Lois McMaster Bujold

Did You Know?

• She credited her friend Lillian Stewart Carl's first book sales with inspiring her to return to writing.
• Falling Free won the Prometheus Hall of Fame award for Best Classic Fiction in 2014.

Biography

Bujold was raised by Robert Charles McMaster, who edited the Nondestructive Testing Handbook, and credits him for sparking her early love of science fiction and shaping parts of the Vorkosigan Saga. She has noted that her own experience of having a celebrated father mirrors that of her characters Miles and Fiametta, who also grow up in a "Great Man's" shadow. Her brother, an engineer like their father, supplied technical advice for her novel Falling Free.

A self-described voracious reader, she began reading adult science fiction at nine, following her father's lead. She entered fandom through the Central Ohio Science Fiction Society and co-created the fanzine StarDate, where she first published under Lois McMaster. At Ohio State University (1968–1972), she avoided an English major, believing it emphasized criticism over creation. She wed John Fredric Bujold in 1971; they divorced in the early 1990s.

Their children are Anne (born 1979), now a sculptor and assistant professor at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, and Paul (born 1981). Bujold resides in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Science fiction

Bujold wrote three books—Shards of Honor, The Warrior's Apprentice, and Ethan of Athos—before The Warrior's Apprentice was accepted after four rejections. It was the first book purchased, though not the first Vorkosigan book written or published. On its strength, Baen Books agreed to a three-book deal including the two bracketing novels. By 2010, Baen claimed to have sold two million copies of her books.

The Vorkosigan Saga, set about 1000 years in the future, includes prequels starring Miles' parents and companion novels centered on secondary characters. Earlier titles are generally space opera with battles, conspiracies, and twists, while more recent volumes make Miles more of a detective. A Civil Campaign explores a high-society romance paying tribute to Georgette Heyer. Bujold has stated the series structure is modeled after the Horatio Hornblower books and reflects themes from Dorothy L. Sayers' Lord Peter Wimsey.

She provides sufficient background in each book for readers encountering the stories in random order, and most recent printings include an appendix summarizing the internal chronology.

Fantasy

Bujold's first fantasy novel was The Spirit Ring, written on spec and sold to Baen Books for a fair price in exchange for more Vorkosigan books; it received little critical acclaim and mediocre sales. She did not attempt fantasy again for almost another decade, until The Curse of Chalion, also written on spec and offered to a book auction. It met considerable critical and commercial success by tapping into a crossover market of fantasy and romance fans. The fantasy world of Chalion was conceived partly due to a University of Minnesota course on medieval Spain. She expanded the setting into the World of the Five Gods series, including Paladin of Souls, The Hallowed Hunt, and the Penric and Desdemona series. Her next fantasy world was the tetralogy of The Sharing Knife, borrowing inspiration for landscapes and farmer dialect from central Ohio, where she grew up.

Relation to fan fiction

Bujold is an outlier among authors her age in her support for fan fiction based on her own work. Amy H. Sturgis connects this to Bujold’s early fan fiction for Star Trek and Sherlock Holmes, which Sturgis views as a kind of training ground. Bujold herself links her approval to her belief in “active” readers, whom she calls “unsung collaborators.” In her view, a book isn’t real until a reader builds it in their mind. When that mental world grows too large, it can spill into fan fiction. She thinks great literature should never be “sterile” or limited to the original text, and that fan fiction offers authors a rare window into their readers’ thoughts. Still, she no longer reads fan fiction about her own characters for legal and financial reasons, “fascinating as [she] finds it.”