The Vorkosigan Companion (23 page)

Of course.

—
Marna Nightingale
May 2003 (September 2007)

This is what I know about Bujold fandom: not as much as I thought I did before I started to write about it, despite having been a listee—a member of the official Lois McMaster Bujold Discussion List,
²
hereafter "the List"—since 1999.

Admittedly, the List is not Bujold fandom. All the lists and fora that exist for people to meet to discuss Lois's work are not, among them, Bujold fandom. At most, they're places where Bujold fandom tends to occur. (Home, Aral Vorkosigan observes, is not a place. Home is people.) Nevertheless, it's nice to have a roof over your head, and Bujold fandom hangs out in some very nice places, of which the List, founded in 1994 by Michael Bernardi and graciously hosted by Melanie Dymond Harper, is the largest, the oldest, and arguably the oddest.

It complicates attempts at description that a mailing list, like a fandom, is a living thing, with a past and a future as well as a present, and virtual structures age and change very much like real structures do. Things break. Things get repaired. Walls fall down, or get moved around; you build an extension or two, you redo the wiring—the inhabitants adapt, more or less, to the new space. Meanwhile, things keep happening out in the larger world, and what happens in the larger world doesn't stay there. The boundaries get blurry. People meet, become friends, fall out, move in together, marry, give birth, die, leave.

The Bujold list isn't the place it was when I came to it; whether it's better or worse is not for me to say—it's different. It'll be different again by the time this article sees print. So "Bujold fandom," or even the List, isn't a thing that I can pin down and describe in a few thousand words, even if I were what I can never be, and don't want to be, an objective observer.

On the other hand, I promised Lillian I'd write an article about Bujold fandom. It has occasionally been suggested that I ought to learn to think before I speak. . . . 

So this will have to be an article about what Bujold fandom looks like to me, here and now,
³
as someone who has been an active, vocal, passionately engaged member of it for nearly a decade. (I feel as though I'd like to write an article dedicated to explaining why each and every one of you ought to come and join us, but the fact is that if you're reading this you're probably already a Bujold fan, and if you aren't you should
stop
reading this and go read
Cordelia's Honor
, because then you will be. No, seriously. We'll wait. Then come and find us on the list, or on Baen's Bar, or just poke about on Google until you find a group that appeals to you—Bujold fans are fairly easy to find, and generally friendly.)

So. Here and now, I am writing this article, which is I suppose a form of participating in Bujold fandom, and the way I got—and found out about—the job strikes me as as good a place as any to begin. Always begin at the end; it saves time.

I was on my way from London to Bath, through a flood, when my e-mail caught up with me. Lillian Stewart Carl needed someone to write an article about Bujold fandom for
The Vorkosigan Companion
, Lois thought I might be both suitable
⁴
and interested, she e-mailed fellow-listee James Bryant, because she knew I was on my way to his house, and he, knowing that I was checking e-mail off and on, forwarded the message to me.

I was on my way to his house in the first place because of Lois. Because one of the things about being a member of the List is that you can go to a place you've never been before and someone will pick you up at the bus terminal (airport, train station), feed you, house you, and throw a party, which between three and sixty of your closest friends will attend. You may have to ask most of them which friend they are, mind you, but you'll almost certainly have an excellent time. (If James Bryant is involved, you will not only have an excellent time, you are likely to be given curry. Incredibly good curry, prepared under all sorts of odd circumstances—he made curry for thirty or so in a hotel-room kitchenette, once—is a specialty of his.) So there I was, in a country I'd never been to before, going to the house of a listee, to meet up with other listees, most of whom I'd never met face-to-face before—which made them what listee Dorian Gray, who was there, calls "axe murderers." It was a splendid gathering of axe murderers, by the way.

Since 1999, this has been the sort of thing that happens to me on a fairly regular basis. Not the part where I get asked to write about Bujold fandom, the other part. The part with the parties and the really good food: for some reason, Bujold fandom seems to have an unusually high concentration of extremely good cooks.
⁵
Also the part involving being offered sofas by—or offering them to—people I've never actually seen in person before. (Which has been known to involve the part where I end up burbling on to Immigration Officials about why they need to read some Bujold, and giving them the mailing list URL. Note to international travelers: "We're fellow members of a literary discussion group" is just as true as and works
much
better than "I met him/her/them on the Internet." Axe murderers, again.)

I am assured that it's not just me: my girlfriend—whom I met on the Bujold list—called me a few years back, at midnight, to tell me that she was stranded in New York City, her train had been late, she'd missed her connection, she was short of cash, were there any listees nearby? She had a place to stay in fifteen minutes. This sort of thing happens on the List.

The funny bit was, the person I got hold of wasn't even an
active
listee. That happens all the time, too; we're not exactly the Mailing List California, but we don't necessarily consider a failure to post or remain subscribed, even should said failure last for several years, evidence that a person has actually, you know,
left
. I mean, it's not that we'll stalk you, but if you find yourself in hospital, or Iraq, or somewhere, there may be phone calls and cards and parcels of books and things from people you haven't talked to in years. . . . 

(The books! Talk about the books!)

Right, the books. It's all about The Books. Except when it isn't. Then it's about gender relations, kosher cooking, cats, weird links, and who's going to which cons or throwing the next party.
⁶
At which we will talk about the books. Probably.

It can be, or at least, it can seem—on checking the List over the last few days I find we are on topic about half the time; so perhaps it's just that we talk twice as much as normal people—harder than is at all sensible, on a list full of people who love the Vorkosigan books—and the Vorkosigans—as much as we do, to get a conversation going about the books. Just about any time, you can get a conversation going about why there's all this off-topicness, though. There are several theories, ranging from "it's all been said" to "it's too difficult, what with some people getting ARCs
⁷
and others having to wait for library copies," though "you people are the weirdest bunch of so-called fans I've ever seen" has its defenders as well.

There are offshoot lists for the discussion of Bujold from both the Lord Peter and the Dunnett lists (LordV and MostlyBujold, respectively), and it is rumored that there is much discussion of the Vorkosigan books to be found on those. This, and the fact that both lists were founded to deal with the tendency of Bujold threads to slip in among the Lord Peter and Lymond discussions, gives rise to yet another theory, which is "Bujold fans, as a class, will tend to talk about anything except what we are meant to talk about." (It occurs to me that we could have saved a certain amount of trouble on-list a few years back by making mention of U.S. politics in all posts mandatory.
⁸
)

Whatever the explanation is, it's not a lack of love for Lois's writing. We have, indeed, been known both individually and collectively to do some extremely mad things to get hold of Lois's works. (She sent a manuscript copy of
Diplomatic Immunity
to two listees on the occasion of their wedding, which was at least a year before publication date. To prevent a spate of impulsive marriage proposals I ought to note that a) we already tried that—that, not the original marriage, was the mad behavior to which I was referring—and b) that manuscript distribution is rare, entirely at Lois's whim, and not to be got by bribes, begging, or backflips, so this is unlikely to happen again; it was the first, and as far as I know so far the only, wedding to come about because of the list.)

Rather madder was what happened when "Winterfair
Gifts" was, for complex publisher-related reasons, released in Croatian a year before it came out in English. Quite a few of us bought it in Croatian. Then we translated it ourselves: rather, a Croatian listee (Vlatka Petrovic) translated it, Bo Johannson and Robert Parks edited it, I proofread it—on the bus from D.C. to New Orleans, as I recall—Robert typeset it, and everyone who had bought a Croatian copy got an English copy. I still have mine; it's a really good translation, actually. (And was responsible for at least one new convert to Lois's writing: a gentleman on the bus who started by reading over my shoulder and ended by snaffling pages from me as fast as I could get them done.) It all seemed a completely reasonable course of action at the time. . . . 

And then there's our crack team of ARC-spotters, who patrol eBay while sane people sleep, and the people who deal with the logistics involved in dividing five or so ARCs by one planet's worth of eager readers, not to mention the mailing costs . . . And yet, we do it. So I think we can definitely conclude that whatever fuels our inability to stay on-topic, it's not a lack of interest in the books.

I suspect that some of the explanation lies in the books themselves, and in the broad range of people and situations they speak to; it is possible to conclude, by careful reading of Lois's books (a practice I recommend with some fervor, every chance I get; if you are ever buttonholed in the SF aisle of a bookstore by a wild-eyed
⁹
Canadian who wants to press a copy of
Cordelia's Honor
or
The Curse of Chalion
into your hand, it's probably me), that either everything is on-topic, or nothing is. Lois once described her fans as "a flatteringly bright bunch," and I'd add to that that we tend to be an engaged bunch: not only do we collectively know a lot of stuff, we tend to care. A lot. And can explain why, sometimes at truly incredible length.

So, things can get heated, on-topic and off-, from time to time and as occasion serves—that Lois's books speak to such a wide range of people, and say such wildly different things to each reader, is, I think, a sign of her quality as a writer. It also makes for some—interesting—conversations among Bujold fans. Perennial on-topic favorites include "Beta Colony: Socialist Utopia, Stalinist Dystopia, or Kind of Scary but Better Than Barrayar?," "Ivan Vorpatril: How Can You Help Loving That Man? (Give Several Examples of How, Please)," "Uterine Replicators: Best Tech Ever or Unnatural, Wrong, and Just Plain Way Too Risky?," and "He Was Bisexual, Now He's Monogamous: How Aral Vorkosigan's Love Life Changed a Planet (Several Times)." Despite the fact that it seems unlikely at this time that any of Lois's books will be filmed, there is also the ever-popular (or much-feared) Casting Thread.

In the midst of it all there's Lois. Not "in the middle," exactly; Lois is, by some alchemy, the exact trick of which escapes me, as much a listee as any of us, without being self-effacing or falsely humble. I mean, she has this day
¹⁰
job which has been known to come up on-list and which frequently requires her to lurk until she's finished a book, but it doesn't stop her being Lois, or from chatting about subtle points in the books, unsubtle misbehaviors practiced by her cats, what else she's reading, or current events—or, indeed, from posting truly brain-breakingly strange links on occasion. If her presence has an effect on the   operation of her fandom, if Bujold fandom is because of her in any way different from other fandoms, and I think it is, it's subtle; it is, perhaps, a little difficult to deliberately behave more badly than you absolutely have to in front of the woman who invented Cordelia Vorkosigan—and Alys Vorpatril.

Or, just possibly, it is a bit easier for a Bujold fan to be a little better, a little more open to points of view they once considered completely deranged, than they thought they were—because of the woman who invented Mark Vorkosigan and Konstantin Bothari, whether she is around or not.

(Talking of Mark, shortly after
Mirror Dance
came out I had occasion to point Lois out at a convention to a new, young, male fan of hers. "She wrote
Mirror Dance
?" he said, in tones of deep shock. "She looks like somebody's mother!"

"Well, she is," I said rather dryly, and managed to wait until he was out of sight to laugh. It was several years before I dared tell Lois this story; as I recall she laughed quite a lot, herself.)

The list refers to new Bujold readers as "converts"; it's a running joke, funnier than it ought to be because of Lois's stunning improbability as a cult leader. On consideration, like most good jokes, it hides a grain of truth. To read Bujold—to read her with the kind of passion and fascination her works seem to inspire—is to see the world a little differently, forever after. She'll tell you that her characters' approaches to the difficulties of ordinary—or extraordinary—life are a case of "professional driver; closed course," and not necessarily to be attempted if you don't have the author on your side, and it's good advice.

The Vorkosigan series is fiction for a reason, and suborning, scamming, intimidating, and beheading people who get in your way should not be expected to produce excellent results when attempted as real-life forms of conflict resolution. Nevertheless, Lois has a great deal to say about how, and why, to be human, and while you're enjoying the twisty plots and the cracking dialogue and the entrancing characters, some of it will tend to slide under your skin. Lois and her characters get into your conversation, then into your mind, and eventually into your human, imperfect heart, and as any reader of the books knows, where her characters go, things tend to change, and, usually, to get better.