The Vorkosigan Companion - Lillian Stewart Carl [16]
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 book from the shelf. I fell ravenously on Walter Farley and Marguerite Henry (this was my horse-obsessed period), and never looked back. I started reading science fiction when I was nine, because my father read it—he used to buy Analog magazine and the occasional paperback to read on the plane during consulting trips. With that introduction, no one was ever going to fool me into thinking SF was kid stuff!
LSC: Kid stuff?
LMB: Well, one must admit, SF has roots in boys'-own-adventure genres; I dimly remember reading SFnal tales in my older brother's copies of Boy's Life (a Boy Scout magazine) back then. But the term "adolescent" when applied to SF is not necessarily a pejorative, in my later and wider view. The great psychological work of adolescence (in our culture, anyway) is to escape the family, especially the mother but in some families the father, depending on which parent is more intent on enforcing the social norms, in order to create oneself as an autonomous person. This is why, I theorize, so much fantasy and SF is so hell-bent on destroying the protagonist's family, first thing, before anything else. Villages must be pillaged and burned, lost heirs smuggled off to be raised elsewhere, SFnal social structures devised that eliminate family altogether—because before anything at all can happen, you have to escape your parents. It's their job to prevent you having adventures, after all.
When I was a kid, my favorite writers included Poul Anderson and James H. Schmitz—who had great female leads in his tales—the usual Heinlein (the juveniles, not his later work), Asimov, and Clarke, Fritz Leiber, L. Sprague de Camp, Mack Reynolds, Eric Frank Russell, Zenna Henderson; toward the end of that period there was Anne McCaffrey, Randall Garrett, Roger Zelazny, Tolkien, Cordwainer Smith, and so on. There was a lot less SF on the library shelves in those days; you could read it all up, and I did.
I discovered the SF sections at the public libraries I could occasionally get to. Since we lived on the outer edge