The Vorkosigan Companion (10 page)

LSC: For most of your career, "the work" meant the Vorkosigan novels. And yet recently you've moved on. Or at least away.

LMB: One of the reasons I had for leaving the Vorkosigan universe for the Chalion books—or at least leaving Miles, who is rather agnostic when he isn't in a foxhole—was that I wanted to do a fairly serious exploration of grown-up religion in a fantasy context. Miles's universe doubtless includes all the beliefs of ours plus a lot of new ones invented since. People are like that. Nonetheless, when I wanted to explore religious themes more directly, I needed a new universe and new characters.

I have been bemused by a certain kind of fantasy that treats religion and magic in a mechanical fashion—"Throw another virgin on the altar, boys, the power level in the thaumaturgistat is getting low!" People running about shooting lightning bolts from their fingers as though they were mystical Uzis, that sort of thing.

A lot of the ways genre fantasy treats religion seemed to me to be both superficial and unsympathetic. I wanted to look at both the positive ways religions function as social institutions, ways for people to organize themselves to get the everyday work of a civilized society done, and at serious mysticism. The real questions real religions grapple with don't have easy answers. A well-built fantasy world's religion ought, I thought, to reflect that complex reality.

The more recent
Sharing Knife
books, on which I've spent the past three years at this writing, have more to do with exploring genre-blending and series structures, being my first really long, closely connected, epic-sized tale—a tetralogy, it seems. They are also about bringing it all home, on more than one level.

LSC: Have you found any difficulties in switching genres?

LMB: A lot of my role models for writing were ambidextrous between fantasy and SF—Poul Anderson, C. J. Cherryh, L. Sprague de Camp, Roger Zelazny, the list goes on and on. I've always considered it normal to write both. The actual mechanics of putting a narrative together—scene selection, characterization, pacing, viewpoint, transitions, plotting, and so on—are the same for both. The two genres have slightly different lists of things to which they pay close attention. Fantasy tends, on the whole, to be more language and style conscious, and reaches, at its most intense, for some sort of experience of the numinous. SF rewards the exploration of ideas, and reaches for a kind of intellectual oh-wow oh-cool moment when the reader's understanding of the world seems to increase, and which may be the SFnal equivalent of the numinous.

Editor Teresa Nielsen Hayden had this little dissertation about writers as otters. You can't train an otter, she says, because when you reward it, instead of saying "Let's do that again!" it says "Oh, let's do something else that's even cooler!" This is the writer's approach. They want to surprise you, and if too many people have the same idea it begins to seem not so surprising anymore. "It does not appeal to my Inner Otter!" Drives editors nuts, because they're trying to train their writers. They want something within the range of marketability.

LSC: You have to go through the editors, the publishers, and the marketers to reach the reader. But then, you've done so.

LMB: 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, Alexandre 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 lived in rural Kentucky, and "read" the books on audio tape; a woman who reread 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 reread 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 reread to get up and continue coping with her life.

One reader wrote to let me know that my books had informed his thinking, when he grappled with the task of composing a statement for his national church council on what its position was to be viz cloning and other looming biotechnologies.

And then the writer gets one of those letters, as I suspect most writers do—paraphrased from memory—"Dear Ms. Bujold, I want to thank you for the very great joy your work gave my husband during the last six months of his life . . ."

Joy to the dying? Where does that fall on any intellectual grid of "literary merit"?

And then you realize that we're all dying, here. And so.

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 scatterbrained 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 gunpoint," 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."

LSC: This story was told to me at a mystery convention—I was pleased to discover that it wasn't the equivalent of an urban legend, but quite true. Talk about escaping into a book!

LMB: Years ago I read an interview with a forensic pathologist who said he had never gone into a bad crime scene, where he had to clean the blood off the walls and whatnot, in any place where there were a lot of books. It occurs to me that because books give us escape even though we may be physically trapped wherever we are, they give us a "time out" space. People who don't have this have to stay in the pressure cooker as the pressure goes higher and higher, until they finally explode into violence expressed either externally or internally in stress illnesses. Books give readers a place to go. This is good for your health and potentially good for the health of the people around you as well. In that sense, I think reading can be a form of self-medication.

Both historical fantasy and futuristic science fiction have the appeal of being very far away from here, that escapist element. Of course the more you read about history, the less you want to go live there, but it still has that romanticism—not in the sense of sexual romance but in the sense of exotic places. "Escapist" is one of those terms that get used with a sneer, but I'm getting to be more and more of the opinion that it has a value in its own right that isn't being properly appreciated.

That said, if there is any meaning at all in any work of fiction that can be transposed back to real daily life, it lies in the characters' lives and moral dilemmas. "All great deeds have been accomplished out of imperfection," as one of my characters remarks. The human condition is a mess and always has been, and visions of perfecting it are a snare and a delusion, but we can all grab for great moments—for one floating instant, to do better than we think we can. Heroes are just people who are lucky or determined enough to match the moment—and at least once, to get it right when it matters.

LSC: So now, after this long strange (and one hopes, ongoing) journey, that's what it's all about?

LMB: If writers have a duty, it is to think as clearly as we can; to reexamine all our assumptions repeatedly on both micro and macro scales. Happily, this also will yield us better fiction. A novel is a slice out of the writer's worldview. The slice in turn, if it is coherent, generates as an emergent property a comment on living as human beings, which is the book's theme. We experience theme, even if we cannot articulate it openly, as an exhilarating sense of meaning to the book. The book has succeeded in creating meaning inside the head of another person. And in my worldview, that's what art is for.

LSC: Thank you. For every word.

You may imagine that a bunch of writers discuss High Art when they get together, but I'm sorry to say they more usually bitch about the publishing business. (The less obvious reason for this is that no writer can talk about his/her own work in front of another writer with the emotional intensity they really feel; it just doesn't work, socially.)

The business as it is presently constituted consists of three parts: publisher, distribution system, and bookstores, followed at a remove by readers. A publisher's actual main customers are therefore not the readers, but the book chains and the big distributors who in turn supply small bookstores and libraries. Present conditions have the publishers trying to push ten gallons of books into a five-gallon pipeline (the distribution system) into a three-gallon bucket (the bookstores). Something has to give, and it does.

One way to get More Stuff through is to speed it up, which is why books whip on and off the shelves with such velocity (category romance novels are given, count 'em, thirty
days
on the market before being replaced by the next batch). What this means is, the speed of book turnover has grown to be faster than the speed of word of mouth, a slowish process formerly vital to a new book or author. All but the very first readers to buy a book thus have no way to send economic feedback messages back through the system saying, "More, please." The late reader's vote is not counted; the reader who borrows instead of buying casts no vote at all.

The selling of any book traditionally falls into two periods. The first phase takes place months before the book is published, out of sight of any reader, when the publishers send their sales people out to take orders from their real customers, the aforementioned middlemen. I was bewildered when I first heard of a large ad budget being spent on a book when I never saw sign of an ad in any newspaper or even bookstore. Turns out that money was being spent advertising to distributors of various ilks. Publishers have turned, in something like despair, to attempts to
buy
room for their books in that narrow pipeline; hence such things as paid placement at the front of a bookstore, front page treatment in book chain newsletters, various complex incentives for high volume, etc. (I won't even get into the horrors of the book returns system.) The sales force works like mad to pitch the
packaging
of their books to a harried crew of buyers who, given the volume of books to pass through their hands, cannot possibly read the actual texts.

Only after those orders are collected is the size of the print run chosen. So to a great degree, the level of success any book can obtain is set before anyone reads it. If orders are low, the book will never have a chance to find readers through store placement, or ever get near any best-seller list. It's like a glass ceiling; breaking through it seems almost impossible. If a book—or rather, its packaging and the sales numbers of previous books by that author—fails to pass muster at the stuffing-in end of the pipeline, no reader (or very few) will ever learn of its existence in order to ask for it. Reader input is limited to an expensive and wasteful negative—readers can (and do) reject books they do see, but they have no way of asking for books they don't see.

Such was the hair-tearing state of the business up to the middle of the Nineties. Then along came the Internet. And publishers' Websites such as Baen's Bar. And Amazon.com, with shelves that never get too full to hold More Stuff. And, most critically—word of mouth got hyperdrive through chat groups and e-mail. Word of mouth got faster, even, than the system's book-removal rhythm.

And suddenly, publishers had an economical way of getting the word out to the excluded people in this process, the actual book readers, of their books' existences—totally jumping over the unfortunate book-blocking nature of the distribution system. Instead of trying to push books through the pipeline, this intelligence network potentially allowed a thousand or ten thousand actual readers to line up on the other end and
pull
the books through—the books they wanted, not the ones some desperately overworked distribution exec imagined would sell. It was briefly very exciting and hopeful—until the Internet filled up. Still, those new lines of communication are solidly established now.

It is at this point still unclear to me what the Internet will do in the long run to publishing. It's certainly a boom time for readers: more books are simultaneously available in more formats, more readily accessible, than ever before in history. MP3 downloading of audiobooks over the Internet is a new market that looks very promising. So far, e-books seem to be falling into a supplemental niche just like audio books. Tree books are mortgage money; e-books are (still) pizza money, although as the generation comes up for whom reading off a screen is the default norm, and as reading devices improve, I expect to see more e-books sold, or at least downloaded. But I'm not sure how much this will help the economics of individual living writers, as given the infinite shelf space in such e-book stores as www.fictionwise.com (who are adding upward of a couple of
hundred
new titles a
week
), writers finds their books competing for reader attention not just with one season's releases, but with a century's worth of offerings. The glut has been shifted from the publishers' laps to those of the readers. Time in which to read is still only issued 24/7, a hard limit. You do the math.