Guest blogger: Lois McMaster Bujold

One of the inevitable question any established writer gets hit with, almost as often as “Where do you get your ideas?”, is “Which of your books is your own favorite?”  The usual avoidance-strategy is to mumble something about “Oh, that would be like choosing among my children,” and then, if the writer is quick on his or her feet, go on to list some good reasons why people should read every one of the writer’s books.

I’m all for that last, but for the moment, at least, I really do have an answer: The Sharing Knife as a whole is my best-beloved book.  A harder question is, Why do I love it so much, and so regret leaving its world?

The answer, I think, lies in its characters and setting, both of which are profoundly intertwined with each other, and with me.  I’ve talked here and elsewhere about how Dag and Fawn’s wide green world has its roots in my own childhood.  (Post Five in this entry and here.)  I grow dry being cooped up in dark houses and cities, and love being outdoors in the light; in these books, I get outside a lot, at least in my imagination.  The characters, too, integrate my past and my present, Dag with his experience of being in his mid-50’s, with all the learning and loss that entails, Fawn with both my memories of my own semi-rural, lake-watered childhood and frustrating female youth, and my admiration of young women in my daughter’s generation, who seem to be doing so much more than I did at that age.  So it’s only right that TSK’s over-arching theme turned out to be about the strengths and healing a whole society might achieve through integration: of past and present, of male and female, of youth and age, of technology and magic, of personal and political.

Passage is also, above all, a river story.  My love of lakes was built into my bones in my own childhood, and had its say back in Legacy’s setting of Hickory Lake Camp.  My love of mid-American rivers sits at one remove; they were my father’s passion, not my own, but I had the chance to watch.  A Pittsburgh native, half-orphaned through the early death of his own mother, my father’s happiest childhood memories from the 1920’s were of a community of summer cottages -- I think we’d call them “shacks” today, or possibly “shanties”-- on Twelve Mile Island, just upstream from the city, and of his own father, for vacations, taking him and a canoe by train some two hundred miles up the Allegheny River, and spending a week or more paddling back down.  I recently had a chance to read some of his journals he kept in his youth, and later in life; as a late teenager, he wrote that he couldn’t decide if his life’s ambition was to become an engineer, or to loaf on a houseboat.  He eventually did both, although by his sixties when he finally acquired his houseboat, out of Cincinnati on the Ohio River, he had rather lost the knack of loafing.  (He wrote better in his youth, too -- too many years of academic papers had crippled his style.)  At any rate, when I sent Dag and Fawn on their own journey of discovery down my wide green world’s equivalent of the Ohio River, I had plenty of material to draw on, having both experienced the river first-hand, and inherited some of my Dad’s library of river lore.

I’m finding it a little awkward talking about TSK at the moment, since I’m standing at the end looking over all four volumes, but the reader has only a partial view as yet.  As what is in effect the middle volume of what would be a trilogy if the first big book hadn’t been split in two, it’s only right that Passage, like the river it follows, “flows from mystery above to mystery below”, as Charles Edward Russell so memorably put it (a line I promptly stole for another young man who falls in love with rivers).  But without what my characters -- and I -- learned along the way, what they do in the upcoming Horizon would not be possible.

As an adventure story, a love story, and a fantasy novel Passage stands well alone; what I may call the argument of the book arises more diffusely from the whole tetrology.  Of which more in my third post, upcoming in a while.         

(Editor's Note: You can read the first four chapters of Passage at the HarperCollins Web site here; just click the "Browse Inside" button under the jacket image.  Samples of Beguilement and Legacy are available, too.)

Comments

[Micki]

It's very interesting that all of your EOS books get outdoors more often. I read a statistic somewhere that most of us are *inside* (a house, car, workplace, etc) 23 hours out of 24. So it makes sense that in a futuristic setting, there might not be that much outdoors. (Although, the outdoors in your SF is very nicely drawn, and vivid. One of my fondest SF setting memories involve a huge river of roses . . .).

I'm looking forward to the different takes on "outdoors" between the river Passage, and the land Horizon!

[g hunzeker]

Interesting.. I still have a cottage on Twelve Mile Island. My father, grandfather loved it too

[Joan Kimmel]

This might not be appropriate for this blog -- but I see that Micki has a cottage on Twelve Mile Island. My sisters and brothers and I grew up summering on a cottage there. We want to figure out a way to rent a cottage for a family reunion next summer. Does anyone know someone I might contact? [email protected]
thanks muchly.