Guest blogger: Lois McMaster Bujold

(Editor's note: The Minneapolis Star Tribune ran a terrific profile of Lois last Sunday; click through the link above to read.  AND Passage is the #1 e-book at Fictionwise.com (http://www.fictionwise.com/topstories.htm#how -- congratulations, Lois!)

I've had an interesting time playing with series structures in my fantasies for Eos, and working through the various kinds has made me very conscious of their differing strengths.  In my earlier science fiction, I went with what I think of as the “Hornblower model”: a collection of separate adventures all centering around a main character aging in something like real time, which, when put together, form the story of his life.  It’s a flexible, natural structure, also used heavily in mystery series.  Its main internal advantage is how it allows, over many books, some pretty deep explorations of character growth and change.  Its main external advantage is how it allows a reader to pick up a book about anywhere in the series and still get a complete read, although, as the pertinent backstory grew and grew, that became trickier for me.  Its main disadvantage, for an SF or fantasy writer with entire universes and the depths of time to romp through, is the stories being constrained to such a modest segment of one’s potential stage.

With the Chalion books, as they developed, I conceived the idea of a thematic series, with one independent tale for each of that world’s five gods, which would allow me to move around more freely through time, setting, and character.  I am at present three-fifths of the way through this plan, and I’m not sure when I’ll get back to it, but the uncompleted pattern niggles.  As a structure, this runs against both reader expectation set for fantasy epics that tell continuous tales, and one of the natural strengths of episodic stand-alone series, reader attachment to on-going characters.  In addition, I have had to re-train my readership who, by repeated conditioning, had expected more of my former series pattern, which, for all its merits, had grown dangerously close to being locked-in.   

With the Sharing Knife books -- or Book -- I set myself free to explore yet another pattern, the single big story spread over several volumes.  This again has required some adjustment from my readership.  This actually wasn’t quite what I’d started out to do -- in the beginning, what I actually wanted was to see what would happen if I set a romance as the main plot of a fantasy novel, genuine genre-blending.

This turned out to be a lot trickier than I thought, once I got into it, and not just because some F&SF readers failed to recognize a romance as fit material for a plot, or even as a plot at all.  In the cross-overs I had read by other writers, it seemed to me that the romance crowd tended to stint the world-building -- it didn’t always seem to go all the way to the edge of the page -- and the skiffy writers in turn didn’t deliver on the emotions of the romance.  What I discovered in the writing was that the two genres had profoundly different focal planes for their tales, to steal a metaphor from photography, which may be shorthanded as “personal versus political”.

I expected to learn a lot about romance through writing one, and I did.  I was more surprised to learn something new about F&SF -- which is how profoundly, intensely, relentlessly political most of the stories in these genres are.  The politics may be archaic or modern, fringe or realistic, naive or subtle, optimistic or dire, but by gum the characters had better be centrally engaged with them, for some extremely varied values of “engaged”.  Even the world-building itself is often a political argument.  I had not noticed this the way a fish does not notice water; only when I’d stepped onto the shore of the neighboring genre and breathed air did I discover there even could be a difference -- and what a difference it was.

In fact, if romances are fantasies of love, and mysteries are fantasies of justice, I would now describe most F&SF as fantasies of political agency.  All three also may embody themes of personal psychological empowerment, of course, though often very different in the details, as contrasted by the way the heroines “win” in romances, the way detectives “win” in mysteries, and the way, say, young male characters “win” in adventure tales. 

In any case, to satisfy both sets of readerly demands I ended up by somewhat dividing the personal and the political parts of the plot, tightly braided as they are, between the two succeeding duologies.  The first two books emphasize the personal side in the courtship-story of Dag and Fawn, even while the characters themselves embody the main cultural conflict of the books.  This sets the essential foundation for the second pair of volumes, where the focus turns more outward.  If the first pair of books may be described as the formation of a couple from two separate and unlikely people, the second pair builds a family, of a sort, from even more disparate elements, and eventually, in Horizon (due out Feb. ’09), a community from a wider pool still.  (I’ll have more to say about the political/personal argument of the books when Horizon comes out.)

Most of all The Sharing Knife as a whole does not have a villain-driven plot, fun and cathartic as those can be.  (I know: I’ve written a boatload of them.)  I set Dag and Fawn to wrestle with a much more difficult and diffuse problem, not of merely destroying the villain du jour, but of building connections and friendships and fresh ways of doing things that will allow both their peoples to meet the challenge of many new dangers in the future.  Building is harder than destroying.  “Winning” in the usual sense is not what’s going on, here, but the prize is certainly their world.

(Editor's Note: In case you haven't clicked through in either of Lois's previous posts, samples of all three of the Sharing Knife books are available at the HarperCollins Web site, through the "Browse Inside" feature located just under the jacket image.  Passage; Legacy; Beguilement)

Comments

[Margaret]

From the wiewpoint of someone definitely in the SF camp, who reads fantasy mainly when a favorite author branches into it, and who, while enjoying a touch of romance in stories, hasn't read an actual capital R Romance since Ju. High, the Sharing Knife books have a lot more in common with the Vorkosigoverse books than with the Five Gods books. The characters Grow and Learn throughout.
I suspect this also makes them more satisfying to the fans of Bujold type SF, also.

Just finished Passage. Had to wait for Amazon to fill my pre-order or would have had it sooner.

Though I mostly prefer ebooks nowadays, and have never preferred hard-cover, the available e-formats don't include eBookwise or multi-format.

[Jeff]

You know what the worst part of finishing Passage is?

Horizon won't be out until next year....

[Tom]

Somehow this post reminded me of Tom Smith's filk "Falling Free".

"One to be a person, two to be a team..." Of course Fawn and Dag will have to find the future while staying in the same world. (It just occurred to me that Leo and Silver are the other Bujold romantic couple with an "age-challenged" relationship.)

[Ginger]

My personal library includes lots of romance, mystery, and F&SF so the proposal that these three genres are fantasies of love, of justice, and of political agency respectively intrigues me. I've been thinking about the themes represented on my bookshelves. Lois may be onto something here. Thinking about the F&SF authors on my shelves -- H.Beam Piper, Heinlein, Zenna Henderson, Flint, Weber, Ringo, Asaro, M. Lackey, M.Z.Bradley, James White, Randall Garrett, among others -- political agency does seem to be a common concern. F&SF marketed as juvenile fiction, like Dianna Wynne Jones and Megan Whalen Turner, also has political threads. I'm not much of a F&SF tv and movie watcher, so I wonder how it fits?

By the way, I completely agree that romance/F&SF combinations rarely work. After many bad experiences, I avoid cross-overs between these two genres the same way I avoid romance/vampire crossovers. I bought Beguilement, despite the crossover aspect, with the conviction that even if LMB was as unsuccessful as everyone else at crossing romance with F&SF, her characters and quotable moments would be worth the money. The Sharing Knife shows that a succesful crossover is possible -- at least it is for LMB!

[Micki]

I had never noticed the political elements of SF&F before LMB brought up this point, and I'm amazed to see that she's very, very right. I have to say that Sharing Knife has a very strong political component -- the two protagonists came from very different cultures, and had to make this work.

Perhaps, rather than "political" (which reminds me of donkeys and elephants, slinging mud), we're talking more about cross-cultural understanding -- and misunderstandings.

At any rate, The three Sharing Knife books were very, very good, and I look forward to the fourth in the series.

[Tora]

As a long-time romance reader (and hard-core Bujold fan), I looked forward to that aspect in the Sharing Knife books, and haven't been disappointed.

Unfortunately, however, the aspect that's lost me slightly, is the multi-book aspect. With the story trickling out in bits, I feel the whole thing is moving too slowly. I'm finding that the romance aspect was "solved" in Beguilement (book 1) to my satisfaction, and the fantasy aspect is dragging out to its hopeful resolution in Horizon (book 4).

I should probably also say that I still love the books (and the world and the characters and the story, etc. etc.) and the writing is excellent as usual. But I think I'm just a bit let-down when the story's not resolved at the end of each book. Obviously, it's not meant to be. But. ;-p

-Tora, also finding it amusing that she's as much of a fantasy reader as a romance reader --- both sets of genre expectations are functioning for me at full speed when reading this series. I didn't even really know I had them until the discussion of these books! ;-)

[Teddi]

I agree with Ginger... the term "political" tends to make me think of governments and more formal social structures (and because of this year's elections, the mud-slinging and position-jockeying Ginger mentioned).

Although "societal" gets closer, I think sci-fi is more of a fantasy of the future of humanity. What might life be like 100, 500 or 10,000 years in the future?

It's not just politics, which is only a slice of human life. Depending on the author, elements of culture, technology, scientific discovery and the theoretical evolution of homo sapiens are all explored with varying emphasis.

Fun! Thanks for sparking this discussion, Lois. Your observations about the genres are invaluable -- not only have you experienced the differences in your crossover writing, but you're articulate and insightful in sharing what you've found. One of the things I love about you!

[Christine]

Thanks for the interesting post. Made me think! I love SF and read little fantasy. That being said, I absolutely love the SK series, this last book especially. I do enjoy a good romance, and to have the romance in an F/SF setting, so much the better. In the last book, I very much enjoyed watching Dag explore and practice his newly found talents.

[johne]

Fascinating insight. "Politics" has to do with authority and resources, so another political genre must definitely be the Western.

[John McCarthy]

The political problem of TSK is how to reconcile the powerful, but so far static, Lakewalker culture with the expanding farmer population and
technology. Dag is the one who sees it and sees mutual knowledge as essential to a solution.

[Helen]

The authors that have made the deepest impression on me, whose words surface in daily life, have been those combining 'empowerment' themes with convincing world-building and characters that stick in the mind: Bujold, LeGuin, Tepper...I have been neglecting even more things than usual for a total immersion in 'Passage'. Wonderful!