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
Derek Peter Hawley
asked
Lois McMaster Bujold:
I read somewhere that your father was a prominent engineer; did his work influence the engineering-technical aspects of your writing? I'm thinking of the Habitat reconfiguration in Falling Free, the bubble-car system on Komarr, the soletta disaster, and Cordelia and Ekaterin's discussion of city planning for Sergyar.
Richard
asked
Lois McMaster Bujold:
“For God's sake, don't drive the boy into hysterics, Vassily. They can keep it up for hours. And everybody stares at you as if you were the reincarnation of Pierre Le Sanguinaire. Little old ladies come up and threaten you—” Personal experience or observing humanity? :)
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