Tor editor Teresa Nielsen Hayden had a wonderful rant some years back. She had been talking to an animal trainer, who explained to her why otters were untrainable. Other animals, it seemed, when given their food reward or whatever by their human handler, would seem to think, “Great, he liked it! I’ll do that again!” Otters, by contrast, would seem to think, “Great, he liked it! Now I’ll do something else that’s even cooler!” Writers, Teresa concluded in a moment of Zen enlightenment, were otters. At least from an editor’s point of view.
When I boot up a new book in my brain, I am not greatly interested in what has and hasn’t won awards. I want to write something else that’s even cooler.
Lois McMaster Bujold, interview at Blogcritics, 2005-05-24.
April 12, 2022
QotD: Writers are like otters
March 23, 2022
QotD: Fansplaining that feudalism is bad
Portrayal is not promulgation, people.
That said, I’ve spent thirty years learning that no writer, be they ever so clear and plain, can control how readers read, or misread, their texts. Reading is a dance, not a march. If some readers step on one’s feet, well, it’s still better than sitting by the wall … Usually.
Lois McMaster Bujold, “Lois McMaster Bujold on Fanzines, Cover Art, and the Best Vorkosigan Planet”, Tor.com, 2017-11-02.
March 9, 2022
QotD: Cynicism
Lois McMaster Bujold, Borders of Infinity, 1989.
November 16, 2021
QotD: Writing SF and fantasy
Lois McMaster Bujold, interview at Blogcritics, 2005-05-24.
June 9, 2021
QotD: Failing to account for mere “women’s work”
Elli Quinn quirked an eyebrow. “How odd. On other worlds, people seem to come in floods, and they’re not necessarily impoverished, either.”
Ethan, diverted, said, “Really? I don’t see how that can be. Why, the labor costs alone of bringing a child to maturity are astronomical. There must be something wrong with your accounting.”
Her eyes screwed up in an expression of sudden ironic insight. “Ah, but on other worlds the labor costs aren’t added in. They’re counted as free.”
Ethan stared. “What an absurd bit of double thinking! Athosians would never sit still for such a hidden labor tax! Don’t the primary nurturers even get social duty credits?”
“I believe,” her voice was edged with a peculiar dryness, “they call it women’s work.”
Lois McMaster Bujold, Ethan of Athos, 1986.
April 29, 2021
QotD: Searching for useful reading lights
Lois McMaster Bujold, letter to Baen’s Bar, 2004-10.
September 6, 2020
QotD: The process of writing fiction
Adding in a consciousness of the audience while doing all this would be like the tap-dancing centipede, who did fine until he started thinking about where he was putting all those feet.
Lois McMaster Bujold, introduction to the Taiwanese edition of The Curse of Chalion by Fantasy Foundation/Cite Publishing, 2020-03-25.
August 2, 2018
Books on the ISS
No, that’s not books about the International Space Station, but physical books on the ISS:
The International Space Station is featured in this image photographed by an STS-132 crew member on board the Space Shuttle Atlantis after the station and shuttle began their post-undocking relative separation. Undocking of the two spacecraft occurred at 10:22 CDT on 23 May 2010, ending a seven-day stay that saw the addition of a new station module, Rassvet, replacement of batteries and resupply of the orbiting outpost.
Via Wikimedia Commons
The astronauts on the International Space Station are obviously busy people, but even busy people need some time to relax and unwind. In addition to a well-stocked film library (particularly strong on movies with a space theme, including 2001: A Space Odyssey and Gravity), there are also plenty of books in their informal library.
Some are brought up by the astronauts – Susan Helms was allowed ten paperbacks and chose Gone With the Wind, Vanity Fair and War and Peace in her carryon. Others come with space tourists such as billionaire businessman Charles Simonyi, who brought Faust and Robert Heinlein’s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.
Authors whose works appear several times in the list include Daniel J. Boorstin (3 books), Terry Brooks (5), Lois McMaster Bujold (11), John Le Carré (3), and David Weber (13).
June 22, 2018
Lois McMaster Bujold group interview with the Facebook SF book club
For those not on Facebook, Lois posted the body of the piece on her Goodreads blog:
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…
November 9, 2017
Lois McMaster Bujold interview
It’s apparently a reprint, but since I missed it the first time, it’s a new one to me:
Ellen Cheeseman-Meyer: You published a Star Trek fanzine in the 1960s, while the series was still on the air. It’s the fiftieth anniversary of Star Trek, so I can’t resist asking you about it. What was it like to be a fan writer in the 1960s?
Lois McMaster Bujold: It was a lonelier enterprise back then than it is now. I go into it a little in this recent interview.
Other than that, I expect it was like being a newbie writer at any time, all those pictures and feelings churning around in one’s head and latching on to whatever models one could find to try to figure out how to get them down on a page. Besides the professional fiction I was reading, my models included Devra Langsam’s very early ST fanzine Spockanalia, and Columbus, Ohio fan John Ayotte’s general zine Kallikanzaros. It was John who guided Lillian and me through the mechanics of producing a zine, everything from how to type stencils (ah, the smell of Corflu in the morning! and afternoon, and late into the night), where to go to get electrostencils produced, how to run off and collate the pages — John lent us the use of his mimeograph machine in his parents’ basement. (And I just now had to look up the name of that technology on the internet — I had forgotten and all I could think of was “ditto”, a predecessor which had a different smell entirely.)
Fan writing, at the time, was assumed to be writing more about SF and fandom, what people would use blogs to do today, than writing fanfiction. So an all-fiction zine seemed a novelty to some of our fellow fans in Columbus.
[…]
ECM: Miles Vorkosigan is an amazingly resilient kid (and then an amazingly resilient adult), but it sometimes seems like moving to Escobar or Beta Colony, or staying with the Dendarii, would make his life much easier. His attachment to his home planet is a little mysterious. What are Miles’s favorite things about Barrayar?
LMB: I actually put off this question for last, as it was strangely hard to answer. (I may be overthinking it.) Partly it’s that it requires me to reboot a character I haven’t written in some years, and hold his whole 43-years-book-time character development in my head at once. Why does anyone love their childhood home, or their family, if they do? (Not a universal given among F&SF readers, I observe; it’s a very anti-domestic genre. Don Sakers’s Analog review of Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen touched on this.)
Miles’s favorite place on Barrayar is easy to tag: the lakeside retreat at Vorkosigan Surleau, and the wild Dendarii mountain range backing up behind it. Actually including its obstreperous people. As ever, Miles is a conflicted hybrid, half city boy and half country, half Betan and half Barrayaran, half future and half past, stretched between in a moving present. Family, friends, landscapes; all made him and all hold him. And from his very beginning, with all those painful medical treatments as a barely comprehending child, he’s been taught that he can’t run away when things get hard. But which also taught him that painful things can get better. It’s a lesson he’s taken to heart, and not only because it validates his own questioned and criticized existence.
(Miles being Miles, he may also take this a step too far, and confuse pain with hope, which would make him not at all the first human to stray down such a path.)
September 1, 2017
QotD: Writing as a profession
“Changing the world” or even “changing the world of science fiction” was never my goal, fortunately. “Not getting my utilities cut off for nonpayment of bills” was. That, happily, turned out to be a more feasible aim.
It is the nature of the book market that one cannot be financially successful without also being well-known, one’s name being one’s brand-name, more or less. Which is felt to be the means and which the end will vary from writer to writer, natch. And whether one really needs “rich and famous” or if “self-supporting and well-known in my field” will do. Beware those moving goalposts, which can always make one feel artificially bad.
“How high is up?” is one of those dangerous questions that each writer must answer for themselves. Setting goals unrealistically high guarantees frustration, too low risks not challenging oneself to do as well as one otherwise might. (As a rule of thumb, it is also better to focus on what you can do, and not on other people’s non-controllable responses. “Finish a book” is controllable, “sell a book” less so, “become a bestseller or win an award” still less so. Unhappy is the writer who boards this train wrong way round.)
As for time, it passes at exactly the same rate for everyone, regardless of how one chooses to apportion it. It’s all choices and tradeoffs. Some prices might really be too high, some rewards too meager; only the person who is leading that life can decide.
That said, when I contemplate the ever-upthrusting mountain range of reading matter in the world, effectively infinitely more than I could ever read in my remaining lifetime, I do sometimes wonder why on earth I’m trying to make more, yeah — if that were my only motivation. Except that writing is in itself an intrinsic pleasure for me, if a weird one — I sometimes wonder if writing fiction ought to be classified as a dissociative disorder. So I would likely still be making up stories even if no one else wanted them, only with less social approval.
Lois McMaster Bujold, “Ask the Author: Lois McMaster Bujold”, Goodreads, 2015-04-21.
August 24, 2017
QotD: Reader demands
Readers often ask for more of the same, but I think in many cases that’s not what they mean; what they are really saying is, “Give me a story that will make me feel the way that one did!” Which may actually be quite a different thing, but is much harder to articulate.
(Or, for all those fractal follow-ups, there’s always Fanficwoman. To the rescue!)
Lois McMaster Bujold, “Ask the Author: Lois McMaster Bujold”, Goodreads, 2015-04-21.
August 9, 2017
Lois McMaster Bujold’s latest novella is out in ebook format
Any book by Lois McMaster Bujold is an automatic buy for me, but with her current “Penric” series, I have to wait until it appears in hardcover (the first two were published by Subterranean Press, and I expect they’ll eventually get this one into print as well).
Penric’s Fox: a Penric & Desdemona novella in the World of the Five Gods. Book 3.
Some eight months after the events of Penric and the Shaman, Learned Penric, sorcerer and scholar, travels to Easthome, the capital of the Weald. There he again meets his friends Shaman Inglis and Locator Oswyl. When the body of a sorceress is found in the woods, Oswyl draws him into another investigation; they must all work together to uncover a mystery mixing magic, murder and the strange realities of Temple demons.
Penric and the Shaman was a 2017 Hugo Award nominee in the novella category.
For those of you who are all up-to-date and twenty-first-centurying like there’s no tomorrow, you can get the Kindle version here.
July 9, 2017
Getting closer to science fiction technology every day
In Lois McMaster Bujold’s Vorkosigan Saga novels, one of the imagined technological innovations to play a key part in the story is the Uterine Replicator (spoiler: it’s used to save the life of a premature baby, who grows up — in a manner of speaking — to be the main protagonist of the saga). In Reason, Katherine Mangu-Ward looks at just how close we are getting to the gee-whiz tech Ms. Bujold invented some thirty years ago for her novels:
In April, researchers announced they had managed to keep several extremely premature lambs alive and growing in artificial wombs. After spending up to four weeks in a clear plastic “extra-uterine device” at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, each sheep transformed from a decidedly undercooked fetal specimen to a much more robust critter with long limbs and a fluffy wool coat, the sort of animal you wouldn’t be terribly alarmed to see plop to the ground in a field on a spring afternoon.
The setup strongly resembles a sous vide cooking apparatus: a tiny, tender lamb floats in a large plastic ziplock, hooked up to tubes and monitors. But a video clip posted by the researchers has the emotional heft of feeling a fetus kick when you put a hand on a pregnant woman’s belly. Visible through the clear plastic, the lamb’s hooves twitch gently as it snuffles its nose and wiggles its ears.
The lambs in the experiment were selected for their developmental similarity to human babies born right on the edge of viability, or about four months premature. Babies born that early are equal parts horrifying and marvelous. Tiny creatures with organs visible through their translucent skin, they’re often called “miracle babies.” But there’s nothing particularly mysterious about those little beings curled up in nests of tubes and wires; they live because of the inspiration and hard work and risk-taking and study and pain of hundreds of people.
There are actually more of these struggling newborns now than there were a decade ago, simply because we’ve gotten so much better at keeping extremely premature babies — born before 24 gestational weeks — alive. Yet in the U.S., one-third of all infant deaths and one-half of all cases of cerebral palsy are still attributed to prematurity. Of the babies born that early who survive, more than 90 percent have severe and lasting health consequences, especially with their lungs, eyes, and intestines.
Previous efforts to improve those numbers have been stymied by difficulties duplicating the functions of the placenta, but the device attached to the “Biobag” looks deceptively simple: a pumpless blue plastic box hooked up to the umbilical cord that oxygenates the blood, removes carbon dioxide, and adds nutrients.
In their paper, published in Nature Communications, the Philadelphia researchers are careful to say that human applications of their work are at least a decade away. Yet these little pink lambs are already taking sledgehammers to some of the most precarious coalitions in American politics.
March 7, 2017
Lois McMaster Bujold’s ongoing series of novellas in “World of the Five Gods”
I’ve been remiss in mentioning some recent works of Lois McMaster Bujold … partly because they’ve been released in ebook format before eventually making it to print, which means I’m already two books behind the current one, because I wait for the hardcover to become available (I’m really not much of a fan of ebooks, except for “emergency” reading on my phone when I’m caught without a dead-tree book to read).
If you’re not averse to ebooks, the first in the series is called Penric’s Demon:
Part of the blurb from the Amazon.ca description:
On his way to his betrothal, young Lord Penric comes upon a riding accident with an elderly lady on the ground, her maidservant and guardsmen distraught. As he approaches to help, he discovers that the lady is a Temple divine, servant to the five gods of this world. Her avowed god is The Bastard, “master of all disasters out of season”, and with her dying breath she bequeaths her mysterious powers to Penric. From that moment on, Penric’s life is irreversibly changed, and his life is in danger from those who envy or fear him.
Set in the fantasy world of the author’s acclaimed novels The Curse Of Chalion, Paladin Of Souls and The Hallowed Hunt, this novella has the depth of characterization and emotional complexity that distinguishes all Bujold’s work.
A limited edition hardcover was published by Subterranean Press, and I believe either a trade or mass-market paperback will be released at some point in the future (perhaps as an omnibus edition).
The second book in the series (and the one I just finished reading last week) is called Penric and the Shaman:
Amazon’s description:
In this NOVELLA set in The World of the Five Gods and four years after the events in Penric’s Demon, Penric is a divine of the Bastard’s Order as well as a sorcerer and scholar, living in the palace where the Princess-Archdivine holds court. His scholarly work is interrupted when the Archdivine agrees to send Penric, in his role as sorcerer, to accompany a “Locator” of the Father’s Order, assigned to capture Inglis, a runaway shaman charged with the murder of his best friend. However, the situation they discover in the mountains is far more complex than expected. Penric’s roles as sorcerer, strategist, and counselor are all called upon before the end.
The third novella is called Penric’s Mission and I haven’t read it yet, as the limited edition hardcover has not been announced (but I anticipate it will be coming out later this year). The latest in the series is Mira’s Last Dance, which went live online just a few days ago.
