The members of the Lois McMaster Bujold mailing list were delighted to present a special present to Lois on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the publication of the first book in the series:

A Reader’s Companion to A Civil Campaign (PDF)

As John Lennard, co-editor of ARCACC wrote:

Ladies, Gentlemen, and all other persons, cats, dogs, squirrels, elephants, and butterbugs.

Yestermonth the Vorkosigan Saga turned 25 glorious years old. Yes, despite their own convictions on these matters, and relative fictional aliveness or otherwise, Aral, Cordelia, Konstantin Bothari, Barrayar itself, and even Miles (dating from a twinkle in Lois’s and Cordelia’s eyes) have hit their quarter-century. It also means that Lois has been putting up with our readerly burbles and spats for longer than seems possible.

[Fanfare. Extraordinary and prolonged fireworks spelling out an enormous THANK YOU, LOIS draw admiring oohs and aahs from all present.]

And by way of a less ephemeral thank-you to Lois for thus entertaining, challenging, amusing, delighting, instructing, and generally vivifying us all, I the Birthday Tixie hereby present to her on behalf of everyone who has been, is, or will be a member of this List, A Reader’s Companion to A Civil Campaign. This work of scholarly erudition and critical acumen has been compiled by many members, that they and the hordes of future Bujold readers may better understand the art, craft, wisdom, allusion, quotation, generic engineering, neologisms, and incomparable one-liners that make a Vorkosiverse novel an endless delight ; and it is presented with warm and fuzzy feelings of gratitude laced with admiration, awe, and a beverage of choice now held high in approbation.

Lois, legentes te salutant!

Lois is delighted to announce that her most recent Vorkosigan novel, Cryoburn has been nominated for a Hugo award:

The Hugos are voted by the membership of the annual World Science Fiction Convention, this year to be held in Reno, Nevada, Aug. 17 – 21: http://www.renovationsf.org/

Both attending and supporting members have the right to vote on the Hugos. In recent years, almost all of the fiction nominees end up being made available on-line, by various links, so the opportunity to be a truly informed voter is better than ever.

CryoBurn is my ninth nomination in the best novel category. My prior novel nominees (title and year of publication) were:

Falling Free (1988)
The Vor Game (1990) *
Barrayar (1991) *
Mirror Dance (1994) *
Memory (1996)
A Civil Campaign (1999)
The Curse of Chalion (2001)
Paladin of Souls (2003) *
CryoBurn (2010)

* — award bestowed

As chance would have it, about the year my work first started garnering nominations, the WorldCons hit on the idea of giving all the nominees a little Hugo lapel pin/tie tack, in the shape of the traditional rocket, by way of memento. (I immediately thought of them as “Hugo seeds” — take it home, cultivate assiduously, and maybe next year it will grow into a full-sized one. This proved to actually work…) The pins quickly caught on, and became a tradition. Over the years, I collected quite a handful of these, together with some Nebula pins and other oddments. (I think the shrunken head of Howard P. Lovecraft, the pin for the World Fantasy Award, probably qualifies and an oddment.)

If you haven’t read Cryoburn, be warned that there are some spoilers in the interview (this excerpt is spoiler-free):

I would have been content to leave the series on the high note of A Civil Campaign, but in the course of the amicable negotiations involved in taking The Curse of Chalion elsewhere, I ended up with an option-filling contract with Baen Books, hence Diplomatic Immunity. For a time, I wasn’t sure if I would alternate books between the two publishers or not, but I got on rather a roll with the fantasies for Eos. Happily, I was able to come up with a second upbeat organic closure for the series with Diplomatic Immunity, after which I turned to Paladin of Souls. (For a while, I had the two Chapter Ones on my plate at the same time, which basically resulted in nine months of writer’s block, at which point I decided to just do Diplomatic Immunity first. Some fortunate, prolific writers seem to be able, efficiently, to keep several projects going at once; it appears I am not one of them.)

[. . .]

The notion of exploring the wider social implications of cryonics, a well-established technology in the series, had been kicking around in my head for at least fifteen years. And the vision of an opening scene where a drug-allergy-addled Miles has a hallucinatory meeting with a street kid, no further story or setting attached, had also been lurking for a long time. (On some level, I think this unanchored scene was a really twisted re-visioning of the opening of Heinlein’s classic Citizen of the Galaxy.) I put the two together, and suddenly hit critical mass. Thematic implications followed.

[. . .]

Ethnic diversity has always been out there; all the colony worlds in Miles’s universe (i.e., everyplace but Earth) are much shaped by their founder populations. We’ve only seen a handful, out of a supposed sixty to one hundred settled worlds/stations/systems; I just haven’t worked around to all the possibilities. (Readers keep wanting me to go back to Vorbarr Sultana, where all their friends are. It’s as frustrating as trying to take a teenager on vacation.)

And for those Vorkosiverse fans hoping for yet another fix after Cryoburn, be of good cheer: Lois is working on a new project with the working title Ivan: His Booke (no, that’s not what it’ll end up being published as).

Next book on the reading list:

Update: I’m reminded that you can sample the first few chapters of Cryoburn at the Baen website.

I’m eagerly awaiting Lois McMaster Bujold’s next novel Cryoburn, which is due to be released next month. Here’s the first preview I’ve seen:

If you’re a big Lois McMaster Bujold fan, you probably already know this. If you’re sort of a fan and haven’t heard, you’ll want to know. If you’ve never heard or read her stuff — well, you really should.

Cryoburn is the latest installment in Lois’s wonderful series featuring Miles Vorkosigan, the frail, dashing, ever-resourceful and hopelessly romantic space-traveler who uses brains and charm to overcome severe physical handicaps as he flits around the universe in the service of his home planet’s security force. If you’re not familiar with these books, I can barely attempt to sum them up. Ms. Bujold has created a finely-textured, richly detailed, eminently logical — and deeply human — universe. The first in the series, Shards of Honor, finds Miles’s future parents on opposite sides of a planetary war. Romance blossoms and in Barrayar they have married and are attempting to conceive in the midst of a fierce political battle that turns violent, with devastating effects on the child they finally manage to bring into the world. With Warrior’s Apprentice, we jump ahead sixteen years to pick up the story of Miles and his struggle to live up to his father’s — and his own — high expectations. And on we go from there — for ten (now eleven) terrific books, plus some short stories and spin-offs — following Miles as he learns the ropes of war and politics to become ever more respected — and powerful.

[. . .]

I think her fans assumed that with Diplomatic Immunity, she had pretty much wrapped up Miles’s tale. To our delight, she has sprung Cryoburn on us and I can safely say that it does not disappoint. Miles, now married and with a growing family, and thoroughly enjoying his job as an Imperial Auditor (read: galactic trouble-shooter), is sent to Kibou-Daini (also known as “New Hope”) to investigate peculiar goings-on in that planet’s cryogenics industry. Getting cryo-ed is now big business and virtually everyone, at some point, opts to be frozen alive, in the hope of awakening to a cure for disease or old age, or simply a more pleasant future. But corporate shenanigans threaten to wreak havoc on millions of slumbering customers unless someone gets to the bottom of a burgeoning scandal.

One of the best parts of Bujold’s Vorkosigan series is that each one stands on its own as a novel: you don’t need to read them in sequence to get full enjoyment. I happened to read them in a mixed-up sequence myself, starting with Warrior’s Apprentice, then going backwards through Barrayar and Shards of Honor to get to Falling Free. In spite of that, I thoroughly enjoyed each book as a book despite taking them chronologically backwards.