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

television was filled with World War II shows. It was all around in the culture. We shared books like Escape from Colditz , which was about WWII prisoner of war camp escapes in Germany. I think it is because we were trapped in high school and the idea of breaking out of the prison camp was a very captivating idea. "Maybe if we dig a tunnel we could get out of the classroom. . . ."
    LSC: One of our history teachers was a big fan of the movie Stalag 17 , so I suppose the thought of breaking out wasn't exclusive to the students. I well remember writing a brief piece where I was magically transported from the crowded halls of the high school to the Pelennor Fields, hearing the horns of Rohan in the dawn.
    LMB: My Tolkienesque epic, embarked upon at age fifteen and never finished, at least has the dubious distinction of having been written in Spenserian verse, the result of having read The Lord of the Rings and The Faerie Queene twice that year.
    LSC: It was you who introduced me to Tolkien, something for which I'm profoundly grateful.
    LMB: I bought an Ace pirated edition of The Fellowship of the Ring on a family vacation to Italy, and found the ending to be a huge disappointment; it just sort of trailed off. Oh, lord, I thought, it's one of those darn dismal British writers. . . . There was nothing on the cover, spine, blurb, nor after the last page that indicated there was more, except for a brief reference buried at the end of the "about the author" paragraph to it being a heroic romance published in three parts. Marketing was more primitive in those days, I suppose.
    Half a year later, it was with overwhelming joy, still remembered vividly, that I found its two sequels. I don't remember the names of most of my high school teachers, mind you, but I can still remember where I was sitting when I first opened up The Two Towers and read, with a pounding heart, "Aragorn sped on up the hill . . ." My father's home office, the air faintly acrid with the scent of his pipe tobacco, in the big black chair under the window, yellow late-afternoon winter light shining in through the shredding silver-gray clouds beyond the chill bare Ohio woods to the west. Now, that's imprinting.
    The chair, the room, the man, the world are all gone now. I still have the book. It has stitched itself like a thread through my life from that day to this, read variously, with different perceptions at different ages; today, my overtrained eye even proofreads as it travels over the lines, and sometimes stops to rearrange a sentence or quibble with a word choice. Is it a perfect book? No, doubtless not. No human thing is. Is it a great book? It is in my heart; it binds time for me, and binds the wounds of time.
    "And he sang to them . . . until their hearts, wounded with sweet words, overflowed, and their joy was like swords, and they passed in thought out to regions where pain and delight flow together and tears are the very wine of blessedness" is no bad epitaph for a writer. I could crawl on my knees through broken glass for the gift of words that pierce like those.
    LSC: It grieves me to hear someone say, "I don't have to read The Lord of the Rings , I've seen the movies"—even though the movies are amazing accomplishments. And had the side effect of allowing us to get back in touch with our inner fan-girls.
    LMB: It all comes back around, doesn't it? I tried sporadically to write through early college, but then got sidetracked—although there was a period during college when several of the members of the local SF club I'd discovered (in Columbus, Ohio) met at the house of a graduate student in English Literature who was himself trying to become a novelist, and who eventually succeeded, too. He went on in academia—I ran into him again a few years back at a con.
    LSC: Then my family had moved to Texas. We didn't see each other for five years, during which time real life overwhelmed the murmurs of our muses.
    LMB: Ray Bradbury, in a speech he