A brief report about VorCon with cross-links and its logo
(http://bujold.da.ru/vorcon_rep_eng.htm)
Lois's greeting to the convention
(http://bujold.da.ru/lois_greet.htm#eng)
The full transcription of Lois's IRC chat on April 19 2002
(http://bujold.da.ru/loischat_19a.htm)
Photo gallery of the role-playing game Council of Counts logo
(http://bujold.da.ru/vorcon_photo_eng.htm)
Lois visited St Petersburg, Russia, for Stranik-2000, in September 2000 and wrote an
article, with links to appropriate sites, about her
Russian Impressions. Her russian fans have also provided, in English,
the following additional stuff.
A conversation with Lois
McMaster Bujold with photos and Real Audio clips of Lois's voice.
A number of FAQs were
also raised.
The History of Barrayar
- a more detailed timeline.
A revised version of Lois McMaster Bujold's speech (
Wars of the future panel St. Petersburg, September 2000).
A colour map of wormholes.
The Russian editions of Lois's book have a distinctive look. Note that all book covers are copyright their publishers and the artwork is copyright of the artist.
Published by AST Publishers (Russia), most of the cover art is by A. Dubovik
These images, with most of the other cover art, have been located at The Dendarii Nexus, Bujold Overflow Site. These actually show scenes from the stories! Even though some of the characters don't really look quite right.
Hello! My Russian editors have invited me to introduce my work to you; as these are the very first of my novels to be translated here, some explanation might be in order.
I welcome you to what has come to be called the time-line of Miles Vorkosigan. You will meet Miles himself in the second novel of this volume, and see why he seems to have become the center of a whole universe.
One of the questions perpetually asked of me at science fiction conventions, and argued on computer-net discussions of my work, is in what order to read my series books -- of publication, or of internal chronology? There are now 11 novels set in Miles's universe, but I was conscious from the very beginning that this might present a problem. I myself dislike books that begin or end in the middle of the story, that are not complete, especially -- as is all too common -- when you can't obtain the other parts. So I took as a structural model for my series the Hornblower books of C.S. Forester, popular during my youth, a sequence of British sea stories set during the Napoleonic Wars. Forester began in the middle of his main character's life, and jumped all over the time-line in subsequent novels. But he designed each book to stand alone, complete in itself, while simultaneously fitting into the over-arching pattern of the character's biography: novels living inside a meta-novel. A pattern like this allows a series to grow organically, and even the author doesn't always know what's going to be next. Thus, I can always give you the best Vorkosigan tale I can think of, not merely the next tale I can think of.
Shards of Honor and The Warrior's Apprentice are the first two novels I ever wrote. Nevertheless, the proper direct sequel to Shards of Honor is actually the Hugo-award-winning Barrayar, written 6 years later -- they are literally two halves of one story -- and the proper sequel of The Warrior's Apprentice is the Hugo-award-winning The Vor Game, also written years later. I find myself in the peculiar position of winning major science fiction genre awards entirely with series sequels, which isn't supposed to happen. This year (1995) another sequel, Mirror Dance, which follows an earlier Miles tale titled Brothers in Arms, is a Hugo nominee yet again. I'm looking around for more literary rules to break. This is fun.
I've always tried to write the kind of book I most loved to read: character-centered adventure. My own literary favorites include, among many others, Dorothy Sayers, Arthur Conan Doyle, Alexander Dumas, and of course C.S. Forester. All of these writers created not works of art, but, on some level, works of life. Theirs are creations who climb up off the page into the readers' minds and live there long after the book is shut. Readers return to such books again and again, not to find out what happened -- for a single reading would suffice for any book if plot and idea were all -- but because those characters have become their friends, and there is no limit to the number of times you want to be with your friends again.
I have been, therefore, vastly pleased with the number of readers who have written to tell me that my stories have stood their friend in time of need: the mother of a handicapped child; a blind man who lives in rural Kentucky, and "reads" the books on audio tape; a woman who re-read them all over a weekend and went back to solve a problem at work that had seemed intractable; a soldier serving in a difficult post in the Middle East; a young woman who took them with her to re-read during the week of aftershocks of the California earthquake, when she was camping in her backyard, unable to return to her damaged house; a woman fighting depression and an array of medical problems, who felt well enough after a re-read to get up and continue coping with her life.
I admit, though, my all-time favorite fan letter was from a woman in Canada. She wrote to tell me she had been reading Shards of Honor, and, not wanting to put it down, took the book along to read while standing in line at the bank. She is not, she added, normally very scatter-brained or oblivious, but she does like to focus on what she reads. Eventually, she got to the teller to do the necessary banking. The teller said she could not give her change, as the robber had taken all her money.
"What robber?" my reader asked.
"The one who just held us up at gun-point," the teller explained. It turned out that while she had been engrossed in reading, a masked gunman had come in, robbed the bank, and made his escape, and she never noticed a thing.
My reader wrote me, "All I can say is, it must have been a very quiet robbery. The security guard at the door asked if I could describe the thief for the police. Embarrassed, I said no, I didn't think I could."
Enjoy.
© 1995-2002 by Lois McMaster Bujold
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Last updated: May 5th 2003