Waterbaby

Introduction:

The hardest thing for writers to do is take ourselves out of our own culture and put ourselves into another. Li-fi writers don't have to do that—in fact, they consider it their job, in part, to document their own culture in their fiction. But we sci-fi writers, by definition, move into alien worlds and alternate realities.

At best we only partly succeed. Anyone who has read even the best sci-fi of the fifties, sixties, or seventies can easily see how, without realizing it, in the midst of inventive and strange fiction, the cultural biases of the writer's own time still reveal themselves.

Well, if I thought getting into an alien culture was hard, it was child's play compared to shifting into an existing, contemporary culture that I'm not part of! For the past couple of years, I've been preparing myself to write a novel set in a contemporary middle class African-American community. Now, I know what happens whenever non-Mormons try to write about Mormon culture – they never, never get it right. And in writing stories within the African-American community, my biggest hurdle was to get rid of the images and stereotypes of African-Americans that contemporary American culture bombards us with.

Let's face it. I've watched too much TV, which gives us either Cliff Huxtable or a gang-banger, pimp, or drug lord. What our culture keeps stressing, these days, is how different European-Americans are from

African-Americans. But in my reading and conversations, what I've gradually learned is that the "American" part of those hyphenates is at least as strong as the "European" and "African" parts. And the unmentioned "human" part is far stronger than either.

So ... here is the first story to emerge from these years of work. The family in this story is African-American. But the story is not purporting to be "about" their Africanness, or even their Americanness. The story is about them as human beings, struggling to deal with the impossible, ready to pay the price of a miracle.

--Orson Scott Card

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