Lois McMaster Bujold

Last summer at the Worldcon, Lois McMaster Bujold won yet another Hugo award, this time for Mirror Dance, the story of what happens after you rescue someone and they turn out to be your cloned twin brother who's supposed to end up living your life for you. Apart from an unusual fantasy novel, The Spirit Ring, which starts with the premise that all that complicated mediaeval alchemy actually worked, her success hinges on just one series about the world and family of a most unlikely military hero, Miles Naismith Vorkosigan - he's only four foot nine and suffers from brittle bone disease, yet manages to be a lieutenant in the Barrayaran navy, something important in Military Intelligence and admiral of the Dendarii mercenaries at the same time. This is military sf that's often dark and vicious but never glorifies war and spends as much time poking and prying at its characters' motives as it does sending them off to death and glory. We caught up with Lois McMaster Bujold when she visited London and asked her rather nervously, "so, why the gun-toting dwarf?"

Military sf is seen as a male province and it seems to worry people when women write about war and fighting. Do you feel that you have to outdo the men?

No, when I write, I set out to outdo everyone.

There's a lot of politics in the books, manipulations by the military or the nobles of the way things are done and how people in power behave. Do your books reflect your own politics and beliefs?

Not necessarily! I suppose the character whose politics are closest to my own is Cordelia Vorkosigan who sits there and thinks "you're all mad". She's as apolitical as you can get and still be conscious and walking around.

Your background is medical rather than military - does that affect the technology that you put in your books?

I worked for many years as a pharmacy technician and I had some biology background in college. So when I'm thinking of science fictional ideas they tend naturally to run on biological and medical lines simply because that's where I've got the most background and the most sense of where the real problems are.

Despite all the technology in your books, it seems to be the effect of technology on society that interests you. Which is more important, the science in the story, or the characters, or the theme of a book?

The characters - but theme is what underlies it all. My stories are very character-centered but the character is always on some kind of spiritual journey. Some of my books have a clearer sense of theme and underlying structure than others and they tend to be the more successful books. Barrayar was very much a book about the cost of being a mother, the cost of parenthood and I found myself exploring the theme through all these parallel couples. We had Aral and Cordelia who were the main theme and we had Padma and Alice Vorpatril who were a another version of it and we had the young Kou and Drou who were following along and modeling on Aral and Cordelia. We had the old Count Piotr and his long deceased wife as a another slice on that problem and all these different characters and their sub-plots took up different aspects of the theme - the way in a symphony the theme may be first played by the oboes and then by the string section and it bounce around and you get a different sense of the possibilities each time. Bothari and the uterine replicator [an artificial womb so women don't have to carry a baby to term and give birth - Ed] was another couple in a weird sense, in this interlocking pattern.

The other book that I think is the most successful in terms of its relation of structure and character and theme is the recent [and Hugo-award-winning - Ed] Mirror Dance, an exploration of the problem of identity and how you get it. It takes Miles' clone brother Mark and proceeds to ring changes both between Miles and Mark and also the other clones in the story, the Durona group, and various renegades - looking at different patterns that fall from there. And of course Mark gets to go home to Barrayar and explore Miles' identity so even when Miles is absent we have the shape of his identity all around. That book really excited me because of the way the theme drove everything and yet it appears to be a page-turning adventure plot.

So what are you reading and watching yourself?

I have been reading Terry Pratchett fairly regularly because I love his world view. On the level of theme Pratchett just fascinates me - you read his books and you come back looking at this world through refreshed eyes. That's an extraordinary effect for a book to have. I'm not presently following anything in television or on film but something may catch my eye.

But we hear that you are in fact a closet Blakes 7 fan?

I had a friend who had it all on tape and you know Blakes 7 fans are like drug pushers, they go off and try to make other Blakes 7 fans - "the first sample is free!" Actually I thoroughly enjoyed watching the series. It was a very different kind of television science fiction than we see in the States, it could never have been produced there so it was doubly fascinating. And of course it had all the nifty character interactions which I liked. You do not watch Blakes 7 for the special effects, except for the giggle value - the scene where the alien fleet came out and I swear somebody had emptied out and spray painted the contents of their desk drawer and thrown them onto a piece of black velvet and photographed them. "Look, the alien invasion fleet! Yes, there's a Bic pen!"

Nearly all of your writing has been hard, military sf but you've also written one fantasy book, The Spirit Ring. Was that a different experience? Did you enjoy writing it and would you do another?

I've never felt that science fiction and fantasy were two separate things; they've always been a continuum for me. There are many other writers who have written on both sides - C J Cherryh is one who writes both science fiction and fantasy. So I never felt any inhibitions about doing fantasy. I just started off with the science fiction and the Vorkosigan series extended itself

My great-uncle was a professor of English at Princeton around the turn of the century and had written a scholarly monograph on an old folktale, called The Grateful Dead - the fast-forward version of which goes "a young man goes out to seek his fortune, comes across a situation where the body of a debtor lies unburied until his debts are paid, gets the guy planted as an act of charity and goes on down the road to further adventures in which he is aided by the grateful ghost of the dead man". I had been seeing things like the Ace and the Tor adult fairy tale lines where they take old folk tales and turn them into modern novels for the fantasy and science fiction market and I thought "that would be fun to do". With this folk tale, which no-one else seemed to have done, it was more obscure and it's always fun to find the idea that hasn't been mined by at least 17 zillion other writers before you.

I actually did more research for that fantasy, which ended up being set in 15th century Italy than I had done for any of my science fiction, because it was also my first historical novel (sort of). And yes, I think I would like to do more.

And did you find you got different reactions or attitudes to the books?

Yes, I am kind of glad that I started off with the science fiction first, because there's a certain non-advantage to being typecast as a female fantasy writer. So I established myself in science fiction and then having covered my ass I was then able to go and do fantasy freely without having to worry about getting downchecked for it. But it was a challenging book to write and I thoroughly enjoyed it.

The goldsmith in Spirit Ring reminded me very much of Cellini - did you base the character on him at all?

Yes! Benforte is lifted directly from Benevenuto Cellini - well I cleaned up Benevenuto, the real Cellini is so obnoxious I don't think anybody could have stood him so Prospero is a sort of Cellini Lite. And Thur, the young Swiss miner, is based in a much more obscure way on Agricola's de Re Metallica, a treatise on mining and metallurgy from the sixteenth century; he was very much the engineering type. Cellini was always parading front and centre of his autobiography and Agricola just receded behind his. If he lived in the twentieth century he would have a pocket protector and pens and a slide rule or a pocket calculator.

You've stayed in the same universe for most of your books (apart from The Spirit Ring). Is there anything you can't do in that universe, or anything you wish you hadn't done?

You do get stuck if you make it up as you go along. You look back four years on and think "why did I give these people names five syllables long?" I find that character interests me more than setting; I've set up a very broad generic universe that has room for all kinds of stories in it. Keeping the universe the same allows me to spend more time and energy and page space on the part that interests me more, which is character development.

I would not have any compunction about making up a new universe if I needed one for the story that I wanted to tell. But most of the stories that I've wanted to tell so far have fit into this universe. One of the things that defines a series in science fiction is that they all share the same universe. So you can write an extremely varied range of books, set them in the same universe, and have them cross-sell each other like series are supposed to do. There's a certain market advantage there! I have gone on record as stating that mainstream fiction is the world's largest shared universe series.

In Brothers in Arms you bring Miles to Earth and set the final scene on the Thames Barrier? Why did you pick it as a setting - have you ever been there?

It's nothing at all like what I describe but what I describe is its ten-time great grandchild 900 years from now so it would naturally not be the same! What happened was I was writing Brothers in Arms at the time of the 1987 Worldcon [in Brighton - Ed] and I'd come over for that and got to spend all of three days in London, forty minutes in the British Museum (it's not enough)! I had actually started to set the book in Paris - the Barrayaran embassy could have been anywhere on Earth for the purposes of my story - but I was so in love with London after that trip that I set it in London and gave Miles the same experience that I had, which was he gets there and he's not allowed to see anything because there's no time; they lock him up in rooms and he doesn't get out. So there's a little "write what you know" going on there!

Do you usually "write what you know? Where do you get your ideas from?

You get your ideas from everything you've ever done or learned or been. You get them from first of all having read other books, from all the movies you've ever watched, from all the history you've ever read, from all the classroom experiences you've ever had. You get it from travel - you name it - you get it from unfortunate disasters you have been through! The one thing about writing is that it has a tremendously redeeming quality - suddenly all your failures can be reclassified as raw material! So you use everything; I use people I know, I use my relationships with my family. Nothing is used whole - it all goes in and is transmuted and transformed and comes out as art on some level.

So the counter-question to that, to the people who ask it is "how do you not have ideas?" Please explain to me how you are turning your brain off so you do not have an idea from one day’s end to the other because I can't imagine how that's done.

Bujold on Bujold

The series has been quite deliberately designed (by me) so that every book stands alone and there is no wrong way to read them - you are never holding part three of a story of which you are missing parts one and two. Every book is a novel complete in itself, so it is safe to start wherever you can find one. If you have a choice, then two of the best books to start with are Shards of Honour, which is the first novel and the first book in the series. I usually recommend that to people who have a taste for - or at least are not allergic to -romance because it has a strong romance plot. If they prefer more the action adventure I direct them to The Warrior's Apprentice which is the key book in the Miles series; it's where Miles really gets introduced as a character.