The Book of Mormon is the most important book in my life. I remember it as one of the earliest things I read, starting with Emma Mar Peterson's children's adaptation. The illustrations in that book still linger in my mind as what black and white illustrations should look like. Soon I graduated to The Book of Mormon itself. I've read it many, many times.

It shows up in my style. Anybody who wonders why practically every sentence begins with "and," "then," "but"—you just have to think of the phrase "And it came to pass," and you will understand where that comes from. You see, if a sentence is important and true, I instinctively feel that it must begin with a conjunction.

But the influence is much deeper than style. It was the Book of Mormon that brought me to BYU as a student. My high school grades were such that I could have taken my pick of schools, but I applied only here, because I intended to become an archaeologist and work on understanding the Book of Mormon. I saw no point in going to any school that did not take the Book of Mormon seriously as an ancient document referring to real-world events.

Later, when I had abandoned the study of archaeology, mostly because I had found out that it was hard work, the Book of Mormon still kept changing my life. I was a theatre student at BYU when I attended a play adaptation of some events in the Book of Mormon. I sat there thinking, "Oh. Oh, she missed the point, she didn't see what's really important in the story." That impelled me to write my own treatment of that same story, which became one of my first produced plays, The Apostate, directed by Charles Whitman in the Arena Theatre at BYU. It was that play which launched me on my career as a writer.

For the rest of my time at BYU, half my writing consisted of adapting other Book of Mormon stories into plays. Years after I graduated, I worked on the first six animated adaptations of the Book of Mormon for Living Scriptures. A few years ago, I was called upon by the Brethren to rewrite the Hill Cumorah Pageant. They told me to ignore the existing script, and instead to go back to the Book of Mormon and find a way to shape a clear and coherent story that would present the book's most important themes for an audience of nonmembers. I've been exploring, analyzing, dramatizing this book for a long time.

So, it seemed to me only natural that I should write my Homecoming series—The Memory of Earth, The Call of Earth, The Ships of Earth. These books are really just another dramatization of the Book of Mormon, only transformed into a science fictional setting, where by fictionalizing it I have the freedom to explore questions of character and society in a way that I couldn't in a more direct adaptation.

Elements of the Book of Mormon have shown up in many of my other works. The massacre at Tippy-canoe in Red Prophet, for instance, clearly is taken from the Book of Mormon. Sometimes my debt to the Book of Mormon is unconscious. Not until Professor Michael Collings pointed it out did I realize that in my first novel, Hot Sleep, the naive narrators in the middle of the book were clearly reminiscent of the narrators in the books taken from the small plates of Nephi.

In short, I have explored the Book of Mormon again and again, going back to that deep well to draw water. No matter how much I take from it, the well is still full.

* * *

What Is This Book?

The Book of Mormon has its own account of how we got it. Most of us here are familiar with that account. Joseph Smith told us how he got the book. You know the story. An angel appeared in his bedroom three times in one night. Later on, while he was climbing over a fence, it appeared to him again. A most insistent angel.

Following the angel's directions, Joseph Smith went to a nearby hill where he found buried in it an artifact of an ancient civilization—golden plates with words written on them in a language he did not understand.

After four years of annual visits to that hill, Joseph Smith took the golden plates into his possession and proceeded to translate them with divine aid, dictating the words of the book to a scribe. We have witnesses of that process, the testimony of people who participated in the translation. Three witnesses were shown the plates by the angel and testified to its divine origin. Another eight witnesses handled the plates and swore that they were physically real.

At the end of the prophet's translation, he returned the plates to the Angel Moroni. Therefore, they are not to be seen among us now.

Either Joseph Smith's account is true, or it isn't. Either the witnesses who said they saw the plates lied, or they didn't.

If the account he gave us is true, then the Book of Mormon must be what it purports to be, which is the record of an ancient people written by an ancient author, and Joseph Smith's role in providing us with the Book of Mormon was solely as translator. Therefore, we should find his influence in the book, or the influence of any other 1820s American, only where we would expect to find a translator's influence: that is, in matters of word choice, consciously or unconsciously linking Book of Mormon events to experiences that he and his American readers could understand, choosing the clearest language he had available to him, fitting ideas he found in the book into existing American concepts as best he could.

Or he did not get the Book of Mormon the way he said, in which case somebody in the 1820s in the United States made it up, and in that case it is fiction, and we should find Joseph Smith's or someone else's influence there as author. In that case all of the ideas and events in the book should come out of the mind of an 1820s American, and it should reflect faithfully the kind of thing an 1820s American would do in trying to create a record which he was going to pass off as an ancient document.

Scripture ... Now, if the Book of Mormon is scripture, who wrote it? The first part of it is written by a man named Nephi, probably writing as an older man looking back on his life, explaining to his own people why and how they were chosen by God. It would have been written in the context of many wars against his brothers' people, and therefore would include a great deal of justification of his own people's rightness versus their enemies' wrongness. It would not be an impartial history by any means, or even an impartial autobiography. It's highly selective: It states clearly that it is designed to show how God worked with him and his family. It includes transcriptions of his favorite scriptures and commentary on the ideas that matter most to him. He has a very specific audience with clear recorded purposes in mind.

The next author is Jacob, his younger brother, who has no memory of Jerusalem, and, therefore, less contact with the culture of that city. He's a vigorous disciple of his older brother, he's writing to the people of his own time, and he's also aware of the scriptures' importance to the people of the future.

Then Enos, Jacob's son, gives his personal testimony, but he's not taking that same role as a teacher or leader in his culture. Then we have a group of authors writing with increasing brevity, sometimes as little as a verse: Jarom, Omni, and others following after. They are minor, weak, and dwindling. They amount to virtually nothing, until the last one writes only to justify turning his particular records over to the king, who is the suitable person, in his mind, to receive ancient records.

Which, by the way, is something that would certainly not be a cultural idea available to Joseph Smith. You don't turn ancient records over to kings in the world of the 1820s in America. Kings would have nothing to do with ancient records. You would turn ancient records over to a scholar. We know that that was Joseph Smith's personal attitude because when he wanted to find support for his translation in order to encourage Martin Harris's continuing support, he sent Harris, not to a king or a president or a political leader, but to a scholar.

The next author we meet is Mormon, the dominant author of the text of the Book of Mormon. He's a man who was a general since his youth, a leader of armies, a man of war, and a man of God. We should expect to see reflections of that in the text. He is watching his people collapse and decay, and no doubt wondering about the mechanisms that cause nations to collapse and decay. For much of his life he is forbidden to preach to his own people, though he longs to do so. Instead he devotes his time to collecting and abridging ancient writings, but the resulting writings will probably reflect his desire to preach. He is a man who claims to have seen our own time in vision and knows that he is writing directly to us, unlike Nephi.

From the Words of Mormon through to Mormon's own book, he abridged old historical records, prophecies, biographies, speeches written by other people. You will find then in his text both abridgements and summaries of other people's writings, and therefore we should find traces of their attitudes and feelings in the book. In addition, we will find the voices of those whose works he includes whole, or at least the voices of those who purport to have written down what they said. We'll find his priorities and interests reflected in his selection of things he has included.

Then we meet Mormon's son Moroni as an author. He writes relatively little, but he is a prophet and military leader in his own right. He had helped in his father's work and in fact completed Mormon's eponymous book. We may also have encountered his voice here and there earlier in the text without knowing it. He continued writing in solitude after his father's death. The book ends with his testimony, which looks almost entirely to our time, and he is the one who, resurrected, returned to lead Joseph Smith to the plates.

We also have another important author, Ether, but we only have his writings as abridged by Moroni, and his writings are also an abridgement and a summary of earlier records from a culture completely unrelated to the cultural traditions from which the rest of the Book of Mormon arose. We should find traces of that earlier culture, though it should be triple-filtered through the perceptions and concerns of the abridgers, Ether and Moroni, and the translator, Joseph Smith.

We're talking about a seriously complex artifact here.

If the Book of Mormon is scripture, then these are the authors of the book.

... Or Hoax. If the Book of Mormon is literature, then some American in the 1820s, most probably Joseph Smith, actually set out to fake a document that would fool us into thinking that all these other guys wrote it, reflecting the concerns of at least three different cultures, none of them particularly similar to the culture of frontier America in its fifth decade.

Now the project of faking up the Book of Mormon is what I'm going to talk about here, because it's very much like what we science fiction writers do. Most of the time, though, we don't pretend to be creating a document from another culture. Instead, American science fiction writers make it very plain that we are 20th-century Americans writing to 20th-century Americans. Nevertheless, occasionally a science fiction writer or a fantasy writer does write a document that in itself purports to be from another culture. And whether the text pretends to have been written from within another culture or not, most science fiction presents cultures that no one has ever seen, histories that no one else can verify. We write about made-up lands and made-up cultures. If the Book of Mormon were fiction, Joseph Smith or someone else must have done the same—made up a culture that no one else has ever seen.