Lois McMaster Bujold: The story ideas don't usually appear alone or singly, but happen when two or more ideas hook up. The key ones can have been lying around in the author's brain for years before they meet their right mates and come alive. To give an example, I will tell how the several ideas came together that triggered the 'Weatherman' sequence that opened The Vor Game.

The first element, in this case, was a book. T.E. Lawrence (better known as Lawrence of Arabia), after his WWI adventures left him with what we would nowadays call a bad case of post-traumatic stress disorder, attempted to change his identity and life by enlisting in the British air corps as a grunt under a pseudonym ('Aircraftman Shaw'). He wrote a memoir about going through enlisted basic training, titled The Mint, which pretty much summed up the dismal horrors of army basic upon a nervy, intelligent man. I read this, heavens, sometime back in the early 70's; it went into the bag of authorial data and lay there pretty much dormant.

The second element was an early Christian martyr story. The story comes from Roman times. A Roman legion was deployed in, I believe, Dacia, off the Black Sea somewhere that had horrible cold winters. The high command was going through flip-flops over whether Christianity was to be an allowed religion among the troops. They decided it wasn't, and the order came down that everyone who had become Christian must recant. Forty men refused. To punish them, they were sent to go stand on the ice of a frozen lake naked until they changed their minds. One man broke, and decided to come back in. The other thirty-nine stood out on the ice, and one of the watching Roman officers was so impressed with their fortitude that he went out to join them, to make up their numbers. They all died together, and so became the early Christian martyr story known as 'The Forty Martyrs of Sebastiani'. That was element two:

Element three. My father, who was a university professor, had a moonlighting job as a television weatherman in Columbus, Ohio, when I was growing up. And he was very good at this. His weather reports -- analyses and predictions -- were better than the military weather reports that the Strategic Air Command pilots at the local Air Force base were getting. So the SAC pilots used to call him to get weather reports for their flights to Thule and other places. Eventually, the pilots' commander caught up with them and cut them off, told them not to do this because it was breaking security. So they had to go back to their inferior military weather reports, which made them unhappy. But anyway, that's where the notion of a weatherman came from. In addition, one of the things I had from my father was a picture, which hung on his home office wall for years, of an arctic weather station. (I still have this.) It was a sort of stylized watercolor print of a man in a parka who has come out into the snow and is checking his instruments. So that was idea cluster three.

Then I had, of course, Miles himself. The Warrior's Apprentice was already written and published, as was Brothers in Arms. I wanted to write a story about Miles going back to the Dendarii mercenaries, but it would have to be a prequel. He had left the Dendarii at the end of The Warrior's Apprentice, but he was obviously back with them in Brothers in Arms. How had he re-connected?

So, I needed a Miles story. I was doing the dishes and listening to music, a tape by the Irish singer Enya, and on the tape was a song she sang in Latin [ Enya, "Cursum Perfico", "Watermark" album, 1988, 32kbps, 192kbps]. Now, I don't understand Latin, and I really have no idea what the song is really about, but somehow the sort of military ecclesiastical rhythms made all the ideas cross-connect in my mind for the first time. And so I though, 'Ah, I know! I will send Miles to a miserable arctic army base as his first assignment, where he'll be assigned to be a weather man and get in all kinds of trouble and replay 'The Forty Martyrs of Sebastiani' and he'll be the fortieth man.' That would be the opening of the story and how he gets into trouble and gets reassigned back to ImpSec. And then the story went on from there.

Vladislav Goncharov: What do you think of the "Starship Troopers" movie?

Lois McMaster Bujold: Voorhoven should be assigned to the deepest reaches of hell.

Lois McMaster Bujold: God, I hope not! It could not decide if it was going to be a war movie or an anti-war movie. It was just a mess. It tried to be a parody and it wasn't, and it tried to be a war movie and it failed: Terrible, stupid movie.

But speaking of sane villains -- I always wondered, looking at the villains in James Bond movies for example -- if they have all the resources they display in the course of the plot, why haven't they just invested them all in mutual funds and retired? They clearly don't need to be villains in order to meet any need they could have. Convincing villains are not villainous at random; they have to have a reason or motivation. Real people don't just go out and say 'I'm going to be villainous today!'

But most people find themselves doing evil things because they've got into a situation that they don't understand, didn't predict, didn't anticipate. Sometimes they get drawn into evil just 'cause they don't realize that they can say "No!" Or the cost of saying "no" means that they will be shot. Always ambiguous, always difficult.

Sergey Pereslegin: And the serious part of the questions was, how Cordelia, a soldier of an enemy planet, could get access to Barrayar? How Ezar and ImpSec could allow her to arrive?

We can asked around the room what ages the people here started reading science-fiction?

Secondly, I hit the movie "Lawrence of Arabia" by David Lean. My friend Lillian and I went to see it seven times, in those days before VCRs were even imagined. This stimulus triggered a whole string of reading. I read "Seven Pillars of Wisdom" which was Lawrence's war memoir -- even though it was way over my head at the time -- and other materials about Lawrence. So, I was mainly interested in Lawrence as a hero and in Lawrence as tortured psychology -- and the military stuff just came along for the ride.

Lillian (Lillian Stewart Carl) was my best friend from seventh grade on. She was very very interested in history and archeology. So we exchanged our shared interests, she got me interested in reading history and archeology, I got her interested in reading science-fiction and fantasy.

Her father had been trained as a bomber pilot in WWII, although he never got to Europe -- he was injured in a training accident and mustered out. She was interested in a military history because her dad had read it, and lived it. So we shared books from her father's bookshelf like Escape from Colditz- -- which was about WW II prisoner of war camp escapes in Germany by American soldiers.

Stalag 17 was another one we both read at the time. Stalag 17 was another prison camp memoir. I think it is because we were trapped in high-school and the idea breaking out of the prison camp was a very captivating idea. 'Maybe if we dig a tunnel we could get out of the classroom:.'

There is a great deal in theology and Christian ethics that I find very beautiful and attractive as an artist and as a story-teller. As, for example, the story of Forty Martyrs of Sebastiani.

I distinguish, looking around in the world, two kinds of realities that people often mix up one with another. One is the real reality -- like this bed, this sky, people and trains and oceans and animals and you and me. They are real things -- they will be here tomorrow, regardless.

And then there are consensus realities -- these are things like money, governments, law, rules, corporations, religions. They are the systems of thought and symbols that people have made up for getting around in the world. They are maps that allow us to organize ourselves and manipulate the real world in efficient ways. One can almost think of the two sorts of realities as hardware and software. Consensus reality and real reality. The important thing about those two is not to mix them up -- and never to sacrifice something that is real to something that is made up. Never sacrifice human beings to things like money, governments, etc.

(And here the tape ends because my host arrived to carry me off to dinner.)

If we hadn't run out of time here, I would have gone on to add something like this. A lot of people think that they should be able to figure out an author's political views by the sorts of governments they portray their heroes as possessing in their writings. My work tends to severely confuse people who imagine this. My own view is that there is little to choose among governmental styles, all of them being equally made-up, consensus fictions. Most anything could be made to work, at least for a time, by the cooperation of enough persons sufficiently virtuous or heroic. If one has to pick, my criteria would be pretty much wholly utilitarian -- which system works most smoothly with the least daily heroism, the least requirement for energy input? Which system produces the most stuff for the most people with the least damage to the fewest people -- in this particular historical place and time? Because the answers don't necessarily have to stay the same.

People hate complexity. It makes their brains hurt. They want the world to be simple enough to get their minds around without undue effort; they want to solve problems once and have them stay solved for all time. But I am deeply suspicious of all simple, one-size-fits-all political or economic theories. I don't think any successful government can ever be made significantly simpler than the reality, and the people, it is trying to manage.

The Cast

Lois McMaster BUJOLD

Sergey Pereslegin

Edward Gevorkian

Dmitrty Volodihin

Vladislav Goncharov

Andrey Lazarchuk

Natalia Mazova

Oleg Pol

Anna Hodosh

Ekaterina Smolyanina

Alexander Balabchenkov

Also were Mikhail Uspensky, Irina Andronati and others...