In that goal I failed—because, of course, it’s an impossible goal. The only kind of story I can ever write is an Orson Scott Card story. When Saints came out, with “The Best Day” imbedded within it, it did not sound like anything of mine that had ever been published. But I already had my epic poem “Prentice Alvin and the No-Good Plow,” which was my first attempt to bring fantasy into the American frontier; and beyond the American setting and flavor, the story is simply a fable, like “Unaccompanied Sonata” and “The Porcelain Salamander.” I can’t do such tales very often, because fables are devilishly hard to write—there is only one Jane Yolen in the world of fantasy, who can do it over and over. But it is one of the most satisfying kinds of tale to tell, because, finished, it makes such a tidy package. Being so complete and yet compact, it gives the author the delusion of having created something perfect, rather like a jewel-cutter, I think, who doesn’t have to see the microscopic roughness of his work. But if fabulists are jewel-cutters, we have a peculiar inability: We can rarely tell, while cutting our little stones, whether we’re working with a diamond, a garnet, or a zirconium.

  “A PLAGUE OF BUTTERFLIES”

  Few of my stories begin with visual images; this one did. I can’t remember now if the idea sprang from the illustration that appeared in Omni magazine along with Patrice Duvic’s story “The Eyes in Butterflies Wings,” or whether I simply remembered my story idea when I saw that illustration. My mental image, though, was of a man awakening in the morning to find his blanket and bedsheets and the floor and walls of his room covered with butterflies, hundreds of different colors on thousands of wings, all moving in different rhythms and tempos so that his room looked like the surface of a dazzling sea. He arose and cast off his blanket, sending the room into a blur of colored flight, and began a journey with the butterflies trailing after him.

  The image stayed with me for some time before I found the story to go with it. I had been toying with the science-fictional notion of creatures that consciously change their own genetic structure, and that transmuted to the idea of an alien creature that fought back against a human invasion by genetically adapting itself into a superior organism. What this had to do with the butterflies I cannot fathom, but for some reason I started trying to put the ideas together.

  Had I been more sophisticated, I would have recognized the visual image as the seed of a tale in the South American magic realism mode. It did not belong with a science fiction idea. And the beginning of the story definitely has the mythic—no, fabulous—quality of magic realism. Indeed, the whole story retains that sense of not quite connecting with reality no matter how many details are provided, so that the science fiction aspects of the story are never clearly presented, or at least are not presented as science fiction, so that readers don’t know if what they’re reading is to be taken factually or magically. Thus the science fiction is swallowed up in the fantasy.

  Years later I would recover the science fiction idea and use it in my novel Wyrms, where it is presented with absolute clarity, yet without losing all the magic. So it is possible to look at “A Plague of Butterflies” as a study for a later work. Yet it also stands alone, my one venture into a strange kind of voice that nevertheless pleased and pleases me very much.

  I knew as soon as I had written it that this story was too strange for any of my previous audiences. At that time I received a letter from Elinor Mavor, who was then performing the thankless task of editing Amazing Stories, trying to keep that long-mismanaged and mis-edited magazine from going under. She was paying, as I recall, one pound of dirt upon publication. But I thought it was important to help keep the magazine alive, and about the only thing a writer can do to sustain a publication is to offer stories for publication. I had sent her a couple of poems, but now I had a story that would probably find no other home. I mailed it. She bought it. Just in time, too—it was almost immediately afterward that TSR bought the magazine and George Scithers took over as editor, which meant the end of my contributions to Amazing. (Scithers and I have a peculiar relationship. He only likes my stories after other editors buy them.)

  To my knowledge, no living human being besides Mavor and me ever read this story. It is still the strangest fantasy I ever ventured to write. If you actually read it all the way through, you have significantly increased its number of readers.

  “THE MONKEYS THOUGHT ’TWAS ALL IN FUN”

  Perhaps it is strange to have this clearly science fiction story in a fantasy collection, but I think it belongs here. The science fiction is only the frame, the outline of the story. Within it, the fables that the artificial habitat tells to itself are the meat of the story, and those are definitely fantasy, perfectly in line with the rest of the stories in Monkey Sonatas.

  I first conceived the story in response to a call by Jerry Pournelle for contributions to an anthology of stories set in artificial habitats. Being perverse, I immediately determined to set my story in an artificial habitat that was, in fact, a living alien organism. I conceived of it as a hollow sphere of great size. Its shell would be composed of thousands—perhaps millions—of hollow cells, each one large enough to sustain a good-sized population of human beings in an Earthlike, self-renewing environment. The hollow interior of the creature would be a highly charged electromagnetic memory chamber that would serve as the creature’s intelligence, running the entire habitat and passing energy and resources as needed from one cell to another.

  The life cycle of the habitat would be the problem. Its original designers knew how to arrest its development so that it didn’t ripen completely and explode, scattering seeds throughout the galaxy—unless they wanted it to. But the one that comes to the human solar system has no such controls, and so it moves as quickly as possible toward maturity, at which time each of the cells becomes a fully functioning adult with tiny minicells forming its own shell, and the hollow space humans were now using as a habitat would become the highly charged inner intelligence. The original inner intelligence dies in the process of giving independent life to all the outer cells.

  The fables are the tales being told by the inner intelligence to its children. There is little sense of separate identity among the cells or between the cells and their parent. But the tales must be preserved in order to keep some sense of purpose and meaning alive in the creatures. They have long since forgotten that all these tales have to do with “human” justice and equity, or that the creature exists in order to provide homes for the makers of the place. Still, the tales survive.

  I include this explanation because of the number of readers over the years who have politely asked me (actually, some have begged) to explain what in hell is going on in “The Monkeys Thought ’Twas All in Fun.” I hope this helps. Those searching for thematic explanations, however, are on their own. I don’t like decoding my work in that way.

  To my mind, the very fact that I didn’t make this story clear enough for many—perhaps most—readers makes the story a failure. I think clarity is the first thing a writer must achieve; if I fail in that, what does it matter what else I do? If I were writing this story again today, I’d spell out precisely what was going on from the beginning, so there wouldn’t be the slightest confusion.

  One must remember, however, that when I wrote this I was a graduate student in English. I think this explains everything.

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to real people or events is purely coincidental.

  MONKEY SONATAS

  Copyright © 1992 by Orson Scott Card

  Previously published as book three of Maps in a Mirror

  by Orson Scott Card (Tor, 1990)

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce

  this book, or portions thereof, in any form.

  A Tor Book

  Published by Tom Doherty Associates, Inc.

  175 Fifth Avenue

  New York, N.Y. 10010

  Tor ® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, Inc.

  ISBN: 978-1-4299-5823-3

  Tor Books by Orson Scott Card

  Note: Within series, books are best read in listed order.

  —–

  ENDER UNIVERSE

  Ender Series

  Ender Wiggin: The finest general the world could hope to find or breed.

  Ender's Game

  Ender in Exile

  Speaker for the Dead

  Xenocide

  Children of the Mind

  Ender's Shadow Series

  Parallel storylines to Ender's Game from Bean: Ender's right hand, his strategist, and his friend.

  Ender's Shadow

  Shadow of the Hegemon

  Shadow Puppets

  Shadow of the Giant

  Shadows in Flight

  The First Formic War Series

  One hundred years before Ender's Game, the aliens arrived on Earth with fire and death.

  These are the stories of the First Formic War.

  Earth Unaware

  Earth Afire

  Ender novellas

  A War of Gifts

  First Meetings

  The Authorized Ender Companion by Jake Black

  A complete and in-depth encyclopedia of all the persons, places, things, and events in Orson Scott Card's Ender Universe.

  THE MITHER MAGES SERIES

  Danny North is different from his magical family. And when he discovers his gift, it is greater than he ever imagined—which could earn him a death sentence.

  The Lost Gate

  The Gate Thief

  THE TALES OF ALVIN MAKER SERIES

  Visit the magical America that might have been, marvel as the tale of Alvin Maker unfolds.

  Seventh Son

  Red Prophet

  Prentice Alvin

  Alvin Journeyman

  Heartfire

  The Crystal City

  HOMECOMING SERIES

  Earth has been rendered uninhabitable. But it is still vital.

  The Memory of Earth

  The Call of Earth

  The Ships of Earth

  Earthfall

  Earthborn

  WOMEN OF GENESIS SERIES

  Fiction exploring the human side of Biblical women.

  Sarah

  Rebekah

  Rachel & Leah

  THE COLLECTED SHORT FICTION OF ORSON SCOTT CARD

  Experience Card's full versatility, from science fiction to fantasy, from traditional narrative poetry to modern experimental fiction.

  Keeper of Dreams

  The Changed Man

  Cruel Miracles

  Flux

  Monkey Sonatas

  STAND-ALONE FICTION

  Hart's Hope: Dark and powerful fantasy.

  Lovelock (with Kathryn Kidd): A startling look at the ethics of bioengineering.

  Pastwatch: In this novel of time travel, can the past be changed?

  Saints: A novel of the early days of the Mormon Church.

  Songmaster: An SF classic and a haunting story of power and love.

  The Worthing Saga: The tale of a seed ship sent out to save the human race.

  Wyrms: The story of a young woman's journey to confront her destiny, and her world's.

  The Folk of the Fringe: When America is destroyed, it's up to those on the fringes to rebuild.

  —–

  www.tor-forge.com

 

 

  Orson Scott Card, Monkey Sonatas

 

 

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