I just read this story in the anthology Flights and found it fascinating.
It's a sort of pre-Magic Street version of Magic Street with a lot of the same elements as that novel--it's about a boy named Mack Street who's found by a pipe in Baldwin Hills--but not a lot of the developments that the novel had.
Anyone else read it? Anyone else have thoughts on it?
It's interersting to see the development of the stories--to see an early stage in the development of the idea was reminiscent of the Writing Class where he showed the first few incarnations of the Ender's Shadow opening.
Posted by Orson Scott Card (Member # 209) on :
Yeah, Keeper was like a rough draft. I've done that with other stories - I used short stories to feel my way into Wyrms, the Alvin Maker books, and Speaker (A Plague of Butterflies was the trial run on that AND on Wyrms). Songmaster and Ender's Game aren't in that category - the story was intended to be the whole finished work, and the novel came later. But with others, the story was an attempt to see how workable the story was.
Other trial runs have not fared so well. i concluded that it was just too hard to make it work at greater length ...