The Vorkosigan Companion (9 page)

LSC: And you're a good writer. At least you've won lots of awards—which doesn't, however, mean the same thing.

LMB: Reading is an active and elusive experience. Every reader, reading exactly the same text, will have a slightly different reading experience depending on what s/he projects into the words s/he sees, what strings of meaning and association those words call up in his/her (always) private mind. One can never, therefore, talk about the quality of a book separately from the quality of the mind that is creating it by reading it, in the only place books live, in the secret mind. The real reason discussions of the quality of literature get emotionally hot very rapidly is that they inescapably entail a covert judgment being passed on the private and invisible mind of another human being. You can get into trouble by mistaking
your
reading experience for
the
reading experience, as though anyone who ran their eyes over the same words brought the same mind to it.

I'm not one of those control-freak writers who feel that everybody has to read the book precisely as I intended. I know perfectly well they're going to take this text and turn it into something in their heads that is at most fifty percent my contribution. When I do get feedback, it's kind of interesting to see the different things they'll do with it. They startle me sometimes.

Broadly, there seem to be to be two kinds of great books, and a lot of linguistic confusion engendered because people keep trying to conflate the two categories: books which are great because they are greatly loved, by many readers over time or perhaps only by a few, but no less passionately for that; and books that are historically important because they change the way other books are written. Not infrequently, a book may be both (
Don Quixote
, anyone?), but students of literature tend to concentrate on the second sort, and I think they are right to do so.

In general, it takes a deal of time to see if a book or writer will have the latter sort of impact. And sometimes books that pass the test with flying colors, such as the works of Arthur Conan Doyle or Georgette Heyer, still get excluded from consideration, but in that case one suspects that the excluders are merely, shall we say politely, inadequately informed, and may be disregarded.

Therefore, due to the inherently subjective nature of reading, awards are not won by the writer, as in a race—they are given, as gifts, by other people to the writer. To attempt to control something one cannot, in fact, ever control—the actions of   others—is a short route to madness. Writers can control what they write. Full stop. Everything that happens after is some class of unintended consequence or chaotic emergent property.

That said, the validation of winning awards is enormously gratifying. Winning one's first major award does a lot to make a new writer more visible (wasted if one does not then produce a follow-up book in short order), and winning the second helps prove that the first wasn't a fluke. After that it becomes a matter of diminishing returns, in terms of the practical consequences or, as it were, economic utility of the things. These are not as magnificent as the average fan imagines; an award is good for generating a few thousand more domestic paperback sales and for garnering foreign sales if one isn't getting such already; but the foreign SF markets are tiny. (Which they make up partly in numbers, if you can collect the whole set.) Over time, awards help but do not guarantee works to stay in print or get reprinted.

I discovered when I won my first Nebula back in the late Eighties that while I might put blank pages under that classy paperweight at night, there would be no words magically appearing on them in the morning. Writing the next book is the same slog, only now with heightened expectations. "Each one better than all the others" seems to be the demand.

LSC: Was there any one award which meant more to you than any other?

LMB: Probably the most important was the first, the Nebula for
Falling Free
, which made folks sit up and take notice. I was very pleased when
Barrayar
won its Hugo, because I didn't think it could win back-to-back with
The Vor Game
like that, and it was the book closer to my heart. The Hugo for
Paladin of Souls
was great, first, because I am hugely fond of its heroine Ista, and second because it finally stopped people driving me crazy by saying brightly, "Just one more and you'll match Heinlein!" It's not a race, drat it.

I have no idea why some of my books draw awards and other don't, except that the ones I spent the least time worrying about other people's response to—that I wrote for myself—seem to do the best of all.

LSC: Why are some books closer to your heart?

LMB: Whenever a writer who has produced more than one volume is asked to name their favorite, it is almost the routine to respond with some mumble about choosing among your books being like choosing among one's children, each has its strengths and weaknesses, you really can't say. This is actually a lie. Not all books are created equal, and for the special ones, you begin to know it sometimes even before the work is finished, but always by the time you slam that last line home and shriek, "Done! Done!," and fall head-down across your keyboard like the runner from Marathon.

Some books reach higher, dig deeper, take more terrifying chances. And you know it, when you've done it; you can't do something like that and not know it. You then spend the next two years sweating through the publication process, those first reviews, the first sales figures, waiting and hoping that you haven't deluded yourself—because you most certainly can delude   yourself—waiting for that validation and biting your tongue against any words you might be compelled to eat later.

LSC: Speaking of validation, on the "photos" section of the Dendarii site, you are captured with your amazing necklace of award tie tacks. You mention looking at them in the box and thinking "thirteen tie tacks and no neckties. Deconstruct the subtext of this one, grrls."

LMB: Mike Resnick has a wonderful sort of "South American Colonel" look when valiantly wearing all his rocket pins at Worldcons, but that's just not in my style. I tried sticking them all on my name badge, which worked for a while, but I was running out of room. So I took my box of award nomination pins to Elise Matthesen, a Twin Cities crafter of art jewelry and a good reader, who understands both her art and my audience, with some vague notion of a charm bracelet or necklace. But she had much better ideas.

The goofy glory of the final necklace design is all Elise's doing, partly driven by technical considerations such as not attempting to cut up the pin backs, risking breakage. I'd like to think I do the same thing to genre tropes in my writing, but that's not for me to judge.

LSC: It's for your fans to judge. Is there a difference between your fans, that is, the people who enjoy your work, and Fans with a capital F?

LMB: Not really; fandom fans are a subset of the broader reader  ship, in my experience. I first found fandom, or it found me, in the fall of 1967, just after I'd graduated from high school and was working in the book department of a downtown department store. I met a fellow from the local SF fan club, who invited me to a meeting. (The guys vastly outnumbered the girls, back then.)

I went to a few local conventions, and attended two   Worldcons—my first was BayCon in '60-hum-something, '68 or '69. So when I returned to the convention scene in the mid-Eighties as a wanna-be pro, it was a fairly socially comfortable milieu for me. I understand some writers who first encounter fandom after they are published are a little baffled how to go on there, as it doesn't really fit expected commercial, literary, or academic models of writer-reader relationships, though it partakes of all of them. But most writers seem to learn pretty quickly. Note, fandom is not a unified body so much as an alliance of varied special interests; you have to locate your own kindred spirits in the array.

I have the fondest memories of sitting around the hotel bar in St. Petersburg, Russia, when I went to an SF conference there, discussing our mutual favorite old SF novelists with the full-blooded Tartar computer programmer from Kazakhstan. This stuff gets around.

LSC: Which brings us to the subject of fan fiction, and through that, to the Internet.

LMB: What the Internet has done to fan fiction has been fascina  ting. Fan fiction has completely exploded. What has stunned me and blown all my prior theories of fan fiction out of the water was the number and variety of things that have fanfic written about them. I would never in my wildest dreams have expected there to be fifty fan fictions based on
1984
on one site, and even
Flatland
had some. Say what? Pat Wrede has a theory that the Arthurian Cycle was actually medieval fan fiction, and the more she points out parallels the more you realize she's right! People took their favorite characters and wrote expanded stories about them. They didn't have the Internet, but they did their best.

The Internet has made the idea of fan fiction accessible to a whole bunch of people who have never heard of fandom, run across the mimeographed magazines, or otherwise discovered the genre. So you had things like 35,000
Lord of the Rings
stories, and over 125,000
Harry Potter
stories on that same site where I found the ones based on
1984
. (More by now, no doubt.) Many of them are dire, but even the bad ones have this weird fascination at first. And once in a great while, there's a brilliant one that could only be fanfic, as part of its brilliance comes from a sort of embedded commentary on the original text.

During the year leading up to and away from my mother's death—she passed away in 2003 at the age of 91—I discovered and read a huge amount of on-line fanfic (not on my work, I should add). Besides the sheer novelty and fascination of seeing what a form I'd first discovered thirty-five years ago was now mutating into, it was about the only thing I could stand to read—it felt like fiction for which I was in no way responsible, I suppose, at a time when my real-life responsibilities had no possible happy outcome, but still had to be met and endured. Anyway, reading in slices down and across fandoms, with all the other variables held constant, I could actually see the way each reader-writer's head was processing the primary text differently, according to their measure. And having watched the process of how different psychological concerns hijack the texts in the petri dishes of fanfic has also altered my awareness of how the exact same processes work, better disguised, in profic.

LSC: What do you think of fan fiction based on your own work?

LMB: I find it very flattering, like fan mail but in different media. It tells me my work touched someone on a very deep level, for it to evoke that kind of energy in return. It's art in response to art: some folks sew costumes, some write or sing songs, some draw or paint pictures. Some write fanfic.

For a while there was a theory that if you did not defend your copyright from these things you would lose it, but I think reality has changed so much that theory is never coming back. You can't stuff the genie back in the bottle. That's a relief, because I understand what kind of game those people are playing. Writers who don't like fanfic may not understand the psychology of reading for pleasure, or may fear their own work could be distorted in readers' heads by the adulteration, which is I think true but inescapable; all original texts are altered in the first place by the mere act of different minds reading them. I think there's more power to be had by figuring out the flow and going with it. It's a huge, fascinating new phenomenon and I think it's going to go some interesting places. Nevertheless, I daren't read fic on my own work, because I get idea and style leaks—I pick up voice like lint—and I'm afraid of losing track of where an idea might have come from.

LSC: What has the Internet done for you personally?

LMB: It has given me a window on the world, and is in process of eating my life, or at any rate, most of the waking time in it. I'm only just beginning to learn to use its resources. Usenet chat groups have been a laboratory of human behavior and blogs are a kind of networking out, tentacles reaching into all corners of society, so people who have otherwise been completely isolated are finding each other. My fan e-mail has been fabulous, but makes up for being easier to answer than snail mail by being more copious. I love being in easy e-mail touch with my agent, my editors, my friends and my children.

The main thing the Internet has done for my writing, I'm afraid, is slow it down. And it's severely cut into my reading time, unless you count reading off the screen.

LSC: Conversely, what have you done for the Internet?

LMB: I have a Website, The Bujold Nexus at www.dendarii.com, entirely fan run, which has proved to be a wonderful resource for all my PR needs. It came as manna from e-heaven. I was guest writer at a science fiction convention in London in 1995 and a British fan named Michael Bernardi came up to me and asked, "Do you have a Website?" to which I replied, "What's a Website?" At the time I didn't even have a modem. So computer-professional Mike, bless him, put one together for me, and has filled it with wonderful things and all sorts of useful links. So now when reporters or anyone else wants to know, "Who is this Lois/Louis/Louise . . . um, how do you pronounce that last name?" without having to read a pile o' books, I can just direct them to The Bujold Nexus.

LSC: And there's the on-line publishing of your most recent novels' first chapters at the Baen Website.

LMB: I adore the advent of on-line sample chapters, not least because they allow my books to sell on the basis of their words instead of their packaging. "The first sample is free. . . ." It allows people to browse on-line and make an informed buying choice. Every bit of increased exposure helps. People can't choose what they don't know about.

There are the e-books available from Fictionwise, too. As a new market, e-sales don't have to beat their way through the system of middlemen to get shelf space, and they're available to fans all over the world. That's cool. Most fascinating to me have been the recent sales of my audiobooks as MP3s over the Net—ninety percent or more of my current Blackstone audiobook sales are as downloads through its partner Audible.com.