The Vorkosigan Companion - Lillian Stewart Carl [32]
LSC: For most of your career, "the work" meant the Vorkosigan novels. And yet recently you've moved on. Or at least away.
LMB: One of the reasons I had for leaving the Vorkosigan universe for the Chalion books—or at least leaving Miles, who is rather agnostic when he isn't in a foxhole—was that I wanted to do a fairly serious exploration of grown-up religion in a fantasy context. Miles's universe doubtless includes all the beliefs of ours plus a lot of new ones invented since. People are like that. Nonetheless, when I wanted to explore religious themes more directly, I needed a new universe and new characters.
I have been bemused by a certain kind of fantasy that treats religion and magic in a mechanical fashion—"Throw another virgin on the altar, boys, the power level in the thaumaturgistat is getting low!" People running about shooting lightning bolts from their fingers as though they were mystical Uzis, that sort of thing.
A lot of the ways genre fantasy treats religion seemed to me to be both superficial and unsympathetic. I wanted to look at both the positive ways religions function as social institutions, ways for people to organize themselves to get the everyday work of a civilized society done, and at serious mysticism. The real questions real religions grapple with don't have easy answers. A well-built fantasy world's religion ought, I thought, to reflect that complex reality.
The more recent Sharing Knife books, on which I've spent the past three years at this writing, have more to do with exploring genre-blending and series structures, being my first really long, closely connected, epic-sized tale—a tetralogy, it seems. They are also about bringing it all home, on more than one level.
LSC: Have you found any difficulties in switching genres?
LMB: A lot of my role models for writing were ambidextrous between fantasy and SF—Poul Anderson, C. J. Cherryh, L. Sprague de Camp, Roger Zelazny, the list goes on and on. I've always considered it normal to write both. The actual mechanics of putting a narrative together—scene selection, characterization, pacing, viewpoint, transitions, plotting, and so on—are the same for both. The two genres have slightly different lists of things to which they pay close attention. Fantasy tends, on the whole, to be more language and style conscious, and reaches, at its most intense, for some sort of experience of the numinous. SF rewards the exploration of ideas, and reaches for a kind of intellectual oh-wow oh-cool moment when the reader's understanding of the world seems to increase, and which may be the SFnal equivalent of the numinous.
Editor Teresa Nielsen Hayden had this little dissertation about writers as otters. You can't train an otter, she says, because when you reward it, instead of saying "Let's do that again!" it says "Oh, let's do something else that's even cooler!" This is the writer's approach. They want to surprise you, and if too many people have the same idea it begins to seem not so surprising anymore. "It does not appeal to my Inner Otter!" Drives editors nuts, because they're trying to train their writers. They want something within the range of marketability.
LSC: You have to go through the editors, the publishers, and the marketers to reach the reader. But then, you've done so.
LMB: I've always tried to write the kind of book I most loved to read: character-centered adventure. My own literary favorites include, among many others, Dorothy Sayers, Arthur Conan Doyle, Alexandre Dumas, and of course C. S. Forester. All of these writers created not works of art, but, on some level, works of life. Theirs are creations who climb up off the page into the readers' minds and live there long after the book is shut. Readers return to such books again and again, not to find out what happened—for a single reading would suffice for