This interview is also available in Spanish

Lois McMaster Bujold ,
inhabitant of Barrayar

She defines herself as a self-taught writer and she cannot imagine herself doing anything else but writing. The creator of Miles Vorkosigan , a handicapped heroe, is still in the peak of the science fiction mountain.

Interview by Lali Rico.

Bibliography in Spanish.

She has won Hugo and Nebula awards many times, and she feels supported not only by the readers but for her colleagues -the other sci-fi writers. She is a native of Ohio, though she is settled in Minneapolis since 1995. We can say she is a courageous woman who knows how to combine the family life with the professional success.

CDK: As many other writers in the history of literature, you have created your own universe in which all the characters are linked. Do you consider it essential to have a liaison between novels, above all if we talk about science fiction -where the sagas, sequels and prequels are abundant?

LMB: Linked sagas and sequels are a property of literature in general -- in no way are they special to science fiction. They go back to the Illiad and The Odyssey, the tales of Amadeus of Gaul and the whole Arthurian cycle in the Middle Ages, the 19th Century novel -- The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas had five sequels. People like to read linked stories, and writers like to write them.

However, I don't think they are essential to science fiction -- many
classic sf tales don't admit of a sequel, especially books with a great deal of cosmic or temporal scope, or stories that concentrate on exploring an idea -- 1984, Childhood's End, and so on. But character centered adventure stories do tend to gravitate to the saga form naturally, almost biologically.

There are sales advantages to having a body of recognizable work -- in bookstores packed with abundant and sometimes overwhelming strangeness, people tend to buy what they know and trust. To a great extent, people will buy an author whose "voice" they like. That said, there are artistic effects one can create with a series of books that can't be done in a single novel; where each book comments on, subverts, or augments each of the others. I find this cross-commentary the most delicious aspect of writing series. Series also allows the room for much more detailed and complex world-building -- and character-building.

CDK: It is unavoidable asking you about Miles Vorkodigan, but I would like to know something about Ethan de Athos before. (This is one of our favorites).
Do you really think Men are from Mars and Woman are from Venus as John Gray
suggests?

LMB: Ethan of Athos is really a comedy of gender role reversal, but it is also one of the most science fictional of my novels, in that the premise (an all-male planet where children are gestated in artificial wombs) absolutely depends on the hypothetical new technology, and goes on to explore some of the consequences of that new technology. I think men are from Earth and women are from Earth, but the planet Athos was presumably settled by men who thought it should be otherwise, and went on to make it so. The book is also, on another level, a parody or subversion of all those dreadful Amazon Planet stories that appeared in my youth in the early 60's, presumably written by their male authors in reaction to the social stirrings of feminism just getting started then.

CDK: Vorkosigan has been with you during all your professional career. Is there any person comparable to Milos in the nowadays real world?

LMB: Not that I've met.

CDK: Could we, the Spaniards, enjoy your science fiction series on audiocassette? Talking a bit about Spain, 'Falling Free' was the first book you published in a language different from English and it was published in Spanish, Do you have any relation with Spain or South America?

LMB: As far as I know, my series is only available in audio in English. Legally, anyway. I believe you may order English-language tapes and, now, CD-ROMs over the Internet from www.thereaderschair.com. They have produced nine of my titles. No Spanish audio publisher has yet offered to do my works in Spanish.

I have no Spanish family background -- my ancestors were English, Scottish, German and French. Children are taught very little about Spain in American schools (to be fair, they are taught very little about any other country), and so I grew up with Spanish history as a big blank spot in my internal map of the world. (Ohio is in the far north of the USA, bordering Canada, and had very few Spanish-speaking immigrants at that time.) In the American media, South America is presented as all people living in cardboard boxes in vast slums who hate us, plus drug dealers. Again, almost no South American history is taught, except for a brief mention of the Conquistadors, and maybe a paragraph on Simon Bolivar. Granted, if I had taken Spanish instead of French as a language in high school, it might not have seemed quite so blank.

Lois, at Hispacon-AstuCon 2000 Courtersy of BEM

Spain and South America are therefore late discoveries of mine, in my adult reading (I actually haven't got to South America much yet.) But I did sign up, a few years ago, for a course on Spanish medieval history at the local university which not only dispelled a lot of my ignorance, but gave me ideas for my new fantasy novel, The Curse of Chalion, just published here in the States by Eos/HarperCollins this past August (2001). I will be very interested to see how Spanish readers respond to that book, since I would expect them to recognize more of the sources for some of the characters and situations than most American readers will.

My first trip to Spain was last year, for Semana Negra and Hispacon, and I loved it. Three weeks was not enough! It was all after I had finished Chalion, though, so the trip had no chance to influence that book. There will be a sequel, however…

CDK: Do you think the consumption of sci-fi books has changed a lot in the latest years or on the contrary it is for an specific target yet?

LMB: More science fiction books are being bought and read than ever before. However, many more writers are writing SF and fantasy than ever before, too, so an average writer's sales per title add up to about one-quarter of the numbers of books sold that an SF writer of, say, the 60's or 70's might have expected. The audience is wide, but could stand to be much wider. A lot of people who don't read SF have incorrect ideas about what the genre really is, but that's true of all genres.

Juan Miguel Aguilera with Lois, at Hispacon-AstuCon 2000 Courtesy of BEM

CDK: Can you please talk to us a bit about your incursion in other genres?

LMB: I regard science fiction and fantasy as a continuum, rather than two discrete boxes, so I wouldn't exactly describe my foray into fantasy as an incursion. Nevertheless, I have now written two fantasies: The Spirit Ring_ (Baen Books, 1992) and The Curse of Chalion_ (Eos/HarperCollins 2001). The Spirit Ring was set in an alternate history Renaissance Italy where magic really worked. I really enjoyed doing the research reading for that one. Chalion, despite its Spanish inspiration, is set in its own world, with its own gods, culture, and history, which gave me a lot more elbow room for creativity. Chalion had sample chapters up on the HarperCollins website at www.eosbooks.com, at one point; they may still be up, although finding
things on that site can be tricky.

If I had to distinguish between SF and fantasy, I would say that a work is fantasy if it posits that the supernatural is real.

CDK: Do you believe in the power of being award? Have prizes changed your perspective?

LMB: Awards and the award system are mainly a distraction to a working writer, but winning a Hugo or a Nebula does seem to help foreign rights sales. The awards do not, alas, automatically turn one into a best-seller, although they may help keep one's books in print a little longer (but not always).
Still, winning is better than not winning, if only because it allows the writer to work through all the illusions surrounding the awards.

Ultimately, I have come to the conclusion that the meaning of any award is embodied in the books that have won it. In other words, the books create the significance of the award, not the other way around. This is similar to how I feel about critics: that in the long run, books will not be judged by what critics said about them, but rather, the critics will be judged by what they've said about the books.

CDK: If there is any particular characteristic in Vorkosigan's adventures, that is irony. Is the sense of humor compulsory to continue being human?

LMB: "Compulsory" is probably too strong a word. But I do believe that humor is a way for humans to cope with pain. And I think that a book that is totally humorless cannot claim to be truly realistic, because humor is found almost everywhere in human society.

CDK: And last but not least, we would satisfy our readers' curiosity. What will we find in Diplomatic Inmunity?

LMB: Well, it is the next book in the Vorkosigan saga, and follows in the series timeline after A Civil Campaign. It chronicles a mission of Miles as an Imperial Auditor. The American hardcover is due out in May 2002; Spanish rights have not yet been sold. A small free sample from Chapter One is now up on Baen's website at http://www.baen.com/press.htm

If you want know more about Lois Bujold, you can visit her website: www.dendarii.com.

And to finish this interview, we leave you with a message from the author:

"Hi Folks --

For those who have been campaigning to have my work in e-book format, here we are: starting today with _Shards of Honor_, Fictionwise will be presenting five of my titles in e-book format -- _Shards of Honor_, _Barrayar_, _The Warrior's Apprentice_, _The Vor Game_, and _Falling Free_.

The Fictionwise home page is at:

http://www.fictionwise.com/home.html

The entry for _Shards of Honor_ may be found at

http://www.fictionwise.com/ebooks/eBook1173.htm

or by a search on "Bujold".

Enjoy!

Bests, Lois."

@ 2001 Lali Rico for cyberdark.net
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