# Orson Scott Card Orson Scott Card (b. 1951) is an American science-fiction writer best known for [[Ender's Game]] (1985) and its sequels. He is also, distinctively in this canon, a figure of the activist religious right — a fact that complicates his reception and makes him a useful case in how the tech world separates a beloved book from its author's politics. ## Ender's Game *Ender's Game* won both the Hugo and Nebula and became a fixture of tech and military reading lists. Its premise — a brilliant child, Ender Wiggin, is trained through immersive war games to command humanity's fleet against an alien threat, and commits genocide without realizing the "simulation" is real — resonates powerfully with a self-image common among young high-achievers: the gifted outsider whose exceptional talent justifies exceptional authority, and whose hard choices are someone else's moral responsibility. The novel has been used in actual leadership and military-training contexts. ## The politics Card is a practicing Latter-day Saint who became a prominent and vocal opponent of same-sex marriage, serving on the board of the National Organization for Marriage. His public positions drew boycotts around the 2013 film adaptation. This places him apart from the more secular-libertarian center of the SF-and-tech story and makes the "love the book, ignore the author" maneuver especially visible in his case. ## Influence on the tech elite *Ender's Game* circulates widely in Silicon Valley as a parable of gifted command, though specific founder citations are thinner than the book's reputation suggests. (The widely-repeated claim that [[Mark Zuckerberg]] named a child after the novel is false — his children are named for Roman emperors.) Card appears in [[Science Fiction and the Tech Elite]] as the supplier of the "gifted-child-commander" myth. ## See also - [[Ender's Game]] — the novel - [[Science Fiction and the Tech Elite]] — the hub