Some readers of nonfiction may see little difference between "Orson Scott Card's Greatest Hits" and the Mafia's "greatest hits." Scott Card - the celebrated science fiction writer - likes to take people on. And he picks his enemies with the care he uses to pick his friends. Here, he takes on Mormons who want to "negotiate" revelation, lazy professionals, hypocrites, elitists, insensitive business executives and other rogues. And Card has assembled quite a collection of opinions over the years.
This, for instance, from what Card calls "The roads to destruction." One road to hell, he tells us, is paved with "perpetual adolescence."
This is what temptation sounds like: `This will make those Relief Society ladies drop their teeth.' It's what I call the `aha syndrome' among naive young LDS historians. When they first find something in their research they didn't read about in Sunday School, they crow `Aha!' and they rush about telling everyone that they've discovered `the truth about Mormonism.' And if you point out the flaws in their reasoning, then you obviously aren't ready yet to `face the truth.'
It's the same adolescent desire to shock, the one that makes you do things that drive your parents crazy. . . .
Say hello to the Mormon Mencken, to the Danite of ideas.
"Mormon liberals think they're persecuted," he once told me. "If they want persecution they should take on the apostles of political correctness. Those people hand out death-threats."
As a writer, Card has made a career out of being prolific and independent. One moment he's writing Hugo-winning sci-fi novels like "Enders Game," the next he's writing scripts for Living Scriptures, the Hansen Planetarium or the Hill Cumorah Pageant.
He took a job as columnist for Sunstone Magazine, then used the pages to flog a major slice of the magazine's readership - a move that prompted a sensitive Signature Books to write Sunstone and threaten to stop distributing the magazine unless changes were made.
Card writes quickly and from the gut - an approach not unlike those Latin American painters who work with such speed and fervor their canvases show slashes from the palette knife. And he loves to play "angel's advocate." If you say "potato," Scott Card will say "potatoe," then offer 27 explanations for the "e."
And "A Storyteller in Zion" - despite its buttoned-down publisher and understated cover - is at heart a collection of passionate political pamphlets. Card's most beloved and despised efforts are here: His hard-nosed attack on the evils of homosexuality, his severe tongue-lashing of critic Susan Wakefield, his thumping praise for the work of Eugene England and his indictment of elitists of every stripe.
There are softer moments - an essay on "Family Art" and another on "Art as an Act of Charity" have a lilt to them. But the best pieces are the ones that move with speed and power - shark stuff.
Not that everything here is first rate. An essay on the Book of Mormon goes on forever, and Card's love of lists and cataloging can get tedious. And in the introduction the author tries to be self-effacing - telling us how little he knows and how modest his skills are. He's trying to strike the pose of a humnble 19th-century novelist addressing his "kind and gentle readers"; what he gets is the air of a riverboat gambler shooting up his sleeves and saying "I don't know much about the game."
Yet taken as a whole, "A Storyteller in Zion" just may turn out to be a watershed work for the sympathetic Mormon essay. Card is obviously an apologist for traditional ideas and values - though an apologist who makes everyone antsy - like those motorcycle gang members who witness for Jesus. And Bookcraft deserves a tip of the hat for taking him on. True, the traditional publisher has played it safe at times (there's no jacket photo of Card, for instance, quite likely because he sports the look of a '50s jazz musician these days.) And, needless to say, some of the man's most strident harangues that have appeared as letters and answers to interview questions were omitted.
Still, it took courage to both write and publish these pieces. It will take some people a little courage to read them. Orson Scott Card shocks, surprises and annoys. But he never bores. He works in strident colors - all reds and yellows. No pastels allowed.
Those Latin American painters would be proud.