The Vorkosigan Companion by Lillian Stewart Carl, John Helfers Read Free Book Online

out the lights, and go to bed.
    But for the majority of ordinary people not in books who find themselves doing evil things, it's because they've fallen into a situation that they don't understand, didn't predict, didn't anticipate. Sometimes they get drawn into evil just because they don't realize that they can say "No!" Or the cost of saying "no" means that they will be shot. That sort of situation is especially ambiguous and difficult. There are hundreds of ways people can be psychologically manipulated into acts they would never have thought they could or would do, both good and bad—it happens all the time, in wars, in political or economic crises, in domestic violence. Army basic training is an example; so are propaganda and atrocity stories and news spins and religious indoctrination, and on and on. Human beings are immensely malleable. But these realistic sorts of resultant evil are more usually in the background than the foreground in my action-oriented tales, being much harder to bring to closure.
    The very last Miles story I wrote before breaking off, or out, of the SF milieu to try my hand again at fantasy was the novella "Winterfair Gifts," set against the backdrop of Miles and Ekaterin's wedding. I came to it after completing Diplomatic Immunity , violating my rule against prequels, but not by much. Like "The Borders of Infinity" novella, it had its seeds in some ideas and images I'd been kicking around earlier that did not seem to support the weight of a whole novel. And like the prior work, their right-sized container found them when I was approached by an editor, in this case Catherine Asaro. She wanted to try some crossover blending between the usually immiscible genres of F&SF and Romance, a project that appealed to me on many levels. (Reintegration across boundaries, again.) The tale gave me a chance to follow up on Sergeant Taura, and explore the character of Roic, whose development had intrigued me in Diplomatic Immunity. A wedding seemed a fitting, if not end, resting place for the series, symbolic as it is of the triumph of the comic, the domestic, and the personal. And the universal.
     

A Conversation with Lois McMaster Bujold
Lillian Stewart Carl
    Lillian Stewart Carl: Let's begin as all biographies begin. To paraphrase Bill Cosby—whose 1960s records we almost   memorized—you started life as a child.
    Lois McMaster Bujold: Yep. I was born in Columbus, Ohio, in 1949, third child and only daughter of the family. My parents were originally from Pittsburgh; they graduated from high school in 1930 straight into the Depression. My father, through work and scholarships, put himself through night school and, eventually, graduate school at Cal Tech. He ended up teaching welding engineering at Ohio State University. So I grew up in the white-bread suburb of Upper Arlington in the Fifties and Sixties.
    My father gave me a model for the writer-at-work; one of his projects during that period was editing the Nondestructive Testing Handbook , a major work in his field that was the world standard for twenty years. He did this largely at home in his upstairs office and in the spare room, where a secretary labored to track and collate the pounds of paper and worldwide correspondence. Memories of my dad center around the clack of his IBM Selectric, the scent of professorial pipe smoke, and the constant strains of classical music (WOSU-FM) from his hi-fi.
    Falling Free has an engineer character based loosely upon my father and his work, and was dedicated to him; Lord Auditor Vorthys owes much to his professor-emeritus mode.
    LSC: Your father was a remarkably patient man, letting us use his recording equipment and his typewriter for our own projects. Or we'd just sprawl in his chairs and read.
    LMB: I fell in love with reading early, but hit my stride in third grade when I discovered that I wasn't limited to the thin "grade level" picture books they laid out for our class during library periods, but could take any