ith more than a dozen titles (translated into 14 languages) under her literary belt from the mid-1980s to the present, winner of both the prestigious Hugo and Nebula awards (for Falling Free, Barrayar and Mirror Dance, to name just a few), and just this year winner of the Mythopoeic Award for the recent release The Curse of Chalion, Lois McMaster Bujold is a testament to growth in the world of science fiction. Plucked from the "slush piles" of unsolicited novel manuscripts in the mid-80s, she began her career with Baen Books sans agent, and has paved a formidable literary trail with her tales ever since. [Photo courtesy of David Dyer-Bennet.]
She began writing in junior high school, and became an English major at Ohio State before going on to work as a technician in the pharmacy of Ohio State University Hospitals. She left that position when she made the decision to begin a family.
Not happy to leave writing as only a hobby, Bujold completed her first novel, Shards of Honor, in 1983 and got her first professional break when Twilight Zone Magazine published her short story "Barter." In 1985, her first three completed novels were picked up by Baen Books, seeing the shelves the following year. Analog magazine serialized her next novel, Falling Free, in its December 1987 through February 1988 issues. In 1992, The Spirit Ring became her first hardcover sale.
Fans of Bujold's have recently been treated to Diplomatic Immunity, published in May 2002. Her comprehensive Web site can be found at www.dendarii.com. Readers can find samples of her work at www.baen.com, where her writing, as well as a novella in the Baen Free Library, can be read. E-book editions of some of her work can be downloaded at www.fictionwise.com, which also includes 11 complete (and free) chapters of The Curse of Chalion.
You landed your first novel sale with Baen without an agent. Would you recommend this course of action to a new writer?
Bujold: Not especially. Since the mid-80's, when I broke in, the slush piles have grown bigger, and the number of publishers who will even look at un-agented submissions has grown smaller. Baen is one of the few publishers who still reads slush, but even they can only "start" perhaps one or two new writers a year. It's worth it to try every channel, but if you can land an agent who likes your stuff, so much the better. While no agent can sell a book that wouldn't sell on its own, once you have an offer, you'll want an agent anyway to do things like retain sub-rights, be sure your contract is reasonable and market foreign sales.
Most agents do not handle short work even for their established clients, so of course new writers who can work at both lengths should send off their short tales to the magazines themselves. There isn't much to negotiate or change in most magazine contracts, and a short-story sale looks good in one's cover letter when offering a novel. No, it is not necessary to write or sell short stories before tackling novels; different writers have different natural lengths, and it's not a bad idea to play to one's strengths in the beginning.
After you won your first Nebula, did it boost your confidence or cause you to feel more pressure in the course of your follow-up novel?
Bujold: Yes. Now, first thing to note is the lead time. I wrote my fourth novel, Falling Free, in 1986. It spent 1987 in the publishing pipeline of both Analog magazine and Baen Books, was published in book form in 1988 and won its Nebula in 1989. By the time of the actual win, the next book [Brothers in Arms] was already finished and published, the one after that [Borders of Infinity] was finished and in the publishing pipeline, and I was at work on yet another, The Vor Game. So I had already passed the point of the distraction being able to affect "my next work." I think this probably helped keep the win from throwing me off my stride too much.
Was the Vorkosigan series written from a detailed outline spanning 10 volumes, or did it grow as you continued writing the series?
Bujold: I've always written the Vorkosigan series one book at a time. Not only do I not know what's going to happen in the next book, I frequently don't know what's going to happen in the next chapter. I use outlines constantly in my writing as a memory aid to capture and organize thought, but they are in no way fixed; I make them up chapter by chapter, in layers of increasing detail, and I'm continually revising and reworking them as I go. Almost all of my structural revisions and tinkerings take place at this outline stage. What's left to do after the first draft is mostly fine-tuning.
That said, it was evident to me from the time I wrote The Warrior's Apprentice, which was my second novel, that I had a world and a cast of characters that would support several books. Part of the fun for me has been in the finding out of just what those books would be, one chapter at a time.
A large portion of your work was published out of chronological order. Was this deliberate?
Bujold: Because I don't have that 10-book outline, the possibility of jumping around the series timeline has always been there. It depends on where the enticing ideas take me. The next thing I'd written after The Warrior's Apprentice was the novella "Borders of Infinity," which jumped forward several years in Miles' timeline. The Vor Game was therefore a fill-in story, answering the question "How did he get from here to there?"
Now, in the case of Barrayar, a direct sequel to my first novel, Shards of Honor, the first part of the tale was already written. I'd cut off the last six or eight chapters of Shards because at the time I didn't quite know how to end a book and had rather overshot the ending, and had to back up to find a good stopping place. I set this fragment aside in my attic for
several years. So about the first third of the book was already written when I was moved to go back and explore those themes and characters. I think it was a stronger, better book for the wait and the extra writing experience I'd accumulated in between—and certainly with a somewhat different plot—than if I had gone on to write it directly instead of turning my attention to The Warrior's Apprentice instead. My other prequel, Cetaganda, had been kicking around for a while in the idea-form of "Miles and Ivan go to the Cetagandan state funeral, and ..." with no idea of what happened next. When I finally came to write the tale, it just seemed to call for younger and more naive characters, so I set the way-back machine to their early 20s. The story might have fallen elsewhere in their timeline, but would have been a slightly different tale.
What influences your imagination when you are building the world your characters inhabit?
Bujold: Strictly speaking, I usually start with the characters and their story, and make up the world around them and the story's needs as I write. The ideas are pulled from every corner of my life—everything I've done or read, everyone I've known, anecdotes people have told me, travels, personal disasters or triumphs, specific bits of research I look up. Everything goes in somewhere.
Did you study contemporary or past examples in politics as a template for that in your own world?
Bujold: "Study" is perhaps too strong a term. I read lots of history, of various periods and places that catch my interest—Renaissance Europe, Japan, China, anything long ago and far away. And I'm picking up odd bits all the time from all sorts of sources. These all go into the compost heap of the imagination, ready to be drawn out when the triggering need occurs. I am actually interested in characters, not in politics; the politics just give the characters something significant to do.
The Curse of Chalion, my recent fantasy (which won the Mythopoeic Award this year, I'm pleased to report) actually did have a partial source in some coursework I took. In a semi-idle moment I'd signed up for a class in Spanish medieval history at the local university, partly for fun because it was an area I'd known little about, partly to explore completing a degree, partly because it was taught at a time that fit my schedule. I was delighted with the wonderful lurid true stories of the late Spanish medieval period, and was determined to do something with this great material. But it wasn't until I came up with a fresh character who interested me that it all really came alive and I began to see how I wanted to rework the good bits into a book.
Did you choose to write in the world of SF/F, or did they choose you?
Bujold: This gives me a mental picture of SF editors out knocking on the doors of random housewives, like Fuller Brush men in reverse, asking them if they would please write some stories. Of course I chose. The world does not come to you; it doesn't know you exist, till you do something to make it notice. I first became interested in SF and fantasy at the usual early age—nine, in my case—because my father read it, and so the magazines and books of the period were lying around the house. I read SF extensively in my teens [the 1960s], although in my 20s I mostly caught up with the
rest of literature. But in my early 30s, when I finally sat down with the serious intent of writing something salable, it just naturally came out as SF. I have a secondary interest in mysteries, and might have gone that route instead, but since mystery incorporates easily into SF, I don't really
have to leave the F&SF field to scratch that itch.
In Ethan of Athos you broach a subject not often engaged in the SF world, homosexuality. What was the inspiration for this?
Bujold: While it may once have been true that homosexuality wasn't much addressed in SF, such a vision gap hasn't been the case for many years. However, back in 1985, when I sat down to write Ethan, the subject was indeed rather thinner on the ground. Ethan of Athos actually explores not so much homosexuality as gender role reversal. I had read some of those dreadful Amazon-planet tales from the '50s and '60s, written by men, and wondered what would happen if one turned the trope around. I had also had the experience of being a parent by then. So, what would happen on a world where the men had to do all the housework? Stir in my medical background, make my hero an obstetrician who takes on the quintessential female role of [technological] childbearing for his woman-free planet, and the thing grew from there.
In your writing of magic usage, there is always a price to be paid for using such powers; is there a similar effect in the use of science or technology?
Bujold: Yes, probably: one of the prices, certainly, is change. One must give up large pieces of the past to make room for the future. This theme is explored quite a bit in the Barrayar stories, a planet whose recent history I deliberately structured to echo that of our own 20th century, wrenched from the past to the future rather faster than some of its inhabitants
wanted to go.
Did you intend to integrate religious beliefs in the Vorkosigan series, or did the story come to require it?
Bujold: Since the Vorkosigan universe purports to be a descendant of our own, if I wrote a tale where no such beliefs existed, I would have to have included a great deal of backstory to explain how they came to be eradicated, I should think. Miles' universe doubtless includes all the beliefs of ours plus a lot of new ones invented since. People are like that. Nonetheless, Miles' own worldview is largely secular. When I wanted to explore religious themes more directly, I went to a new universe, that of Chalion, and new characters.
Can readers expect more novels formed as offshoots of the Vorkosigan series, for example Ethan of Athos?
Bujold: I have just this month finished a new book in the Chalion universe, which completes a set of contracts I took on at the beginning of 2000. The new novel doesn't have its final title yet, but publication is planned by Eos/HarperCollins in the fall of 2003. [The current working title is
Paladin of Souls.] I plan to enjoy being obligation-free for a bit, and then decide what's next. I like both my series worlds very much, albeit for different reasons, so I'll probably end up doing more of both—but one book at a time. I'm not an especially fast writer. Most of my colleagues who support multiple series (not to mention multiple publishers) are two- or even three-book-a-year writers. My brain just doesn't work that fast; one book a year is my maximum. So people will have to patiently wait their turns.
Did you have any difficulty selling a book that took place out of the Vorkosigan world?
Bujold: Back when I wrote my first fantasy, The Spirit Ring, my agent shopped the proposal around to yawns, so I ended up back at Baen with it after all. A decade and eight or 10 genre awards later, when she took the finished manuscript of The Curse of Chalion out, things went much better. Note, because Baen has the option on the next Vorkosigan universe book, I couldn't offer anything but something new to other publishers, at least not without first spurning Baen, which I do not care to do. They have proven themselves the right publisher for the Miles books, over time, I think. Despite the covers.
Many female authors stick to their own gender as far as main characters go, pulling from their own life experiences. However, you show a tremendous insight into the internal and external actions of your male characters. How did you achieve this insight?
Bujold: Men and women aren't that different from each other, in most areas of life. I think the proper question is, how do other writers avoid the insight into the opposite gender? Guys are all around us, all the time. We live with them—I had a father, grandfathers, brothers, a husband, a son, male colleagues, bosses, fellow students—we read books written by and about them. Nowadays, we read online posts by them, in perhaps more startling variety than one's immediate family might offer, or so I would hope. I think some people must screen out this data, as if knowing, or at least,
admitting to knowing, was somehow a violation of their own gender identity. I was on a convention panel once with a male writer who was complaining—actually, covertly bragging—that he couldn't write female characters very well, the not-so-hidden subtext being that he was so ineluctably masculine, the terrible effort at getting his mind around this alien female viewpoint was just beyond him. As though it were a subject impossible to research! I didn't think he was ineluctably masculine. I just thought he was a poor writer.
Is your character, Miles Vorkosigan, modeled after an individual person or several?
Bujold: Miles came as real people do—from his parents. I have a catch phrase to describe my plot-generation technique—"What's the worst possible thing I can do to these people?" Miles was already a gleam in my eye even when I was still writing Shards of Honor. For his parents, Aral and Cordelia, living in a militaristic, patriarchal culture that prizes physical perfection and has an historically driven horror of mutation, having a handicapped son and heir was a major life challenge, a Great Test. Miles has a number of real-life roots—models from history such as T.E. Lawrence and young Winston Churchill, a physical template in a handicapped hospital pharmacist I'd worked with, most of all his bad case of "great-man's-son syndrome," which owes much to my relationship with my father. But with his first book, The Warrior's Apprentice, he quickly took on a life of his own; his charisma and drive, his virtues and his failings—and he has both—are now all his.
With Gregor Vorbarra married off, Miles settling down, and his clone Mark right behind, what do you have in store for Ivan Vorpatril?
Bujold: That actually has to be one of the most frequently asked questions I encounter, lately. Clearly, I'll have to think about something special for Ivan. He'll hate it, but he doesn't get a vote, heh.
Is there any expansion on the Cetagandan race in the works? Will we ever hear of the Quaddies again?
Bujold: Beyond what I've shown in Diplomatic Immunity, I haven't set anything yet.
What was your inspiration for the Quaddies?
Bujold: The quaddies were developed for my fourth novel, Falling Free. I was playing with some ideas about technological obsolescence, and what it might mean in terms of bioengineering. I came up with the idea of a race of humans bioengineered to live and work in free fall, whose raison d'être would be knocked asunder when a practical artificial gravity was developed. As I researched what was then [1985] known about free-fall physiology, it seemed to me that most of the obvious changes wouldn't necessarily leave people unable to return to a gravity environment. I came up with the notion of a second set of hands to replace legs after conversing with a NASA doctor about the dual problems the astronauts faced of leg atrophy and their hands growing excessively tired as they took over the task of bracing oneself in place while working that on Earth is done by gravity. I decided to begin the Quaddies' tale at the beginning, came up with the main characters, and from there just followed their actions to their logical conclusions.
Also in this issue:
The cast and crew of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets.
