The Vorkosigan Companion (8 page)

LSC: After all these years, does it come any easier?

LMB: Well, I'm more skilled at the mechanics of everything. I'm not intimidated or bewildered by the business anymore. There are things I haven't tried yet, so I haven't developed the chops. I've never written anything in omniscient viewpoint. I've never written anything in first person, so those are challenges yet to be met. A whole novel is this very complex pattern which would really have been too vast for my feeble logical mind to have figured out in advance, but something in my back-brain assembles it. I've learned to trust this aspect of myself as a writer.

This doesn't mean I don't whine about my book in progress. In fact, I whine my way from beginning to end. First I whine that I can't get any good ideas, then after an initial rush I whine my way through the whole middle, which can run from Chapter 2 to Chapter 22 of a twenty-three-chapter book. And then my whining rises to a crescendo during revisions, which I hate above all other parts of the process. And when it's all over, I dither about how people will like it. The outside observer mustn't mistake normal creative whining for dislike of the work. To test this, see what happens if you try to take the book away from its author while she's whining about it. Trying to take a baby bear from its mama would be much less dangerous.

LSC: The shelves in your home are lined by copies of your books translated into—how many languages is it now?

LMB: Let's see if I can come up with the whole list: Spanish, French, German, Dutch, Italian, Greek, Croatian, Serbian, Czech, Bulgarian, Hungarian, Polish, Russian, Lithuanian, Hebrew, Japanese, Korean, Finnish, Chinese traditional-characters, Chinese simplified-characters, and I'm still missing a couple somewhere. British is a foreign sale but not—quite—a foreign language.

Some of these are very tiny markets, mind. Our old fanzine had a bigger print run than some of them.

LSC: Have you any explanation for your universal appeal?

LMB: Miles does seem to survive translation well, much as he survives everything else thrown at him. A lot of other SF authors are also translated into other languages, though, so I'm just a part of the picture. I have noted with bemusement that some countries and cultures seem to be "science-fiction-friendly," and others less so. The most avid overseas markets for SF and fantasy at present seem to be Japan and Russia, then Australia and New Zealand, Europe and Eastern Europe, and a very little in South America. There does not appear to be as much SF activity in the rest of Southeast Asia (although I once received e-mail from a fan from Vietnam, he read in the original English), India, Africa apart from South Africa, or the Islamic countries, but that may be changing.

Part of the problem, I think, is that SF has been so America-  centic and Britain-centric (with a nod to Jules Verne, here). If people look at a type of literature and don't see anyone like themselves represented in it, they tend to put it back on the shelf, thinking it isn't addressed to them. This has posed a problem for SF in our own country in the past with respect to women readers and black readers, whose selves and concerns seemed excluded from earlier works in the genre. In all the places where SF is popular, the cultures and countries in question seem to have taken up the genre and made it theirs, with the local writers assimilating the foreign model, but then taking off with it in their own directions with their own voices.

LSC: Your work has been packaged as military SF. I don't recall this ever being your intention, though.

LMB: At the time I wrote my first books, I don't think the sub-genre had split out yet; I certainly was not aware of it as a thing separate from adventure tales in general. Properly speaking, milSF as a label should be applied to works whose central concern is an exploration of the military in action, doing its job (well or badly, depending). My Miles-centric books, really, are explorations of the psychology of a fellow from a deeply conservative culture who starts out as an army-mad youngster, and grows out of it (well, partially), and along the way encounters other people who occasionally have to deal with the military as a human cultural artifact in the course of a larger story. The military adventures are sometimes occasions for my tales, but they are seldom the point of my tales, which are more usually about what's going on inside people's heads, and in their wider lives. "What are these people thinking?," again.

LSC: The Vorkosigan series covers a lot of genres, and was doing so before genre-blending became marketable.

LMB: I don't stick to one mode, which confuses people who think series books should be cut to standard shapes like cookies. Genre conventions—which I see as another term for reader expectations—are fun. There're so many things you can do with them—twist them, invert or subvert them, bounce things off them, ignore them, or even play them straight. Like the form of a sonnet, genre forms don't really constrain content, emotion, or meaning—you can write a sonnet about anything from love and death to HO-gauge model railroading, although I'm not sure anyone has done the latter, yet. Surprise, for example, is a literary effect that almost depends on the readers having expectations shaped by prior reads.

My personal definition of a genre is, "Any group of works in close conversation with each other." As readers, we tend to encounter only the polished result of that uproar, as the book alone appears in our hand and the context drops away. Classics are particularly at risk of seeming to have been hung in air, having escaped the death of their original surround. But the reading context matters, since the ground changes the figure.

I've long imagined the sort of SF critics who claim "We want to see writers stretch the boundaries of the genre!" taking one look at my work and crying, "No, but not like that!" (I suspect they really want to see SF link upward to genres of higher status, like mainstream, and not, say, sideways to mystery, or worse, downward to romance.) Within the Vorkosigan series, I've played with romance, coming-of-age, mystery, military fiction, Golden Age engineering, thriller, and satire, for starters—SF is a very malleable genre, rather like whichever blood type is the universal receiver (AB, if I remember correctly), able to accept transfusions from all sources. How many genres can I fit in one series? Well, let's see . . . 

LSC: Ah yes, romance. Girl stuff. When we were kids we'd knit little sweaters for our Barbie dolls and also build spaceships for them to pilot. I don't think many little boys knitted sweaters for their G.I. Joe action figures.

LMB: Poor deprived tykes, missing out on all that small muscle development and pattern-recognition practice. . . . I have noticed, over time, the allergy of many SF readers—male and female, mark you well—to romance; not just lack of interest, an "I don't care for that" response, the way I feel about horror as a genre, but genuine, almost hysterical hostility, which I shorthand as, "Girl germs! Girl germs! Run away!" In my view, nobody gets that heated up over a mere book. They get that heated up because, on some level, their identity or status seems threatened. Why should a reading choice do that?

And then there's the parallel reaction to SF by many romance and mainstream readers. "Ick!" would probably be the politest shorthand. Whatever underlying identity thing is going on, it runs both ways. Why do these women (and men) reject (in an almost medical-organ-transplant sense) SF?

Status-based arguments about ejecting the abject would seem to fall down, here—except that these women don't see SF readers and writers as having status. They see us as geeky dweebs stuck in permanent adolescence. At a book fair once, I talked to one such woman about this perception thing—to her, it was as though SF were some sort of disease vector for social dweebishness, and if you read that stuff, you'd turn into one of them, spontaneously sprouting rubber Spock ears and Nintendo thumbs through some sort of Lamarckian devolution. This is a war with two sides. And SF doesn't actually have any manifest destiny to win it. Indeed, in many—most—cases, in an SF story, the woman's traditional agenda is either totally ignored, or clearly loses, which may be something else that's putting off all those women readers.

LSC: So why is there a literary gender/genre war? What does this systematic put-down of the romance genre really mean?

LMB: You'd think males would line up to applaud a genre that works so hard to interest women in men—after all, wouldn't the relentless celebration of heterosexual relationships seem to increase their chances of getting laid? And yet, it is not so. . . . 

In my view, the key to the romance/women's fiction genre is, the woman's agenda wins. Her situation, her personal responsibilities, her life, her needs, and above all her emotions, are made central to the reader's attention. (And if there is anything in the world more thoroughly diminutized and dismissed than women's emotions, I can't think of it right now.) In the end, she gets what she wants, or needs—a committed guy who will stick around to help raise children. In short, in the course of the plot the hero, however much a rake he is initially presented, is transformed into a guy who will do the chores, personally or by the proxy of servants. No wonder adolescent males—and some females, too—of all ages run screaming. . . . 

To heck with sex, women, squishy stuff, and liquidity. The real phobia at the bottom of all this gender/genre allergy is to chores, I'm absolutely convinced.

LSC: It's another status thing. Whoever cleans up is the abject. Your mother used to collect your
Analog
from the mailbox and hide it until you'd cleaned your room.

LMB: This whole dialectic presents particular problems for women, and especially for women SF writers. Women in our culture are given the duty and responsibility (though not the power, of course) of "molding" our kids; we're drafted willy-nilly into the Cultural Gestapo, and woe betide us if our kids "don't turn out right." How can we become mothers, yet not become
our
mothers? We are SF writers in the first place only because, like our brothers, we resisted being assigned many of the chores of womanhood, handed out from our culture via, usually, our moms. Instead we went off and read disapproved books. And then, by damn, we even started writing them. (I can still hear my mother's voice, echoing from my own adolescence—"If you don't stop reading those silly science fiction books and get out of bed, you'll never get anywhere!" Now I sit in bed writing silly science fiction books, and my career has given me the world. Ha!) So, which side shall I be on? Must I choose, and lose half my possibilities thereby whichever choice I make?

LSC: But since you write "guy stuff," too, you're respected. By the earnest young (male) fan, for example, who told you that you "write like a man."

LMB: To which I should have replied (but didn't, because I don't think fast on my feet—that's why I'm a writer, the pencil waits) "Oh, really? Which one?"

I'm still trying to work out whether or not it came to a compliment. In all, since I write most of my adventure books from deep inside the point of view of a male character, Miles Vorkosigan, I've decided it's all right; if I'm mimicking a male worldview well enough that even the opposition can't tell for sure, I'm accomplishing my heart's goal of writing true character. The comment worried me for a long time, though. A trip through the essays of Ursula Le Guin also shook my self-confidence. Was I doing something wrong? But then I wrote
Barrayar
, returning at last to the full range of a female character's point of view, and I haven't been troubled by such comments since.

LSC: What does it mean to "write like a woman"?

LMB: Not one damned identifiable thing, as far as I can tell. As any competent statistician can testify, from a general statement about any group of people (such as a gender), nothing reliable can be predicted about the next individual to walk through the door.

I once ran a selection of my work through a supposed "  gender-identifier" algorithm-machine found on the Net. All of the scenes written from the point of view of female characters came out as "written by a woman." All the scenes written from the point of view of male characters came out as "written by a man." I concluded that I wrote like a writer.

I see plenty enough female SF writers not to feel unusual. When I start naming them, it adds up pretty quickly—Willis, Cherryh, Asaro, Moon, McCaffrey, Turzillo, Czerneda, Zettel, Kagan, Kress, Le Guin for heaven's sakes, and dozens more. I don't know why journalists and critics and commentators keep mentally erasing us; perhaps we mess up their pretty theory. I'm less sure about foreign markets, but in the American midlist, SF seems a pretty level playing field between men and women writers. There are lots of women editors in the genre, as well.

But even in fantasy, the very top best-sellers do seem to be disproportionately male. I've heard it theorized that it's because more women will buy and read books by male writers with male protagonists, but fewer men will buy and read books by women writers with female protagonists. Women writers with male protagonists seem to get a partial free pass.

I get to meet my own fan-base at conventions and book signings and on-line. They seem to be pretty evenly divided between men and women, and with ages ranging all over the map, from eleven to eighty and sometimes up, with a diverse array of views on practically everything. A lot of folks report reading my books in families, passing them between siblings and generations both. They're a flatteringly bright bunch, on the whole. This seems to suggest my books don't exclude readers by gender.

LSC: This same question crops up among mystery readers—can a woman write believably from a man's viewpoint? The reverse seems to be less of an issue.

LMB: Ditto for romance. The reverse is often an issue in SF, though. I think the real answer is, "Some writers can, some can't." Men and women aren't that different from each other, in most areas of life. I think the proper question is, how on earth do writers avoid insight into the opposite gender? Guys are all around us, all the time. We live with them—I had a father, grandfathers, brothers, a husband, a son, male colleagues, bosses, fellow students—we read books written by and about them . . . Nowadays, we read on-line posts by them, in perhaps more startling variety than one's immediate family might offer, or so I would hope. Swapped around, the same is true for male observers. I think some people must screen out this data, as if knowing, or at least, admitting to knowing, was somehow a violation of their own gender identity. I was on a convention panel once with a male writer who was complaining—actually, covertly bragging—that he couldn't write female characters very well, the not-so-hidden subtext being that he was so ineluctably masculine, the terrible effort at getting his mind around this alien female viewpoint was just beyond him. (As though it were a subject impossible to research!) I didn't think he was ineluctably masculine. I just thought he was a lazy writer.