The Folk of the Fringe
A collection of short stories.
- West
- Salvage
- The Fringe
- Pageant Wagon
- America
You're never really prepared for how quickly the world can come down around your ears. You spend your days working, watching TV, shopping at the same old grocery store, mowing the same lawn, washing the same dishes. And then one day, without warning, there's no water in the faucet, no shows on TV, no food in the stores, no job to work at. Looters run through the streets. People fire on strangers who just happen to walk through the neighborhood. Your children have caught a terrible disease. Someone is shouting and knocking on your door. You'd trade your whole house for one gallon of gas so you could get away, your American Express gold card for a loaded pistol so you could dare to open the door.
Civilized people are never prepared for the collapse of civilization.
But some do survive. Some towns hold together, some neighborhoods help each other out, some communities follow the old rules of human behavior in spite of all the terror and danger surrounding them.
The stories in this book take place in the near future. Only six missiles flew in World War III, but that was enough to change the climate drastically. Biological weapons killed millions, famine killed even more, and now in the ruins of America, a few surviving communities are trying to hold onto enough of civilization that their children might grow up in peace, and their grandchildren in plenty.
One such community is forming on the shores of the Mormon Sea – the Great Salt Lake, now swelling to rival the size of the ancient Lake Bonneville. Word has spread: Head for the Rocky Mountains. There's peace there, and enough to eat, and thousands make the dangerous trek across the plains. Outriders come and meet them; relief organizations feed the refugees; the largest land reclamation project in history gives them a place to live, a job to do. Yet even in a land of peace and order, there are some people who just don't fit in. They search for a niche that belongs to them, but learn, again and again, that they just don't belong. Not right here. Not right now.
These are the folks of the fringe. All they want is to go home.
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Orson Scott Card
Before Ender’s Game became required reading in classrooms and a touchstone for science fiction fans worldwide, it was just a short story—one that Orson Scott Card wrote while trying to understand how humanity might survive its own genius. That idea, born of curiosity and a deep interest in moral complexity, would eventually grow into a sprawling series exploring war, empathy, leadership, and the loneliness of brilliance.
Born in Richland, Washington in 1951 and raised mostly in Utah and California, Card grew up in a family where storytelling was a living thing—spoken, passed down, constantly evolving. Though he began his career writing plays and studying literature, he found his true voice in speculative fiction. And when he wrote Ender’s Game—and later Speaker for the Dead—he did something science fiction rarely dared at the time: he treated the genre as a tool for exploring the human soul.
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