Lois McMaster Bujold | |
|---|---|
 Bujold at home in 2009 | |
| Born | Lois Joy McMaster[1] (1949-11-02)November 2, 1949 (age 76) Columbus, Ohio, U.S. |
| Occupation | Novelist |
| Nationality | American |
| Alma mater | Ohio State University[2] |
| Period | 1985–present |
| Genre | Science fiction,fantasy |
| Children | 2 |
| Website | |
| dendarii | |
Lois McMaster Bujold (/buːˈʒoʊld/ ⓘboo-ZHOHLD; born November 2, 1949) is an Americanspeculative fiction writer.[1] She has won theHugo Award for best novel four times, matchingRobert A. Heinlein's record (not counting his Retro Hugos). Her novellaThe Mountains of Mourning won both the Hugo Award andNebula Award. In the fantasy genre,The Curse of Chalion won theMythopoeic Award for Adult Literature and was nominated for the 2002World Fantasy Award for best novel, and both her fourth Hugo Award and second Nebula Award were forPaladin of Souls. In 2011 she was awarded theSkylark Award.[3] She has won twoHugo Awards for Best Series, in 2017 for theVorkosigan Saga[4] and in 2018 for theWorld of the Five Gods.[5] The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association named her its 36th SFWAGrand Master in 2019.[6]
The bulk of Bujold's works comprises three series: the Vorkosigan Saga, the World of the Five Gods, and theSharing Knife series.
Bujold is the daughter ofRobert Charles McMaster[7][8] and attributes her early interest in science fiction, as well as certain aspects of theVorkosigan Saga, to his influence. He was editor of theNondestructive Testing Handbook.[9]
Bujold writes that her experience growing up with a famous father is reflected in the same experience that her characters (Miles, Fiametta) have of growing up in the shadow of a "Great Man". Having observed this tendency in both genders, she wonders why it is always called "great man's son syndrome", and never "great man's daughter's syndrome."[10] Her brother, an engineer like their father, helped provide technical details to support her writing ofFalling Free.[11]
She has stated that she was always a "voracious reader".[2] She started reading adult science fiction at the age of nine, picking up the habit from her father. She became a member ofscience fiction fandom, joined the Central Ohio Science Fiction Society, and co-publishedStarDate, ascience fiction fanzine in which a story of hers appeared under the byline Lois McMaster. Her reading tastes later expanded and she stated she now reads "history, mysteries, romance, travel, war, poetry, etc".[2]
She attendedOhio State University from 1968 to 1972. While she was interested in writing, she didn't pursue an English major, feeling it was too concerned with literary criticism instead of literary creation.[2]
She married John Fredric Bujold in 1971, but they divorced in the early 1990s. The marriage produced two children, a daughter named Anne (born 1979) and a son named Paul (born 1981).[12] Anne Bujold is currently (January 2020) Artist-In-Residence for the Metals Department at the Appalachian Center for Craft, a campus ofTennessee Tech;[13] formerly she was a metal artist and welder in Portland, Oregon[14] and vice president of the Northwest Blacksmith Association.[15] Bujold currently lives inMinneapolis, Minnesota.[16]
Bujold had been friends withLillian Stewart Carl since high school, where they "collaborated on extended story lines [but where] only a fragment of the total was written out.".[2] At one point, she even co-produced aStar Trek zine calledStarDate[17] which she wrote for. In college, she wrote a Sherlock Holmes mystery as well.[17] However, she stopped writing after that, being busy with marriage, family, and a career in hospital patient care.[18]
It wasn't until her thirties[18] that she returned to writing. Bujold has credited her friend Lillian Stewart Carl's first book sales with inspiring her to return to the field: "it occurred to me that if she could do it, I could do it too."[2] She originally planned to write as a hobby again, but discovered the amount of work required was too much for anything other than a profession, so she decided to turn professional.[19] With support from Carl andPatricia Wrede,[20] she was able to complete her first novel.
Lois Bujold wrote three books (Shards of Honor,The Warrior's Apprentice andEthan of Athos) beforeThe Warrior's Apprentice was finally accepted, after four rejections.The Warrior's Apprentice was the first book purchased, though not the first Vorkosigan book written, nor would it be the first one to be published. On the strength ofThe Warrior's Apprentice,Baen Books agreed to a three-book deal to include the two bracketing novels. By 2010, Baen Books claimed to have sold two million copies of Bujold's books.[21]
Bujold is best known for herVorkosigan Saga, a series of novels featuringMiles Vorkosigan, a physically impaired interstellarspy andmercenary admiral from the planet Barrayar, set approximately 1000 years in the future. The series also includes prequels starring Miles' parents, along with companion novels centered on secondary characters. Earlier titles are generally firmly in thespace opera tradition with no shortage of battles, conspiracies, and wild twists, while in more recent volumes, Miles becomes more of adetective. InA Civil Campaign, Bujold explores yet another genre: ahigh-society romance with a plot that pays tribute toRegency romance novelistGeorgette Heyer (as acknowledged in the dedication). It centers on a catastrophic dinner party, with misunderstandings and dialogue justifying the subtitle "A Comedy of Biology and Manners".
The author has stated that the series structure is modeled after theHoratio Hornblower books, documenting the life of a single person. In themes and echoes, they also reflectDorothy L. Sayers' mystery characterLord Peter Wimsey. Bujold has also said that part of the challenge of writing a series is that many readers will encounter the stories in "utterly random order", so she must provide sufficient background in each of them without being excessively repetitious. Most recent printings of her Vorkosigan tales do include an appendix at the end of each book, summarizing the internal chronology of the series.
Bujold has discussed her own views on the optimum reading order for the Vorkosigan series in her blog.[22]
Bujold also wanted to break into the fantasy genre, but met with early setbacks. Her first foray into fantasy wasThe Spirit Ring. She wrote the book "on spec", shopped it around, and found low offers, sending her back toBaen Books, whereJim Baen bought it for a fair price in exchange for the promise of more Vorkosigan books. Bujold called this experience very educational; the book received little critical acclaim, and had only mediocre sales.
She did not attempt to break into the fantasy market again for almost another decade, withThe Curse of Chalion. This book was also written on spec and offered to a book auction. This time she met with considerable critical and commercial success by tapping into a crossover market of fantasy and romance genre fans. The fantasy world ofChalion was first conceived as a result of aUniversity of Minnesota course she was taking aboutmedieval Spain in her spare time. She would eventually expand the setting into theWorld of the Five Gods series, includingPaladin of Souls,The Hallowed Hunt, and the sixteen novels, novellas, and short stories of the Penric and Desdemona series.
The next fantasy world she created was thetetralogy set in the universe ofThe Sharing Knife, borrowing inspiration for its landscapes and for the dialect of the "farmers" from ones she grew up with in central Ohio.[23] She writes that her first readers who helped proofread it said she got it exactly right and they could recognize Ohio features in the descriptions anddialects.
Bujold has generally been supportive offan fiction written about her characters and universe. Amy H. Sturgis, in her essay "From Both Sides Now: Bujold and the Fan Fiction Phenomenon",[17] notes that this is unusual for writers of Bujold's generation, most of whom are opposed to fan fiction. Sturgis relates this to Bujold's own production ofStar Trek andSherlock Holmes fan fiction early in her life, which Sturgis saw as an apprenticeship for her professional writing career.
Bujold herself ties her appreciation of fan fiction to her appreciation of "active" readers. To her, good readers are the "unsung collaborators" who make the story work, by actually constructing the world and characters in their heads. Books, to her, don't actually exist until they enter the reader's head and grow there. And sometimes, the characters and stories in a book grow so much that they escape the writer's original confines and become fan fiction. To Bujold, great literature is never "sterile", stopping with only what the original author wrote.[24] She further believes that fan fiction gives authors a unique chance to see into the minds of those "invisible collaborators", the readers.[25]
Despite this, she no longer reads fan fiction about her own characters due to legal and financial concerns, "fascinating as [she] finds it".[25]
| W | Won | N | Nominated |
| Series | Book | Award[26] | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Hugo | Locus | Nebula | ||
| Vorkosigan Saga | Falling Free (1988) | N | – | W |
| The Vor Game (1990) | W | N | – | |
| Barrayar (1991) | W | W | N | |
| Mirror Dance (1994) | W | W | – | |
| Memory (1996) | N | N | N | |
| A Civil Campaign (1999) | N | N | N | |
| Diplomatic Immunity (2002) | – | – | N | |
| Cryoburn (2010) | N | N | – | |
| Captain Vorpatril's Alliance (2012) | N | N | – | |
| As a series | W | – | – | |
| World of the Five Gods | The Curse of Chalion (2001) | N | N | – |
| Paladin of Souls (2003) | W | W | W | |
| The Hallowed Hunt (2005) | – | N | – | |
| As a series | W | – | – | |
Bujold has also received the following accolades:
Bujold is currently the Artist-In-Residence for the Metals Department at the Appalachian Center for Craft in Smithville, TN.
Anne Bujold was named Vice President.
