Lois McMaster Bujold's Blog, page 20
September 7, 2020
Second Taiwanese interview, for Storm Media
Herewith the English version of the other long email interview I did this past spring for Taiwanese media, in support of the reissue of the Chalion series by Fantasy Foundation.
Chinese translation here:
https://www.storm.mg/article/2765692
***
Storm Media Taiwan interview Mrs. Bujold May 2020
The Interview of The World of the Five Gods
Interview Questions by Storm Media
SM: Can it be said that the Bastard of Quintarianism was designed as a mechanism for embracing diverse values within a feudal society?
LMB: I suppose it could, but not by me.
SM: You have mentioned that you conceived of the Five Gods from a biological perspective. Could you give some specific examples of this? Also, what makes this biological conception distinct from a mythological or historical one?
LMB: Casting my mind back – twenty years! – to when I was initially writing this story, I knew I wanted to devise a serious religion, in a world where gods (and magic) were real and not the arbitrary artistic creations of humans, and that resisted dualism, the human impulse to divide things into easy black-white good-evil categories. Biology gives an alternate substrate in contrast to the old, deeply culturally embedded Platonic-style philosophies, that start from abstractions like “godhead” and then try to generate material reality downward (in status, among other things) from them. Not to mention in contrast to the many colorful even older mythological versions of creator-gods of all sorts.
So in this book-universe, I make the material world the first thing, and matter, chemistry, biochemistry, life, and mind emerge upward from it. The gods are thus not creator gods, but created by the world, one level up from life and minds to an array of collective Overminds.
If you take humans as the highest organizing source of these Overminds, they sort in life biologically first into sexes, then into ages, and then, because I believe humans exist in continuums not boxes, all the lubricating spaces between those grids of mental categories usually dropped over the underlying inchoate, seething, unbounded mass of reality. (Such cultural grids or world-views are wildly historically varied, but usually comfortingly rigid, compared to what they attempt to containerize.)
I also wanted to devise a fictional religion that took seriously all the social work of real-world religions -- community support and practical mutual service of all kinds. And also took seriously mysticism, the human longing for some kind of personal experience of the divine, beyond the rudimentary “begging for favors” of cruder prayers.
SM: Ista had a remarkable journey in Paladin of Souls, casting off her shackles as royina to pursue her freedom and sexual autonomy. Such a story might still seem audacious even told in a modern setting. What were some of your considerations when deciding to have this story set with a medieval backdrop?
LMB: I think this question mistakes the direction of causality in my creative process, especially for this book. I don’t get up a story to display a point of view or even to explore a theme. I set characters in motion and let them show me their tale, and theme arises as an emergent property of the gestalt whole of the work, an abstraction after the fact.
Ista began, of course, as a minor and quickly left-behind character in The Curse of Chalion, heroine Iselle’s “mad” mother. But every time she appeared onstage, she generated a strong gravitational field that tilted the story toward her. I considered even back then giving her a larger part, but the book was already full, and she deserved more than merely being the subplot in someone else’s tale.
She also arose out of my consideration of what longer modern lifespans do to women’s traditional roles. In the last century and a half, average female life expectancies in post-industrial societies with modern medicine have doubled from around 45 to around 90 years. The traditional tripartite fairy-tale model for women’s lives, “maid, matron, crone”, now has a big gap between the last two stages, in part because fewer women die of assorted female ailments in childbirth or later middle age, in part because having fewer children curtails the “matron” stage. So now we have “maid – matron – big undefined gap – crone”. Passing through it myself, I wanted to examine that gap. So I’m not exploring a theme; I am exploring lives.
SM: You have mentioned that your father, who is a well-respected scientist, had an impact on your interest in sci-fi. On the other hand, you have remarked on the fact that much attention is paid to the hardships of the sons of great men, while their daughters' lives cannot have been any easier. Having witnessed such gender disparities in society, what inspiration have you drawn from these to put into your works? In a non-contemporary, fictitious setting, how do these look different?
LMB: Family psychology – relationships between parents and children -- is a pretty universal thing, though it takes different particular forms depending on the family and people and culture in question. While not all of us have children, all of us have parents, of one sort or another, and all of us have ideals of parents, examined or not. (We become most conscious of this when we decide, usually in our teens, that the ones we were issued are substandard in some way. There are underlying necessary reasons of adolescent maturation, separation, and individuation for this.) Such relationships are part of the underlying human reality of all story, no more escapable than our biology of which they are part, though some stories succeed in artificially ignoring such dependent aspects of life. (Not necessarily a negative criticism – stories must focus, and that means leaving a lot of things out.) So in a fictitious setting, if one is trying to write characters who ring true to readers or even just to oneself, there is no difference in the writing among setting choices. People always carry their biology with them.
That said, part of what science fiction or fantasy can do is present very alternate ways for people to come into existence, from something as technology-driven as my race of bioengineered quaddies in my SF novel Falling Free, to something as mythical as being born from a peach, a bamboo stalk, or the head of Zeus. Such stories very often go on to explore the consequences of the unusual beginning.
Of course, that leads to the consideration, particularly in SF but also fantasy, of truly alien sentient species, who Do It Differently. These tales can be a wonderful laboratory for the examination of the deep underlying issues of how to be alive.
SM: Besides The World of the Five Gods, you also wrote the Vorkosigan Saga and Sharing Knife series. World building from scratch must be exhausting.
LMB: Sure, yes, that’s why they pay us for it. But it’s fun as well. As my ex-accountant fantasy-writer friend says, “The IRS doesn’t say you can’t enjoy your work”
SM: Where do you usually draw your motivation from?
LMB: There are all kinds of economic motives for the act of publishing, and I’ve shared a lot of them in interviews before – needing the money, needing a job I could blend with childcare in an economically depressed small town, the social and emotional rewards of having a job that other people find interesting. But the stories come out of my brain from I-don’t-know-where, except that I have certainly stuffed a huge amount of story into it over the years. This is “story” in the broadest possible sense, including everything I’ve seen, read, watched, done, or learned from. My brain (and, I believe, all brains) naturally fantasizes from this substrate, generates thoughts; my learned culture gives them a shaped vessel to pour into.
So beyond all the business-of-being-a-writer aspect, my stories, once they reach a certain critical mass of thought, demand their own completion. This seems to be motivation enough to labor to The End.
I am thus a one-project-at-a-time writer. I’ve tried multi-tasking, and it just stalls out altogether. So among other things, I have to finish a current writing project before I can turn to anything else. Not finished is not finished; it would be like trying to stop halfway through childbirth. (Which also doesn’t work, btw.)
SM: What expectations do you bring when starting a new series?
LMB: All my series-starts have been tentative; I figure it’s all I can manage to get through to the end of the story in front of me. (Technically, of the scene in front of me, since that’s about what I can hold in my brain at one time, my natural work-unit.) So while I may certainly, along the way, think, “Huh. There could be more of this…”, I don’t plan my series out a set numbers of books in advance. Publishers, for their own economic reassurance, are addicted to multi-book contracts. I gradually learned that even the most open-ended contract feels like an onerous constraint to me, so part of my “retirement for Lois” scheme has been to contract no work until it is at least finished in first draft. The advent of indie e-publishing has freed me from contracts at all, apart from after-the-fact subrights sales.
SM: The World of the Five Gods has won yet another Hugo Award nearly twenty years after the publication of the first book in the series. How does that feel to you? And speaking of winning awards, people often compare your accolades with those of Robert Anson Heinlein. How do you feel about that comparison?
LMB: I was delighted with both of my series-category Hugo wins, the inaugural one for the science fictional Vorkosigan saga, and the second one the next year for what has grown into The World of the Five Gods. “Series” is a difficult category to figure out how to capture in an annual award, since series by their nature spread over many years in their creations and publication. But I have long thought that series are artistic works in their own right, as distinct from the novel in form and function as the novel is from the short story, with their own potential strengths in diverse structures, development, and re-examination that a single novel can’t address.
The comparison with Heinlein seems to be basically numerical, for those people who like keeping score and ranking things by hierarchies. Heinlein has the distinct advantage of being a half-century ahead of me, a foundational writer in my genre; I can’t match that. But I can write my own stories, nonetheless.
This year, I’ve followed Heinlein – and nearly three dozen other senior science fiction and fantasy writers – in being named 2020’s Damon Knight Grandmaster by the Science Fiction Writers of America. As in so many things, Heinlein was first, being named the inaugural Grandmaster in 1974.
https://nebulas.sfwa.org/grand-masters/ for those curious about the honor.
***
Fantasy Foundation’s Facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/ffoundation/
The Curse of Chalion’s Product Page on Books.com:
https://www.books.com.tw/products/001...
L.
Chinese translation here:
https://www.storm.mg/article/2765692
***
Storm Media Taiwan interview Mrs. Bujold May 2020
The Interview of The World of the Five Gods
Interview Questions by Storm Media
SM: Can it be said that the Bastard of Quintarianism was designed as a mechanism for embracing diverse values within a feudal society?
LMB: I suppose it could, but not by me.
SM: You have mentioned that you conceived of the Five Gods from a biological perspective. Could you give some specific examples of this? Also, what makes this biological conception distinct from a mythological or historical one?
LMB: Casting my mind back – twenty years! – to when I was initially writing this story, I knew I wanted to devise a serious religion, in a world where gods (and magic) were real and not the arbitrary artistic creations of humans, and that resisted dualism, the human impulse to divide things into easy black-white good-evil categories. Biology gives an alternate substrate in contrast to the old, deeply culturally embedded Platonic-style philosophies, that start from abstractions like “godhead” and then try to generate material reality downward (in status, among other things) from them. Not to mention in contrast to the many colorful even older mythological versions of creator-gods of all sorts.
So in this book-universe, I make the material world the first thing, and matter, chemistry, biochemistry, life, and mind emerge upward from it. The gods are thus not creator gods, but created by the world, one level up from life and minds to an array of collective Overminds.
If you take humans as the highest organizing source of these Overminds, they sort in life biologically first into sexes, then into ages, and then, because I believe humans exist in continuums not boxes, all the lubricating spaces between those grids of mental categories usually dropped over the underlying inchoate, seething, unbounded mass of reality. (Such cultural grids or world-views are wildly historically varied, but usually comfortingly rigid, compared to what they attempt to containerize.)
I also wanted to devise a fictional religion that took seriously all the social work of real-world religions -- community support and practical mutual service of all kinds. And also took seriously mysticism, the human longing for some kind of personal experience of the divine, beyond the rudimentary “begging for favors” of cruder prayers.
SM: Ista had a remarkable journey in Paladin of Souls, casting off her shackles as royina to pursue her freedom and sexual autonomy. Such a story might still seem audacious even told in a modern setting. What were some of your considerations when deciding to have this story set with a medieval backdrop?
LMB: I think this question mistakes the direction of causality in my creative process, especially for this book. I don’t get up a story to display a point of view or even to explore a theme. I set characters in motion and let them show me their tale, and theme arises as an emergent property of the gestalt whole of the work, an abstraction after the fact.
Ista began, of course, as a minor and quickly left-behind character in The Curse of Chalion, heroine Iselle’s “mad” mother. But every time she appeared onstage, she generated a strong gravitational field that tilted the story toward her. I considered even back then giving her a larger part, but the book was already full, and she deserved more than merely being the subplot in someone else’s tale.
She also arose out of my consideration of what longer modern lifespans do to women’s traditional roles. In the last century and a half, average female life expectancies in post-industrial societies with modern medicine have doubled from around 45 to around 90 years. The traditional tripartite fairy-tale model for women’s lives, “maid, matron, crone”, now has a big gap between the last two stages, in part because fewer women die of assorted female ailments in childbirth or later middle age, in part because having fewer children curtails the “matron” stage. So now we have “maid – matron – big undefined gap – crone”. Passing through it myself, I wanted to examine that gap. So I’m not exploring a theme; I am exploring lives.
SM: You have mentioned that your father, who is a well-respected scientist, had an impact on your interest in sci-fi. On the other hand, you have remarked on the fact that much attention is paid to the hardships of the sons of great men, while their daughters' lives cannot have been any easier. Having witnessed such gender disparities in society, what inspiration have you drawn from these to put into your works? In a non-contemporary, fictitious setting, how do these look different?
LMB: Family psychology – relationships between parents and children -- is a pretty universal thing, though it takes different particular forms depending on the family and people and culture in question. While not all of us have children, all of us have parents, of one sort or another, and all of us have ideals of parents, examined or not. (We become most conscious of this when we decide, usually in our teens, that the ones we were issued are substandard in some way. There are underlying necessary reasons of adolescent maturation, separation, and individuation for this.) Such relationships are part of the underlying human reality of all story, no more escapable than our biology of which they are part, though some stories succeed in artificially ignoring such dependent aspects of life. (Not necessarily a negative criticism – stories must focus, and that means leaving a lot of things out.) So in a fictitious setting, if one is trying to write characters who ring true to readers or even just to oneself, there is no difference in the writing among setting choices. People always carry their biology with them.
That said, part of what science fiction or fantasy can do is present very alternate ways for people to come into existence, from something as technology-driven as my race of bioengineered quaddies in my SF novel Falling Free, to something as mythical as being born from a peach, a bamboo stalk, or the head of Zeus. Such stories very often go on to explore the consequences of the unusual beginning.
Of course, that leads to the consideration, particularly in SF but also fantasy, of truly alien sentient species, who Do It Differently. These tales can be a wonderful laboratory for the examination of the deep underlying issues of how to be alive.
SM: Besides The World of the Five Gods, you also wrote the Vorkosigan Saga and Sharing Knife series. World building from scratch must be exhausting.
LMB: Sure, yes, that’s why they pay us for it. But it’s fun as well. As my ex-accountant fantasy-writer friend says, “The IRS doesn’t say you can’t enjoy your work”
SM: Where do you usually draw your motivation from?
LMB: There are all kinds of economic motives for the act of publishing, and I’ve shared a lot of them in interviews before – needing the money, needing a job I could blend with childcare in an economically depressed small town, the social and emotional rewards of having a job that other people find interesting. But the stories come out of my brain from I-don’t-know-where, except that I have certainly stuffed a huge amount of story into it over the years. This is “story” in the broadest possible sense, including everything I’ve seen, read, watched, done, or learned from. My brain (and, I believe, all brains) naturally fantasizes from this substrate, generates thoughts; my learned culture gives them a shaped vessel to pour into.
So beyond all the business-of-being-a-writer aspect, my stories, once they reach a certain critical mass of thought, demand their own completion. This seems to be motivation enough to labor to The End.
I am thus a one-project-at-a-time writer. I’ve tried multi-tasking, and it just stalls out altogether. So among other things, I have to finish a current writing project before I can turn to anything else. Not finished is not finished; it would be like trying to stop halfway through childbirth. (Which also doesn’t work, btw.)
SM: What expectations do you bring when starting a new series?
LMB: All my series-starts have been tentative; I figure it’s all I can manage to get through to the end of the story in front of me. (Technically, of the scene in front of me, since that’s about what I can hold in my brain at one time, my natural work-unit.) So while I may certainly, along the way, think, “Huh. There could be more of this…”, I don’t plan my series out a set numbers of books in advance. Publishers, for their own economic reassurance, are addicted to multi-book contracts. I gradually learned that even the most open-ended contract feels like an onerous constraint to me, so part of my “retirement for Lois” scheme has been to contract no work until it is at least finished in first draft. The advent of indie e-publishing has freed me from contracts at all, apart from after-the-fact subrights sales.
SM: The World of the Five Gods has won yet another Hugo Award nearly twenty years after the publication of the first book in the series. How does that feel to you? And speaking of winning awards, people often compare your accolades with those of Robert Anson Heinlein. How do you feel about that comparison?
LMB: I was delighted with both of my series-category Hugo wins, the inaugural one for the science fictional Vorkosigan saga, and the second one the next year for what has grown into The World of the Five Gods. “Series” is a difficult category to figure out how to capture in an annual award, since series by their nature spread over many years in their creations and publication. But I have long thought that series are artistic works in their own right, as distinct from the novel in form and function as the novel is from the short story, with their own potential strengths in diverse structures, development, and re-examination that a single novel can’t address.
The comparison with Heinlein seems to be basically numerical, for those people who like keeping score and ranking things by hierarchies. Heinlein has the distinct advantage of being a half-century ahead of me, a foundational writer in my genre; I can’t match that. But I can write my own stories, nonetheless.
This year, I’ve followed Heinlein – and nearly three dozen other senior science fiction and fantasy writers – in being named 2020’s Damon Knight Grandmaster by the Science Fiction Writers of America. As in so many things, Heinlein was first, being named the inaugural Grandmaster in 1974.
https://nebulas.sfwa.org/grand-masters/ for those curious about the honor.
***
Fantasy Foundation’s Facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/ffoundation/
The Curse of Chalion’s Product Page on Books.com:
https://www.books.com.tw/products/001...
L.
August 11, 2020
July 22, 2020
First Taiwnese interview -- Readmoo
I did two long email interviews (and an introduction posted earlier, https://www.goodreads.com/author_blog... ) this spring for my Taiwanese publisher, Fantasy Foundation, who have lately reissued the Chinese traditional characters translations of the first three Chalion/World of the Five Gods books. The two interviews cover much of the same ground, so I will space them out a bit.
First up was for a vendor called Readmoo.
https://news.readmoo.com/2020/05/22/i...
English original follows below:
Readmoo Taiwan interview Bujold May 2020
The Interview of The Curse of Chalion
Interview questions by Readmoo.
1. Why did you decide to make Cazaril, the protagonist of The Curse of Chalion, a 35-year-old middle aged man?
In what ways does having a middle aged protagonist with extensive experience, such as having worked as a Castillar, a castle warder, and even a slave, affect your plot development?
LMB: I don’t really “decide” what my characters will be. They appear in my imagination as already what they are -- or are going to be, since characters grow by their actions in their story. I may do some fine-tuning as the tale wends on and I discover things about them I didn’t know at first.
That said, Cazaril does have some historical inspirations among an array of interesting Renaissance men, in a type that pops up repeatedly in this period of European history – not monarchs themselves, but the middle-class ministers, secretaries, and assistants to kings and queens who helped gate the world from the sorts of feudal governments that were essentially run out of the king’s household, to proto-modern nation-states. Examples include but are not limited to Walsingham in England (and Cardinal Wolsey before him), Cardinal Richelieu in France, Cardinal Cisneros in Spain, and the ill-fated David Riccio in Scotland. Fantasy tales usually background such figures and go haring off after the more glittering young princes and princesses.
Young characters are a great aid to a writer when presenting a fantasy story, because the reader can learn about the world for the first time right along with them. But older characters can have more interesting minds, more complex thinking based on longer experiences. Since I write in a very close third-person-personal mode, with everything filtered through the current point-of-view character’s knowledge and perceptions, this gives me a roomier “headspace” to tell my tale
Cazaril’s war-captive slavery experiences were also loosely inspired by the real-life experiences of the Spanish writer Miguel Cervantes.
2. In the Quintarian setting of The Curse of Chalion, father, mother, son and daughter are the respective gender roles of the four seasons. How did you come up with that setting? As Umegat said to Cazaril in the book, Bastard, despite being the weakest among all five, has the great responsibility of controlling the balance. Why did you design it that way?
LMB: There were several factors in play when I came up with the religion of the five gods. First, I wanted to resist dualism, the division of the world and its woes into black-and-white, simple good-versus-evil. This is simplistic in fiction, and a dangerous error of thinking in real life. So having an array of gods that could not be divided up that way, or easily fitted into a rigid hierarchy of status, helped that along.
(Naturally, since humans are wildly addicted to status hierarchies and simplistic thinking, we also have the Quadrene heresy, which, comfortingly for some people, restores both.)
A “holy family” is a biologically natural way for people to construct their gods. A good deal of biological thinking on my part underlies the religion and magic of Chalion. For one key thing, the pantheon are not actually creator-gods, but instead were created or generated by the world as a sort of emergent property, and so have evolved along with it.
The Bastard, as fifth god, a trickster figure, and the controller of chaos, is pivotal in keeping the theology and the world fluid and not rigid, working smoothly as contrasted with having to break static patterns to allow any change.
3a. Who is your favorite character in The Curse of Chalion, and why?
LMB: Well, besides Cazaril himself, whose inspirations I described above, the character of the (five-gods-style) saint Umegat proved unexpectedly interesting and complex. The mad dowager queen Ista, though minor in page-time here, proved so gripping that she subsequently generated her very own novel, Paladin of Souls.
3b. How did you go about character creation?
LMB: The short version is, I write a story about them. Characters are created by the whole of their actions, including thoughts and words, over the courses of their tales. I write in chronological or story-time-order, so I begin at their tale’s beginnings and go on with them, and we both learn and grow together. More details of their backstories, angsty or otherwise, often get assembled in a just-in-time fashion as needed, apart from the necessary pre-writing making-notes phase to boot them up to the start-point.
With a continuing series-character, of course, much of the backstory is already created in detail and set by prior books. Any new character who walks onstage will have a similar hidden old story behind them, tacitly, though in much less detail and more malleable. And in some cases, although not Cazaril’s, also duller, which is why their story doesn’t start earlier.
3c. Did you use any real life references?
LMB: For The Curse of Chalion, I drew heavily on 15th Century Spanish court history, which was just as lurid and bloody as the better-known late Plantagenet and Tudor history from England.
4a. You have mentioned that your interest in sci-fi came from your father, who had an impact on your writing as well. In The Curse of Chalion, are there any setting or plot points that show this influence?
LMB: My father had the most influence in my science fiction, particularly my fourth novel (and first Nebula Award winner) Falling Free, which featured among other things his engineering specialty, welding engineering, which he taught for many years at Ohio State University. He did not much influence my fantasy writing, which came later on in my career.
4b. What sparked your interest in writing?
LMB: Reading. Which, for me, took off in about third grade due to increased access to a wider range of school library books. My interest in writing started in junior high school, now over fifty years ago. My best friend Lillian (who also went on to write professionally under the name Lillian Stewart Carl) and I exchanged what would now be recognized as fan fiction, extensions of our favorite stories and television shows from the mid-60s. (I don’t think the term “fan fiction” yet existed, although the thing itself certainly pre-dates us – Sherlock Holmes derivative stories were being written from very soon after the originals were first published in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and arguments can be made about the Arthurian cycle from the Middle Ages.)
4c. How did you come to write The World of the Five Gods?
LMB: The full answer to this would cover the last 20 years of my career, which I am not going to attempt to relate here. The first spark came from making the connection in my head (in the shower, one cold February day at the end of the last millennium) from two previously acquired pieces: the aforesaid Spanish court history, picked up from a recent college course on the subject that I’d taken for fun; and a stray character, secretary to a duchess, whose beginnings I’d created for a letter game that my writer friend Patricia C. Wrede and I had started and then dropped. So I’d had a setting without a character and a character without a story, both sitting idle; when they at last came together, we were off and running.
5. You have written fan fiction of Sherlock Holmes and Star Trek. Why did you choose those two series as your subjects? In your fan fiction works, what did you keep and what did you change from the original story? Why? How do you feel about readers creating fan fiction of your own works?
LMB: Not answering the first parts of this because it was 50 years ago. Really, people, get a grip!
Moving along to this century, I am pleased that some readers find themselves so engaged with my stories that they are inspired to write fan fiction, but I need them to not send it to me. Fanac is for the fans. (“Fanac” is a slang contraction of “fannish activity”.)
6. Would you share with us some of your favorite fantasy and sci-fi works, as well as your go-to book genres and writers to read? Since you have written Sherlock Holmes fan fiction, what are some of your favorite detective novels and why? What books would you recommend to readers and why?
LMB: [Skipped this one due to fatigue, but I thought the interviewer's odd focus on old -- very old -- fanfiction curious.]
7. How do you conduct your research when world-building and creating religions for a series? What resources do you use to find your information?
LMB: Aside from the entirety of my life’s experiences and all the people I have ever talked to, all piled up in the heap of my memory, I read a lot of history, both as a general interest, and more specifically targeted when I have honed in on a particular story idea. So “resources” would be “wherever books are found”. In these days of Google, writers can ask more targeted questions and get the answers magically out of the air, any time of the day or night, which speeds things up considerably. I used to have to hit the library, or when local resources failed, interlibrary loan (a wonderful service) and wait weeks for books to arrive, which as often as not would fail to answer the question I’d started with anyway. Though they sometimes answered questions I hadn’t thought to ask, so it was never a waste.
8. What do your kids and family think of your work? What advice have you received during the writing process and how did it affect your works?
LMB: [See fatigue, above.]
9a. Before becoming a writer, what kind of jobs did you have? How have those experiences impacted your writing?
LMB: In addition to homemaking and motherhood, my principal early work experience was as a drug administration technician (a kind of nurse’s aide who gave medicines to all the patients on a hospital floor) at a major university hospital. This job lasted the decade of my 20s, most of the 1970s.
Prior to that was a grab-bag of short-terms jobs: working on the packing line and then as a lab assistant at a pharmaceutical manufacturer in Columbus, Ohio; retail clerk in a now long-gone discount department store; and, if you want to go all the way back to my very first paid job at age 12 or so, shoveling out stalls at a horse barn.
The medical experiences particularly have informed all my work, along with parenthood, but my youthful horse mania has certainly proved useful for my pre-industrial fantasy settings.
9b. Would you share some unforgettable experiences in your writing career?
LMB: [Skipped again. Really, this was supposed to be 10 questions; they'd slipped in something like 28.]
9c. As a writer, what does your daily routine look like?
LMB: As a writer, I don’t have a daily routine. My inspiration has always arrived in irregular lumps. If I can see it in my head, I can write it; if the pictures aren’t there yet, I have to wait. Back when I was trying to write a novel a year, I figured my professional output should be about two chapters a month.
I have written all over the clock, as the schedule of the people around me changed what times I had available. After my kids started school, I fell into the habit of writing in the morning or early part of the day, which still persists. Mid to late afternoon, I hit a physiological slump and am usually done for the day.
“Making it up” and “writing it down” are two different phases of the process for me. Walks are quite useful for the first part. I seldom compose directly at the computer, but rather, work out my scenes in notes, capturing thoughts and pinning them down. I take the notes to the keyboard to keep myself organized; extra bits and a lot of fine-tuning then happen as I type.
9d. If you were to have a different career, what choices would you consider and why?
LMB: It’s a bit late for that. Prior to my current aging-eye issues (macular pucker, mainly – you can look it up on Wikipedia) limiting my reading endurance, I might have named editing, in one form or another. I did edit one anthology back in the 90s, but I didn’t enjoy that task as much as I did and do writing original fiction.
10. Do you have any plans to write a new series? Why?
LMB: Why, indeed. At age 70, I am officially semi-retired, which for me turns out to mean that I keep writing, but do much less PR, travel, or public speaking. (Although people are now trying to pursue me into my house to do online public speaking, which is just as bad.) I’ve also been happily experimenting with indie self-e-publishing through a series of novellas, now up to 8 in number, centering on Temple sorcerer Penric kin Jurald and his resident demon Desdemona, set in another part of the World of the Five Gods and chronologically falling between The Hallowed Hunt and The Curse of Chalion with its sidewise sequel Paladin of Souls. I’ve also done an e-novella set in the world of The Sharing Knife tetralogy, and one short Vorkosigan novella. All are available worldwide in English on the Kindle, iBooks, and Nook vendors.
I am taking my projects one at a time, as my inspiration, interest, and energy flow, without commitments to any future guarantees. Which is pretty much the way I’ve always worked, only more so.
For anyone who wants more Bujold essays, I direct you to Sidelines: Talks and Essays available as an ebook (in English only, sorry) from the previously mentioned ebook vendors. But, really, go to the stories first.
***
Ta, L.
First up was for a vendor called Readmoo.
https://news.readmoo.com/2020/05/22/i...
English original follows below:
Readmoo Taiwan interview Bujold May 2020
The Interview of The Curse of Chalion
Interview questions by Readmoo.
1. Why did you decide to make Cazaril, the protagonist of The Curse of Chalion, a 35-year-old middle aged man?
In what ways does having a middle aged protagonist with extensive experience, such as having worked as a Castillar, a castle warder, and even a slave, affect your plot development?
LMB: I don’t really “decide” what my characters will be. They appear in my imagination as already what they are -- or are going to be, since characters grow by their actions in their story. I may do some fine-tuning as the tale wends on and I discover things about them I didn’t know at first.
That said, Cazaril does have some historical inspirations among an array of interesting Renaissance men, in a type that pops up repeatedly in this period of European history – not monarchs themselves, but the middle-class ministers, secretaries, and assistants to kings and queens who helped gate the world from the sorts of feudal governments that were essentially run out of the king’s household, to proto-modern nation-states. Examples include but are not limited to Walsingham in England (and Cardinal Wolsey before him), Cardinal Richelieu in France, Cardinal Cisneros in Spain, and the ill-fated David Riccio in Scotland. Fantasy tales usually background such figures and go haring off after the more glittering young princes and princesses.
Young characters are a great aid to a writer when presenting a fantasy story, because the reader can learn about the world for the first time right along with them. But older characters can have more interesting minds, more complex thinking based on longer experiences. Since I write in a very close third-person-personal mode, with everything filtered through the current point-of-view character’s knowledge and perceptions, this gives me a roomier “headspace” to tell my tale
Cazaril’s war-captive slavery experiences were also loosely inspired by the real-life experiences of the Spanish writer Miguel Cervantes.
2. In the Quintarian setting of The Curse of Chalion, father, mother, son and daughter are the respective gender roles of the four seasons. How did you come up with that setting? As Umegat said to Cazaril in the book, Bastard, despite being the weakest among all five, has the great responsibility of controlling the balance. Why did you design it that way?
LMB: There were several factors in play when I came up with the religion of the five gods. First, I wanted to resist dualism, the division of the world and its woes into black-and-white, simple good-versus-evil. This is simplistic in fiction, and a dangerous error of thinking in real life. So having an array of gods that could not be divided up that way, or easily fitted into a rigid hierarchy of status, helped that along.
(Naturally, since humans are wildly addicted to status hierarchies and simplistic thinking, we also have the Quadrene heresy, which, comfortingly for some people, restores both.)
A “holy family” is a biologically natural way for people to construct their gods. A good deal of biological thinking on my part underlies the religion and magic of Chalion. For one key thing, the pantheon are not actually creator-gods, but instead were created or generated by the world as a sort of emergent property, and so have evolved along with it.
The Bastard, as fifth god, a trickster figure, and the controller of chaos, is pivotal in keeping the theology and the world fluid and not rigid, working smoothly as contrasted with having to break static patterns to allow any change.
3a. Who is your favorite character in The Curse of Chalion, and why?
LMB: Well, besides Cazaril himself, whose inspirations I described above, the character of the (five-gods-style) saint Umegat proved unexpectedly interesting and complex. The mad dowager queen Ista, though minor in page-time here, proved so gripping that she subsequently generated her very own novel, Paladin of Souls.
3b. How did you go about character creation?
LMB: The short version is, I write a story about them. Characters are created by the whole of their actions, including thoughts and words, over the courses of their tales. I write in chronological or story-time-order, so I begin at their tale’s beginnings and go on with them, and we both learn and grow together. More details of their backstories, angsty or otherwise, often get assembled in a just-in-time fashion as needed, apart from the necessary pre-writing making-notes phase to boot them up to the start-point.
With a continuing series-character, of course, much of the backstory is already created in detail and set by prior books. Any new character who walks onstage will have a similar hidden old story behind them, tacitly, though in much less detail and more malleable. And in some cases, although not Cazaril’s, also duller, which is why their story doesn’t start earlier.
3c. Did you use any real life references?
LMB: For The Curse of Chalion, I drew heavily on 15th Century Spanish court history, which was just as lurid and bloody as the better-known late Plantagenet and Tudor history from England.
4a. You have mentioned that your interest in sci-fi came from your father, who had an impact on your writing as well. In The Curse of Chalion, are there any setting or plot points that show this influence?
LMB: My father had the most influence in my science fiction, particularly my fourth novel (and first Nebula Award winner) Falling Free, which featured among other things his engineering specialty, welding engineering, which he taught for many years at Ohio State University. He did not much influence my fantasy writing, which came later on in my career.
4b. What sparked your interest in writing?
LMB: Reading. Which, for me, took off in about third grade due to increased access to a wider range of school library books. My interest in writing started in junior high school, now over fifty years ago. My best friend Lillian (who also went on to write professionally under the name Lillian Stewart Carl) and I exchanged what would now be recognized as fan fiction, extensions of our favorite stories and television shows from the mid-60s. (I don’t think the term “fan fiction” yet existed, although the thing itself certainly pre-dates us – Sherlock Holmes derivative stories were being written from very soon after the originals were first published in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and arguments can be made about the Arthurian cycle from the Middle Ages.)
4c. How did you come to write The World of the Five Gods?
LMB: The full answer to this would cover the last 20 years of my career, which I am not going to attempt to relate here. The first spark came from making the connection in my head (in the shower, one cold February day at the end of the last millennium) from two previously acquired pieces: the aforesaid Spanish court history, picked up from a recent college course on the subject that I’d taken for fun; and a stray character, secretary to a duchess, whose beginnings I’d created for a letter game that my writer friend Patricia C. Wrede and I had started and then dropped. So I’d had a setting without a character and a character without a story, both sitting idle; when they at last came together, we were off and running.
5. You have written fan fiction of Sherlock Holmes and Star Trek. Why did you choose those two series as your subjects? In your fan fiction works, what did you keep and what did you change from the original story? Why? How do you feel about readers creating fan fiction of your own works?
LMB: Not answering the first parts of this because it was 50 years ago. Really, people, get a grip!
Moving along to this century, I am pleased that some readers find themselves so engaged with my stories that they are inspired to write fan fiction, but I need them to not send it to me. Fanac is for the fans. (“Fanac” is a slang contraction of “fannish activity”.)
6. Would you share with us some of your favorite fantasy and sci-fi works, as well as your go-to book genres and writers to read? Since you have written Sherlock Holmes fan fiction, what are some of your favorite detective novels and why? What books would you recommend to readers and why?
LMB: [Skipped this one due to fatigue, but I thought the interviewer's odd focus on old -- very old -- fanfiction curious.]
7. How do you conduct your research when world-building and creating religions for a series? What resources do you use to find your information?
LMB: Aside from the entirety of my life’s experiences and all the people I have ever talked to, all piled up in the heap of my memory, I read a lot of history, both as a general interest, and more specifically targeted when I have honed in on a particular story idea. So “resources” would be “wherever books are found”. In these days of Google, writers can ask more targeted questions and get the answers magically out of the air, any time of the day or night, which speeds things up considerably. I used to have to hit the library, or when local resources failed, interlibrary loan (a wonderful service) and wait weeks for books to arrive, which as often as not would fail to answer the question I’d started with anyway. Though they sometimes answered questions I hadn’t thought to ask, so it was never a waste.
8. What do your kids and family think of your work? What advice have you received during the writing process and how did it affect your works?
LMB: [See fatigue, above.]
9a. Before becoming a writer, what kind of jobs did you have? How have those experiences impacted your writing?
LMB: In addition to homemaking and motherhood, my principal early work experience was as a drug administration technician (a kind of nurse’s aide who gave medicines to all the patients on a hospital floor) at a major university hospital. This job lasted the decade of my 20s, most of the 1970s.
Prior to that was a grab-bag of short-terms jobs: working on the packing line and then as a lab assistant at a pharmaceutical manufacturer in Columbus, Ohio; retail clerk in a now long-gone discount department store; and, if you want to go all the way back to my very first paid job at age 12 or so, shoveling out stalls at a horse barn.
The medical experiences particularly have informed all my work, along with parenthood, but my youthful horse mania has certainly proved useful for my pre-industrial fantasy settings.
9b. Would you share some unforgettable experiences in your writing career?
LMB: [Skipped again. Really, this was supposed to be 10 questions; they'd slipped in something like 28.]
9c. As a writer, what does your daily routine look like?
LMB: As a writer, I don’t have a daily routine. My inspiration has always arrived in irregular lumps. If I can see it in my head, I can write it; if the pictures aren’t there yet, I have to wait. Back when I was trying to write a novel a year, I figured my professional output should be about two chapters a month.
I have written all over the clock, as the schedule of the people around me changed what times I had available. After my kids started school, I fell into the habit of writing in the morning or early part of the day, which still persists. Mid to late afternoon, I hit a physiological slump and am usually done for the day.
“Making it up” and “writing it down” are two different phases of the process for me. Walks are quite useful for the first part. I seldom compose directly at the computer, but rather, work out my scenes in notes, capturing thoughts and pinning them down. I take the notes to the keyboard to keep myself organized; extra bits and a lot of fine-tuning then happen as I type.
9d. If you were to have a different career, what choices would you consider and why?
LMB: It’s a bit late for that. Prior to my current aging-eye issues (macular pucker, mainly – you can look it up on Wikipedia) limiting my reading endurance, I might have named editing, in one form or another. I did edit one anthology back in the 90s, but I didn’t enjoy that task as much as I did and do writing original fiction.
10. Do you have any plans to write a new series? Why?
LMB: Why, indeed. At age 70, I am officially semi-retired, which for me turns out to mean that I keep writing, but do much less PR, travel, or public speaking. (Although people are now trying to pursue me into my house to do online public speaking, which is just as bad.) I’ve also been happily experimenting with indie self-e-publishing through a series of novellas, now up to 8 in number, centering on Temple sorcerer Penric kin Jurald and his resident demon Desdemona, set in another part of the World of the Five Gods and chronologically falling between The Hallowed Hunt and The Curse of Chalion with its sidewise sequel Paladin of Souls. I’ve also done an e-novella set in the world of The Sharing Knife tetralogy, and one short Vorkosigan novella. All are available worldwide in English on the Kindle, iBooks, and Nook vendors.
I am taking my projects one at a time, as my inspiration, interest, and energy flow, without commitments to any future guarantees. Which is pretty much the way I’ve always worked, only more so.
For anyone who wants more Bujold essays, I direct you to Sidelines: Talks and Essays available as an ebook (in English only, sorry) from the previously mentioned ebook vendors. But, really, go to the stories first.
***
Ta, L.
July 14, 2020
Orphans of Raspay out in audio today
On Amazon Audible:
https://www.amazon.com/Orphans-Raspay...
I'm not seeing it on the Downpour site yet, although the prior "Knife Children" is present and accounted for. Hm.
("The Physicians of Vilnoc", btw, is scheduled for audio release mid-August, I hear.)
Ta, L.
https://www.amazon.com/Orphans-Raspay...
I'm not seeing it on the Downpour site yet, although the prior "Knife Children" is present and accounted for. Hm.
("The Physicians of Vilnoc", btw, is scheduled for audio release mid-August, I hear.)
Ta, L.
July 10, 2020
Orphans of Raspay now at Uncle Hugo's
Signed trade hardcovers. Mail order only. Owner Don just brought 3 cartons out for me to sign, so it is very much In Stock. Don has quite a number of other signed Bujolds, with more on the way. If there's something of mine you don't see on the website, email Hugo's and ask.
Note that Hugo's have copies available of all the prior SubPress trade and leather-bound titles except for "Penric's Demon", even some that are sold out at the publisher. (A couple aren't listed on the retooled Hugo's website -- email and ask if you are looking for something in particular.) So now would be a good time to fill out your shelf, before they go to collector's prices.
http://www.unclehugo.com/prod/ah-bujo...
Ta, L.
Note that Hugo's have copies available of all the prior SubPress trade and leather-bound titles except for "Penric's Demon", even some that are sold out at the publisher. (A couple aren't listed on the retooled Hugo's website -- email and ask if you are looking for something in particular.) So now would be a good time to fill out your shelf, before they go to collector's prices.
http://www.unclehugo.com/prod/ah-bujo...
Ta, L.
June 29, 2020
Orphans of Raspay up at SubPress
The limited hardcover of "The Orphans of Raspay" is now listed as in-stock at Subterranean Press, so I construe it has been printed.
https://subterraneanpress.com/orphans...
My author's copies have not yet turned up at my door, but soon I trust. Uncle Hugo's usually gets theirs a bit after I get mine; when they do, owner Don will bring out some cartons for me to sign for their mail-order sales. (Mail order only, at this time.) I see Amazon is still waiting as well. "Temporarily out of stock" decodes, in this case, to "Our cartons have not yet arrived." But real soon now...
In other SubPress news, they have also just licensed "The Physicians of Vilnoc" for the next in their hardcover series. It's too soon for a pub date, but I'll post when it's finalized.
"Physicians" has also been licensed by Blackstone Audiobooks; they mention a projected audio release in mid-August. And "Orphans" will be released in audio on July 14th, coming up in just a couple more weeks.
https://www.amazon.com/Orphans-Raspay...
Update Wed. July 1 -- two copies of the hardcover, one of each morph, arrived in my doorway via UPS this morning, presumable sent specially. Wow are they pretty. I'm guessing copies are on their way to other vendors, wending through the systems at more normal speeds. They should arrive certainly if not soon. I'll report again when Hugo's gets theirs.
Ta, L.
https://subterraneanpress.com/orphans...
My author's copies have not yet turned up at my door, but soon I trust. Uncle Hugo's usually gets theirs a bit after I get mine; when they do, owner Don will bring out some cartons for me to sign for their mail-order sales. (Mail order only, at this time.) I see Amazon is still waiting as well. "Temporarily out of stock" decodes, in this case, to "Our cartons have not yet arrived." But real soon now...
In other SubPress news, they have also just licensed "The Physicians of Vilnoc" for the next in their hardcover series. It's too soon for a pub date, but I'll post when it's finalized.
"Physicians" has also been licensed by Blackstone Audiobooks; they mention a projected audio release in mid-August. And "Orphans" will be released in audio on July 14th, coming up in just a couple more weeks.
https://www.amazon.com/Orphans-Raspay...
Update Wed. July 1 -- two copies of the hardcover, one of each morph, arrived in my doorway via UPS this morning, presumable sent specially. Wow are they pretty. I'm guessing copies are on their way to other vendors, wending through the systems at more normal speeds. They should arrive certainly if not soon. I'll report again when Hugo's gets theirs.
Ta, L.
June 19, 2020
The Object
...arrived safely today. Very glad I didn't have to hand-carry it through airports.
Self-explanatory label, I think. My earlier post about Nebula Weekend Online is here: https://www.goodreads.com/author_blog...
Ta, L.
Self-explanatory label, I think. My earlier post about Nebula Weekend Online is here: https://www.goodreads.com/author_blog...
Ta, L.
June 16, 2020
Uncle Hugo's mail order starting
Or, technically, re-starting. Uncle Hugo's Science Fiction Bookstore is now doing a limited number of mail orders. More titles will be added by their website wrangler as new wholesale items gradually start to come in to their mail-order-only location, including, pertinent here, to-be-signed copies of "The Orphans of Raspay" when it is printed by Subterranean Press. So you can preorder them here:
http://www.unclehugo.com/prod/ah-bujo...
I'm also told that the ordering info for the Uncle Hugo's/Uncle Edgar's T-shirts and sweatshirts should be added later today.
Ta, L.
http://www.unclehugo.com/prod/ah-bujo...
I'm also told that the ordering info for the Uncle Hugo's/Uncle Edgar's T-shirts and sweatshirts should be added later today.
Ta, L.
June 9, 2020
Orphans of Raspay upcoming from SubPress soon
I see by a note from Subterranean Press that the print run of "The Orphans of Raspay" is expected to sell out immediately, due to a nice review in Publishers Weekly. I believe they fill all their direct private orders before they ship to vendors, so if you want to be sure of securing a copy, order here:
https://subterraneanpress.com/orphans...
Due out roughly the end of June.
Ta, L.
https://subterraneanpress.com/orphans...
Due out roughly the end of June.
Ta, L.
June 5, 2020
Taiwanese 5 Gods introduction in English
My Taiwanese publisher, Fantasy Foundation, is bringing out a new edition of the first three Chalion/World of the Five Gods books, and a few months ago asked me to write them an introduction for the reprints, to be translated into Chinese (traditional characters) to go with the works. This involved casting my memory back 20 years, good exercise I suppose. My translations editor tells me:
"...Fantasy Foundation’s Facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/ffoundation/
The Curse of Chalion’s Product Page on Books.com:
https://www.books.com.tw/products/001...
--I've found some foreign readers curious about Chinese online bookstores, and maybe readers of your blog will be interested too. Books.com is quite like Amazon in Taiwan."
For my readers (like me) who don't read Chinese, I am going to post the English-language original here. (It's rather long for a blog post.) :
***
Lois McMaster Bujold Introduction for Fantasy Foundation/Cite Publishing edition of The Curse of Chalion, Taiwan. 3/25/2020.
***
Introduction
The Curse of Chalion is the opening volume in what grew to be not so much a trilogy as a trio of fantasy novels set in what—eventually—came to be dubbed The World of the Five Gods. More recently, a succession of novellas about the Temple sorcerer Penric beginning with “Penric’s Demon” has extended both the series and its world.
I did not set out to write a series back at the turn of the millennium when I began the tale, just the book in front of me. My ideas at the time had two main sources. First was a course I took in the mid-90s at the local university on the history of medieval Spain, about which I had known almost nothing. I emerged from it, reeling slightly, clutching an armload of incandescent incidents and chewy characters, with no clear idea what I wanted to do with them. I knew I didn't want to write alternate history or historical fantasy, so I set it all aside while working on other projects.
Meanwhile, I'd created a character for a short-lived letter game that my friend, Minneapolis fantasy writer Patricia Wrede, and I had started. (A letter game works by the participants writing back and forth to each other in the personas of their fictional characters, each letter inspiring its reply like a game of tennis.) My character was based on a type one meets over and over in real Renaissance history—the hard-working, serious civil servants, frequently in religious orders, who provided key support to their various monarchs. Sometimes they ended up rich and rewarded, sometimes betrayed and stuck full of daggers. The letter game foundered after a brief exchange, but my idea for my character lingered on.
In the shower one cold February day, these two halves, the setting without a character and the character without a job, came unexpectedly together in my head, and my story began to crystallize around Cazaril. When I began writing, I had the opening vision of the bedraggled Cazaril approaching a castle to seek employment, plus a cast of potential characters who were avatars of real persons, and some sense of their necessary contexts. Certain key elements rose up out of the fog of possibilities like beacons, but I had no idea how I was going to fit it together or where we would all eventually arrive. That, I had to work out chapter by chapter.
Older character Cazaril's rich reserves of vocabulary, experience, and observation, as he mediated his world to me, made living in his head for a year a notable pleasure. Working out the peculiarities of this fantasy world’s magic and theology—both closely connected, as it turned out—was also a lot of fun.
Over the course of the writing, what was intended to be the minor character of dowager queen Ista dy Chalion developed a great deal of gravitational pull on me. I realized she deserved more than to be a subplot in somebody else’s tale. I tackled her unique themes next in the sequel novel Paladin of Souls. This was a little confusing to some well-trained fantasy readers who expected a more direct continuation of their favorites from the first book, but most managed to adjust to the change of protagonists.
With Cazaril devoted to the goddess known as the Daughter of Spring, and Ista, eventually, to the trickster god the Bastard, I was by this time toying with the notion of making a thematic series, one book for each of my world’s five gods. With this in mind, I moved backward in time several centuries and over a couple of realms in geography for The Hallowed Hunt, devoted to themes of the god known as the Son of Autumn. This was even more confusing to readers expecting a standard chronological progression of events, though it had some fascinating historical sources, including two biographies of Charlemagne, a deal of material on the early Christianization of pagan Europe, and an irresistibly titled slim history, Mad Princes of Renaissance Germany.
The five-book-series idea then stalled for a long time on my disinclination to write books for the two remaining gods. But when, by way of an experiment, I wandered into writing original e-novellas, the character of Penric revived his world anew, in a more free-form mode that has suited me better. The reception of both the first trio of books and the recent novellas has been very gratifying, not least by garnering, in 2018, my second Hugo Award for best series.
Like most writers, when I am in the throes of composing fiction I don’t actually think about my work’s future readers. All my attention and mental energy are focused on the immediate task in front of me. Scene by scene, I have to hold in my head who these people are, what they’ve just done in the prior scene and their prior lives, what will happen next (which, depending on what they do right now, can turn out to be something quite unexpected), their relationships to each other and how they are developing, and scripting the dialogue—or choreographing it, since characters’ conversations sometimes feel more like a dance than like a play, and are definitely a form of action. What should be in the next scene, the next paragraph, the next sentence, the next word—oh, not that word, this one would work better, that bit of syntax needs rearranged for clarity, and oh dear that sentence is far too long, better cut it in half and restructure it… The process of writing is like sandpainting in a windstorm.
Adding in a consciousness of the audience while doing all this would be like the tap-dancing centipede, who did fine until he started thinking about where he was putting all those feet.
I’ve thought about this uncrossable gap from the reader’s side as well. A few years back, I read a book written by an eleventh-century Byzantine bureaucrat and historian, Michael Psellus, chronicling his turbulent times. (That the title was Fourteen Byzantine Rulers but only covered a century is a clue to just how turbulent.) It was, of course, originally handwritten, “publication” consisting of the manuscript being hand-copied by scribes, and distributed to a tiny audience of like-minded men. I read it in English translation, in an e-edition instantly available worldwide in unlimited quantities, on my tablet computer. Psellus could not possibly have pictured me as his reader, living a thousand years later on a continent he didn’t know was even there, speaking a language that hadn’t come into existence yet, in a technological future he could not have imagined. (That I’m female, to boot, might be less of an issue—there were plenty of literate Byzantine women, at least in the upper classes of his assumed readership.) And yet his words and thoughts were handed to me as freshly as if they’d been penned (though not typed) yesterday. I could see him; he couldn’t see me.
The Psellus book was a memoir, and so its author was presenting himself fairly directly to his audience, if in a self-edited fashion. Fiction adds a layer of veiling between creator and reader, ranging from a thin gauze to a thick stage curtain. People are naturally curious about anything hidden by a curtain, and always want to peek. (When thinking about this as a shy writer, I always channel that famous line from the Wizard at the climax of the movie The Wizard of Oz—“Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!”) But if readers can’t get an actual look, they will make up the writer in their heads, constructed from their own knowledge and expectations much as they mentally construct the fictional characters they’re reading about.
I got an accidental peek at this process many years ago at a science fiction convention, where I fell into a conversation in the booksellers’ room with a (male) reader who was very surprised to discover I was a woman—by whatever assumptions, he had not processed my name on the cover as female. (This, I later discovered, is not uncommon in my foreign-language translations, where the genders of English names are less recognizable.) Quickly, before his mental image was overwritten by our encounter, I got him to describe the author whom he had imagined had written the books he’d enjoyed (Vorkosigan Saga science fiction stories, at the time.) It included some odd details—male, mid-thirties, dark-haired, East Coast upper class—rather like my fictional character Ivan Vorpatril, really. Nothing at all like the beleaguered (if also mid-thirties) Midwestern housewife and mother I actually was. Yay curtain.
When I sat down to write The Curse of Chalion just about twenty years ago (or fifteen minutes ago, from my interior point of view) I had no idea how far the book would travel in geography, languages, and time. Just getting to the end of the next chapter was challenge enough. I certainly didn’t imagine myself ever having to explain it to an audience in faraway Taiwan, but here we all are. There is less of a distance between end-of-the-millennium Minneapolis and 2020 Taiwan than there is between 11th century Byzantium and 21th century Minnesota, but it’s still a big one-way jump.
I am grateful that, with this reissue of the World of the Five Gods books, my translators and editors at Fantasy Foundation have allowed us all to make that leap together.
-- Lois McMaster Bujold
March 2020
Ta, L.
"...Fantasy Foundation’s Facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/ffoundation/
The Curse of Chalion’s Product Page on Books.com:
https://www.books.com.tw/products/001...
--I've found some foreign readers curious about Chinese online bookstores, and maybe readers of your blog will be interested too. Books.com is quite like Amazon in Taiwan."
For my readers (like me) who don't read Chinese, I am going to post the English-language original here. (It's rather long for a blog post.) :
***
Lois McMaster Bujold Introduction for Fantasy Foundation/Cite Publishing edition of The Curse of Chalion, Taiwan. 3/25/2020.
***
Introduction
The Curse of Chalion is the opening volume in what grew to be not so much a trilogy as a trio of fantasy novels set in what—eventually—came to be dubbed The World of the Five Gods. More recently, a succession of novellas about the Temple sorcerer Penric beginning with “Penric’s Demon” has extended both the series and its world.
I did not set out to write a series back at the turn of the millennium when I began the tale, just the book in front of me. My ideas at the time had two main sources. First was a course I took in the mid-90s at the local university on the history of medieval Spain, about which I had known almost nothing. I emerged from it, reeling slightly, clutching an armload of incandescent incidents and chewy characters, with no clear idea what I wanted to do with them. I knew I didn't want to write alternate history or historical fantasy, so I set it all aside while working on other projects.
Meanwhile, I'd created a character for a short-lived letter game that my friend, Minneapolis fantasy writer Patricia Wrede, and I had started. (A letter game works by the participants writing back and forth to each other in the personas of their fictional characters, each letter inspiring its reply like a game of tennis.) My character was based on a type one meets over and over in real Renaissance history—the hard-working, serious civil servants, frequently in religious orders, who provided key support to their various monarchs. Sometimes they ended up rich and rewarded, sometimes betrayed and stuck full of daggers. The letter game foundered after a brief exchange, but my idea for my character lingered on.
In the shower one cold February day, these two halves, the setting without a character and the character without a job, came unexpectedly together in my head, and my story began to crystallize around Cazaril. When I began writing, I had the opening vision of the bedraggled Cazaril approaching a castle to seek employment, plus a cast of potential characters who were avatars of real persons, and some sense of their necessary contexts. Certain key elements rose up out of the fog of possibilities like beacons, but I had no idea how I was going to fit it together or where we would all eventually arrive. That, I had to work out chapter by chapter.
Older character Cazaril's rich reserves of vocabulary, experience, and observation, as he mediated his world to me, made living in his head for a year a notable pleasure. Working out the peculiarities of this fantasy world’s magic and theology—both closely connected, as it turned out—was also a lot of fun.
Over the course of the writing, what was intended to be the minor character of dowager queen Ista dy Chalion developed a great deal of gravitational pull on me. I realized she deserved more than to be a subplot in somebody else’s tale. I tackled her unique themes next in the sequel novel Paladin of Souls. This was a little confusing to some well-trained fantasy readers who expected a more direct continuation of their favorites from the first book, but most managed to adjust to the change of protagonists.
With Cazaril devoted to the goddess known as the Daughter of Spring, and Ista, eventually, to the trickster god the Bastard, I was by this time toying with the notion of making a thematic series, one book for each of my world’s five gods. With this in mind, I moved backward in time several centuries and over a couple of realms in geography for The Hallowed Hunt, devoted to themes of the god known as the Son of Autumn. This was even more confusing to readers expecting a standard chronological progression of events, though it had some fascinating historical sources, including two biographies of Charlemagne, a deal of material on the early Christianization of pagan Europe, and an irresistibly titled slim history, Mad Princes of Renaissance Germany.
The five-book-series idea then stalled for a long time on my disinclination to write books for the two remaining gods. But when, by way of an experiment, I wandered into writing original e-novellas, the character of Penric revived his world anew, in a more free-form mode that has suited me better. The reception of both the first trio of books and the recent novellas has been very gratifying, not least by garnering, in 2018, my second Hugo Award for best series.
Like most writers, when I am in the throes of composing fiction I don’t actually think about my work’s future readers. All my attention and mental energy are focused on the immediate task in front of me. Scene by scene, I have to hold in my head who these people are, what they’ve just done in the prior scene and their prior lives, what will happen next (which, depending on what they do right now, can turn out to be something quite unexpected), their relationships to each other and how they are developing, and scripting the dialogue—or choreographing it, since characters’ conversations sometimes feel more like a dance than like a play, and are definitely a form of action. What should be in the next scene, the next paragraph, the next sentence, the next word—oh, not that word, this one would work better, that bit of syntax needs rearranged for clarity, and oh dear that sentence is far too long, better cut it in half and restructure it… The process of writing is like sandpainting in a windstorm.
Adding in a consciousness of the audience while doing all this would be like the tap-dancing centipede, who did fine until he started thinking about where he was putting all those feet.
I’ve thought about this uncrossable gap from the reader’s side as well. A few years back, I read a book written by an eleventh-century Byzantine bureaucrat and historian, Michael Psellus, chronicling his turbulent times. (That the title was Fourteen Byzantine Rulers but only covered a century is a clue to just how turbulent.) It was, of course, originally handwritten, “publication” consisting of the manuscript being hand-copied by scribes, and distributed to a tiny audience of like-minded men. I read it in English translation, in an e-edition instantly available worldwide in unlimited quantities, on my tablet computer. Psellus could not possibly have pictured me as his reader, living a thousand years later on a continent he didn’t know was even there, speaking a language that hadn’t come into existence yet, in a technological future he could not have imagined. (That I’m female, to boot, might be less of an issue—there were plenty of literate Byzantine women, at least in the upper classes of his assumed readership.) And yet his words and thoughts were handed to me as freshly as if they’d been penned (though not typed) yesterday. I could see him; he couldn’t see me.
The Psellus book was a memoir, and so its author was presenting himself fairly directly to his audience, if in a self-edited fashion. Fiction adds a layer of veiling between creator and reader, ranging from a thin gauze to a thick stage curtain. People are naturally curious about anything hidden by a curtain, and always want to peek. (When thinking about this as a shy writer, I always channel that famous line from the Wizard at the climax of the movie The Wizard of Oz—“Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!”) But if readers can’t get an actual look, they will make up the writer in their heads, constructed from their own knowledge and expectations much as they mentally construct the fictional characters they’re reading about.
I got an accidental peek at this process many years ago at a science fiction convention, where I fell into a conversation in the booksellers’ room with a (male) reader who was very surprised to discover I was a woman—by whatever assumptions, he had not processed my name on the cover as female. (This, I later discovered, is not uncommon in my foreign-language translations, where the genders of English names are less recognizable.) Quickly, before his mental image was overwritten by our encounter, I got him to describe the author whom he had imagined had written the books he’d enjoyed (Vorkosigan Saga science fiction stories, at the time.) It included some odd details—male, mid-thirties, dark-haired, East Coast upper class—rather like my fictional character Ivan Vorpatril, really. Nothing at all like the beleaguered (if also mid-thirties) Midwestern housewife and mother I actually was. Yay curtain.
When I sat down to write The Curse of Chalion just about twenty years ago (or fifteen minutes ago, from my interior point of view) I had no idea how far the book would travel in geography, languages, and time. Just getting to the end of the next chapter was challenge enough. I certainly didn’t imagine myself ever having to explain it to an audience in faraway Taiwan, but here we all are. There is less of a distance between end-of-the-millennium Minneapolis and 2020 Taiwan than there is between 11th century Byzantium and 21th century Minnesota, but it’s still a big one-way jump.
I am grateful that, with this reissue of the World of the Five Gods books, my translators and editors at Fantasy Foundation have allowed us all to make that leap together.
-- Lois McMaster Bujold
March 2020
Ta, L.
