Washington Talking Book and Braille Library's
Evergreen Radio Reading Service Science Fiction
Hour August 4, 2001 Host Jeff Cavanaugh; Interviewer Susan Profit
An audio version, of which this is not exactly a transcription is
now available.
- SP:
- Thank you Jeff. My name is Susan Profit. I would like to introduce Lois McMaster Bujold, one of the treasures of science fiction authordom. Ms. Bujold was born in Ohio in 1949. She attended Ohio State University from 1968 to 1972. She is the mother of two children and she has recently moved to Minneapolis, Minnesota. She has been a lifelong voracious reader who picked the habit up from her father. Her father was a professor of welding engineering at Ohio State and a CalTech graduate with a double Ph.D. in 1944, magna cum laude in physics and electrical engineering. She has a lifelong interest in wildlife and is an amateur photographer. Her first stories were in junior high school and were written about horses. Around twenty years ago her childhood friend, Lillian Stewart Carl, got her into writing professionally. With her fourth novel she picked up her first Nebula. She has three Hugos for novels and one Hugo for a novella, and she has two Nebulas, one for a novel and one for that same novella. The only author who has more Hugos for best novel than Ms. Bujold is Robert Heinlein, and she's still writing. Welcome!
- LMB:
- Good evening. Glad to be here, Susan.
- SP:
- I would like to mention a few things before we go too far involved in this. For those of our readers who have web-browsing software that can convert text into audio, I'd like to make you aware of a site that has some of the chapters of her book: www.ReadersChair.com. You can also download chapters from her latest books at www.harpercollins.com/. Well, before I get to the other two websites --
- LMB(laughing):
- There are a lot of websites.
- SP:
- That's a lot of websites.
- LMB:
- OK, let's break it up with something else. Go ahead.
- SP:
- In what ways is Curse of Chalion similar to, and in what ways is this novel different from your Vorkosigan series, which many readers may be aware of?
- LMB:
- OK, well. For those readers who are not yet aware of it, the Vorkosigan series is a long-running action-adventure or space opera series starring an unusual character by the name of Miles Vorkosigan, who's kind of a post-modern hero. He's all the things that you don't expect from your standard heroes, and he's been a very popular character. I've very much enjoyed writing stories set in his universe. The tales turn often on points of biotechnology and the interesting moral dilemmas they supply, but they take place against a space opera background that gives me lots of opportunity for colorful plots and characters.
Now, this is has been a lot of fun, but I also enjoy fantasy. I have been both a fantasy reader and a science fiction reader all my life. I was reading Tolkien and Heinlein at the same time, with equal pleasure. And, of course, I had many models before me of science fiction writers who write both science fiction and fantasy. Poul Anderson, for one example. I always wanted to do fantasy as well as science fiction. I had my first excursion into fantasy as a genre to write in with a novel called The Spirit Ring a number of years back-- almost decade ago-- which was set in a Renaissance Italy where magic actually worked, and followed the adventures of characters from a tale-- well, actually taken from an old folk tale. That was my journeyman piece as a fantasy writer, and I enjoyed the historical research aspects of it. Probably one of the great pleasures of writing fantasy, is to be able bring out all the history reading one does if one is a writer. All the writers I know are history buffs. So I knew the next time out I that wanted to make my book set in its own world -- not our world and not a variant of our world, but its own unique place.
I've come quite lately to the study of Spanish medieval history. For fun a few years ago I took a course at the local university on the subject, about which I had known almost nothing. And I emerged from it with this wonderful load of characters and incidents and plots and astonishing historical events. It was just fascinatingly complex and full of lurid details. Authors are suckers for lurid details. I knew I wanted to do something with that material but I had really no idea what. So it sort of laid dormant in my mind for a while as I continued to work on my science fiction series.
I had finished the most recent book in that series, A Civil Campaign, (which is now out from Baen Books), toward the end of 1999, and I was looking around for something different. I wanted a break from the series. I wanted to sort of refresh my mind. And I had also the chance to write a book on spec, which means, without pre-contracting before it's written. I had enough money to take a year and just write without committing myself to a contract. So my mind turned to the Spanish material. The opportunity came at the right time.
I had also, a couple of years back, started a letter-game with my friend Pat Wrede. She's another fantasy writer who lives here in Minneapolis. The letter game is kind of an epistolary tennis. You write back and forth to each other in the personas of characters, set in whatever setting you want to make up. If the people who are playing this game are writers, it tends to turn into books. I can think of at least two recent novels that started out as letter games, Steven Brust and Emma Bull's Freedom and Necessity and Pat Wrede and Carolyn Stevermer's Sorcery and Cecelia. So Pat and I began one of these, but it didn't go very far because the character that I had evolved didn't want to be in that world. He had a certain character density. He was there, he was very strong, but he didn't want to play that game. We both had other projects we were working on, so we let the letter game drop. But the character hung around in my mind. And he was the character that came along and suddenly informed my setting that I had-- all this Spanish material that I wanted to do something with. Cazaril, as he eventually came to be named, provided the focus. It was his story.
- SP:
- Well, with your novel you have done a wonderful job of evoking a particular place and time in history and you also took one of the greatest romances out of Spanish history. Would you tell us what the original was and how did you separate this novel from that history? In what ways?
- LMB:
- The great romance of course is that of Ferdinand and Isabella, which truly changed the world totally. I think Isabella is one of the most under-rated of the monarchs of that period. She just doesn't have good press -- it was that Inquisition stuff that came along later that kind of besmirched her reputation. But she certainly started out in a very promising fashion. She was born in the second half of the 1400s. This was when the Wars of the Roses were going on in England, and there were also dynastic civil wars going on in Spain during the same period that were just as lurid and just as complicated in terms of the players. Isabella was actually the child of the second marriage of her father, King Juan II. Juan's first heir was Enrique IV, also known as Enrique the Impotent. Isabella and her brother Alfonso came from the second marriage. Enrique inherited in due course, and Isabella and her brother became the center of various noble factions swirling about them.
I will not go into the whole long story of Spanish dynastic wars during this Trastamara period. People can look it up in their libraries. But the story of her romance with Ferdinand of Aragon and how they came to be married is quite as fantastic as any romance one could make up. The story is written in these various places. Prescott has a three volume biography of Ferdinand and Isabella which I used for a reference, among many other works full of fascinating details. So basically during the civil war Isabella contracted her own marriage with Ferdinand. They had to sneak him across the border to marry her because Enrique, her older brother, had other ideas for how he was going to play this dynastic pawn. The pawn played herself instead. Quite fascinating, quite a fascinating bit of history, and indeed a fabulous romance, and a fabulous marriage that followed, really, by the standards of that day or any other day.
But of course Spanish history has its dark side, its dark edges, its problems that flowed both out of its initial set-up and out of certain wrong choices that people made along the way. So I was fascinated by the period, I was fascinated by the characters but I did not want to be locked in to the particularities of medieval Spain. I wanted to go in other directions, I wanted to be able to do other things. I said, okay, I will take some of these ideas but I will put them in my own world so that the results can come out differently. In a way, fantasy almost gives one the opportunity to heal the mistakes of history. You can make history go differently in your own world. It's an interesting kind of what-if game.
- SP:
- And you're also only part-way through the history of Ferdinand and Isabella.
- LMB:
- Yeah, I actually-- because the events of The Curse of Chalion go in such a different direction, for various underlying reasons, than the historical models, as the series grows, if I write more books in this world, it will probably depart more and more from its initial historical incidents. So I'm not going to make any predictions about how the future of the series will go. This is not rewriting history, this is something different.
- SP:
- When you build your fantasy worlds, one of the things that has so enraptured me is that you have so many different layers of ideas and concepts and practices from our own world that you add into it to give it a sense of reality and truth that might not otherwise be there. What are some of the ones that you wanted to make certain that you included particularly in Curse of Chalion?
- LMB:
- Well, one of the things I wanted was a more realistic and authentic religion in this fantasy world. There are a lot of fantasies in which religion or the magic -- which tend to be related to one another -- are treated mechanistically or superficially, and I wanted to get away from that. I wanted to look at the kinds of problems that real religions in the real world tackle or solve for people, and I wanted to borrow some of that authenticity for the magic and for the religion in my fantasy world.
One of the many things that religions do and did in real life, particularly in the middle ages, was that they provided a social context. They provided a way to do the work of the community, a way for people to come together and do the work of the world that needed to be done, a way of organizing social tasks. The church provided hospitals, it provided schools, it provided many of the things that are now taken over by government functions. The churches provided all kinds of social support networks for people. I wanted to have that in. And religion also has an authentic mystical aspect -- people who are genuinely searching for God -- and these mystics and saints are also a fascinating part of medieval history that I thought would be interesting to try to do something with in a fantasy context in a way that was less superficial than one sometimes sees in the genre.
- SP:
- You've done it very, very well in this. Getting back to the theme of the religion you built, you have a religion with five divinities. Would you describe who they are and the parts they play in the lives of the people in this kingdom?
- LMB:
- Yes. One of the things I wanted to get away from in the religion I was going to build for my fantasy world is the idea of dualism, the idea that good and evil are divided into absolutely separate units that are never intermingled. It's as if all the oxygen was on one side of the room and all the nitrogen was on the other. But when you look around in real life things are always more mixed. There are no pure essences.
- SP:
- Mm-hm?
- LMB:
- And it seemed to me that setting up a pantheon that did not divide evenly would help discourage this false representation of good and evil into pure essences that are somehow antithetical, as if they could be found separately. So I started up with five gods and they have a sort of family base. You have the Father, the Mother, the Daughter, the Son, and the Bastard. And the Bastard turned out to be the most interesting of the gods because he's the god of balance. He's the god that moves most freely and can throw his weight behind one faction or another and keep the world turning. He's a kind of Coyote or Trickster figure, familiar to any student of folklore.
- SP:
- Mm-hm?
- LMB:
- And he turned out to be a lot of fun. I look forward to exploring more aspects of him. He's the most ambiguous of the gods as well, being half a demon in this pantheon. And in fact one of the religious controversies of the world of Chalion is the question of whether the Bastard is a god or a demon. There are two principal religions:
- the Quintarians, who take the Bastard as a god, and the Quadrenes, who take him as a demon. Each of the religions is effectively a heresy of the other. They're each sure the other one has got it wrong and is worshipping wrongly. So this sets up some interesting religious tensions for the people in the story.
But each of the gods takes their appropriate season so each is balanced through the year. The Father is associated with winter and justice, and death of old age. The Daughter of Spring is of course associated with the renewal of life and with young women. The Mother is associated with summer, with fertility, and with healing. The medics of this world, the doctors of this world give their allegiance to the Mother. And the Son is associated with autumn, with the hunt -- he is god of war. A number of other interesting divisions of labor among my pantheon both reflect and augment the human society that they're embedded in.
So people have particular allegiances to a particular god according to their own gender and their own station in life and this may change as they pass through life. A girl would normally be born into a particular relationship with the Daughter, then when she becomes a mother she moves into a relationship with the Mother goddess instead, and so on. And the other thing that this religion with its fifth god provided for the story -- it provided a social structure with a place for the odd bits.
An awful lot of medieval horrors came from trying to fit people into their proper boxes without any parts left over. Anything that didn't fit tended to get lopped off. I think this tendency still happens in our society. We have the theory and we try to make the people fit the theory, whatever the social or economic or political or religious theory may be. But this Quintarian religion has built into it a place and a god for all the people that don't fit. I do think that's something that's needed in any world. A legitimate place to belong when you don't quite slot into your society in any of the standard roles. So all sorts of people end up with their allegiance not to the Daughter or the Son or the Father but rather to the Bastard. Not only bastards and foundlings but also some artists and other persons. So that was a lot of fun, to devise a religion that had room for more kinds of people than some of the religious models that history provided.
- SP:
- You also have a very neat and precise way to separate the two armies that serve two particular divinities.
- LMB:
- Yes. The two armies in question are the army that owes its allegiance to the Son and the one that owes its allegiance to the Daughter. In original Spanish history, there were many military religious orders-- the Order of St James, the Order of Calatrava, the Order of Alcantara-- that began as brotherhoods, sort of lay-religious, semi-monkish brotherhoods of soldiers who had the job of fighting the war against the Moors which was going on-- a seven hundred year long war that went back and forth over that peninsula-- and various other activities. And these organizations changed and grew over time in various fascinating ways. So the military orders of Spain were actually the origin of my idea for the military orders of the gods in the world of Chalion. The Order of the Daughter is actually the -- ended up being the policemen of Chalion. They're sort of the Chalion Highway Patrol. They began as the brotherhood of soldiers whose job it was to protect pilgrims on the road as they went to the various shrines and so on. Pilgrimage-- the medieval holiday-making-- slipped very neatly into Chalion. And the Order of the Son is more the army proper. They've been principally involved in the wars with the Quadrene heretics on their borders and they have a different set of functions. So if you are a young man, depending upon how you are called you might end up as a soldier in either of these two Orders and have somewhat different activities fall to your lot depending on which order you chose.
- SP:
- I would also like to go back to something you mentioned earlier. You said that many things are not pure essences, in some ways they have the seeds of their opposite within them.
- LMB:
- Yes.
- SP:
- That's a particularly Jungian approach and you use it in how the curse of Chalion affects those that surround the royal house. These are not people that are overtly evil but it subverts the strongest motivation of their personality to its own uses. What other sources for human motivation did you draw on to give this curse and the magic in this world a sense of common-sense reality?
- LMB:
- Hm. Well it... My ideas for the magic in this world sort of grew gradually as I put the book together, as scenes and sequences of events fell into place. I wasn't exactly sure how I was going to do it when I embarked on it, except that I knew I wanted the magic to be essential to the world, I wanted it to be distinguishable from other fantasy novels, and I wanted it to be different from the ideas of magic that we found in the actual middle ages. If one reads up on historical magic, people had all kinds of bizarre theories about how they thought it worked. But one of the aspects of it was that magic worked by magic. In the twentieth century readers have been trained in physics and they're always looking for things to balance. They want to know where the energy comes from; they want to know where the matter goes to. All these kinds of practical, SF-y minded questions. For the magic that I wanted to develop for my world, I wanted to be both unique to the book and something that a twentieth-century reader would find intuitively reasonable. Which is not the case for medieval magic, which is just really strange. The Hermitic magic is particularly complicated.
- SP:
- It's very difficult to find chemistry in alchemy although the two are related.
- LMB:
- Yeah, they had very strange ideas of cause and effect back then. But magic in this world, I finally decided, after playing around with it a while, flows from the gods and has some interesting limitations. The gods themselves in this world have some limitations. I've often thought about the question of religion, of God all-powerful, all-knowing, all-good:
- pick any two of the three, and you've got something that will account for the world that we have. For the world of Chalion the two that I chose for the gods is that they are good and they are knowing but they are not all-powerful. They do not have power over matter; they can only work through life. This gives them an interesting range of ways that they can affect the world. They clearly have the ability to foresee and to shape events, but they can't control, they can't reach in and directly make things happen. They have to work through people, through living things, and this gives them some limitations that are extremely useful to my plot as the story unfolds. Every kind of power in a world has to have its limitations or otherwise there's no story. If you invent Superman you almost immediately have to invent kryptonite in order to slow him down, in order to make the story be of interest. The story is about struggle, the story is about trying hard when the outcome isn't necessarily given. So it's important that magic have limits.
- SP:
- You also have three mystics in this book, at the center of the novel, the heart of it. How does the way they deal with their gifts particularly illustrate the way that the divinities and magic work in this world?
- LMB:
- Each of the three characters represents a different -- besides a different god working through them -- each of the three characters' response to their god illustrates something about the way magic works in the world and the way mysticism works. I don't want to give away too much of the plot here. Those characters who are able to understand it rightly do much better than those who misinterpret what their mystical experiences mean, or try to use it in a mechanical fashion or otherwise screw up, basically. So the comparison and contrast among the three of them is reasonably instructive, I think.
- SP:
- Are these three people seen, by those that surround them, as being filled with grace?
- LMB:
- No, the other aspect of saints in my world-- I give sainthood a very particular definition which I will talk about in a moment-- is that they are not particularly visible, which I think is true of saints in our world, too. Many of them go by without making a great ripple or splash. There are some notable exceptions, but I decided, for this world, what made a person a saint was that they were a person who was especially able to let the gods work through them, through their life, in the world. To let the gods enter in and have an effect on the world, which otherwise the gods were blocked from. The gods needed the gift of a will, the gift of a willing mind in order to participate. So this gives human free will very significant pride of place in the theology. A person need not entertain the gods -- he need not have anything to do with them if he does not desire to. It's only the person who gives the gift of their life that allows the gods of Chalion to work in their world, through them. So that had some very interesting consequences as the story played out but it did mean that the saints were not necessarily splashy people.
- SP:
- I don't see how you could be splashy people and still be receptive to being open.
- LMB:
- It's an interesting problem.
- SP:
- Your hero, Cazaril, is a man who is seen by others as having a great deal of integrity. He considers himself to be in many ways a failure and although he understands very clearly the way of the court politics and the ambitious men around him, why don't people see him as a hero? He has the integrity of a hero.
- LMB:
- Well, I think many people do see him that way. The better they get to know him the more they see him that way. He's a self-effacing man. Cazaril has the slight disadvantage of being born extremely intelligent in a world where IQ tests haven't been invented. He's really only aware of himself as a pretty straight-forward guy who's not as good of a swordsman as he ought to be, so I think perhaps his greatest strengths are undervalued in his culture and therefore undervalued a little bit by him. But he's quite a bright guy. That was one of the pleasures of -- well, of several pleasures of working with him as a viewpoint character. He's very intelligent; he's very perceptive. He's also an older character. That was a lot of fun for me as a writer, as I'm getting to be an older writer, because he had such rich reserves of vocabulary and experience to draw upon. He gave me a very rich window into the world that he was experiencing, to see everything through his eyes. But Cazaril was sufficiently self-effacing to be rather surprising.
He has his model in a historical type which I've read about, and the more one reads history the more one begins to notice these guys popping up all over. The secretaries, the ministers, the assistants, the people who made things go for their particular monarchs. Queen Elizabeth I had her Walsingham. Mary Queen of Scots had David Rizzio, her secretary, horribly murdered by the conspirators who overthrew Mary. And various other important secretaries and ministers turn up over and over in history. They're frequently people in religious orders, but they're hard working, serious fellows who put in, in some cases, incredible amounts of work, making the government function, taking care of the correspondence, taking care of the diplomatic issues and running back and forth to do the negotiations between one side and another. Fascinating bunch of men and not as much written about as the more resplendent monarchs whom they actually served and in a way created. So Cazaril has some roots in that historic type and because they never get to be the heroes of the story-- it's always the king or the princess or the queen who's the center-- I thought that they ought to have a story in which one of theirs is the center. And therefore, I invented Cazaril.
- SP:
- The character is just absolutely fascinating to me. You also have a character in your book by the name of Umegat?
- LMB:
- Umegat, yes.
- SP:
- Who tells a profound parable about a goblet and everybody's heard about this parable of the goblet, everybody is talking about it as if it's just an old chestnut that keeps getting trotted out every year at the same time and the same season--
- LMB(laughing):
- Probably, yeah. It's undoubtedly "This is the third week of the year, we will have this sermon." But go ahead.
- SP:
- --but how many people in your kingdom actually get the heart of the parable?
- LMB:
- A few, but that's true I think with the parables that our poor hardworking ministers trot out every Sunday. They keep trying to tell us, but we only hear if we are listening. The idea of the parable, or the story, or the sermon, the tale-- the way stories convey the theological center of things is another aspect of real religion that I sort of lent to my made-up religion here in Chalion. This bit is important. You know, religions should have stories. It's the way they live, the way they transmit themselves, it's the way they reach people's hearts. So that was fun, to have that. It also had plot aspects. It also demonstrated character. I made that parable work very hard for my story.
- SP:
- And Umegat as a character is the keeper of a menagerie for King Orico. Where did you get the idea for the menagerie?
- LMB:
- Well, in medieval times many, many noblemen kept menageries, or animal collections of various kinds as a hobby. Our modern zoos are descendants of that sort of beginning. The particular fate of Orico's menagerie, upon which a major plot-point turns, actually came out of a footnote in a Ph.D. thesis that was a biography of Enrique IV, which I read for my Spanish history course. When you're reading those history books never skip the footnotes, because you find the most amazingly useful things therein. But the menagerie was fun and as I thought about it, as I thought about the religion, I realized that the animals have this particular part to play in the world. They, too, were something that the gods could enter into. They could participate in the divinity of their world. I think animals in general live in a kind of eternal now that is very innocent and very interesting, and so I made use of the animals in my world as part of this.
- SP:
- You also use the animals in the funeral rites for the religion. Would you like to describe that?
- LMB:
- Yes, that was rather fun. It came up, once again when I was thinking, okay, what do religions do in the real world? Well, they take care of birth, they take care of death. Funerals are a very important part of religion. In the religion of Chalion, one of the questions that comes up whenever somebody dies is, which god are they going to? Which god is taking in their soul in the afterlife? This has practical considerations as you want to know to which god should you donate your money on the altar when you're taking care of the funeral, and you kind of want to know where your loved ones are. Have they gone to the right god for them, are they going to be okay?
So one of the small, everyday miracles that occurs in the world of Chalion is that at the funeral, people find out which god the deceased has been taken up by, which god their soul has gone to, by a kind of blessing of the animals, a parade of the animals. The animal representing each god is brought to the bier and the god who has claimed the particular soul in question gives a sign through one of His or Her sacred animals and thus each funeral rite includes this sequence. These gorgeous creatures are brought out, each appropriate to their god -- color, gender -- and that was fun, particularly sort of thinking about the backstory. Where do these animals go after the funeral? Whose job is it to look after them? So that was interesting, how that came out. It just sort of fell out -- I didn't plan it in advance. It worked its way up out of the material and presented itself to me. Yes! This is the how funerals work in this world.
- SP:
- Would you like to go into detail as to which animals are associated with which particular divinity?
- LMB:
- Well, it can vary. Basically people have to use whatever they have to hand. In the case of one incident somebody describes, they used a basket of five kittens with ribbons around their necks representing each of the particular gods. But the richer temples can keep dedicated animals specifically for this purpose. In the temple at Cardegoss, which is where we see one of the funerals take place, the Father is represented by a big old gray wolf, the Mother is represented by a beautiful green bird, rather parrot-like, the Daughter is represented by a bluejay, the Son is represented by a red fox, his coat all brushed and burnished bright, each suitably attended by its acolyte who grooms and takes care of it and is very concerned about looking after it. The Bastard is represented by a pair of white rats. I had a friend a few years back who was much into rats. She was a biologist and she also kept rats as pets, so I got to know her rats. They were quite charming.
- SP:
- Well, with animals and divinities playing such a part in the funeral rites is medicine and its connection to spiritual practices different in this world? Is the spiritual aspect greater than what we would consider to be modern medicine, herbs, setting bones, etc. or is it less?
- LMB:
- No, it's more of course, because it's a little more reliable. The medicine of Chalion is not in a one-for-one correspondence to the medicine of the middle ages. For one thing Chalion lacks a lot of the wrong medical theories that sent medicine kind of down the wrong path for so many centuries. Dissection is allowed in Chalion, it's not forbidden by religion. Therefore their grasp of anatomy is much better than it was in the real world, particularly in the early middle ages. The Chalionese don't have microscopes yet, so they haven't figured out microbes. There are certain technical aspects that they simply haven't gotten onto. I've not quite decided whether they've figured out circulation of the blood or not, since it didn't come up in this part of the plot. So medicine is on a fairly rational basis given their technical limitations. They've probably figured out cleanliness to a greater degree than they had in the middle ages. That may have been a gift of the gods. 'Wash your hands between patients! I had a dream last night, the Mother told me.' I can picture that going on.
So medicines are a little different, a little better in the world of Chalion. Also, it isn't limited to one gender to practice. In our own history, basically only men could become doctors, although there were a lot more women doctors than you realize. They just weren't visible and recorded. They were working in and around the edges. When you read the more detailed histories they start to turn up. But in the world of Chalion the practice of medicine is divided equally among women and men, we have both men and women physicians, and women work in other aspects of this. So there's a little more equality of the genders in this fantasy world than there was in the original model.
- SP:
- One of the other things that fascinates me is that the magic that is used, whether it's healing magic or whatever, you pay a price. It does not come free.
- LMB:
- Effects must have causes. That's deeply inculcated into the modern mind and so we want to see these causes, these prices. Great events should have great causes. It just feels more satisfying that way as storytelling.
- SP:
- One of the other things that it also points out is, how much do you really want what you're asking for? How much are you willing to pay for this result, how much are you willing to be responsible for? The lack of casualness is important in the plot.
- LMB:
- Indeed, yes.
- SP:
- How did you come to such a common-sense approach, if it's not too personal to ask?
- LMB:
- It's not too personal to ask but I'm not sure I can clearly answer it. I've been reading and studying these questions for years. I've read the works of some mystics talking about meditation, and read the works of some theologians talking about religion -- I've read a lot of C. S. Lewis. He certainly touched on a lot of these problems. So it's all the things that I've been looking at and thinking about, off and on, all my life. So, when the time was right it just flowed out that way. I didn't think about it in a very logical way, it just-- Okay, this looks right, we'll do it this way. I tend to be a very intuitive writer, to fly by the seat of my pants a bit. I do a lot of things because they feel right and look back on the thing and discover that I've been putting together this very complex pattern which would really have been too complex for my feeble logical mind to have figured out in advance, but something in my back-brain assembles it. I've learned to trust this aspect of myself as a writer.
- SP:
- You have a great many layers to everything you write. That's one of the things that fascinates me about your Vorkosigan saga, is that they appear to be very simple on the surface, and yet they explore the human psyche and motivations very carefully.
- LMB:
- Yeah, that's probably what interests me most. Of course, that's kind of what storytelling is all about. For all the physical action, eventually it always comes down to someone making a choice somewhere, to do one thing and not another, and those choices are the turning points, if you like, of history. Historians tend to fall into two camps. You have the Impersonal Historical Forces camp, who want to say that all history is these great movements -- vast things happen but no people ever do anything. And on the opposite pole are the Great Man theorists, who want all of history to be the effects of certain individual acts by a rather limited cast of people. I think the actual truth lies somewhere in between. It's far more chaotic. Small causes can have enormous effects and it's very fractal, really. Connie Willis is another science fiction writer who's devoted some thought to this kind of view of history. In some of her time travel books she has a very fractal view, a very complex view, and I think a more realistic view of history than either of these two extremes. I wanted to explore some of those things in putting together my story.
- SP:
- You also did something absolutely fascinating with language in Curse of Chalion. You took names and titles, and it was almost like you did a mix-and-sort. This root here, but that suffix from there, and that prefix from there. Where did that idea come from?
- LMB:
- It's an ongoing problem. If you're making up a new world, you have to be conscious of where language comes from. If you're trying to transport the reader into a different time and place than their everyday normal twentieth century USA, twenty-first century USA world, you can't keep saying certain kinds of names because they're just too mundane and sort of drop everybody back into the real world with too hard of a thump. So the names of things are an important part of the atmosphere, in a sense. The selection of names is something that the writers have to spend a good deal of thought on. You want to be a little bit conscious of the sources of words -- with a book like Chalion particularly, the setting of which is while not historical at any rate pre-industrial. You always have to be constantly watching your vocabulary for anachronisms. You can't use metaphors or refer to objects that wouldn't have been invented in this world. All your metaphors have to be checked to make sure that they work in this new context. For the names, I did, indeed, the mix-and-match, basically took Spanish names for the Chalionese -- Spanish and Portuguese -- and chopped them up and rearranged them to euphonious sounding new words. Of course, Spanish itself has so many language sources. It has Celtic, it has Visigothic, it has Latin, it has Arabic. There're all these different sources that go into Spanish-- oh, and Carthaginian, there are Carthaginian root-words in Spanish if you get down to studying it. So I was doing a mix-and-match on something that had already been mixed-and-matched quite a bit by actual real history. And the Roknari names, in order to distinguish them from the Chalionese names-- Roknari are a sea-faring people that are the kind of off-stage enemy through all of this-- I picked a different area of the map of the world and ran the same trick. But I was always conscious, when I was using a name, whether it was Chalionese or whether it was Roknari, and would decide which part of the map of the world I would go to look for ideas, for syllables for name-combinations. So it kept each language group subliminally consistent.
- SP:
- And it did, beautifully.
- LMB:
- The problem of neologisms in fantasy and science fiction is an ongoing one. You need a certain number of new words for new concepts -- like, if you're introducing them for the first time in this book -- you need a certain number to give atmosphere, but if you have too many the reader gets vocabulary overload and they can no longer sort out, they can't keep track of, you know, is this a noun or a verb, is this a person, a place, or a thing. They get saturated. So getting just the right amount of strangeness to give the atmosphere without overloading and shorting out the reader's mental processes is a fine and interesting line one has to walk very carefully.
- SP(laughing):
- Now, how is it that you came to decide on Spain as a location for this?
- LMB:
- Well, it came from source material, from having taken that course over at the university, which I chose because-- it was very random-- it was the one course that was taught with a long lecture one day a week instead of lectures five days a week. I only had to sacrifice one working day to get myself over there and take the course. So that's why I picked Spanish history, in addition to being interested in it. From these little random factoids the most amazing things do flow.
But I took the course first, and then I wrote the book, and then, after the book was done, I got a chance to actually go to Spain. I was invited to a Spanish national science fiction convention, which was taking place at a town called Gijon on the north coast of Spain, last summer. The invitation arrived in the middle of December in Minneapolis -- I think it was like 20 below that night -- and the idea of going to Spain in July just seemed so overwhelmingly attractive I sent back a 'yes' immediately. Yes, yes, I will come! So I had the peculiar experience of kind of running my research in reverse. Having written the book, then I got to go look at some of the places that had inspired some of the settings and ideas for towns and castles.
One of the settings in the story of The Curse of Chalion is the capital of the Zangre in Cardegoss, which is based upon the Alcazar of Segovia, a very famous castle in Segovia, Spain. I actually got to go see the castle. At the time I was researching the book I had a very limited amount of information about the actual building so I'd made up my own version. I had to look at the photographs that I had and then kind of figure out what it ought to look like from the inside. When I actually got there it was quite a bit different, but that was okay because, since I wasn't writing historical it didn't have to be 100% accurate. The one thing that I found in real life that hadn't shown in any of the pictures was the front entrance. It turns out the castle is set on the lip of an extremely steep rocky cleft that provides a kind of natural dry moat. It's an amazing location for a castle. So when the revisions came in my one change as the result of visiting Spain was to go back and write in that cleft at the mouth of the castle of Zangre so that it would match. But other than that, I think it was just a wonderful three weeks soaking up atmosphere and perhaps ideas for the sequel.
- SP:
- I think our listeners have a very good idea at this point why you are a much-beloved writer who wins Nebulas and Hugos.
- LMB(laughing):
- Thank you.
- SP:
- This is an astounding amount of information. I would like to mention two other websites before I go any further. You are a Baen author--
- LMB:
- Yes.
- SP:
- --and if people want to turn their web-browsing software to
www.baen.com/series_list.asp#VS they can get to your books and there are, indeed, chapters and audioclips on the site.
- LMB:
- It's a very, very rich site. I'm also an Eos author -- check www.eosbooks.com.
- SP:
- You can also go to www.dendarii.com for access to information about your science fiction series and links to everything from recipes to some of the other interviews that you have done. You've been translated into 14 languages now?
- LMB:
- I think it's up to 17 now. We've added Korean here in the spring when my agent sold a couple books to Korea. Yes, it's an amazing number of languages. I have readers in countries I never even imagined reading me when I was writing the books, and now that we have the internet I get fan mail from the most amazing places. I got a fan letter from Khazakstan on the internet the other day.
- SP:
- Oh, my!
- LMB:
- E-mail from Vietnam, from Australia, from Finland, from South Africa, from Israel, from every imaginable corner of the globe. It's just stunning,
- SP:
- And you well deserve to have your reputation spread about. The writing is fascinatingly complex and wonderful and welcoming. I just really enjoy your work.
- LMB:
- Thank you.
- SP:
- Curse of Chalion definitely took me away from a very difficult weekend this weekend and I very much enjoyed it.
- LMB:
- Very good!
- SP:
- I'm Susan Profit, and my guest has been Hugo and Nebula award winner Lois McMaster Bujold. I would like to turn this back to the host of the Science Fiction Hour, Jeff Cavanaugh. Thank you very much.
