Ender's Game (Author Biography)

Author Biography

Born to Willard and Peggy Card on August 24, 1951, Card grew up in Utah, where he was raised in the Mormon faith. When he was sixteen, he read Isaac Asimov's Foundation trilogy, which had a profound effect on his thinking about the future. The plot of Foundation implies that history repeats itself, regardless of the people involved or the specific situations that they encounter. Asimov softens this message through his idea that humans can learn these patterns and work to minimize the most harmful effects of change. Since Card's Mormon beliefs hold that people are basically good, he liked Asimov's notion that human beings are capable of overcoming adversity through self-improvement and cooperation. As a result of his thinking about Asimov's message, Card decided he wanted to write stories that would affect others in the positive way that Asimov's writing had affected him.

At the time, he focused on military topics. His brother served in the army, and Card had read Bruce Catton's three-volume Army of the Potomac. He learned from his reading that leadership makes the difference in an army's success. This led him to think about how future leaders would successfully train their armies, particularly for battles in space. His thinking led to his creation of the Battle Room in Ender's Game, where the children-warriors practice for three-dimensional warfare with three-dimensional games. The young Card had little experience writing, however, and the idea would remain undeveloped for almost ten years.

Card graduated from high school as a junior in 1968 and went on to study archaeology at Brigham Young University. He soon found he preferred writing plays to digging for artifacts and studied theater instead. After returning from a stint as a Mormon missionary in Brazil, Card graduated with distinction from Brigham Young University in 1975. The "Battle Room" had lived in the back of Card's mind since he first imagined it as a boy of sixteen. In debt for his college education, he decided to try to incorporate the Battle Room idea into a story. He began the short-story version of Ender's Game on an afternoon outing with a friend and her children. The short-story version won Card the 1977 John W. Campbell Award for best new writer, which launched his career. That same year Card married his wife, Kristine. The couple are the parents of five children.

Card had published five novels to little notice when he began reworking the story "Ender's Game" into a novel. He intended the work to set up his second novel featuring Ender Wiggin, Speaker for the Dead. The success of the novel version surprised Card, winning both the Nebula (1985) and Hugo (1986) awards. The author achieved an unprecedented "double-double" when Speaker for the Dead duplicated the sweep the following year. Since then, Card has continued to write science fiction, while also branching out into fantasy, horror, and mainstream fiction. He has also penned an award-winning guide to writing science fiction and fantasy, and frequently contributes columns to various writing, genre, and computing magazines.