[LMB] SCI FI Wire interview in full

[Lois McMaster Bujold]

I thought this might be of mild interest.  It's always curious to 
compare what goes in and what comes out of any news article.  I've 
gradually learned to give brief answers to these things, since they only 
ever have space for sound bites anyway.

But a few of my remarks aren't repeated elsewhere, and besides, _The 
Hallowed Hunt_ has been on-topic in recent weeks; we're almost to the 
end where I feel folks can jump in with general comments.  This may 
either answer or trigger questions.

I'm still a bit amused by the headline for the published squib.  
"Bujold's HUNT Based on Books".  Books!  Weren't those those funny paper 
thingies people used to have around before the Internet...?  But then, 
Sci Fi Wire, as a news service of the Sci Fi Channel, is intrinsically 
media-oriented.  It's all good coverage, anyway.

Ta, L.


SCI FI Wire Interview, June 2006, complete text.

Questions are by:
John Joseph Adams
www.tuginternet.com/jja/ <http://www.tuginternet.com/jja/>

for the Sci Fi Channel website,

http://www.scifi.com/scifiwire/

or more specifically,

http://www.scifi.com/scifiwire/index.php?id=36542

 

Answers by Lois McMaster Bujold.

 

 (1) How did you hear that you'd been nominated?  What was your reaction? 

 

I was notified, as has become usual for such things, by email; my 
reaction was something like, "Oh!  Cool!"

 

(2) How do you feel about the Mythopoeic Award, and other awards in 
general?  Is one of them more important (in your eyes) than any of the 
others?  Where does the Mythopoeic Award rank?

 

Awards in general are a lot more fun to win than lose -- I've done 
plenty of both.  There is an effect of diminishing returns after a 
while.  One's early awards tend to make a bigger difference to one's 
new-minted career than later ones.  But it really does have to be 
remembered that literary awards are not won in any objective fashion, 
like a race; they are bestowed, like a gift. 

If awards have a utility, it is in their use as advertising, I suppose; 
so the most useful awards to win are those that are widely recognized by 
one's target audience.  There are a lot of awards out there, targeted to 
a lot of different audiences.  In my neck of the genre woods, science 
fiction and fantasy, I suppose the Hugo and Nebula awards are the most 
widely recognized.  Coming from a mainly SF-nal background, I admit the 
first time I'd ever heard of the Mythopoeic awards was when I was 
informed that _The Curse of Chalion_ had won one, but some of my 
fantasy-writer friends were quite aware of it and happy to bring me up 
to speed.

Ultimately, awards are defined by the books that have won them.  I found 
on looking up the lists of past winners that I had come into some very 
interesting company indeed.

 

(3) What do you think of your competition on the shortlist?  Have you 
read any of the other novels?  Which do you think has the best shot (or 
is most deserving) of winning? 

Alas, I am perpetually behind in my genre reading, and I have not yet 
read any of the other books on this year's list.  So I haven't a guess, 
here.

 

(4) Please describe /The Hallowed Hunt/--just enough to give readers a 
taste of the novel.

 

You want, like, two sentences, don't you.  Sigh.

 

 _The Hallowed Hunt_ opens when Ingrey kin Wolfcliff, retainer to the 
Sealmaster (chancellor) of the Weald, is sent to arrest a young woman, 
Ijada dy Castos, who has just killed in self-defense a mad scion of the 
royal house, Prince Boleso.  Ingrey discovers the prince was engaged in 
illegal animal magic, and Ijada has become accidentally imbued with the 
spirit of a sacrificed leopard, possibly as a partial result of 
interference by a god known as the Son of Autumn, one of the five real 
and active gods of this alternate world.  Ingrey himself, as a result of 
a mysterious family contretemps of 11 years ago that resulted in the 
death of his own father, bears the spirit of a wolf.

 

T/o/g/e/t/h/e/r, t/h/e/y f/i/g/h/t/ c/r/i/m/e... no, wait.

 

          Returning to the capital, they find the apparent political 
complications of their dilemma are as nothing compared to the 
theological ones.  At Boleso's funeral, Ingrey and Ijada have a 
visionary encounter with the Son of Autumn hinting at further use of 
Ingrey's growing powers on the god's behalf, involving the Wounded 
Woods, the haunted site of a former military massacre and Ijada's dowry 
lands; as the plot unravels, their tasks as the gods' chosen tools 
gradually grow clearer, but not easier, as ancient and modern tragedies 
intertwine.

 

Then please talk about the genesis of the book, how you came to write 
it, where the idea came from, etc.  (5) Was there anything about the 
writing of the novel that was unusual or noteworthy?  Was it personal to 
you, or did you have to do a lot of research, anything like that?  If 
so, please discuss.

 

Squishing these together:

I suppose the book started with two chance encounters.  The first, some 
years back, was meeting Dr. Tom Shippey in an airport lounge on the way 
home from an academic conference on the fantastic in the arts in 
Florida.  Our paths had not crossed there, as we were running on 
separate tracks.  I was unfamiliar with his work at the time, so we 
ended up talking about academics devoted to medieval subjects generally, 
and I told him about my great uncle Gordon Hall Gerould who had been a 
professor of early English at Princeton during the first half of the 
20th C.  But later, remembering the conversation, I picked up Shippey's 
book _J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century_ in a convention book 
dealer's room, and read it with great interest, especially the parts 
about how the history of words unfold from them, Tolkien's interest in 
what is sometimes called "that great Northern thing", and some of his 
original sources, which I also went on to read -- _Beowulf_ of course, 
_Kalevala_, and _The Nibelungenleid_, mainly.  (I read the latter in one 
day while stuck in LAX waiting through a five hour layover for a plane 
to New Zealand that was 6 hours late.  The international terminal at LAX 
is horribly under-lit for readers, I note in passing.)

 

The second chance was in November of 2002, when I happened to be between 
writing books. I stumbled over, literally, a book on the floor of a 
friend's house where it had fallen from her to-be-read pile, with the 
irresistible title of _Mad Princes of Renaissance Germany_, by an 
academic historian named Midelfort.  Wonderful, lurid, sometimes 
horrifying and heartbreaking stuff, there, in that slim vol.  But it got 
me to thinking how under-utilized German medieval sources are in modern 
fantasy genre writing, as the Spanish sources also were, which was part 
of why that region snared me for the first two Chalion books.  One of 
the histories caught in my mind, and I couldn't help thinking about how 
I would have wanted it to come out instead of the tragedy it was.  This 
tale was the seed of the opening plot situation of _The Hallowed Hunt_, 
where a young woman has just murdered a mad prince who tried to ravish 
her.  (In the real world, it was the other way around; the girl was 
slain by the mad prince.  It took four days for his handlers to nerve up 
to get the body away from him and arrest him...)

 

I then started looking into early German history, only to discover that 
very little was known of or readily available about the pagan Saxons, 
conquered and forcibly converted to Christianity in a generations-long 
war by, mainly, Charlemagne.  That war included a major, and at the time 
infamous, military massacre that also caught my imagination, Viet Nam 
war-era child that I was. 

 

Meanwhile, in December of 2002, my agent had run an offer from another 
publisher past me for a romantic fantasy.  The ideas I was incubating 
didn't fit in that space, but the offer did trigger their 
coming-together in an idea for a new book set in the Chalion 
5-gods-world equivalent of medieval Germany, exploring the consequences 
of historical tragedies spinning down through time.  It all comes 
together.  Trust me...



(6) What is it about the novel that you think the award voters responded 
to?  That is, what is it that made your novel stand out amongst the rest 
of the field, that made it worthy of singling out as one of the best of 
the year?

 

Reader-response is a slippery and idiosyncratic thing; this is a 
question you really need to ask the readers.  Individually.  But the 
Chalion books take religion seriously, both as a social institution and 
in the exploration of the emotions of mysticism, so seem naturally of 
interest to an array of readers looking for a book that exemplifies "the 
spirit of the Inklings", a group of men who also took their religion 
seriously.

 

(7) Who are your authorial inspirations?  Were there any inspirations 
for this novel in particular?

 

Passing on this one, tho' the second part is covered above.

 

(8) Anything else you'd like to add?  (Feel free to plug any new or 
forthcoming work here.)

Upcoming in October of this year from Eos/HarperCollins will be _The 
Sharing Knife, vol. 1: Beguilement_, my first fantasy duology.  (The 
second half, _Legacy_, will appear in 2007.)  It's set in a very 
different world from the Chalion books, and written in a very different 
voice than the usual faux-European medievaloid.  I also needed a break 
from gods.  I have a short description up on my website, here:

http://www.dendarii.com/news/06Jan.html

 

Even more exciting is the cover art by Julie Bell, some of the most 
beautiful and accurate I've ever had; a sneak peek is here, which you 
can link:

http://www.dendarii.co.uk/Covers/American/knife.html

 

 

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