There Is No Society That

The Great Forces Of History Were Real, After A Fashion. But When You Examined Them Closely, Those Great Forces Always Came Down To The Dreams And Hungers And Judgments Of Individuals.

Most Victories Came From Instantly Exploiting Your Enemy's Stupid Mistakes, And Not From Any Particular Brilliance In Your Own Plan.

The Most Important Training, Though, Is To Experience Life As A Writer, Questioning Everything, Inventing Multiple Explanations For Everything. If You Do That, All The Other Things Will Come; If You Don't, There's No Hope For You.

For It Is In The Millions Of Small Melodies That The Truth Of History Is Always Found, For History Only Matters Because Of The Effects We See Or Imagine In The Lives Of The Ordinary People Who Are Caught Up In, Or Give Shape To, The Great Events.

In A Way, Being A Mormon Prepares You To Deal With Science Fiction, Because We Live Simultaneously In Two Very Different Cultures. The Result Is That We All Know What It's Like To Be Strangers In A Strange Land. It's Not Just A Coincidence That There Are So Many Effective Mormon Science Fiction Writers. We Don't Regard Being An Alien As An Alien Experience. But It Also Means That We're Not Surprised When People Don't Understand What We're Saying Or What We Think.