Lois McMaster Bujold's Blog, page 12
August 22, 2022
Sharing Knife e-covers full scan: Legacy
Legacy turned out to be the cover that occasioned the most back-and-forthing between myself and cover artist Ron Miller. Here’s the final result in full resolution:
My original idea for this cover was that it should follow up from the sort of standing-figures-reaching silhouette meet-cute I’d envisioned for Beguilement, with Dag and Fawn riding double on a horse. I liked Ron’s final meeting-picture with them both mounted – a lot more interesting – but I was very startled by this first offering for Legacy:
Well composed and subtly colored, in line with the set, but way too mid-century horror-movie poster for my tastes. Cowering females being menaced by monsters are out of tune with the present zeitgeist, I feel – monster menace may still be OK, but cowering is right out, besides being out-of-character for Fawn. Ron had said he was very artistically interested in tackling a malice, which I was rather um about since SK malices are so protean in form. But I bounced hard off this version.
As an aside at this point, I should explain my “rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic” metaphor with respect to unsatisfactory art. Not wanting to make more wasted work for the artist (I have possibly misguided housewifely instincts about that) my first impulse is to try to save the situation with what seem to me to be the smallest changes I can come up with, fiddling to frustration for all, when what actually needs to be done is to sink the blasted boat and start over. I put Ron through this back when we were working on the cover for “The Physicians of Vilnoc”, when the first idea, which he’d put a lot of work on, could not be saved, and we needed to try something else altogether.
I had meanwhile gone back and looked at that attractive cover of For the Wolf from my 72-covers link, and at some point mentioned that it might be interesting to have the knife/knives as tree roots or some such connection.
Apropos this, Ron had shown me a first-draft idea for Horizon:
which seemed to me might recycle well for the punted Legacy cover. At some point I also suggested it might tie the image together better to have the tree roots winding around the knife hilt. I was also concerned with the figures’ apparent heights, as it should be clear that Dag was taller. Fawn needed to be visibly shorter, but not so short as to suggest a child.
Next draft was this:
Generally good, but Ron had flipped the cloud-sky colors from white on blue, against which the white title had shown up just fine, to blue-on-white. Black tree branches against a white sky would not work as backing for either black or white typeface (he tried both), so Ron tried this green.
To my eye, it also had a camouflage problem – the eye expects to see green leaves in a tree; it did not have equal “pop” with the other titles on the plain backgrounds. I tossed out some ideas for other colors taken from the characters’ clothes, since we didn’t want to be multiplying colors, but Ron instead came back with giving more of a white halo around the letters, and then added actual green leaves, which finally worked to make the title not recede, though it made the tree less stylized.
Meanwhile Ron had changed Dag’s buckskins from brown to an orange I did not care for, and repositioned the depth of the figures I think to try to deal with the height issue. Once I started really looking at the clothing colors, I wanted to see some more choices. (I had optimistically assumed swapping out solid colors on the figures was like swapping out colors on typefaces, known to be a trivial test. My apologies to Ron if I was wrong about that.) I am not mad keen on yellow, either. I kept asking for a muted red on Fawn’s dress (burgundy, maroon), which proved to be a vocabulary problem as it kept getting pinker. I thought pink was problematic as it would signal “girl” not “adult woman”.
After several tries, I finally got a burgundy, and not-orange buckskins, and thought I’d better stop. The end result was more American Primitive and less WPA-poster/Arthur Rackham than the others in the set, more busy and realistic, a mismatch that still bothers me a little. Later, out on a walk, I wondered if we’d actually needed to sink a boat and try the image without the difficult figures and those extra colors at all, maybe with a little blood dripping from the tree roots onto the white knife, but I suspected it would leave the middle of the composition too empty unless the tree trunk were shortened or something. And the other three covers all have human figures, so.
Whoever said, “Art is never finished, merely abandoned,” had the right of it.
***
Ron has a continuation/guest post about our process in the first comment; scroll down! The two links GR wouldn't let him put in are:
https://bookcoverbasics.tumblr.com/ for an overview
and the one on silhouettes specifically, linked in the earlier post in this series,
https://bookcoverbasics.tumblr.com/po...
Ta, L.
My original idea for this cover was that it should follow up from the sort of standing-figures-reaching silhouette meet-cute I’d envisioned for Beguilement, with Dag and Fawn riding double on a horse. I liked Ron’s final meeting-picture with them both mounted – a lot more interesting – but I was very startled by this first offering for Legacy:
Well composed and subtly colored, in line with the set, but way too mid-century horror-movie poster for my tastes. Cowering females being menaced by monsters are out of tune with the present zeitgeist, I feel – monster menace may still be OK, but cowering is right out, besides being out-of-character for Fawn. Ron had said he was very artistically interested in tackling a malice, which I was rather um about since SK malices are so protean in form. But I bounced hard off this version.
As an aside at this point, I should explain my “rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic” metaphor with respect to unsatisfactory art. Not wanting to make more wasted work for the artist (I have possibly misguided housewifely instincts about that) my first impulse is to try to save the situation with what seem to me to be the smallest changes I can come up with, fiddling to frustration for all, when what actually needs to be done is to sink the blasted boat and start over. I put Ron through this back when we were working on the cover for “The Physicians of Vilnoc”, when the first idea, which he’d put a lot of work on, could not be saved, and we needed to try something else altogether.
I had meanwhile gone back and looked at that attractive cover of For the Wolf from my 72-covers link, and at some point mentioned that it might be interesting to have the knife/knives as tree roots or some such connection.
Apropos this, Ron had shown me a first-draft idea for Horizon:
which seemed to me might recycle well for the punted Legacy cover. At some point I also suggested it might tie the image together better to have the tree roots winding around the knife hilt. I was also concerned with the figures’ apparent heights, as it should be clear that Dag was taller. Fawn needed to be visibly shorter, but not so short as to suggest a child.
Next draft was this:
Generally good, but Ron had flipped the cloud-sky colors from white on blue, against which the white title had shown up just fine, to blue-on-white. Black tree branches against a white sky would not work as backing for either black or white typeface (he tried both), so Ron tried this green.
To my eye, it also had a camouflage problem – the eye expects to see green leaves in a tree; it did not have equal “pop” with the other titles on the plain backgrounds. I tossed out some ideas for other colors taken from the characters’ clothes, since we didn’t want to be multiplying colors, but Ron instead came back with giving more of a white halo around the letters, and then added actual green leaves, which finally worked to make the title not recede, though it made the tree less stylized.
Meanwhile Ron had changed Dag’s buckskins from brown to an orange I did not care for, and repositioned the depth of the figures I think to try to deal with the height issue. Once I started really looking at the clothing colors, I wanted to see some more choices. (I had optimistically assumed swapping out solid colors on the figures was like swapping out colors on typefaces, known to be a trivial test. My apologies to Ron if I was wrong about that.) I am not mad keen on yellow, either. I kept asking for a muted red on Fawn’s dress (burgundy, maroon), which proved to be a vocabulary problem as it kept getting pinker. I thought pink was problematic as it would signal “girl” not “adult woman”.
After several tries, I finally got a burgundy, and not-orange buckskins, and thought I’d better stop. The end result was more American Primitive and less WPA-poster/Arthur Rackham than the others in the set, more busy and realistic, a mismatch that still bothers me a little. Later, out on a walk, I wondered if we’d actually needed to sink a boat and try the image without the difficult figures and those extra colors at all, maybe with a little blood dripping from the tree roots onto the white knife, but I suspected it would leave the middle of the composition too empty unless the tree trunk were shortened or something. And the other three covers all have human figures, so.
Whoever said, “Art is never finished, merely abandoned,” had the right of it.
***
Ron has a continuation/guest post about our process in the first comment; scroll down! The two links GR wouldn't let him put in are:
https://bookcoverbasics.tumblr.com/ for an overview
and the one on silhouettes specifically, linked in the earlier post in this series,
https://bookcoverbasics.tumblr.com/po...
Ta, L.
August 18, 2022
Sharing Knife e-covers full scan: Horizon
Horizon was another that worked for me at first sight, although there was some email discussion beforehand with Ron. I'd suggested something with a wagon on a mountain road (Appalachian-style mountains, not Alps.) Ron really wanted to work in a menacing malice somewhere on the covers, and we'd discussed that possibility, but it was tricky; no two malices are the same. (Rather like Five Gods demons, they are what they eat.) I'd bounced hard off the rendition of a malice he'd offered in the first draft of the cover for Legacy, and fitting a bat-malice into his composition in progress was evidently proving a puzzle. He went instead with fireflies, which we'd also discussed in other contexts. (I thought the ones on the sample silhouette cover for Spellhorn in his linked post on same worked well.)
Once again, with a shift in perspective he managed to make something that I'd envisioned as a rather too horizontal subject fit well in a more vertical book frame.
Ta, L.
Once again, with a shift in perspective he managed to make something that I'd envisioned as a rather too horizontal subject fit well in a more vertical book frame.
Ta, L.
August 17, 2022
Sharing Knife e-covers full scans: Passage
From my point of view, this one was the easiest: I asked for a scene with a flatboat on a river, I got a scene with a flatboat on a river. Boom, done. How it was from Ron's point of view I don't know, but there surely must have been some thought put into how to arrange a basically horizontal image into a mostly vertical book-cover rectangle.
I'm presenting these a little out of order, saving what had proved the most difficult, Legacy, for last.
Ta, L.
(Ron also has a recent post on the new Vorkosigan novella e-covers he did this spring: https://bookcoverbasics.tumblr.com/po... )
I'm presenting these a little out of order, saving what had proved the most difficult, Legacy, for last.
Ta, L.
(Ron also has a recent post on the new Vorkosigan novella e-covers he did this spring: https://bookcoverbasics.tumblr.com/po... )
August 16, 2022
Sharing Knife e-covers full scans: Beguilement
So, I promised a better look at the UK-World e-covers for US viewers. Shall start at the beginning...
In my initial exchanges with artist Ron Miller about "what do we put on this book", once we'd set stylized-with-silhouettes (see Ron's link in the prior post about using silhouettes on book covers), same typeface as "Knife Children" and the verbiage, my first idea for the cover image for Beguilement was standing Dag & Fawn figures reaching out for each other, with Legacy to follow up with the pair riding double on one horse. Ron combined the two ideas and came up with this instead:
Note also the limited and subdued color palette, which adds to the air of classy restraint.
Silhouette portraits were a Thing in early 19. C. America (and elsewhere), thus in-period and congruent to my inspirations for this fantasy world. The colors remind me of classic early 20th C. illustrations with restricted colors due to technical printing issues.
Ta, L.
In my initial exchanges with artist Ron Miller about "what do we put on this book", once we'd set stylized-with-silhouettes (see Ron's link in the prior post about using silhouettes on book covers), same typeface as "Knife Children" and the verbiage, my first idea for the cover image for Beguilement was standing Dag & Fawn figures reaching out for each other, with Legacy to follow up with the pair riding double on one horse. Ron combined the two ideas and came up with this instead:
Note also the limited and subdued color palette, which adds to the air of classy restraint.
Silhouette portraits were a Thing in early 19. C. America (and elsewhere), thus in-period and congruent to my inspirations for this fantasy world. The colors remind me of classic early 20th C. illustrations with restricted colors due to technical printing issues.
Ta, L.
August 15, 2022
new e-covers for UK-World Sharing Knife
So...
It was time to refresh the UK-World e-covers for the Sharing Knife tetralogy, which were among the first indie works we'd put up back around 2010. I began by taking a look at what was new and hot in fantasy covers by perusing a handy Goodreads link,
https://www.goodreads.com/blog/show/2372
Lots of classy recent samples on a page, very useful. Some staring, and I noticed, when I wasn't being distracted by pretty colors, I trended toward the "silhouette" covers -- For the Wolf being the best example. On to artist Ron Miller, who came back with this useful link on the subject:
https://bookcoverbasics.tumblr.com/po...
Primed with that, there followed much back-and-forthing by email, one false start, much fiddling -- some of the images were good to go on the first try, others fought us to the end. Final result:
Note that the US ebooks for this series are still under the imprint of HarperCollins -- these will only show up elsewhere in the world, when my ebooks wrangler gets time to update everything.
(These sample jpegs are a little fuzzy at high magnification -- the real covers will have sharper resolution.)
Ta, L.
It was time to refresh the UK-World e-covers for the Sharing Knife tetralogy, which were among the first indie works we'd put up back around 2010. I began by taking a look at what was new and hot in fantasy covers by perusing a handy Goodreads link,
https://www.goodreads.com/blog/show/2372
Lots of classy recent samples on a page, very useful. Some staring, and I noticed, when I wasn't being distracted by pretty colors, I trended toward the "silhouette" covers -- For the Wolf being the best example. On to artist Ron Miller, who came back with this useful link on the subject:
https://bookcoverbasics.tumblr.com/po...
Primed with that, there followed much back-and-forthing by email, one false start, much fiddling -- some of the images were good to go on the first try, others fought us to the end. Final result:
Note that the US ebooks for this series are still under the imprint of HarperCollins -- these will only show up elsewhere in the world, when my ebooks wrangler gets time to update everything.
(These sample jpegs are a little fuzzy at high magnification -- the real covers will have sharper resolution.)
Ta, L.
August 9, 2022
Bujold Reading-order Guide, 2022 update
A Bujold Reading-Order Guide
The Fantasy Novels
My fantasy novels are not hard to order. Easiest of all is The Spirit Ring, which is a stand-alone, or aquel, as some wag once dubbed books that for some obscure reason failed to spawn a subsequent series. Next easiest are the four volumes of The Sharing Knife—in order, Beguilement, Legacy, Passage, and Horizon—which I broke down and actually numbered, as this was one continuous tale divided into non-wrist-breaking chunks. It has a stand-alone codicil novella, "Knife Children".
What were called the Chalion books after the setting of its first two volumes, but which now that the geographic scope has widened I’m dubbing the World of the Five Gods, were written to be stand-alones as part of a larger whole, and can in theory be read in any order. Some readers think the world-building is easier to assimilate when the books are read in publication order, and the second volume certainly contains spoilers for the first (but not the third.) In any case, the publication order is:
The Curse of Chalion
Paladin of Souls
The Hallowed Hunt
In terms of internal world chronology, The Hallowed Hunt would fall first, the Penric & Desdemona novellas perhaps a hundred and fifty years later, and The Curse of Chalion and Paladin of Souls would follow a century or so after that.
The internal chronological order of the Penric tales is presently:
“Penric’s Demon”
"Penric and the Shaman"
"Penric's Fox"
"Masquerade in Lodi"
"Penric's Mission"
"Mira's Last Dance"
"The Prisoner of Limnos"
"The Orphans of Raspay"
"The Physicians of Vilnoc"
The Assassins of Thasalon
"Knot of Shadows"
The nine first-published of these have been collected in three Baen Books paper editions: Penric's Progress, containing Demon, Shaman, and Fox: Penric's Travels, containing Mission, Mira, and Limnos; and (upcoming November 2022) Penric's Labors, containing Masquerade, Orphans, and Physicians.
Other Original E-books
The short story collection Proto Zoa contains five very early tales—three (1980s) contemporary fantasy, two science fiction—all previously published but not in this handy format. The novelette “Dreamweaver’s Dilemma” may be of interest to Vorkosigan completists, as it is the first story in which that proto-universe began, mentioning Beta Colony but before Barrayar was even thought of.
Sidelines: Talks and Essays is just what it says on the tin—a collection of three decades of my nonfiction writings, including convention speeches, essays, travelogues, introductions, and some less formal pieces. I hope it will prove an interesting companion piece to my fiction.
The Gerould Family of New Hampshire in the Civil War: Two Diaries and a Memoir is a compilation of historical documents handed down from my mother’s father’s side of my family. A meeting of time, technology, and skillset has finally allowed me to put them into a sharable form.
The Vorkosigan Stories
Many pixels have been expended debating the ‘best’ order in which to read what have come to be known as the Vorkosigan Books (or Saga), the Vorkosiverse, the Miles books, and other names. The debate mainly revolves around publication order versus internal-chronological order. I favor internal chronological, with a few adjustments.
It was always my intention to write each book as a stand-alone, so that the reader could theoretically jump in anywhere. While still somewhat true, as the series developed it acquired a number of sub-arcs, closely related tales that were richer for each other. I will list the sub-arcs, and then the books, and then the duplication warnings. (My publishing history has been complex.) And then the publication order, for those who want it.
Shards of Honor and Barrayar. The first two books in the series proper, they detail the adventures of Cordelia Naismith of Beta Colony and Aral Vorkosigan of Barrayar. Shards was my very first novel ever; Barrayar was actually my eighth, but continues the tale the next day after the end of Shards. For readers who want to be sure of beginning at the beginning, or who are very spoiler-sensitive, start with these two.
The Warrior’s Apprentice and The Vor Game (with, perhaps, the novella “The Mountains of Mourning” tucked in between.) The Warrior’s Apprentice introduces the character who became the series’ linchpin, Miles Vorkosigan; the first book tells how he created a space mercenary fleet by accident; the second how he fixed his mistakes from the first round. Space opera and military-esque adventure (and a number of other things one can best discover for oneself), The Warrior’s Apprentice makes another good place to jump into the series for readers who prefer a young male protagonist.
After that: Brothers in Arms should be read before Mirror Dance, and both, ideally, before Memory.
Komarr makes another alternate entry point for the series, picking up Miles’s second career at its start. It should be read before A Civil Campaign.
Borders of Infinity, a collection of three of the six currently extant novellas, makes a good Miles Vorkosigan early-adventure sampler platter, I always thought, for readers who don’t want to commit themselves to length. (But it may make more sense if read after The Warrior’s Apprentice.) Take care not to confuse the collection-as-a-whole with its title story, “The Borders of Infinity”.
Falling Free takes place 200 years earlier in the timeline and does not share settings or characters with the main body of the series. Most readers recommend picking up this story later. It should likely be read before Diplomatic Immunity, however, which revisits the “quaddies”, a bioengineered race of free-fall dwellers, in Miles’s time.
The novels in the internal-chronological list below appear in plain text; the novellas (officially defined as a story between 17,500 words and 40,000 words) in quote marks.
Falling Free
Shards of Honor
Barrayar
The Warrior’s Apprentice
“The Mountains of Mourning”
“Weatherman”
The Vor Game
Cetaganda
Ethan of Athos
Borders of Infinity
“Labyrinth”
“The Borders of Infinity”
Brothers in Arms
Mirror Dance
Memory
Komarr
A Civil Campaign
“Winterfair Gifts”
Diplomatic Immunity
Captain Vorpatril’s Alliance
"The Flowers of Vashnoi"
CryoBurn
Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen
Caveats:
The novella “Weatherman” is an out-take from the beginning of the novel The Vor Game. If you already have The Vor Game, you likely don’t need this.
The original ‘novel’ Borders of Infinity was a fix-up collection containing the three novellas “The Mountains of Mourning”, “Labyrinth”, and “The Borders of Infinity”, together with a frame to tie the pieces together. Again, beware duplication. The frame story does not stand alone.
Publication order:
This is also the order in which the works were written, apart from a couple of the novellas, but is not identical to the internal-chronological. It goes:
Shards of Honor (June 1986)
The Warrior’s Apprentice (August 1986)
Ethan of Athos (December 1986)
Falling Free (April 1988)
Brothers in Arms (January 1989)
Borders of Infinity (October 1989)
The Vor Game (September 1990)
Barrayar (October 1991)
Mirror Dance (March 1994)
Cetaganda (January 1996)
Memory (October 1996)
Komarr (June 1998)
A Civil Campaign (September 1999).
Diplomatic Immunity (May 2002)
“Winterfair Gifts” (February 2004)
CryoBurn (November 2010)
Captain Vorpatril’s Alliance (November 2012)
Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen (February 2016)
"The Flowers of Vashnoi" (May 2018)
— Lois McMaster Bujold
The Fantasy Novels
My fantasy novels are not hard to order. Easiest of all is The Spirit Ring, which is a stand-alone, or aquel, as some wag once dubbed books that for some obscure reason failed to spawn a subsequent series. Next easiest are the four volumes of The Sharing Knife—in order, Beguilement, Legacy, Passage, and Horizon—which I broke down and actually numbered, as this was one continuous tale divided into non-wrist-breaking chunks. It has a stand-alone codicil novella, "Knife Children".
What were called the Chalion books after the setting of its first two volumes, but which now that the geographic scope has widened I’m dubbing the World of the Five Gods, were written to be stand-alones as part of a larger whole, and can in theory be read in any order. Some readers think the world-building is easier to assimilate when the books are read in publication order, and the second volume certainly contains spoilers for the first (but not the third.) In any case, the publication order is:
The Curse of Chalion
Paladin of Souls
The Hallowed Hunt
In terms of internal world chronology, The Hallowed Hunt would fall first, the Penric & Desdemona novellas perhaps a hundred and fifty years later, and The Curse of Chalion and Paladin of Souls would follow a century or so after that.
The internal chronological order of the Penric tales is presently:
“Penric’s Demon”
"Penric and the Shaman"
"Penric's Fox"
"Masquerade in Lodi"
"Penric's Mission"
"Mira's Last Dance"
"The Prisoner of Limnos"
"The Orphans of Raspay"
"The Physicians of Vilnoc"
The Assassins of Thasalon
"Knot of Shadows"
The nine first-published of these have been collected in three Baen Books paper editions: Penric's Progress, containing Demon, Shaman, and Fox: Penric's Travels, containing Mission, Mira, and Limnos; and (upcoming November 2022) Penric's Labors, containing Masquerade, Orphans, and Physicians.
Other Original E-books
The short story collection Proto Zoa contains five very early tales—three (1980s) contemporary fantasy, two science fiction—all previously published but not in this handy format. The novelette “Dreamweaver’s Dilemma” may be of interest to Vorkosigan completists, as it is the first story in which that proto-universe began, mentioning Beta Colony but before Barrayar was even thought of.
Sidelines: Talks and Essays is just what it says on the tin—a collection of three decades of my nonfiction writings, including convention speeches, essays, travelogues, introductions, and some less formal pieces. I hope it will prove an interesting companion piece to my fiction.
The Gerould Family of New Hampshire in the Civil War: Two Diaries and a Memoir is a compilation of historical documents handed down from my mother’s father’s side of my family. A meeting of time, technology, and skillset has finally allowed me to put them into a sharable form.
The Vorkosigan Stories
Many pixels have been expended debating the ‘best’ order in which to read what have come to be known as the Vorkosigan Books (or Saga), the Vorkosiverse, the Miles books, and other names. The debate mainly revolves around publication order versus internal-chronological order. I favor internal chronological, with a few adjustments.
It was always my intention to write each book as a stand-alone, so that the reader could theoretically jump in anywhere. While still somewhat true, as the series developed it acquired a number of sub-arcs, closely related tales that were richer for each other. I will list the sub-arcs, and then the books, and then the duplication warnings. (My publishing history has been complex.) And then the publication order, for those who want it.
Shards of Honor and Barrayar. The first two books in the series proper, they detail the adventures of Cordelia Naismith of Beta Colony and Aral Vorkosigan of Barrayar. Shards was my very first novel ever; Barrayar was actually my eighth, but continues the tale the next day after the end of Shards. For readers who want to be sure of beginning at the beginning, or who are very spoiler-sensitive, start with these two.
The Warrior’s Apprentice and The Vor Game (with, perhaps, the novella “The Mountains of Mourning” tucked in between.) The Warrior’s Apprentice introduces the character who became the series’ linchpin, Miles Vorkosigan; the first book tells how he created a space mercenary fleet by accident; the second how he fixed his mistakes from the first round. Space opera and military-esque adventure (and a number of other things one can best discover for oneself), The Warrior’s Apprentice makes another good place to jump into the series for readers who prefer a young male protagonist.
After that: Brothers in Arms should be read before Mirror Dance, and both, ideally, before Memory.
Komarr makes another alternate entry point for the series, picking up Miles’s second career at its start. It should be read before A Civil Campaign.
Borders of Infinity, a collection of three of the six currently extant novellas, makes a good Miles Vorkosigan early-adventure sampler platter, I always thought, for readers who don’t want to commit themselves to length. (But it may make more sense if read after The Warrior’s Apprentice.) Take care not to confuse the collection-as-a-whole with its title story, “The Borders of Infinity”.
Falling Free takes place 200 years earlier in the timeline and does not share settings or characters with the main body of the series. Most readers recommend picking up this story later. It should likely be read before Diplomatic Immunity, however, which revisits the “quaddies”, a bioengineered race of free-fall dwellers, in Miles’s time.
The novels in the internal-chronological list below appear in plain text; the novellas (officially defined as a story between 17,500 words and 40,000 words) in quote marks.
Falling Free
Shards of Honor
Barrayar
The Warrior’s Apprentice
“The Mountains of Mourning”
“Weatherman”
The Vor Game
Cetaganda
Ethan of Athos
Borders of Infinity
“Labyrinth”
“The Borders of Infinity”
Brothers in Arms
Mirror Dance
Memory
Komarr
A Civil Campaign
“Winterfair Gifts”
Diplomatic Immunity
Captain Vorpatril’s Alliance
"The Flowers of Vashnoi"
CryoBurn
Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen
Caveats:
The novella “Weatherman” is an out-take from the beginning of the novel The Vor Game. If you already have The Vor Game, you likely don’t need this.
The original ‘novel’ Borders of Infinity was a fix-up collection containing the three novellas “The Mountains of Mourning”, “Labyrinth”, and “The Borders of Infinity”, together with a frame to tie the pieces together. Again, beware duplication. The frame story does not stand alone.
Publication order:
This is also the order in which the works were written, apart from a couple of the novellas, but is not identical to the internal-chronological. It goes:
Shards of Honor (June 1986)
The Warrior’s Apprentice (August 1986)
Ethan of Athos (December 1986)
Falling Free (April 1988)
Brothers in Arms (January 1989)
Borders of Infinity (October 1989)
The Vor Game (September 1990)
Barrayar (October 1991)
Mirror Dance (March 1994)
Cetaganda (January 1996)
Memory (October 1996)
Komarr (June 1998)
A Civil Campaign (September 1999).
Diplomatic Immunity (May 2002)
“Winterfair Gifts” (February 2004)
CryoBurn (November 2010)
Captain Vorpatril’s Alliance (November 2012)
Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen (February 2016)
"The Flowers of Vashnoi" (May 2018)
— Lois McMaster Bujold
Bujold reading-order guide to be relocated
As most Goodreads denizens may know by now, GR is deleting the "creative writing" section of their users' blogs on Sept. 1st.
I had been using it as, I thought, a good place to keep a permanent link to my reading-order guide, and had distributed the link far and wide. Wherever it has been shared, it is now going to click on frustration, sadly.
For the moment, I will repost the guide here on my blog periodically, till I find it a better home. Apologies to future net surfers who will follow the old URL to a dead link.
The other two items on it were a recent interview not published elsewhere, and the first draft of my Gerould family history chapbook. I'd figured the latter would serve readers who don't do the Kindle ecosystem, but alas. The interview I have backed up on my computer, and I'll have to figure out where else it might be permalinked. Note that any comments on the entries will presumably also be erased.
The reading-order guide may also be found in the back of every single one of my indie-published ebooks, but it's surprising how many people don't seem to find it there.
This is getting longish, so I'll put the first repost in a separate post to follow.
Ta, Lois.
I had been using it as, I thought, a good place to keep a permanent link to my reading-order guide, and had distributed the link far and wide. Wherever it has been shared, it is now going to click on frustration, sadly.
For the moment, I will repost the guide here on my blog periodically, till I find it a better home. Apologies to future net surfers who will follow the old URL to a dead link.
The other two items on it were a recent interview not published elsewhere, and the first draft of my Gerould family history chapbook. I'd figured the latter would serve readers who don't do the Kindle ecosystem, but alas. The interview I have backed up on my computer, and I'll have to figure out where else it might be permalinked. Note that any comments on the entries will presumably also be erased.
The reading-order guide may also be found in the back of every single one of my indie-published ebooks, but it's surprising how many people don't seem to find it there.
This is getting longish, so I'll put the first repost in a separate post to follow.
Ta, Lois.
dinged Assassins on sale at Sub Press
A few copies of The Assassins of Thasaon that got slightly dinged in production are still on sale at Subterranean Press, at half price for you bargain hunters:
https://subterraneanpress.com/assassi...
(The regular copies are sold out, which means the used prices will be rising in due course.)
Ta, L.
https://subterraneanpress.com/assassi...
(The regular copies are sold out, which means the used prices will be rising in due course.)
Ta, L.
July 15, 2022
Penric's Labors 3-novella collection on paper due November
Baen Books will be bringing out the next 3-novella Penric & Desdemona collection in hardcover, pub date scheduled for November 1. Contents are "Masquerade in Lodi", "The Orphans of Raspay", and "The Physicians of Vilnoc".
Paperback edition to follow at the usual time lag. Along with the 3 stories, there's an Introduction at the beginning and Outroduction at the end by me -- the former to new readers with what they need to know (mostly "Yes, you can read this book by itself!") the latter for a little spoiler discussion of how each of the tales got written.
It should be generally available in bookstores, but it won't hurt to pre-order it from your favorite bookseller rather than just hoping it will show up. (There's always a lot of competition for physical bookshelf space.) Uncle Hugo's and Dreamhaven here in Minneapolis will be able to get their copies signed, and personalized for you by arrangement.
https://www.baen.com/penric-s-labors....
Baen will as usual have an e-edition of the collection available exclusively on the Baen E-Bookstore.
https://www.amazon.com/Penrics-Labors... and so on.
*
In other news this morning, I see the Subterranean Press website lists their signed limited edition of The Assassins of Thasalon as out-of-stock. This means all the copies they printed have shipped, not that you still can't get one -- Dreamhaven and Uncle Hugo's still have them, I know, and there may be other paper book sellers around who have some.
(SubPress will also be bringing out their signed limited hardcover edition of the novella "Knot of Shadows" sometime this winter. It's not yet listed on their site, but I've previewed the very fine cover art by Lauren Saint-Onge, another Penric treat upcoming from her.)
Ta, L.
Paperback edition to follow at the usual time lag. Along with the 3 stories, there's an Introduction at the beginning and Outroduction at the end by me -- the former to new readers with what they need to know (mostly "Yes, you can read this book by itself!") the latter for a little spoiler discussion of how each of the tales got written.
It should be generally available in bookstores, but it won't hurt to pre-order it from your favorite bookseller rather than just hoping it will show up. (There's always a lot of competition for physical bookshelf space.) Uncle Hugo's and Dreamhaven here in Minneapolis will be able to get their copies signed, and personalized for you by arrangement.
https://www.baen.com/penric-s-labors....
Baen will as usual have an e-edition of the collection available exclusively on the Baen E-Bookstore.
https://www.amazon.com/Penrics-Labors... and so on.
*
In other news this morning, I see the Subterranean Press website lists their signed limited edition of The Assassins of Thasalon as out-of-stock. This means all the copies they printed have shipped, not that you still can't get one -- Dreamhaven and Uncle Hugo's still have them, I know, and there may be other paper book sellers around who have some.
(SubPress will also be bringing out their signed limited hardcover edition of the novella "Knot of Shadows" sometime this winter. It's not yet listed on their site, but I've previewed the very fine cover art by Lauren Saint-Onge, another Penric treat upcoming from her.)
Ta, L.
June 29, 2022
The Gerould Family of New Hampshire in the Civil War
And now for something completely different.
So…
A while ago, I was invited to be a guest subject on a website called WikiTree, which is an online association of dedicated genealogy enthusiasts. https://www.wikitree.com/ They run a group effort called WikiTree Challenge, in which they turn their skills loose upon the guest’s family tree for one week, and compete to see who can find out the most previously unknown information about the guest’s ancestors; sort of a cross between Roots and Time Team, crowdsourcing genealogy research.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nmYzt...
They begin by asking their subject to supply what they already know, which in the case of some quadrants of my family tree is quite a lot, in other a frustrating blank. The most documentation I have is on my mother’s father’s side, the Geroulds, New England Protestants who ran heavily to literacy and record keeping. An earlier family genealogist even produced a book, which he had published in 1885. I have a memory of it passing through my hands at one point, a slim vol. with a maroon cover. To my delight, when I began poking around to try to answer my WikiTree starter questions, I found someone had put up a scan with the Library of Congress, which got us all abruptly forwarder.
This also prodded me to find and pull off my shelves the typed transcripts my mother had made in the early 1970s of two pocket diaries she had from her family from the 19th Century, from a mother and a son in the key year of 1864. I remember her laboring over them, but paid little attention at the time. She (fortunately) had copies made to distribute around the family. When her condo was cleared out after her death in 2003, I remembered this, and secured the small tin box containing the original diaries and others of the period, thinking they should be photocopied into some sort of enhanced and enlarged PDF for later perusal, and then proceeded not to get to it (life was full) though I did get as far as getting a friend to make a pdf file of the transcripts. I eventually took the tin box back to my brother James, who has been stuck warehousing most of the other family memorabilia, so at least everything would be together.
In emailing my brother about all this, he also came up with his scan of a transcript of another Gerould brother of that generation, a memoir of his Civil War experiences, which I don’t remember seeing before but must also have been among the papers from my mother. With all three elements in my hands, I realized I had enough to Do Something with. The Something turned out to be this:
Now up on Kindle at:
https://www.amazon.com/Gerould-Family...
Cover design again by Ron Miller, who did a bang-up job, I think, with the family memorabilia and other elements we found.
Vendor page copy goes like this:
When family history meets history…
This chapbook is a collection of eyewitness historical documents from the American Civil War handed down through descendants of the Gerould family. Two transcribed pocket diaries for the year 1864 describe the day-by-day tribulations of young Union navy surgeon Dr. Martin Gerould, assigned to the ill-fated ironclad Eastport in the Red River Campaign; and his aging mother Cynthia Locke Gerould, the wife of a clergyman, back home in New Hampshire. The increasingly gripping cross-illumination of the paired accounts is further rounded out by the later-written memoir of Martin’s eldest brother Reverend (soon to be Private) Samuel L. Gerould, detailing his experiences in the Fourteenth New Hampshire Volunteers: three voices from the past speaking directly, in their own words.
***
Editor Lois McMaster Bujold is a well-known science fiction and fantasy writer, and the great-granddaughter of Samuel L. Gerould.
With my added introductions and other material, it ended up running about 42k words, about the size of a long novella. Really, it was a lucky intersection of stimulus, time, technology, and ebook skillset, most of which I’d not had until recently.
Be it noted, my primary purpose in assembling this e-chapbook was to preserve historical documents, not to write a history as such. My mother had the same idea, exactly reproducing all original wording, errata, spelling, and punctuation or lack of it from the faded handwritten originals, as well as she could make out with a magnifying glass and a good light. To that end, I have reproduced her typescripts in turn as accurately as I could (including, probably, any errors she’d made), with the extra challenge of my OCR scanner choking on oddities and frequently turning sentences into word-salad. Correcting these did force me to pay extremely close attention to every word, to the great benefit of my previously spotty understanding of the material, rewarding my effort in unexpected ways.
Ta, L.
So…
A while ago, I was invited to be a guest subject on a website called WikiTree, which is an online association of dedicated genealogy enthusiasts. https://www.wikitree.com/ They run a group effort called WikiTree Challenge, in which they turn their skills loose upon the guest’s family tree for one week, and compete to see who can find out the most previously unknown information about the guest’s ancestors; sort of a cross between Roots and Time Team, crowdsourcing genealogy research.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nmYzt...
They begin by asking their subject to supply what they already know, which in the case of some quadrants of my family tree is quite a lot, in other a frustrating blank. The most documentation I have is on my mother’s father’s side, the Geroulds, New England Protestants who ran heavily to literacy and record keeping. An earlier family genealogist even produced a book, which he had published in 1885. I have a memory of it passing through my hands at one point, a slim vol. with a maroon cover. To my delight, when I began poking around to try to answer my WikiTree starter questions, I found someone had put up a scan with the Library of Congress, which got us all abruptly forwarder.
This also prodded me to find and pull off my shelves the typed transcripts my mother had made in the early 1970s of two pocket diaries she had from her family from the 19th Century, from a mother and a son in the key year of 1864. I remember her laboring over them, but paid little attention at the time. She (fortunately) had copies made to distribute around the family. When her condo was cleared out after her death in 2003, I remembered this, and secured the small tin box containing the original diaries and others of the period, thinking they should be photocopied into some sort of enhanced and enlarged PDF for later perusal, and then proceeded not to get to it (life was full) though I did get as far as getting a friend to make a pdf file of the transcripts. I eventually took the tin box back to my brother James, who has been stuck warehousing most of the other family memorabilia, so at least everything would be together.
In emailing my brother about all this, he also came up with his scan of a transcript of another Gerould brother of that generation, a memoir of his Civil War experiences, which I don’t remember seeing before but must also have been among the papers from my mother. With all three elements in my hands, I realized I had enough to Do Something with. The Something turned out to be this:
Now up on Kindle at:
https://www.amazon.com/Gerould-Family...
Cover design again by Ron Miller, who did a bang-up job, I think, with the family memorabilia and other elements we found.
Vendor page copy goes like this:
When family history meets history…
This chapbook is a collection of eyewitness historical documents from the American Civil War handed down through descendants of the Gerould family. Two transcribed pocket diaries for the year 1864 describe the day-by-day tribulations of young Union navy surgeon Dr. Martin Gerould, assigned to the ill-fated ironclad Eastport in the Red River Campaign; and his aging mother Cynthia Locke Gerould, the wife of a clergyman, back home in New Hampshire. The increasingly gripping cross-illumination of the paired accounts is further rounded out by the later-written memoir of Martin’s eldest brother Reverend (soon to be Private) Samuel L. Gerould, detailing his experiences in the Fourteenth New Hampshire Volunteers: three voices from the past speaking directly, in their own words.
***
Editor Lois McMaster Bujold is a well-known science fiction and fantasy writer, and the great-granddaughter of Samuel L. Gerould.
With my added introductions and other material, it ended up running about 42k words, about the size of a long novella. Really, it was a lucky intersection of stimulus, time, technology, and ebook skillset, most of which I’d not had until recently.
Be it noted, my primary purpose in assembling this e-chapbook was to preserve historical documents, not to write a history as such. My mother had the same idea, exactly reproducing all original wording, errata, spelling, and punctuation or lack of it from the faded handwritten originals, as well as she could make out with a magnifying glass and a good light. To that end, I have reproduced her typescripts in turn as accurately as I could (including, probably, any errors she’d made), with the extra challenge of my OCR scanner choking on oddities and frequently turning sentences into word-salad. Correcting these did force me to pay extremely close attention to every word, to the great benefit of my previously spotty understanding of the material, rewarding my effort in unexpected ways.
Ta, L.
