Orson Scott Card brings a set of communitarian values to his fiction:
Not my plan, just who I am. But I think it’s partly the experience of being Mormon — or maybe it’s my communitarian values make me very compatible with being a Mormon — but Mormons all live in these little villages where we’re intensely involved in each other’s lives, where our roles shift from time to time, so we’re constantly moving into new roles and positions within Mormon life. So that colors and affects my fiction. … What I find interesting is the people who commit and keep their commitment at great personal cost, the grown-up story, the story of parents, the story of people who sacrifice for community but stay in it and have to live in the mess they made. … They don’t take off their mask and go back into society under another name. They have to be who they are, wear their own face in their community.
This has made some critics very uncomfortable right from the start. And as my politics diverged from the political correctness that has captured the left — I mean, (in) 1976 I was a Daniel Patrick Moynihan liberal Democrat — and without changing any of my principles, I’ve now become quite a right-winger in the eyes of the left. And I’m a little baffled by it because I’m a liberal and they’re not. They’re repressive, punishing, intolerant of the slightest variation, absolutely the opposite of what it means to be a liberal. But that’s the way it goes. They still get the label. I am the fact of what it meant to be a liberal. I find the most liberals who feel like I do among people who are labeled as conservatives. It’s a very odd thing.
But that political thing has affected the criticism of my work. And it would just make me crazy to read asinine, irrelevant comments by critics who think they’re saying something intelligent.
You see, what happens is, if you respect a writer, then you talk about the work. If you disdain the writer, then you try to psychoanalyze the writer and figure out why would he write this. And that’s all I get from science fiction literary elite. If they mention my work at all, which they rarely do, it’s to dismiss it and to psychoanalyze me, which they are incapable of doing since they’ve never actually formed the kind of community bonds that my fiction always depends on. They have no idea what I’m talking about. They couldn’t produce that fiction if they tried because they don’t share those values. But readers do.
It’s really an odd thing. When you write communitarian fiction, what happens is, the fans that show up at your signings are people who respond to community values. I’ve had bookstore people — widely separated; it’s not like they get together and chat about Orson Scott Card signings — but I’ve had the remark in awe, “Boy, the fans in your signing are so patient and … they’re so nice to each other, and so many friendships begin in line, and people exchanging emails and phone numbers and so forth and taking pictures of each other’s cameras … people who’ve never met before.” … Because the people who respond to my fiction tend to be people who want to build community.
That’s not the elitist literary view. Those are people who are about writing fiction that will impress people, that will make them rise above the community. I write fiction that’s about people who immerse themselves in community and who don’t think that they’re better than everybody else and who aren’t trying to impress everybody. A very different set of values, and I get the results.