Modern Masters of Science Fiction

Edward James

• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780252097379
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Readers have awarded Lois McMaster Bujold four Hugo Awards for Best Novel, a number matched only by Robert Heinlein. Her Vorkosigan series redefined space opera with its emotional depth and explorations of themes such as bias against the disabled, economic exploitation, and the role of women in society.
 
Acclaimed science fiction scholar Edward James traces Bujold's career, showing how Bujold emerged from fanzine culture to win devoted male and female readers despite working in genres--military SF, space opera--perceived as solely by and for males. Devoted to old-school ideas such as faith in humanity and the desire to probe and do good in the universe, Bujold simultaneously subverted genre conventions and experimented with forms that led her in bold creative directions. As James shows, her iconic hero Miles Vorkosigan--unimposing, physically impaired, self-conscious to a fault--embodied Bujold's thematic concerns. The sheer humanity of her characters, meanwhile, gained her a legion of fans eager to provide her with feedback, expand her vision through fan fiction, and follow her into fantasy.

AN INTRODUCTION TO LOIS MCMASTER BUJOLD

In 2012, when she turned sixty-three years old, Lois McMaster Bujold remarked that her life had been strangely balanced—she had been single for twenty-one years, married for twenty-one years, and divorced for twenty-one years. She noted, however, that “the thirds don’t all seem to have the same weight.”1 In terms of her writing career, however, each third has equal, but different, importance. In the first third she built the foundations of a writing career; in the second third she established herself as a professional writer; and since then she has consolidated her position as one of the most popular writers of science fiction and fantasy in the United States and beyond.

Lois McMaster was born in Columbus, Ohio, on November 2, 1949, the third child and only daughter of Robert Charles McMaster and Laura Gerould McMaster. Her parents had graduated from the same high school in Wilkinsburg, Pennsylvania (in the eastern outskirts of Pittsburgh), in 1930, although they did not start dating until after this. Bob received his first degree, in electrical engineering, from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh in 1936 and then progressed to graduate work at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena, getting his master of science in 1938 and his doctorate in 1944. He moved to Ohio in 1945, initially taking a post as supervisor of electrical engineering at Battelle Memorial Institute’s laboratories in Columbus. From 1955 until retirement in 1977 he was a professor at Ohio State University, specializing in welding engineering. In his spare time he was a television weatherman, one of the world’s first, broadcasting weather bulletins twice a day on WBNS-TV in Columbus, from 1950 to 1964. The family home where Lois and her two elder brothers grew up was in Upper Arlington, a suburban city just to the west of the university campus, whose origins had been a Garden City development in 1913: a safe, middleclass environment.

Bob McMaster’s obituary by Robert I. Jaffee, in the National Academy of Engineering’s Memorial Tributes, remarks that he was a superb teacher, whose neatly printed blackboards and booming voice would never be forgotten by his students. It also notes that he was as meticulous a teacher of English as he was of engineering: if a student submitted a piece of writing with grammatical errors in it, it would be handed back, “with pithy comment,” to be corrected before final submission. Lois’s brother Jim has also published his own reminiscences of his father, with whom he studied on the five-year Welding Engineering course. “Doc,” as he was called around the department, used to have a cartoon of a man collecting an enormous ball of string posted on his office door, with the caption “Whatever you do, do it to the best of your ability.”2

Lois’s father was clearly a crucial figure in her development. Like many engineers at the time, he was a science fiction reader. He subscribed to Astounding Science-Fiction, which became the leading science fiction monthly magazine at the end of the 1930s, and he gave Lois her own subscription to it for her thirteenth birthday. At that point it had just been renamed Analog by its longtime editor John W. Campbell Jr., and Analog would eventually publish a number of Lois’s own works, both short stories and novel serializations. Her monthly copy of Analog was clearly important to the young Lois, for once or twice her mother took the copy from the mailbox herself and retained it until after Lois had cleaned her room (VC 49). McMaster was a writer himself: he was the editor of the Nondestructive Testing Handbook, which became a standard reference book around the world—McMaster on Materials. It was a massive work: Jaffee’s obituary reports that the typescript stood twenty-six inches high. He did the work on it at home in his upstairs office: “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 ” (VC 29). It is no accident that at least two of Lois’s protagonists, Miles Vorkosigan and Fiametta, learn (and to some extent suffer) from the experience of growing up as the child of a Great Man.

Lois soon became a voracious reader. She started reading science fiction when she was nine years old. Her favorite writers in the field included Poul Anderson (his Van Rijn stories) and James H. Schmitz (best known probably for his “Federation of the Hub” sequence: space opera notable for featuring three intelligent and adventurous young women, Telzey Amberdon, Trigger Argee, and Nile Etland). Bujold read the juveniles of Robert A. Heinlein (published annually by Scribner’s between 1947 and 1958), which long remained the touchstone for science fiction written specifically for adolescents. But in the 1950s there was very little adult science fiction that was not readily accessible to adolescents (one reason, of course, was that the category of Young Adult did not yet exist), and Lois read widely. In a conversation with Lillian Stewart Carl (VC 30–31), Lois mentions most of the big names of the period: Isaac Asimov, Fritz Leiber, L. Sprague de Camp, Mack Reynolds, the British writers Arthur C. Clarke and Eric Frank Russell, and one of the most prolific early women writers, Zenna Henderson. Later on, she adds, she came across Anne McCaffrey (who began publishing novels at the end of the 1960s), Randall Garrett, Roger Zelazny, Cordwainer Smith, and J. R. R. Tolkien. She was mostly dependent on public libraries, which, until she started driving at age sixteen, and apart from a time when she cycled, meant that she was dependent on her mother for taking her the ten or twenty miles to the nearest libraries.

Lois, like many other adolescents in the 1960s (the author of this book included), was enormously impressed by Tolkien’s works. She bought the first volume of The Lord of the Rings in the pirated Ace paperback edition while on holiday in Italy with her parents in 1965. Six months later “with overwhelming joy” she found the second and third volumes.

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 (VC 32–33).

She added that the book “has stitched itself like a thread through my life from that day to this, read variously, with different perceptions at different ages” (VC 33). It may be a flawed book, as all are, but “it is in my heart; it binds time for me, and binds the wounds of time,” and after quoting from the chapter “The Field of Cormallen” in The Return of the King, where the minstrel sings of the deeds of Frodo and Sam, she comments, “I could crawl on my knees through broken glass for the gift of words that pierce like those.” In the light of such a tribute, it is not at all surprising that Bujold would write several fantasy novels; and it should be noted that two of them (The Curse of Chalion and Paladin of Souls) are among the very best of the many medievalist fantasies of the post-Tolkien era. However, we may perhaps be grateful that the Tolkienesque epic she wrote at age fifteen (in Spenserian verse, the result of reading both The Lord of the Rings and The Faerie Queen twice that year) has not been published.

In the summer of 1966 Lois spent three weeks hitchhiking with her older brother Jim in Britain, which she has said was the highlight of her high school years.3 She was fifteen, and he was twenty-one. Luckily, perhaps, her parents did not know that Jim was being so parsimonious that, when they arrived at Oxford, they hopped over the wall into Worcester College (with the help of a friendly policeman) and slept the night in the gardens. For Lois the visit to Stratford-upon-Avon was the highlight: Love’s Labour’s Lost at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, she writes, “just blew me away” (DD 200).

Like many science fiction readers before and since, Lois did not find it easy to fit in to the conforming demands of school life, which is no doubt how she bonded so closely with Lillian Stewart (now Lillian Stewart Carl) when she first met her, at Hastings Junior High School in Upper Arlington. Lillian’s father was a professor of agricultural engineering at OSU. That Lois and Lillian decided to try out for the school talent show by singing Tom Lehrer’s “Poisoning Pigeons in the Park” reveals quite a lot about them. “The silence after we finished could have swallowed a planet,” says Lillian (VC 31). They watched television together, being particularly excited by The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (originally broadcast between 1964 and 1968). David McCallum, who played the Russian-born secret agent Illya Kuryakin, was one reason Bujold chose Russian culture as the background for Miles Vorkosigan’s Barrayar (VC 123), while Illya himself transmuted into one of Bujold’s most interesting characters, Simon Illyan, the head of Barrayar’s ImpSec. For a season they both watched and loved The Wackiest Ship in the Army. Lois introduced Lillian to science fiction and fantasy in general; Lillian introduced Lois to history and mythology. The two of them discovered Arthur Conan Doyle and C. S. Forester together. They both read Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land when it came out in 1961 and, Lillian recalls, “were unduly impressed by this first exposure to ‘adult’ content in sf ” (VC 122).4

Lillian returned one year from vacation to discover Lois enthusing about a new TV series, Star Trek, which had begun its initial three-year run in September 1966. They started watching it together and invited other friends in to watch, and they even used Lois’s father’s reel-to-reel tape recorder to record the soundtracks, which included, in Lillian’s words, “half a dozen female squeals as Spock actually (be still, my teenage hormones) smiled!” (VC 124). One tape preserved Lois’s mother saying, “You girls are going to be so embarrassed when you grow up and remember how you acted over this program.” For many people in the 1960s and 1970s, Star Trek was actually a route into a lifetime in science fiction, as a fan, a professional, or both; and few were as embarrassed as their parents had anticipated. Lois and Lillian both began to write stories set in the Star Trek universe, an activity widely replicated in the Anglophone world and generally taken as being at the origins of contemporary fanfic. They eventually found having to fit in to the Star Trek universe stifling, so they moved into compiling a multigenerational future history together. But their love of Star Trek continued. Their mothers’ words when the girls threatened not to go to their own high school graduation because it was a Thursday—in other words, Star Trek night—are not recorded.

Lois did not discover science fiction fandom until a few months later. She was working in the book section of a downtown department store and met a young man from COSFS, the Central Ohio Science Fiction Society. By the time Lillian came back from college Lois was a well-established member of the society, and Lillian saw Kubrick’s movie 2001: A Space Odyssey (it opened in April 1968) with Lois and the whole group. Lois and Lillian were not the only members interested in writing, and some of them used to meet up at the house of Lloyd Kropp, a graduate student in English at Ohio State. Kropp would become a novelist of some repute; his most famous novel was probably Greencastle (1987), a coming-of-age story set in New Jersey in the early 1950s, about three boys who love science fiction and who set up a club called The Denizens of the Sacred Crypt. Lois wrote a story at this time about a hermaphrodite, a precursor of her character Bel Thorne (VC 125) and an early indication of her later interest in speculation about gender.

Lois and Lillian announced to the group that they were going to produce a fanzine focused on Star Trek, called StarDate, and ignored the response: that there was no such thing as an sf fanzine devoted to a TV show, or an all-fiction fanzine (VC 125). In fact Spockanalia had come out not long before StarDate, and that inspired Lois and Lillian to persevere. They wrote most of it themselves, while some of the illustrations were provided by a student at the Columbus College of Art and Design (graduated 1970), Ron Miller, who is now regarded as one of the world’s best space and astronomy artists. The fanzine was produced on the mimeograph machine belonging to COSFS member John Ayotte, who had his own fanzine, and Lois and Lillian saw their own “words in black and white type for the first time. Daring to air our psyches before the world. We were giddy, and not only from the fumes of the corflu” (VC 125–26).5

Lois and Lillian carried their copies of StarDate to Midwestcon, in Cincinnati, their first sf convention. There was never to be a second issue: Lillian’s family moved to Texas, where Lillian has lived ever since.

Lois went to other local conventions during her college years (1968–1972) and to two World Science Fiction Conventions (Worldcons): BayCon (San Francisco, 1968) and St. Louiscon (St. Louis, Missouri, 1969). Initially, she was an English major, but she soon shifted to the sciences, and an interest in both wildlife and close-up photography led her to embark on a six-week field trip to East Africa, from which she returned with eight hundred slides of bugs and a fascination for insects that she was to utilize with great fun in A Civil Campaign. It was not long after that trip to Africa that she told Lillian, as Lillian’s infant son crawled over their feet, of a story she had been thinking about writing, set in the Star Trek universe, in which a red-headed female Federation scientist and a Klingon officer are stranded together on a planet that looked very much like East Africa (VC 126). The hypothetical novel was never written: and, as Bujold notes, “the urban legend that Shards of Honor began as an ST novel with the serial numbers filed off is both untrue and, apparently, unkillable.”

In 1971 Lois married John Bujold, whom she had met at a science fiction convention two years earlier (Marcon IV, in Columbus). (Despite her subsequent divorce, she has preserved her married name, under which she has always published, and henceforth I shall refer to her as Bujold.) On leaving university she worked for several years (from 1972 to 1978) as a drug administration technician in the Ohio State University hospitals. This gave her a staff card to the stacks of the university library, and she started reading everything that looked interesting. Partly as a result of this, she did not do much writing, although her Sherlock Holmes fanfic “The Adventure of the Lady on the Embankment” dates from late in this period. From the point of view of her future career, however, the library may have been the least of it: she has calculated that during her time at the hospital she must have met around fourteen thousand patients, as well as many staff—an invaluable introduction to the variety of human experience.6 She gave up her job, as her mother had done before her, to look after her two children: Anne, born 1979, and Paul, born 1981. In 1980 the family moved to Marion, Ohio, and lived in straitened circumstances; John’s company went under, and he was unemployed for some time.

Meanwhile, Lillian had sold some stories, which inspired Bujold to persevere with writing: “It seemed to me this might be a way to make some money but still get to stay home with my kids” (VC 34). She dates the beginning of her writing career to Thanksgiving Day in 1982, when she tried out her father’s new Kaypro II computer, which came bundled with word-processing software. She worked on a fragment that she had tried out for a local writers’ group: it became, a month later, a novelette called “Dreamweaver’s Dilemma,” the starting point of the Vorkosigan Universe. She got feedback from the minister’s wife at her parents’ church, and she teamed up with Lillian and another fledgl...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Chapter 1 An Introduction to Lois McMaster Bujold
• Chapter 2 The Science Fiction
• Chapter 3 Fantasy Worlds
• Chapter 4 Cultural Critique
• Chapter 5 Character
• Chapter 6 Disability and Genetic Modification
• Chapter 7 Women, Uterine Replicators, and Sexuality
• Chapter 8 War, Leadership, and Honor
• A Lois McMaster Bujold Bibliography
• Stories in the Vorkosigan Universe
• Notes
• Critical Bibliography
• Selected Interviews with Lois McMaster Bujold
• Index