Lois Bujold asked Lois McMaster Bujold:

Was Shards of Honor ever a Star Trek fanfic? (I am asking this myself because it keeps coming up out on the Net, and I need a handy place, bookmarked, to post the answer so I don't have to keep typing it over and over (and over and over) again. Anyone is welcome to link or repost the answer in full.)

Lois McMaster Bujold I keep bashing this in the head, but the same rumor keeps surfacing; I have concluded that the fanfic tale is the story people want to be true. And there are more of them than there are of me, so.

There is just enough of a grain of truth under this that I can't deny it outright, but the real story is rather more complex.

The Vorkosiverse actually got its proto-start in the very first novelette that I wrote, "Dreamweaver's Dilemma", back in late 1982. It never sold at the time. (Later, it was printed in the Boskone SF convention souvenir collection Dreamweaver's Dilemma when I was GoH there in the mid-90's, and again in my little e-collection Proto Zoa http://www.amazon.com/Proto-Zoa-Lois-... ) Beta Colony and the Wormhole Nexus generally got its (somewhat off-stage) start in that tale, plus the history of jump ships, the initial colonization diaspora from Earth, etc. Barrayar did not yet exist.

Scratching around for what to write next, in December of 1982, I bethought me of a TOS scenario that I had made up to entertain myself while driving to work at OSU Hospitals at least five years prior. Which was, indeed, a female Federation officer and a Klingon captain (pre-ridged-rubber-heads; these were the old-style fuzzy-eyebrows morph) down on a hostile wilderness planet who had to cooperate to trek I-don't-remember-where for I-don't-remember-why; the mental movie was never written down. There was no more to it. Whether or not this long-vanished train of thought qualifies as "fanfic" seems to me a question for debate. By someone other than me.

Walking around behind the notion of Klingons to the actual historical Earth militaristic cultures upon which they were based, I considered both European and Asian models, especially the samurai. A key work under this (besides a 3-volume history of early Japan I'd read back-when, and a history of the Meiji era) was A Daughter of the Samurai (1928) by Etsu Inagaki Sugimoto, a memoir of a woman who was born just prior to the Meiji era as the daughter of a rural two-sword samurai, and who ended teaching Japanese at an eastern American university in the 1920's. The notion of a planet with that sort of abrupt generational socio-political transition came from that reading. Lost colonies being an SF staple, one with such a traumatic rediscovery yielded my Barrayar pretty quickly. It slotted very neatly into my wormhole diaspora background from the novelette, Aral's boots appeared in the mud in front of Cordelia's nose, and the rest was, so to speak, future history.

Note that the rest of the series, not to mention the rest of that book, was not yet in my mind: just getting to the end of My First Novel quite filled my plate. (Working title Mirrors, final title Shards of Honor (1986))

You may copy and quote this in full if you wish.

Ta, L.

flag