Here's the way Lois McMaster Bujold describes herself in the Dendarii site,
which is her official home on the Internet. What can be said on Lois? She is probably one of the most
talentous writer on the scene of the fantastic genre, even if it is a bit too little to limit
her talent to science fiction, fantasy and even alternate history. She is a passionate writer;
loves to read and to take inspiration from biology, history, genetics and medicine. A polihedric
artist, who is always ready to get into new challenges and who's been so kind to explain heraself and
her works in this long interview.
Are you going to leave behind the Vor Saga?
That's hard to say. Many an author has sworn off a series only to find, years later, that they have something new to say after all. So never say never, I say. All I can state for certain is that I don't and won't have anything new brewing for Miles and his friends now or for the next year, because I'm currently working on something else. The sequel to The Sharing Knife has the working title, for the moment, of The Wide Green World, but I don't know if that's going to stick.
How did you decide to switch from science fiction to fantasy?
I've never really regarded the two genres as separate, but as a continuum. Many of the writers who have been my role models -- Poul Anderson, C.J. Cherryh -- slipped back and forth over the genre boundary at will, and I always thought I might, too. Note that my first fantasy, in retrospect sort of a journeyman piece, was The Spirit Ring, which I wrote way back in the early 1990s. This book was set in an alternate-history north Italian tiny dukedom in a world where magic works, and was mostly the spawn of my reading The Autobiography of Benevenuto Cellini, Agricola's De Re Metallica, and a scholarly tome on folklore written by an academic great-uncle of mine shortly after the turn of the 20th Century. I have no idea how the book read to actual Italians, as I had none available to check the manuscript with at the time; I remember, particularly, wondering if I'd assigned character names to wrong social classes, or if any of my made-up names would sound really weird to an Italian ear.
Most SF and fantasy writers are history buffs, and cycle their voracious reading into their work in various indirect and direct ways. Anyway, although it was inspired by my readings of the history of medieval Spain, when I came to approach The Curse of Chalion I knew I wanted to make it my own world, and to do some rather different things with theology than a historical setting would allow. I also could not do active gods in Miles's science fiction world, supposedly a descendant of our own; there's no supernatural there.
The Lord of The Rings, Harry Potter, your Chalion Saga. Fantasy is
flourishing as a genre all over the world, in novels and movies. Why
does this happen on your opinion?
Because people like to read and watch this stuff, I suppose. It's a mystery to everyone, including publishers, why some modes catch on and others don't, in a particular year or decade. Certainly fantasy, in the form of folk and fairy tale, legend and myth, has been popular pretty much forever. Realistic fiction is the new invention, from a historical perspective.
I would point out, the Chalion books aren't nearly in the same sales class as the other two. The genre awards have been very nice, though.
At the same time science fiction seems to remain behind. Have we
all started loving spells and curses rather than space ships and
space new frontier?
I'm not sure. Certainly, back in 1960 when I began reading SF, I could imagine myself becoming an astronaut or space colonist; I can't imagine that today, partly because time has passed me by, partly because it has become clear that for the foreseeable future very few humans will get to go into space. Further, it is now pretty plain that there is no other life to be found in our solar system, which has drained some of the excitement out of it. Space has become utilitarian rather than a refuge for the romantic.
There are, and have always been, other modes of science fiction that pay attention to other sorts of science. My space background in the Miles universe is pretty generic and frankly unlikely; the serious science in my science fiction has mostly been biology, medicine, and genetics.
Some people think that fantasy allows people to keep on dreaming,
while science fiction is more and more mixed with our daily reality.
Could this be the reason why people seem to adore Harry Potter?
Harry Potter is amusing, inventive, and a touch satirical. It's been suggested that the books aren't really much of a stretch for muggle readers, as they are generally full of twists on common tropes, such as the boarding school story, that are very familiar. Its comic aspects, too, make it attractive and non-threatening. The series is very accessible to a broad range of readers, and, of course, it is famous for being famous, which gets yet more people to try it. Success is a feedback loop. Every writer I know wishes their own work would achieve that sort of heat-of-reaction, to borrow a term from chemistry, but alas most dampen out.
The Chalion Saga has had an extremely large success and you're
going to publish many other novels. How much has in common this Saga
with the Vor universe?
I don't know how long the Chalion series will run. At the moment it, too, is having a rest. I have toyed with the notion of making it a closed series with one book for each of the five gods, of which I've completed three. If I were to follow this pattern, there would be two more, a book for the Father, god of justice, and the Mother, goddess of, among other things, medicine. Thus I have thematic notions but no characters or plots, so for the moment, the idea is just lying there inertly. I did, specifically, want the Chalion books to escape the Vorkosigan series pattern of following one cast of characters, in order to broaden the world-building scope, and keep myself fresh.
The other structural element both series have in common is that each book in them reads as a stand-alone, and so potentially could be the last, if I wanted to walk away or give it a rest. Which I have done.
What do one need in order to turn a novel into a best-seller? A
good story or a good set of characters?
And rather than or, I would presume. A story also needs to be accessible to a broad range of readers, rather than just to a tiny elite. It usually needs to be a book that sells itself, that people will recommend to each other; clever or expensive publicity can boost a book up onto bestseller lists for a moment, but only the story itself can keep it there for any length of time. There is also the question of cracking that critical mass, of getting enough people recommending it to each other (or arguing about it) that other readers become curious just because they've heard about this thing six times in two weeks in several completely different conversations, and start to actually remember it well enough to go look for it.
In your novels you seem to give a lot of importance to the role of
family, and in fact Miles Vorkosigan can always rely on his parents. Is
family a strong value for you?
I think it's a strong value for everyone, one way or another. Either your experience of family has been good, and you recognize and relate to the emotions, or it has been bad, and you long for something better even if just in the pages of fiction. It's one of those fundamental needs built into human biology, as universal as "boy meets girl". Which also, of course, connects with family.
How' s Lois' typical day as a writer? How do you catch your
inspiration? Would you define yourself as a "tidy" writer or a "chaotic" one?
I mean, do you set up a summary for your novels or you just follow a
scheme in your mind?
I use a sort of rolling-outline technique, largely as a memory aid, and work forward a small section at a time, because that's all my brain will hold. I will start to work up ideas for a story from all sorts of sources -- other reading, history, film, television, my own life experiences, debates with friends about ideas or other books. When my eyes or brain burn out on reading, I'm quite fond of all the non-fiction DVDs I can get from the local library, science and travel and history. At some point, all this will spark or clot into notions for a character or characters, their world, and the opening situation, and sometimes but not always a dim idea of the ending. I will start jotting notes in pencil in a loose-leaf binder. By the time I have about 40 or 50 pages of these, I will start to see how the story should begin.
I then make a broad section outline, up to what I call "the event horizon", which is how far I can see to write till I have to stop and make up some more. This is usually a chapter or three. I'll get a mental picture of what scenes should go in the next chapter, and push them around till they slot into sequence. I then pull out the next scene and outline it closely, almost a messy sort of first draft. I choreograph dialogue especially carefully. Then I take these notes to my computer and type up the actual scene. Lather, rinse, repeat till I get to the end of the chapter and, my brain now purged and with room to hold more, I pop back up to the next level to outline again. Every scene I write has the potential of changing what comes next, either by a character doing something unexpected or by my clearer look at the material as it's finally pinned to the page, so I re-outline constantly.
Making up the story and writing down the story are, for me, two separate activities calling for two different states of mind. Creation needs relaxation; composition is intensely focused. I do the making up part away from the computer, either while taking my walks or otherwise busying myself, or, when I get to the note-making or outlining stage, in another room. I do not compose at the computer, although I do edit on the fly, and the odd better ideas for a bit of dialogue or description do often pop out while I'm typing. Sometimes, they're sufficiently strong that they derail what I'd planned and I have to stop typing and go away and re-outline; sometimes they're just a bonus, an unexpected Good Bit, and slot right in.
I don't write a certain set number of pages or words a day. Either I'll have nothing outlined, or what I have outlined will be unsatisfactory and I'll be stalled -- or doing invisible work, sometimes even invisible to me -- or I'll have a fresh outline and be racing ahead to get it onto the page. I generally write a chapter in a few days, then go fallow for several days -- or, in a sticky bit or when interrupted by travel, several weeks -- then have another burst. I figure an average of two chapters a month for minimum professional production, more if I can get them, but even that is irregular.
"Tidy chaos" might sum it up, at that.
I do most of my writing either in the late morning, or the late evening. Late afternoon tends to be a physiological down-time for me.
Are you thinking of writing other stories, apart from the Vor and
the Chalion Sagas?
The Sharing Knife is all finished, set in a new world not related to any prior books of mine, except perhaps thematically -- in other words, it's not another Chalion book. The first book split into a duology, and now it looks as if it's going to spawn a sequel. The sequel may run as much as two books before I arrive at the closure I want for it, or it may just be one fat volume. So the whole thing is going to be either a trilogy or a double-duology or tetrology. I think. It's a little too early to tell for sure.
My first ideas for The Sharing Knife surfaced in June, 2004, when I was out on my back deck trying to soak up some Minnesota sunshine for the long winter ahead. (In other words, I made it up, in a welcome idle moment.) I began writing in August, quite soon after I'd turned in the final manuscript for The Hallowed Hunt. This was to be a book written for my own pleasure, at my own pace, without the constraints of a contract or pressure of a deadline. The duology length came as a bit of a surprise to me, but it was precisely what the story, as it developed, needed. Also a surprise was how fast the writing went; I finished the first draft in Aug. 2006, a mere year after I'd started, the time it would usually take me to write a single much shorter book.
The landscape, ecology, and history are not, for a change, any analogue from medieval Europe, but are more inspired by the countryside of my own Ohio childhood. No kings, no castles, no state religions. (No gods! After three Chalion books close together, I needed a break from theology.) The results came out rather different than my other high fantasy, more so than I really expected, while at the same time giving me a chance to play with -- or argue with -- a lot of my favorite fantasy (and other) tropes. Really, there's no excuse for this book; I just wrote what I liked. At this point I have no idea what readers are going to make of it, but I can hope that enough of them will share my tastes. It's written in a mild local (to me) dialect, which may or may not give translators trouble.
As the story opens, Fawn Bluefield is a young farmer girl running away from home for some very traditional reasons. On the road, she encounters Dag Redwing Hickory, a rather weary patroller from a race of mages called Lakewalkers, who are engaged in a generations-long war and hunt against a peculiar and recurring supernatural menace called by the farmers, "blight bogles", and by the Lakewalkers, "malices". The history and mystery of the Lakewalkers' magical "technology" for dealing with this threat -- the "sharing knives" -- drives much of their culture and hence this tale. Lakewalker traditions surrounding the making, priming, ownership and use of these knives are naturally complex and fraught.
Because Lakewalkers' magical abilities are inherited, their culture is set up to preserve pure bloodlines, and actively discourages liaisons between Lakewalkers-born and "farmers," i.e., anybody who isn't a Lakewalker. These urgent cultural constraints drive the main opposition to the romance between Dag and Fawn; their dodgy situation in turn gives me a vehicle to explore both of their cultures, their underlying world, and its history. The first volume, Beguilement, concentrates on Fawn and her farmer culture and family; the second volume, Legacy, focuses more on Dag and his Lakewalker heritage, and goes on to examine the tensions between the two cultures and their fragile hopes for a less divided future. (And, of course, we find out what happens to the knife.)
Yes, of course there is action. But to describe it here would get into spoiler-territory rather swiftly, so you'll just have to wait till October '06.
