Stonefather

Orson Scott Card Stonefather

Orson Scott Card began publishing in 1977, and by 1978 had won the John W. Campbell Award as best new writer of the year. By 1986, his famous novel Ender’s Game, one of the best-known and bestselling SF novels of the eighties, won both the Hugo and the Nebula Award; the next year, his novel Speaker for the Dead, a sequel to Ender’s Game, also won both awards, the only time in SF history that a book and its sequel have taken both the Hugo and Nebula Awards in sequential years. He won a World Fantasy Award in 1987 for his story “Hatrack River,” the start of his long Prentice Alvin series, and another Hugo in 1988 for his novella “Eye for Eye.” His many short stories have been collected in Cardography, Tales from the Mormon Sea, Unaccompanied Sonata and Other Stories, The Folk of the Fringe, The Elephants of Posnan and Other Stories, First Meetings: Four Stories from the Enderverse, and the massiue Maps in a Mirror: The Short Fiction of Orson Scott Card. His many novels include Ender’s Shadow, Shadow of the Hegemon, Shadow Puppet, Hot Sleep, A Planet Called Treason, Songmaster, Hart’s Hope, Wyrms, Seventh Son, Red Prophet, Prentice Alvin, Alvin journeyman, Heartfire, The Crystal City, The Call of Earth, Earthborn, Earthfall, Homebody, The Memory of Earth, Treason, Xenocide, and Children of the Mind. As editor, he has produced Dragons of Light, Dragons of Darkness, Future on Ice, Future on Fire, and Masterpieces: The Best Science Fiction of the Century. His most recent books are the novels Magic Street and Shadow of the Giant. Card lives in Greensboro, North Carolina, with his family.

In the vivid and compulsively readable story that follows, pure storytelling at its very best (which takes place in the same fantasy world as the Mithermages series, the first novel of which is coming from Del Rey in early 2008), he introduces us to a boy born in poverty who has nothing but his own wits and native abilities to count on in order to survive in an indiffererit and even hostile world—and who ends up using those abilities in ways that will not only change his own life, hut the lives of everyone else around him.

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WHEN Runnel was born, he was given a watername even though there had never been a wetwizard in the family.

In the old days such names were given only to those babies as would be sacrificed to Yeggut, the water god. Later, such names were given to those who would live to serve as priests to Yeggut. Still later, wetnames went to children of families that pretended they once had a watermage in their ancestry.

But now, in the village of Farzibeck, wetnames were given because the mother was fond of a nearby brooklet or because the father had a friend with such a name. This close to Mitherhome, the great city of watermages, it was no surprise that waternames were more popular than any others, even among rude peasants.

Runnel was born to be the rudest of them all, the ninth son and fifteenth child of a farmwife who had the gift of conceiving children readily and bearing them as if her loins were a streambed and each baby a spring flood. Mother had the wide and heavy hips of a woman whose body had reconciled itself to perpetual pregnancy, yet her cheery smile and patient temper still drew men to her more than her husband wished.

Runnel had the misfortune of looking like neither of his parents, so perhaps Father had dark suspicions about the boy’s siring. What other explanation could there be for the way Father pointedly ignored him, whenever he wasn’t cuffing him or berating him for the constant infraction of being an unloved boy who persisted in existing.