The Vorkosigan Companion - Lillian Stewart Carl [78]
Being human, it turns out, is simple, though not easy: you become a human when you choose to be human—and keep choosing it, over and over. And so Terrence Cee both fulfills and overturns another science-fiction trope: he is the genetically engineered ultimate weapon who becomes something far beyond his creators' wildest dreams.
As do we all, sooner or later, for better or worse—for better and worse, generally. Because under and above it all, animating the bones, skin, and flesh of any creation—a novel or a human being or anything—is one more thing, the most important thing: the unique spark of life that properly belongs to any creation—and, of course, there is a phrase from the same root as genre, gender, and genus for that as well—sui generis, one of a kind, the only of its type. The aspect of a story that no analysis can capture; the part that turns A Great Book into A Life-Changing Story. The piece of a human being that neither nature nor nurture can account for. The inexplicable, unlooked-for capacity within us that makes us the species that commits atrocities and makes miracles happen; that can inspire a woman named Lois to create an Ethan, provincial, frightened, out of his depth—and able to respond to someone as completely outside of his experience as Elli Quinn with respect, and to all the promise and peril of a Terrence Cee by seeing him, and naming him, as exactly what he is: "You are my brother, of course."
Of course.
—
Marna Nightingale
May 2003 (September 2007)
THE FANS
Come for the Bujold, Stay for the Beer1:
Science Fiction Writers as Occasions of Fandom
Marna Nightingale
This is what I know about Bujold fandom: not as much as I thought I did before I started to write about it, despite having been a listee—a member of the official Lois McMaster Bujold Discussion List,2 hereafter "the List"—since 1999.
Admittedly, the List is not Bujold fandom. All the lists and fora that exist for people to meet to discuss Lois's work are not, among them, Bujold fandom. At most, they're places where Bujold fandom tends to occur. (Home, Aral Vorkosigan observes, is not a place. Home is people.) Nevertheless, it's nice to have a roof over your head, and Bujold fandom hangs out in some very nice places, of which the List, founded in 1994 by Michael Bernardi and graciously hosted by Melanie Dymond Harper, is the largest, the oldest, and arguably the oddest.
It complicates attempts at description that a mailing list, like a fandom, is a living thing, with a past and a future as well as a present, and virtual structures age and change very much like real structures do. Things break. Things get repaired. Walls fall down, or get moved around; you build an extension or two, you redo the wiring—the inhabitants adapt, more or less, to the new space. Meanwhile, things keep happening out in the larger world, and what happens in the larger world doesn't stay there. The boundaries get blurry. People meet, become friends, fall out, move in together, marry, give birth, die, leave.
The Bujold list isn't the place it was when I came to it; whether it's better or worse is not for me to say—it's different. It'll be different again by the time this article sees print. So "Bujold fandom," or even the List, isn't a thing that I can pin down and describe in a few thousand words, even if I were what I can never be, and don't want to be, an objective observer.
On the other hand, I promised Lillian I'd write an article about Bujold fandom. It has occasionally been suggested that I ought