Folk of the Fringe by Orson Scott Card
"West" was written in response to a request from Betsy Mitchell of Baen Books; she wanted a novella from me as part of the fourth volume of her Alien Stars series of triptych books. The idea was to write a story about a mercenary soldier. As I tried to develop a story for Alien Stars, though, I realized that everything I had ever wanted to say both for and against the military and soldiering and war was pretty well covered in my novel Ender's Game. I hadn't the faintest interest in telling soldier stories.
But I did have a long-time idea about the first story in my collection of "Mormon Sea" stories. I wanted to write a story about a mixed-race group of Mormons leaving the eastern U.S. and making a difficult trek through chaotic, collapsing America to finally reach safety in the Rocky Mountains. It would deliberately echo the 19th-century trek of the handcart companies, with a new version of the murders and atrocities and other persecution that drove the Saints out of the United States in the 1840s; to Mormons, this is some of the most powerful material in our community epic. I also figured two of the characters would be named Deaver and Teague, and out on the prairie they would find the hero of "Salvage" as a child. Still, this wasn't a story yet, just a milieu and a situation and some episodes. It didn't hang together.
When I thought of this story in the context of the "mercenary soldier" theme, however, it finally began to open up for me. What if I continued the theme of an outsider looking in that was inherent in all the other stories? Why not have this party of Mormon refugees "hire" a woodsman to serve as guide, leader, and defender—their mercenary soldier?
My first thought was to make this mercenary a Cherokee Indian, but as I tried to write the story it wasn't working. Then I came across a heartbreaking essay in Harper's about a family that kept two of their little children locked in a closet for years. The writer of the essay did a magnificent job of taking the large view—seeing that not only were the victims tragic figures, but so also was the mother who instigated this crime. Yet there was one person in this terrible story who was not fully explored: the next older child who took the victims their food and carried away their bodily wastes. This child held the key to their prison in his hand, and locked it; this child was the one who, accidentally or deliberately, let his imprisoned brother escape. And even though this story seemed utterly unrelated to my story about the trek west, I realized that my "mercenary soldier" had to be the child who had held the key. He was the one who was equally victim and victimizer; he was the one who would hunger for the forgiveness and redemption that the community of Mormon survivors could provide.
At once the trek west became background instead of foreground; all my plans for having them pass through the empty ruins of Chattanooga, find some protection under the military government of Nashville, and only escape from black-ruled Memphis because of the pleadings of the black members of the party—those plans faded away. The story became something else, and something stronger. I wrote "West" in one long draft. Betsy Mitchell made perceptive and helpful comments, and my rewrite became the story that begins this book.
Finally, "Pageant Wagon." It was the original story, the one at the root of all the others, and yet it was the hardest to write. The characters were drawn from my days as a theatre student at BYU and the years following, when I launched a community theatre on a shoestring. The intensity of theatre people, my love for my friends of that time, and my memory of my own passion and excitement and cliquishness and arrogance when I was in theatre were part of the reason for the story to exist; it was a tale of theatrical community, its intensity magnified by making the players a family, set against the equally intense but conflicting Mormon community of the desert fringe.
The plot first took form back in 1980. My long-time friend and collaborator, Robert Stoddard, came to visit me in my home in Orem, Utah, as we prepared new versions of our musical drama Stone Tables, for production at Brigham Young University, and our musical comedy Father, Mother, Mother, and Mom, for production at the Sundance Summer Theatre. We discussed Pageant Wagon then as an idea for a musical comedy, and the basic plotline emerged: the pageant wagon family, torn by internal conflict, picks up a stranger on the road who heals the family and stays with them forever; in that version of the story, the stranger was meant to function as, perhaps even be an angel, echoing the Mormon folklore of Godsent visitors met on the road. We also looked forward to writing a satirical yet powerful fifteen-minute pageant that would be a commentary on the self-congratulatory pageants that Mormons are wont to put on.
The years passed, and other stories growing out of the same milieu got written. Robert got married and put down some roots in Los Angeles; we lost contact with each other, except through my cousin and dear friend Mark Park, a terrific pianist, who had also moved to L.A. Neither Mark nor Robert was working in music now, except for private pleasure. Yet I still treasured the memory of working with Robert on our shows in the past. I had worked with other composers and written many solo works, but nothing had ever been as satisfying as those hours standing by the piano, fitting my lyrics to his music, each of us serving as instant audience for the other's inventions. My skills were primitive then, and I suppose his were, too, but we made each other better, and there was real joy in that. Not only did I want to make a play out of "Pageant Wagon," I wanted the story of it to include that feeling I had with Robert, the sense of making something beautiful together.
I signed a contract to produce this book with Alex Berman of Phantasia Press in November 1986. That winter I wrote "West" and "America." All I had to do then was write "Pageant Wagon," and the contract would be fulfilled.
But I couldn't write it. I didn't know the people. I knew their "type," I even knew the family dynamics, but I didn't know them. Discovering that the man they pick up on the road was Deaver Teague from "Salvage"—that helped. But I knew from the experience of writing Speaker for the Dead that creating an entire believable family was an enormous fictional task. And the story was so important to me personally that I retreated from it, backed away.
Ironically, after I signed the contract for the book that would contain "Pageant Wagon," I was asked to write the new script for the Mormon Church's Hill Cumorah Pageant, the oldest and best and most resonant of the Church's pageants. It was a mark of great trust in me, and I spent the winter of 1987 working on nothing else. The result was a script that I was proud of, given the institutional needs and pressures that must shape such a work. I also came to understand far more clearly just what such a pageant is for, how it feeds the hunger of a community; if I had not written America's Witness for Christ, the real Hill Cumorah Pageant, I could not have written Glory of America, the mini-pageant that is performed in "Pageant Wagon."
However, it was not until I got to the third Sycamore Hill in August 1987—again without a story written!—that I actually started writing down the words of "Pageant Wagon." Even then I wrote five thousand words of another story, but it was so miserably bad that I determined that even if it killed me, I would write the tale that had to be written. I spent a couple of long and terrible nights hammering it out, forcing it into some kind of shape, just so a draft of the story would exist. I took it home and printed it out, xeroxed it, and brought it in for them to read. It was 111K on the computer—about 18,000 words, a novella—but they read it.
Sycamore Hill has only grown stronger and better over the years; the critique was intense and extremely helpful. In my first version, I had Deaver Teague violently expel Ollie from the family, with Scarlett's open consent. This seemed monstrous to the writers at Sycamore Hill, and it was; I had let the plotline control the characters, instead of the other way around. I emerged from the workshop with clear ideas of how to revise the story. They had taught me what the story ought to be, and again I felt like I had taken far more away from Sycamore Hill than I could ever repay. It was no accident that three of the five stories in this book were first written down while enmeshed in that powerful community experience.
Yet I didn't immediately revise "Pageant Wagon." The
It was also a season in which I did no writing of fiction. And when the semester ended, I got caught up in other projects. Some animated video scripts for Living Scriptures. Revising and finishing Prentice Alvin. Going to too many conventions. Teaching a writing class in the evenings in Greensboro. Alex Berman was patient, but he did wonder from time to time whether I would ever deliver the contracted book.
The temptation was strong just to put "Pageant Wagon" into the book the way it was first drafted. It was certainly professional and publishable in that draft. I didn't have time or heart to go back to it and do the drastic revision that would make it the story I really wanted. Yet I couldn't turn in a book I didn't believe in. So I waited, and therefore Alex waited.
It wasn't until I was teaching the first week of Clarion West in June of 1988 that I finally had the fire and ambition to go back to "Pageant Wagon." I had brought my critique notes from Sycamore Hill with me; the students at Clarion West were so fired up that I caught that spirit of creativity, and one afternoon I locked myself in my room for four hours and actually began to revise. I didn't finish that day, but I got a strong start, and when I got back to my family I was able to complete the new draft in several days. In the process, the story had grown from 18,000 words to 30,000, but I knew that the basic movement of the story was right.
I found myself in Ohio the next week, and many of my students at the Antioch Writers Workshop were kind enough to give up mealtimes to hear me read the new draft and critique it. They helped me greatly in polishing and tightening; I ended up rewriting the beginning to make it less introspective, more eventful. Some weaknesses of the story, though, were inherent—before I could show the family changing, I had to show what the family was, and that takes time and pages. Finally, though, I knew the story was ready. The first story, the root story of this collection, was the hardest to write and the last to be completed.
Back when the story was a mere 18,000 words long, I had promised Gardner Dozois first look at it. When the story was finally finished, I sent it to him, confident that at 30,000 words there wasn't a hope in the world that Asimov's would publish it. But Gardner astonished me by accepting it—even though by his count it was 36,000 words long, and even though it could not appear in Asimov's until six months after the release of the Phantasia Press edition of this book. Dozois is either congenitally open-minded or pleasantly insane; either way, I'm grateful that he'll be offering it to his audience.
But I'm not through with "Pageant Wagon." Even after all this work, the narrative you have within these pages is still not final. For the story was conceived as a play with music, and I won't be satisfied until I have seen actors perform the roles, until I have seen the Aal family's flatbed truck on a turntable stage, with Katie playing Betsy Ross and Toolie playing Royal Aal and Deaver finding his way into the family. Perhaps it will never come to be. But I'm sending the finished manuscript of "Pageant Wagon" to Robert Stoddard.
Robert, it's in your hands now.
—Orson Scott Card
Greensboro
July 1988
Afterword: The Folk of the Fringe
Michael Collings
In March 1982, I read a paper to a session of the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts, in which I argued that science fiction and Mormonism provide essentially opposing perspectives; since their expectations for the future and their modes of knowing that future are so opposite, it is difficult for one writer to incorporate both. The final version, published in Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought (Autumn 1984), referred to Orson Scott Card's early novels as examples of writing that came close to blending the two, but I was still hesitant about the possibility of such a blending.
Then something changed my mind.
In January 1985, I received a letter from Card. It was entirely unexpected; we had never met, never corresponded—out of nowhere, a thick packet arrived from North Carolina containing a letter, a response to my article (later published as Card's "SF and Religion" in the Summer 1985 Dialogue), and a typescript of a short story.
The letter was enjoyable; the response, stimulating; but the story...
For me as science fiction reader and as Mormon, "Salvage" was a revelation. The greater shock, however, was still to come.
A year later, "Salvage" appeared in the February 1986 issue of Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine. I bought my copy and opened it eagerly—there is something exciting about seeing a story in print, even if you've already read it in manuscript. The story seems more finished, more final.
And there it was. The Salt Lake Temple half submerged in the floodwaters of a resurgent Lake Bonneville. One of the prime tenets of Mormon folk-belief is that the Temple was built to stand until the Second Coming, and here was a story that both validated and refuted that belief. Yes, the Temple was standing, but it was empty, a hollow shell bearing witness to death of faith.
But not really. And that was the beauty of the story. The Temple became an external symbol for an internal truth. Outward faith might be dead in the world of the Mormon Sea, but the inward urge to belief is still as strong and powerful as ever. There is treasure buried in the Temple, but a treasure understandable and perceivable only to the few.
In a subsequent letter, Card noted that he had not been overtly aware of this level of the story—that it was "threatening to a good many folk doctrines about the future of Salt Lake Valley." The story was, he continued, intended as fiction, not as independent prophecy; the key to the tale is to understand that a science fiction writer may not literally believe the future he posits, but he must believe that that future communicates the fundamental assumptions of a story that must be told. "On the matter of storytelling," Card asserts, "my vocation is as sound as anyone's, and I bow to no authority but the light I see by, which I will shine into every dark corner until somebody shows me a brighter one."
"Salvage" and "The Fringe," written within a few days of each other, were ground-breaking stories for two reasons. First, they were Card's first short stories in several years. He had written and published much short fiction early in his career, but those were, as he notes in "On Sycamore Hill," actually "novel-length ideas struggling to get out." After publishing over forty stories between 1977 and 1981, his last science fiction story, "The Changed Man and the King of Words," had appeared in 1982. But the two stories he wrote during the Sycamore Hill Writers Workshop in early 1985 were short stories by form and by design.
Second, they were LDS short stories. "My stories focused around people surviving," he wrote. "Not just any people, my people. Mormons, and the non-Mormons who live among them and must adapt to this curiously secular religion." For some time, he had been thinking about the plot lines for the stories that eventually appeared as "Salvage" and "The Fringe" (Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, October 1985)—and one that appears in this volume for the first time, "Pageant Wagon." The stories, and the extended story of which they form a part, are uniquely science-fictional and Mormon in that they deal with the exclusivity of the community of faith and with the adjustments and adaptat
After the Sycamore Hill workshop, Card evaluated its effect on him, writing that he had "realized then, that this milieu—of Mormon country under water, the survivors struggling to keep civilization alive—was viable; more important, I was viable. I had written two presentable short stories for the first time in years."
Had the workshop just resulted in "The Fringe" and "Salvage," it would have been a major achievement. Both stories were well received. "The Fringe" garnered Hugo and Nebula nominations for Card and appeared in Gardner Dozois's The Year's Best Science Fiction collection in 1986; "Salvage" appeared in the 1986 Nebula anthology, edited by George Zebrowski.
But there was more to the vision than these two stories. In January 1987, Asimov's published the third story in the Mormon Sea series, "America." Here Card moved into a new and challenging direction. The first stories concentrated on Mormon backgrounds and folk beliefs. This one extrapolated from basic tenets of the Church. The Book of Mormon is the sine qua non of Mormonism, and its fundamental premise is the fulfillment of prophecy: America is the new Promised Land, and those who possess it do so with a responsibility for righteousness and worthiness. But in the world of the The Folk of the Fringe, European-Americans have abrogated that promise. The logical and inexorable corollary is that they have lost their right to the land itself. "America" deals with the strict and literal fulfillment of prophecy as the Land itself raises up a new savior from among the Indians. It is legitimate as science fiction, understandable and moving, exploring possibilities and extrapolations. But it is even more powerful as LDS science fiction, based on assumptions central to what it is to be a Mormon, transcending rigid moralizing in its assertion of deeper truths.