Krista asked Lois McMaster Bujold:

I've noticed some Japanese elements in Barrayaran culture (the two swords, some of their attitude towards their ancestors), but only a couple Asian names. How extensive is that cultural influence, and how did it get so submerged while remaining so important?

Lois McMaster Bujold The influence of Japan is more structural, on the authorial level, than internal in terms of fictional founder population. (Though the 50,000 Firsters were undoubtedly more racially mixed than most readers seem to realize, drawn from four different kind-of-European Earth regions 200 or more years from "now".) But Japanese history gives a worked example of cultural isolation and forcible rediscovery that is most evocative, psychologically and politically, when thinking about SFnal lost-colony scenarios. Useful stuff.

Reading rec: A Daughter of the Samurai (1925) by Etsu Inagaki Sugimoto.

Ta, L.

flag