.
00:50:27.000I'm, I would say, fairly well read in the genre at this point, having read maybe a thousand different books.
00:50:33.000But it seems like everything that gets reviewed now Is something that is rooted fundamentally not in interesting plots or interesting premises or interesting worlds, but in a brand of politics that is radical.
00:50:46.000And so if you write a character who is transgender that is much more important than actually writing a story that is worth reading.
00:50:52.000Or if you write an entire book that is rooted in a specific type of gender politics, in which men are evil and women are good, then that is likely to receive a rave review from the New York Times, even if it doesn't actually have anything particularly interesting to say.
00:51:04.000What do you make of the attempt to take over the sci-fi genre, fancy genre too, by the political left?
00:51:11.000Because it's pretty obvious that that's happening.
00:51:35.000Now, Kurt Vonnegut did a kind of semi-arty writing along with plenty of sci-fi in all of his work while denying he was a science fiction writer and refusing to have it labeled with the genre on the covers of the books.
00:51:52.000But right now, if you want to write science fiction, you can just write a mainstream thriller or a spy novel or pretty much anything you want to write.
00:52:01.000And a lot of the people, you know, David Foster Wallace definitely was writing a lot of stuff that had to be classed as sci-fi or would have been in the 1950s.
00:52:12.000And then look at Margaret Atwood, who simply is bad, bad, bad at science fiction.
00:52:18.000She uses science fiction motifs in all the ignorance of her arrogance.
00:52:22.000I mean, I've met her personally and therefore my detestation is far beyond what I would do for literary reasons.
00:53:33.000But I haven't been a member of that community for a long time.
00:53:36.000Because when you look in science fiction in the bookstore, the few bookstores we have left, you'll find that most of the books in the science fiction fantasy area are fantasy.
00:53:49.000And fantasy is not getting taken over.
00:53:51.000Because that's where the science fiction writers who were fed up went.
00:53:55.000And that's where George Martin, who may very well be, hold social justice warrior beliefs.
00:54:00.000We've never had a discussion about that.
00:54:03.000But you won't find them in his very realistic, socially and even historically, even though it's a made up history, in his Game of Thrones books, because he's writing about people who were not politically correct.
00:55:44.000And we wanted our kids to grow up in a place where they would actually meet black people at school.
00:55:53.000And then we found out that South Bend, Indiana was not that place because the segregation was almost total just by neighborhoods.
00:55:59.000But when we moved to Greensboro, our first visit there when I was applying for a job at the time, we went to a near downtown restaurant and two waiters approached us, one white, one black.
00:56:13.000The white guy says, Hi, I'm your white waiter for the evening.
00:56:15.000And this is, said his name, your black waiter for the evening.
00:56:18.000Then they both broke up laughing because they knew it was ridiculous.
00:56:24.000One was the back server, one was the waiter.
00:56:28.000But they just thought it was hilarious.
00:56:29.000And we realized you go into McDonald's in Greensboro, North Carolina, black and white people come in together, sit down together, eat lunch together.
00:56:38.000And even though Greensboro is famous as a town where segregation was challenged at the Woolworth's lunch counter, nevertheless, in the South, black people and white people talk to each other.
00:56:49.000Sometimes they're yelling, but they can get along.
00:56:56.000And so while there's still race prejudice here, let's not pretend that there's not.
00:57:03.000We find that in Greensboro, our kids grew up having black friends and white friends, and that was all we could ask for, was that they got that multiracial view.
00:57:15.000But now, black kids are being taught that all white people are privileged, which is just not true, and that all white people hate them, which is also not true.
00:57:28.000But I know now that all white people are getting more and more nervous that no matter what they say, it's going to be turned on them and used to call them the ugly name, racist.
00:57:37.000And that is pretty much the ugliest name that we have in our vocabulary right now.
00:57:42.000If you're looking for your Tourette's list of words that you should not speak, words that will wound, the F word is now way, way low on the list compared to, because we hear it all the time, compared to racist.
00:57:59.000And so, you know, we live in in troublous times, but I, I'm not a conservative, and I'm really not.
00:58:09.000I am from 1976, a Daniel Patrick Moynihan liberal.
00:58:15.000And I have not had to change any of my fundamental ideas since then.
00:58:19.000But somehow believing the same stuff has turned me into a conservative.
00:58:24.000So when I was writing my column for a while, I would get letters from people saying, why don't you become a Republican?
00:58:29.000Why are you still registered as a Democrat?
00:58:31.000And I said, Republicans don't want me either.
00:58:34.000With the things I believe, if I became a Republican and somehow came to prominence, Then I would just find out on Fox that Hannity would label me as a rhino, or a Republican in name only, because I believe in very liberal immigration laws, and I believe in gun control, and all kinds of other... and I don't like the death penalty at all.
00:58:59.000As long as it's administered by humans, it's going to end up executing innocent people.
00:59:05.000And so I have my beliefs that just don't square with the right-wing mantras, the shibboleths of conservatism.
00:59:16.000Now, most of those are not things that I would have thought of as conservative in the 1960s.
00:59:21.000The conservative party has moved to some weird radical position that includes issues that I think are just, why should this be a barrier to becoming a Republican?
00:59:31.000Why should you have to believe these mutually exclusive things?
00:59:35.000But both parties have those, and both parties are very mean to their People who look toward the middle of the road.
00:59:42.000You know, every time someone says something bad about Mitt Romney, I think, you had a Republican who ran as a Republican, won in Massachusetts, and governed successfully.
00:59:56.000In Massachusetts, that's the only way you can do it.
00:59:59.000So why are they surprised that he has moderate policies and positions?
01:00:03.000Why do they treat that as if, you know, it were some horrible birth defect that disqualified him for high office?
01:00:10.000Because, well, Mitt Romney was never my candidate, mostly because he adopted the, you know, be mean to immigrants thing, which is not my feeling at all.
01:00:23.000Nevertheless, he was a better candidate than the man who became president.
01:00:30.000And so, you know, I, I just don't understand the Republican party.
01:00:35.000The big tent position is available to them and they aren't taking it.
01:00:40.000They're narrowing and restricting, which just guarantees an eventual democratic victory.
01:00:48.000If not in 2020, then the next time around.
01:00:51.000Because even though the Democrats are even more rigidly and savagely against anybody who takes a moderate line, for some reason they are the default party of an awful lot of people in America.
01:01:49.000And I have admired the fact that even though I hate a lot of the promises he made, he's actually kept them.
01:01:55.000More than any other politician I've ever seen in American history, Trump has kept promises.
01:02:01.000And you have to give a guy credit for that, because Democrats elect candidates who make promises that the Democrats are counting on them not to keep.
01:02:10.000Clinton ran as a moderate, but his voters, his party, assumed that he wouldn't keep those promises and that he'd govern from the left, which he did for the first few years, until Newt Gingrich gave him a lovely wake-up call.
01:02:26.000And Obama, of course, the leftmost senator in the U.S.
01:02:30.000Senate, was elected, but hope and change sounded open and all-embracing instead of rigid left-wing policies, which is where he went.
01:02:42.000And so, you know, as long as the Democrats are willing to pretend to be middle of the road and Republicans are not willing to nominate a candidate who actually is middle of the road, We're in trouble.
01:02:54.000I want to ask you about your book recommendations in movie and TV.
01:02:59.000So, obviously, you're incredibly well-versed in all of this stuff.
01:03:02.000Who are your favorite sci-fi authors and what are some of your favorite sci-fi movies and TV series?
01:03:41.000But I don't understand how mysteries work yet.
01:03:43.000I mean, I do on a superficial level, but I can read good mysteries.
01:03:47.000So, you know, a new Michael Connolly comes out, or a new Robert Kreis, or there are some new writers whose names I will not be able to bring to mind that I'm really enjoying.
01:03:57.000A new Grey Man novel comes out, and it's fine, you know, not the greatest writing in the world.
01:04:02.000I'm reading one right now that has the horrible mistake of first-person present tense whenever he's following the main character, the Grey Man.
01:04:10.000Why does he have to adopt that asinine thing from creative writing programs in American universities?
01:04:17.000But that's, you know, he's free to do whatever he wants and it's working pretty well because most of it's in third-person past tense like a real American novelist.
01:04:26.000And so there are, you know, there are wonderful writers in Mystery.
01:04:40.000And I also read a few mainstream things, but I mostly read non-fiction.
01:04:46.000Right now I'm listening on Audible to one of the great book series that fortunately, not great books, great courses, that the great courses people have made available on Audible.
01:04:57.000So I'm listening to one that's pretty current with the science on great moments or great turning points in evolution.
01:05:05.000Which is really well done and has actually taught me stuff that with my constant reading in the field I still didn't know about and so you know good job them, but I'm also reading a book on walking And that one's on Kindle, so I'm not listening to it and etc etc I'm constantly listening to an audiobook this earphone that I have in my ear for this discussion is my normal position in life because I have my
01:05:34.000A little audible player on a lanyard around my neck.
01:06:45.000I'm glad that they made a lot of money.
01:06:49.000I felt like Bob Chartoff, one of the producers of that, was a friend of mine in the later years of his life when he worked with me on Ender's Game, back before a studio took over.
01:07:00.000I think he could be proud of his work on Rocky.
01:07:04.000The sequels, I've never watched one of them, so I have no opinion except that I never watched them, which is a choice.
01:08:18.000Which meant that his proportion of good ideas compared to other people in any of the other governments during the war was ridiculously high.
01:08:25.000But, of course, he had all the failures.
01:08:28.000And failures that weren't his failures that were blamed on him.
01:08:31.000But, in Darkest Hour, they did a brilliant job of making him seem like a real person.
01:08:37.000It helps that they cast one of our finest living actors.
01:08:40.000Uh, in the part and uh, you know, he it's just he's an actor who can never do a part badly Even if it's in a dumb movie, he's good.
01:09:00.000Because what they did was they took any anecdote that fit the description, the prescription of film teachers, screenwriting teachers.
01:09:12.000What they were told makes a good movie.
01:09:15.000And they put all of those together with just a handful of characters and made, to my mind, an incredibly boring and offensively unreal treatment of Dunkirk.
01:11:24.000And I'm just catching up now on the series of Chicago PD, Chicago whatever, Chicago Fire and so on, because I didn't realize they were done by the same people who produced Law & Order.
01:11:38.000And so I'm getting the same fix I used to get from them.
01:11:41.000Good writing, good acting, powerful stories.
01:11:44.000And the episode is always about the episode, not about the soap opera between the characters.
01:11:49.000That stuff goes on and it helps add to the interest, but it never takes over.
01:11:54.000That's what killed Moonlighting years ago when it was the best thing on TV.
01:11:57.000And by their third season, it was not good even.
01:12:02.000Writers had lost their way completely, and you often would tune in and there was no story to carry you except the soap opera.
01:12:09.000And I didn't care about the soap opera part.
01:12:11.000So, you know, writers can kill their own series.
01:13:14.000But they still treat writers like little bags of dirt.
01:13:20.000And that's, you know, they'll try to put a seed in about five at once, hope some of them grow, and as soon as they can get the fruit off the thing that grew, then they just kick that bag of dirt out of the way.
01:14:18.000And then the flunky tells them about it or writes coverage on it.
01:14:22.000And they make their decisions based on that.
01:14:24.000Plus the filmography of the people attached.
01:14:28.000And they figure if you've got the same guy who was involved with The Exorcist, then it's got to be a great hit.
01:14:36.000Even though it's not horror, doesn't have anything to do with anything that made The Exorcist a hit, nevertheless, they think that that magic will then work.
01:15:38.000And then there are movies that I think, well, I could smell this movie on the way into the theater.
01:15:43.000I didn't realize the stink was coming from this particular theater in the complex, but Yep, this is the one that gave the odor to the whole place, and it goes ahead and wins an Oscar.