Hélène Louise asked Lois McMaster Bujold:

I'm afraid to ask a question which must have been asked before, but here we go: For the Vorkosigan saga, did you decide for specific reasons to imagine a science-fi world without any aliens, or does the world came naturally to your mind already formed like that, with genetically altered humans but no aliens at all? Or is it the reflect of a personal conviction about science-fi credibility?

Lois McMaster Bujold Aliens vs. no-aliens is an old bifurcation in space opera. The formative works I was reading back in the 60s offered both models. A lot of the aliens tended to be just people in costume, and not just on Star Trek. Two models of the latter choice for world building were of course Asimov, who had humans-only, and the less-well-known but amazing writer Cordwainer Smith, who had extensive bioengineering of both human and animals, and who was much the bigger influence on me.

By the time I began writing, science was beginning to catch up with the bioengineered future Smith had envisioned, and the "aliens are us" notion seemed even more plausible. By the time I'd finished the first couple of volumes of my not-planned-in-advance series, I'd pretty much committed to the bioengineered-humans model, and that if there were any advanced aliens in our galaxy (which is a big place not only in space but in time -- two such species could miss each other not only by light years but by millions of years) they wouldn't show up in in my characters' lifetimes.

Ta, L.

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