Orson Scott Card does Shakespeare

If you're a reader of science fiction at all then you must known Ender's Game, Card's classic story of a boy genius who (reluctantly?) saves the universe. (Later Card expanded it to a many book series, but die hards will tell you the original should have been left as it was :)).

His newest is Magic Street, where "The residents of Baldwin Hills, a middle-class African-American L.A. neighborhood, get caught up in a battle between the king and the queen of the fairies in this wonderful urban fantasy..." Points for you if you said, "Hmmm, that sounds like Midsummer Night's Dream" because that's exactly what the author has done, putting Oberon, Titania and Puck straight into the book.

"What was fun was fitting them into black culture and sort of back-writing onto Shakespeare's story that they were black all along and the conceit that William Shakespeare actually knew Titania. That was too much fun. I couldn't pass up the chance to do that," he says.