Catherine Nemeth
Catherine Nemeth asked Lois McMaster Bujold:

Would you be willing to make an authorial statement of the status of the WGW outside of Lakewalker/Farmer lands? If the malice disaster was limited to that continent or was worldwide, and if so, are there other survivors? Were there any other cultures at the same level of ground/mage technology, and did they know what happened? Did they quarantine the area & are they keeping a close eye in case a malice escapes?

Lois McMaster Bujold
I've a notion there are survivors beyond the Great Blight and whatever lies athwart it, on the west coast. Some farmer navigator will discover it someday, circling the south coast. No, I don't know anything more than that.

The logical options for other continents are: fully blighted, slowly recovering but unpeopled; partly blighted, and fighting by some means magically related to what we've seen; or unblighted or fully cleaned, peopled, and keeping all other continents in quarantine. Or, some of each.

(When a malice had fully blighted its bounded region, a continent at the largest, but also possibly a closed circle or wall of other blight and, say, seacoast, it will die of starvation.)

I have a very dim memory of some reference to other continents on old maps somewhere in the tetralogy, but I couldn't for the life of me find it now.

Ta, L.

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