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(The books! Talk about the books!)

Right, the books. It's all about The Books. Except when it isn't. Then it's about gender relations, kosher cooking, cats, weird links, and who's going to which cons or throwing the next party.6 At which we will talk about the books. Probably.

It can be, or at least, it can seem—on checking the List over the last few days I find we are on topic about half the time; so perhaps it's just that we talk twice as much as normal people—harder than is at all sensible, on a list full of people who love the Vorkosigan books—and the Vorkosigans—as much as we do, to get a conversation going about the books. Just about any time, you can get a conversation going about why there's all this off-topicness, though. There are several theories, ranging from "it's all been said" to "it's too difficult, what with some people getting ARCs7 and others having to wait for library copies," though "you people are the weirdest bunch of so-called fans I've ever seen" has its defenders as well.

There are offshoot lists for the discussion of Bujold from both the Lord Peter and the Dunnett lists (LordV and MostlyBujold, respectively), and it is rumored that there is much discussion of the Vorkosigan books to be found on those. This, and the fact that both lists were founded to deal with the tendency of Bujold threads to slip in among the Lord Peter and Lymond discussions, gives rise to yet another theory, which is "Bujold fans, as a class, will tend to talk about anything except what we are meant to talk about." (It occurs to me that we could have saved a certain amount of trouble on-list a few years back by making mention of U.S. politics in all posts mandatory.8)

Whatever the explanation is, it's not a lack of love for Lois's writing. We have, indeed, been known both individually and collectively to do some extremely mad things to get hold of Lois's works. (She sent a manuscript copy of Diplomatic Immunity to two listees on the occasion of their wedding, which was at least a year before publication date. To prevent a spate of impulsive marriage proposals I ought to note that a) we already tried that—that, not the original marriage, was the mad behavior to which I was referring—and b) that manuscript distribution is rare, entirely at Lois's whim, and not to be got by bribes, begging, or backflips, so this is unlikely to happen again; it was the first, and as far as I know so far the only, wedding to come about because of the list.)

Rather madder was what happened when "Winterfair Gifts" was, for complex publisher-related reasons, released in Croatian a year before it came out in English. Quite a few of us bought it in Croatian. Then we translated it ourselves: rather, a Croatian listee (Vlatka Petrovic) translated it, Bo Johannson and Robert Parks edited it, I proofread it—on the bus from D.C. to New Orleans, as I recall—Robert typeset it, and everyone who had bought a Croatian copy got an English copy. I still have mine; it's a really good translation, actually. (And was responsible for at least one new convert to Lois's writing: a gentleman on the bus who started by reading over my shoulder and ended by snaffling pages from me as fast as I could get them done.) It all seemed a completely reasonable course of action at the time. . . .

And then there's our crack team of ARC-spotters, who patrol eBay while sane people sleep, and the people who deal with the logistics involved in dividing five or so ARCs by one planet's worth of eager readers, not to mention the mailing costs . . . And yet, we do it. So I think we can definitely conclude that whatever fuels our inability to stay on-topic, it's not a lack of interest in the books.

I suspect that some of the explanation lies in the books themselves, and in the broad range of people and situations they speak to; it is possible to conclude, by careful reading of Lois's books (a practice I recommend with some fervor, every chance I get; if you are ever buttonholed in the SF aisle of