Stephen McKee
asked
Lois McMaster Bujold:
If you were writing the Vorkosigan books for the first time in 2022, do you think you'd still choose to refer to hermaphrodites like Bel Thorne as "it" or would you use "they/them" instead? If so, have you thought about maybe doing an updated edition of the books to reflect this? I think the use of "it" is a bit jarring to modern readers.
Lois McMaster Bujold
Well, my tale first tripped (literally) over Bel in 1983, supposed to have been a throw-away bit of world-building, scene setting not a speaking or an ongoing character. If I had known, etc. I most regret the use of "it" then because the pronoun would have been far more useful later when my genuinely sexless ba came onto the scene.
The English language is desperately in need of an unambiguous gender-neutral singular pronoun, and if science fiction as a genre had picked one ("zie" ferex), instead fielding a competing dozen, and agreed upon it decades ago as common coin, it might have leaked into the wider culture by now and the problem would be solved, sigh. If I'd given Bel a different pronoun, it would have been one of these or one of my own coinage, certainly not the repurposed plural.
Updating is a problem with multiple pitfalls. First of course is that "current standards" are a moving target that change about every ten or even five years. Any writers engaging in reediting a large body of work to keep up would soon find themselves doing nothing else.
A subtler problem is that, in a very real sense, those long-ago books were written by someone else. Not only am I a different person mentally by now, in 20 years, they say, even one's bones completely replace themselves. To what extent should I have a right to alter that other person's words, to retcon the past, to photoshop that snapshot of history?
Which also leads me to the musing of whether a story is more like an artifact or a person, a philosophical question that would require a lot more tea than I've drunk yet this morning to address.
Ta, L.
(Betan herms, I should probably say again, are not intersexed. They are an artificially bioengineered future sex that does not exist on Earth today. I suspect this fine point of biology slips past many readers.)
Well, my tale first tripped (literally) over Bel in 1983, supposed to have been a throw-away bit of world-building, scene setting not a speaking or an ongoing character. If I had known, etc. I most regret the use of "it" then because the pronoun would have been far more useful later when my genuinely sexless ba came onto the scene.
The English language is desperately in need of an unambiguous gender-neutral singular pronoun, and if science fiction as a genre had picked one ("zie" ferex), instead fielding a competing dozen, and agreed upon it decades ago as common coin, it might have leaked into the wider culture by now and the problem would be solved, sigh. If I'd given Bel a different pronoun, it would have been one of these or one of my own coinage, certainly not the repurposed plural.
Updating is a problem with multiple pitfalls. First of course is that "current standards" are a moving target that change about every ten or even five years. Any writers engaging in reediting a large body of work to keep up would soon find themselves doing nothing else.
A subtler problem is that, in a very real sense, those long-ago books were written by someone else. Not only am I a different person mentally by now, in 20 years, they say, even one's bones completely replace themselves. To what extent should I have a right to alter that other person's words, to retcon the past, to photoshop that snapshot of history?
Which also leads me to the musing of whether a story is more like an artifact or a person, a philosophical question that would require a lot more tea than I've drunk yet this morning to address.
Ta, L.
(Betan herms, I should probably say again, are not intersexed. They are an artificially bioengineered future sex that does not exist on Earth today. I suspect this fine point of biology slips past many readers.)
More Answered Questions
Penny
asked
Lois McMaster Bujold:
Have you seen "Sneaky Pete" episodes on Amazon? At last, I think I've found the actor to play Miles ... Giovanni Ribisi. He's marvelously talented, very charismatic .... and short. Once he smiles, just follow him anywhere. Have you ever seen an actor you thought could pull it off?
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