Interview with Lois McMaster Bujold June 2018
FB SFBC: It’s been over 30 years since the epic, bestselling Vorkosigan Saga launched with Shards of Honor, and author Lois McMaster Bujold continues to mine new depths for the characters and settings in her rich science fiction universe. Set approximately 1,000 years in the future in a system of fictional planets (and occasionally on Earth), the series follows Miles Vorkosigan, a man as gifted in military tactics and interplanetary politics as he is at stumbling into trouble.
Beyond the Vorkosigan Saga, Bujold has written books in the Chalion series and The Sharing Knife series. Known for her wit, warmth, and operatic, action-packed plots, Bujold has won the Hugo Award for Best Novel four times, the Hugo Award for Best Novella, and three Nebula Awards.
Jo Zebedee: How integral are the short works to the Vorkosigan universe?
LMB: As integral as any of the novels, in my opinion. (Well, maybe excepting “Weatherman”, which is an out-take from the novel The Vor Game, and thus double-dipping.) The reader may pick up three of the (currently) six in one package in the collection Borders of Infinity; the other two are still ala carte.
Michael Rowe: Did you have an expectation on how we would view the Cetaganda Nobles and the Vor? (One more agreeable one less so?)
LMB: The Vor are an ordinary sort of aristocracy, so that will depend on how one feels about aristocracies. The Cetagandans have a two-tier system, of which the upper level, the haut, turn out to be an ongoing genetics project aiming at creating post-humans. Their one saving grace may be that they don’t imagine they have already succeeded. So that one will depend on how one feels about post-human genetic engineering. (Though of the two, I think the Cetagandans make for the scarier neighbors.)
Michael Rowe: What was the inspiration for the malice hunters in the Sharing Knife series?
LMB: Besides the “Ranger” trope in fantasy, they follow from the nature of the malices, as an ecosystem shapes a species. The notion of the sharing knives, the magical method by which Lakewalkers “share” their own deaths with the otherwise immortal malices, who will grow like a cancer consuming all around them if not checked, is also something of a metaphor for the personal sacrifices made by any culture’s protectors: soldiers, police, emergency workers.
[…]
John Grayshaw: What is the story with your books being free as e-books for a while? How did that happen and why was it stopped?
LMB: I believe you are referring to the CD of my backlist that was included as a freebie in the back of the first hardcover edition of Cryoburn. (Copies of which are still floating around, by the way. Go for it if you want one.)
That was intended as a premium gift for purchasers of the hardcover, not as something to be put up online and distributed infinitely and indefinitely. Jim Baen did give a general permission to do so in earlier versions of this ploy, for other writers’ series, which was sort of the internet version of opening the barn door after the horses were long gone. (Because there is no way to control e-pirates, so why harass customers?) However, I construed that Baen’s permission could only run as long as Baen held the e-licenses for the titles, and when their license ran out, so did the permission. At which point I asked that the online freebies be taken down, which was promptly and courteously done.
A second, separate problem was that the CD was never supposed to contain all of the titles, just a select few. But at the time the CD was put together, Baen e-matters were in some disarray due to their chief e-wrangler being deathly ill in the hospital, and the word of what was to be included (and not) never got passed along to the people actually doing so. By the time I caught up with the miscommunication, the books were printed, the CDs were bound in, and the print run was all on its way to bookstores. So I bit my tongue and reclassified it as a marketing experiment. Which it proved to be.
One of the then-extant books was missing from the CD, so I was able to use its subsequent sales reports as a check against the assertion that free e-books did not hurt sales: a kind of built-in, accidental control sample. In the event, its sales turned out quite significantly higher than those of the other titles. So.
Back at the turn of the millennium, Jim Baen originally conceived of e-books as a minor venture mainly worthwhile as advertising for his paperbacks, and in the early days this was quite true. Then came the Kindle, the game-changer, and e-books shifted from pizza money to mortgage money. I was late to the party with my CD, and ended up wrong-side-to viz this market shift. Live, learn…
