Lois McMaster Bujold
Some considerable amount of this question can be answered by this:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5...
which I'd read for general interest the summer, iirc, before I wrote that section of the Ivan book.
It also has, in that weird way writers' brains work, some inspiration in a climactic scene in an old Alec Guinness movie titled The Horse's Mouth. It's not a building that unexpectedly sinks, but the sort of hidden-in-plain-sight setup is reminiscent.
But I did not actually come up with ImpSec HQ's fate until I was almost at that scene in the writing. At the time the Arquas discovered where the old lab now was, I had no more idea than they did how they were to tunnel for access. From reading all those WWII POW-camp memoirs, I knew tunneling was not a trivial task, but then I remembered I was writing science fiction, and was not limited to 20th C. technology.
How the Mycoborer (tm) could go wrong in so many ways was inspired somewhat by my niece Molly's colon cancer awareness/teaching project, The Colossal Colon, which I will leave you to Google. And from that point on, the logical developments pretty much wrote themselves.
So it was a complicated tangle of feedback loops from many sources, not a single tidy logical string.
Ta, L.
Some considerable amount of this question can be answered by this:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5...
which I'd read for general interest the summer, iirc, before I wrote that section of the Ivan book.
It also has, in that weird way writers' brains work, some inspiration in a climactic scene in an old Alec Guinness movie titled The Horse's Mouth. It's not a building that unexpectedly sinks, but the sort of hidden-in-plain-sight setup is reminiscent.
But I did not actually come up with ImpSec HQ's fate until I was almost at that scene in the writing. At the time the Arquas discovered where the old lab now was, I had no more idea than they did how they were to tunnel for access. From reading all those WWII POW-camp memoirs, I knew tunneling was not a trivial task, but then I remembered I was writing science fiction, and was not limited to 20th C. technology.
How the Mycoborer (tm) could go wrong in so many ways was inspired somewhat by my niece Molly's colon cancer awareness/teaching project, The Colossal Colon, which I will leave you to Google. And from that point on, the logical developments pretty much wrote themselves.
So it was a complicated tangle of feedback loops from many sources, not a single tidy logical string.
Ta, L.
More Answered Questions
Adam
asked
Lois McMaster Bujold:
Dear Lois, Thank you for all the excellent hours of reading over the years. I really have to force myself to slow down when you have a new release because it's always bittersweet to wait a year or more for a book and then finish it in a day. I'm really enjoying penric. I'd write more, but I have to get to my question. Do you have any recommendations for someone looking for a new author to read?
Rick York
asked
Lois McMaster Bujold:
I haven't seen the question here recently, so I'll go ahead and ask it: are there any more Vorkosigan books coming? I love the series and the characters, but there are not enough of them. Have you ever thought about possibly encouraging fan fiction or a collaborator along the lines of the late Marion Zimmerman Bradley. The barraar universe seems icy in both plots and characters.
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