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.
Reading rec: A Daughter of the Samurai (1925) by Etsu Inagaki Sugimoto.
Ta, L.
More Answered Questions
Gard Evyr
asked
Lois McMaster Bujold:
Hi, Lois, thanks for your habitual championing of Patricia Wrede's blog, it was through you that I discovered the veritable goldmine of writing info. It took several weeks but I started at the oldest post and made my way pretty much through all (hundreds) of her posts. I felt like I read a voluminous novel on writing technique but I feel like I've learned an unquantifiable number of things. She's a brilliant didact. ?
Chris
asked
Lois McMaster Bujold:
For the collected novella versions of Penric, do they include the original covers? Having seen a couple of Dan Dos Santos’s amazing covers, now I want them. But I am not an ebook guy, and missed all the previous editions. I have been waiting for them to come out in relatively affordable collected editions as Mass market pb or Trade pb.
Clio
asked
Lois McMaster Bujold:
Bit of an odd question, but, what was the inspiration behind the name of the planet Escobar?
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