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Sidelines: Talks and Essays
Sidelines offers Lois McMaster Bujold's nonfiction, over the course of three decades, on the many facets of writing and a writer's life, on art, literature, society, cultural differences and some revelations about her own life, family and how they influenced her.
In this beautifully written series of speeches, travelogues, articles, introductions and less formal pieces, multiple Hugo and Nebula Award winner Bujold shares her views on a wide variety of subjects, with grace, humor, and at times startling insight. A welcome companion to Lois McMaster Bujold's science fiction and fantasy, by the author whom Booklist called "one of sf's outstanding talents."
In this beautifully written series of speeches, travelogues, articles, introductions and less formal pieces, multiple Hugo and Nebula Award winner Bujold shares her views on a wide variety of subjects, with grace, humor, and at times startling insight. A welcome companion to Lois McMaster Bujold's science fiction and fantasy, by the author whom Booklist called "one of sf's outstanding talents."
234 pages, Kindle Edition
First published March 18, 2013
About the author
Lois McMaster Bujold
180 books39.6k followersLois McMaster Bujold was born in 1949, the daughter of an engineering professor at Ohio State University, from whom she picked up her early interest in science fiction. She now lives in Minneapolis, and has two grown children.
Her fantasy from HarperCollins includes the award-winning Chalion series and the Sharing Knife tetralogy; her science fiction from Baen Books features the perennially bestselling Vorkosigan Saga. Her work has been translated into over twenty languages.
Questions regarding foreign rights, film/tv subrights, and other business matters should be directed to Spectrum Literary Agency, spectrumliteraryagency.com
A listing of her awards and nominations may be seen here:
http://www.sfadb.com/Lois_McMaster_Bu...
A listing of her interviews is here:
http://vorkosigan.wikia.com/wiki/Auth...
An older fan-run site devoted to her work, The Bujold Nexus, is here:
http://www.dendarii.com/
Her fantasy from HarperCollins includes the award-winning Chalion series and the Sharing Knife tetralogy; her science fiction from Baen Books features the perennially bestselling Vorkosigan Saga. Her work has been translated into over twenty languages.
Questions regarding foreign rights, film/tv subrights, and other business matters should be directed to Spectrum Literary Agency, spectrumliteraryagency.com
A listing of her awards and nominations may be seen here:
http://www.sfadb.com/Lois_McMaster_Bu...
A listing of her interviews is here:
http://vorkosigan.wikia.com/wiki/Auth...
An older fan-run site devoted to her work, The Bujold Nexus, is here:
http://www.dendarii.com/
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Displaying 1 - 19 of 19 reviews
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March 20, 2013I cannot very well review this e-book, since I wrote it, but through it I discovered how to add a book to the Goodreads data base, another small step for technology as I am slowly dragged, backwards and protesting, into the 21st Century. Let me know if I have made any errors, though I must say the GR process seems very helpful in preventing such.
bests, Lois.
bests, Lois.
January 1, 2017
Having started my first Bujold novel, I collected and read the rest in about two months -- it would have been faster, except that some of her titles were hard to find. Reading the novels, I wanted to know more about the author and her approach to writing. As another reviewer noted, some of the pieces in Sidelines are from certain editions of her books; however, I had to hunt all over the place to find additional nonfiction. And Sidelines includes far more than I was able to find.
Bujold's fiction is well thought out, broad in scope, specific in details, inclusive of philosophy and wonder. Her language is high level, yet her style, while it adapts clearly to science fiction and fantasy, is far from either an academic's or an English major's. Her speeches and other nonfiction writing show the same command of language as her fiction; in addition, her nonfiction writing, with its casual references to a range of sources from Plato to manga, Chaucer to engineering, provides an explanation for the depth of ideas she employs in the themes, worlds, and characters she creates in her novels.
My favorite section of Sidelines contains essays, but I can't decide which I like best. For example, Bujold explores the integrated relationship between writer and reader in "The Unsung Collaborator." A keynote address she gave in Barcelona discusses the differences she has encountered between writing science fiction and writing fantasy. In another speech in which she approached the influence of science fiction and fantasy on today's world, Bujold mentions reading about a forensic pathologist who had never entered a bad crime scene in a house filled with books. Bujold muses about crime scenes without books, "These disasters were all book-free places. Which, upon reflection, made all kinds of sense to me; if there is no escape of any kind, emotional pressures have no release but to build up and up until they explode. Fiction, especially, gives our minds and souls another place to be, a personal time-out, even if we cannot evade our captivity in any other way."
Sidelines is the nonfiction equivalent of another novel by Lois McMaster Bujold. This one encompasses everything from real life today to the most exotic of worlds and agape.
Bujold's fiction is well thought out, broad in scope, specific in details, inclusive of philosophy and wonder. Her language is high level, yet her style, while it adapts clearly to science fiction and fantasy, is far from either an academic's or an English major's. Her speeches and other nonfiction writing show the same command of language as her fiction; in addition, her nonfiction writing, with its casual references to a range of sources from Plato to manga, Chaucer to engineering, provides an explanation for the depth of ideas she employs in the themes, worlds, and characters she creates in her novels.
My favorite section of Sidelines contains essays, but I can't decide which I like best. For example, Bujold explores the integrated relationship between writer and reader in "The Unsung Collaborator." A keynote address she gave in Barcelona discusses the differences she has encountered between writing science fiction and writing fantasy. In another speech in which she approached the influence of science fiction and fantasy on today's world, Bujold mentions reading about a forensic pathologist who had never entered a bad crime scene in a house filled with books. Bujold muses about crime scenes without books, "These disasters were all book-free places. Which, upon reflection, made all kinds of sense to me; if there is no escape of any kind, emotional pressures have no release but to build up and up until they explode. Fiction, especially, gives our minds and souls another place to be, a personal time-out, even if we cannot evade our captivity in any other way."
Sidelines is the nonfiction equivalent of another novel by Lois McMaster Bujold. This one encompasses everything from real life today to the most exotic of worlds and agape.
August 10, 2020
For Bujold completionists. Very enjoyable. Took me a long time to finish because it's mostly short speeches and reprinted essays, easy to put down and pick up again in spare moments.
August 19, 2024
“Sidelines: Talks and Essays is just what it says on the tin—a collection of three decades of my nonfiction writings, including convention speeches, essays, travelogues, introductions, and some less formal pieces. I hope it will prove an interesting companion piece to my fiction.” Yes, extremely interesting, full of intriguing, fascinating or clarifying details, considerations and musings.
(N.B.: I'm actually just past the middle of reading Memory.)
“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, Alexander Dumas, and, of course, C. S. Forester. All of these writers created not just 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.”
“Some of my ideas have persisted, some been made obsolete; some have been swapped out for what I presently think are better ones; others have deepened. It would be a minor tragedy if, after all that journeying, the landscape were still the same.”
“It was also explained to me—by Jim Baen in one of our early newbie-writer-tutorial conversations—that the average novel made eighty percent of all the income it was ever going to produce in its first two months on the bookstore shelves, after which it was obsolete and no longer economically exciting. It pretty quickly occurred to me that the defense against that was not to write average novels. This strategy turned out to serve very well.”
“It's increasingly clear to me that the reader and viewer—the active reader or viewer—does a lot more than he or she is ever given credit for. They fill in the blanks. From hope and charity, they explain away plot-holes to their own satisfaction. They add background from the slimmest of clues. They work. (...) So for me, this sheaf of inked paper with the gaudy cover glued to the spine is not the book. The book is not an object on the table; it is an event in the reader's mind. It's a process, through which an idea in my mind triggers an idea, more-or-less corresponding, in yours. TheI don't think a book exists till someone reads it, and the cognitive experience that results is never more than half the text writer's doing. Writers can shape, they can hope, but they can't control; fiction is a dance, not a march. words on the page are merely the means to that end, a think-by-numbers set, a bottled daydream. The book, therefore, is only finished when somebody reads it. (...) The book, if you like, is not the story but merely the blueprint of the story, like the architect's drawings of a house. The reader, then, is the contractor, the guy who does the actual sweat-work of building the dwelling. From the materials in his or her head, the ideas, the images, the previous knowledge, each one actively reconstructs the story-experience—each according to his measure, knowledge, gifts. And charity. (...) I don't think a book exists till someone reads it, and the cognitive experience that results is never more than half the text writer's doing. Writers can shape, they can hope, but they can't control; fiction is a dance, not a march.”
“I probably used my on-line thesaurus more with this book than with any other I've ever written—to find simpler but equally precise synonyms for the polysyllables that tend to fall most trippingly from my typing fingers. I suspect the practice of paying such close attention to my language was good for me as a writer; I know it was fun.”
“All this as preamble to The Sharing Knife. Because TSK is written in dialect: several of 'em, in fact. My native dialect, to be precise—or what would be if my parents hadn't been from Pittsburgh via California and a lot of formal speech training—that of rural Ohio (and points nearby). Fawn's voice is rural central Ohio pretty directly, as are the rest of the crew from West Blue.”
Ah, yes, the United States...
“Because with TSK, I'm mining down to some of the deepest layers of my own experience: the farms, woods, lakes, rivers, animals, plants, insects, people, and weather of my Ohio childhood. (...) Like so many other Americans, for me that vanished landscape is engulfed by various sorts of change or urban sprawl, and is now recoverable only in the mind, as inaccessible to daylight reach as any faerie realm. My childhood has been paved. (...) I was then taken by another fan, Sini, who is a Helsinki librarian in her day job, up to look at the church carved out of the rock, and a ride around town on the tram—trams are as good as a Disneyland ride to me, raised in the no-public-transportation American Midwest. (...) As a car-raised Midwesterner, I tend to regard public transportation as an entrancing alien device with all the charm of a Disneyland ride, and I have to retrain myself in how to use it every time I encounter it.”
Great story: “I admit, though, my all-time favorite fan letter was from a woman in Canada. She wrote to tell me she had been reading Shards of Honor, and, not wanting to put it down, took the book along to read while standing in line at the bank. She is not, she added, normally very scatterbrained or oblivious, but she does like to focus on what she reads. Eventually, she got to the teller to do the necessary banking. The teller said she could not give her change, as the robber had taken all her money. "What robber?" my reader asked. "The one who just held us up at gun-point," the teller explained. It turned out that while she had been engrossed in reading, a masked gunman had come in, robbed the bank, and made his escape, and she never noticed a thing. My reader wrote me, "All I can say is, it must have been a very quiet robbery. The security guard at the door asked if I could describe the thief for the police. Embarrassed, I said no, I didn't think I could."
(N.B.: I'm actually just past the middle of reading Memory.)
“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, Alexander Dumas, and, of course, C. S. Forester. All of these writers created not just 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.”
“Some of my ideas have persisted, some been made obsolete; some have been swapped out for what I presently think are better ones; others have deepened. It would be a minor tragedy if, after all that journeying, the landscape were still the same.”
“It was also explained to me—by Jim Baen in one of our early newbie-writer-tutorial conversations—that the average novel made eighty percent of all the income it was ever going to produce in its first two months on the bookstore shelves, after which it was obsolete and no longer economically exciting. It pretty quickly occurred to me that the defense against that was not to write average novels. This strategy turned out to serve very well.”
“It's increasingly clear to me that the reader and viewer—the active reader or viewer—does a lot more than he or she is ever given credit for. They fill in the blanks. From hope and charity, they explain away plot-holes to their own satisfaction. They add background from the slimmest of clues. They work. (...) So for me, this sheaf of inked paper with the gaudy cover glued to the spine is not the book. The book is not an object on the table; it is an event in the reader's mind. It's a process, through which an idea in my mind triggers an idea, more-or-less corresponding, in yours. TheI don't think a book exists till someone reads it, and the cognitive experience that results is never more than half the text writer's doing. Writers can shape, they can hope, but they can't control; fiction is a dance, not a march. words on the page are merely the means to that end, a think-by-numbers set, a bottled daydream. The book, therefore, is only finished when somebody reads it. (...) The book, if you like, is not the story but merely the blueprint of the story, like the architect's drawings of a house. The reader, then, is the contractor, the guy who does the actual sweat-work of building the dwelling. From the materials in his or her head, the ideas, the images, the previous knowledge, each one actively reconstructs the story-experience—each according to his measure, knowledge, gifts. And charity. (...) I don't think a book exists till someone reads it, and the cognitive experience that results is never more than half the text writer's doing. Writers can shape, they can hope, but they can't control; fiction is a dance, not a march.”
“I probably used my on-line thesaurus more with this book than with any other I've ever written—to find simpler but equally precise synonyms for the polysyllables that tend to fall most trippingly from my typing fingers. I suspect the practice of paying such close attention to my language was good for me as a writer; I know it was fun.”
“All this as preamble to The Sharing Knife. Because TSK is written in dialect: several of 'em, in fact. My native dialect, to be precise—or what would be if my parents hadn't been from Pittsburgh via California and a lot of formal speech training—that of rural Ohio (and points nearby). Fawn's voice is rural central Ohio pretty directly, as are the rest of the crew from West Blue.”
Ah, yes, the United States...
“Because with TSK, I'm mining down to some of the deepest layers of my own experience: the farms, woods, lakes, rivers, animals, plants, insects, people, and weather of my Ohio childhood. (...) Like so many other Americans, for me that vanished landscape is engulfed by various sorts of change or urban sprawl, and is now recoverable only in the mind, as inaccessible to daylight reach as any faerie realm. My childhood has been paved. (...) I was then taken by another fan, Sini, who is a Helsinki librarian in her day job, up to look at the church carved out of the rock, and a ride around town on the tram—trams are as good as a Disneyland ride to me, raised in the no-public-transportation American Midwest. (...) As a car-raised Midwesterner, I tend to regard public transportation as an entrancing alien device with all the charm of a Disneyland ride, and I have to retrain myself in how to use it every time I encounter it.”
Great story: “I admit, though, my all-time favorite fan letter was from a woman in Canada. She wrote to tell me she had been reading Shards of Honor, and, not wanting to put it down, took the book along to read while standing in line at the bank. She is not, she added, normally very scatterbrained or oblivious, but she does like to focus on what she reads. Eventually, she got to the teller to do the necessary banking. The teller said she could not give her change, as the robber had taken all her money. "What robber?" my reader asked. "The one who just held us up at gun-point," the teller explained. It turned out that while she had been engrossed in reading, a masked gunman had come in, robbed the bank, and made his escape, and she never noticed a thing. My reader wrote me, "All I can say is, it must have been a very quiet robbery. The security guard at the door asked if I could describe the thief for the police. Embarrassed, I said no, I didn't think I could."
April 1, 2013
While this is probably worth it only for Bujold uber-fans, I'm squarely in that category. The author's notes I'd seen before and the travelogues were indeed like watching someone's vacation slides, but I did really love the essays and convention speeches. I especially liked her discussions of how she was trying to play against both romance and fantasy conventions in the Sharing Knife series (to try and make a meaningful, adult blend of both). That's persuaded me to give the Sharing Knife (which I didn't connect with the first time around) a second try.
August 12, 2022
Really good, if somewhat repetitive: the book is (as advertised) basically reprints of previously-published essays, though many of those would be very hard to find if they hadn't been collected here. Likely to interest mostly her fans, which I am certainly one. I had a great time reading it. High marks from me!
The rest of this review is selected quotes from highlights in the Kindle edition I read, which was blessedly not copy-protected.
On fiction and individual tastes: "Even the tastes of a single individual vary, sometimes wildly, from day to day and year to year. Anyone who's had the experience of rereading an old favorite and fondly remembered book from their youth, and having it fall apart before their horrified eyes...." Amen! This is Jo Walton's notorious "Suck Fairy."
"Immunity to propaganda ought to be taught as a mental discipline, as common a task for grownups as learning to balance a checkbook."
Getting started as a writer: it's hard. Bujold writes of a story critique she received from her friend Patricia C. Wrede, a fantasy writer from Minneapolis: "She wrote me back a fourteen-page single-spaced letter of critique and encouragement, which was more attention than I'd gotten from one human being in years. I did some rewriting, packed up my story and sent it to a magazine, calculated my pay ($.07 per word times 13,000 words), and waited anxiously. (It never did sell.) .... My personal record is fourteen rejections for a short story."
"The assertion that it's called "hard SF" because it's harder to write has a certain merit. ....
A number of reviewers seem to be allergic to engineering, citing a preference for "characterization," as if engineering was not a human activity, or solving a difficult engineering problem in difficult circumstances was not both a test and a demonstration of character. I disagree profoundly. ...
I wanted to put in a plea for technology as a high human endeavor. ... If Falling Free encourages even one bright young person to look into engineering as a career, I shall be most pleased."
"What I write, really, are Bujold books. They are full of stuff I like, sidestep whatever I don't care for, and have as their main job to please me as a reader." Yay Lois!
The rest of this review is selected quotes from highlights in the Kindle edition I read, which was blessedly not copy-protected.
On fiction and individual tastes: "Even the tastes of a single individual vary, sometimes wildly, from day to day and year to year. Anyone who's had the experience of rereading an old favorite and fondly remembered book from their youth, and having it fall apart before their horrified eyes...." Amen! This is Jo Walton's notorious "Suck Fairy."
"Immunity to propaganda ought to be taught as a mental discipline, as common a task for grownups as learning to balance a checkbook."
Getting started as a writer: it's hard. Bujold writes of a story critique she received from her friend Patricia C. Wrede, a fantasy writer from Minneapolis: "She wrote me back a fourteen-page single-spaced letter of critique and encouragement, which was more attention than I'd gotten from one human being in years. I did some rewriting, packed up my story and sent it to a magazine, calculated my pay ($.07 per word times 13,000 words), and waited anxiously. (It never did sell.) .... My personal record is fourteen rejections for a short story."
"The assertion that it's called "hard SF" because it's harder to write has a certain merit. ....
A number of reviewers seem to be allergic to engineering, citing a preference for "characterization," as if engineering was not a human activity, or solving a difficult engineering problem in difficult circumstances was not both a test and a demonstration of character. I disagree profoundly. ...
I wanted to put in a plea for technology as a high human endeavor. ... If Falling Free encourages even one bright young person to look into engineering as a career, I shall be most pleased."
"What I write, really, are Bujold books. They are full of stuff I like, sidestep whatever I don't care for, and have as their main job to please me as a reader." Yay Lois!
June 23, 2026
I recently watched the author in a YT interview, and I was trying to work out how she designed her world of five gods, so went looking for more info, and found this.
cackling.
I NEED THEM NOW - grabby hands - all of them! PLEASE, Lois.
That is a really good point.
A little repetitive, but she warns you of that - she repeats speeches.
4 stars
**I continue this cycle of creation and writing in fits and starts — I have fits , and then I start writing — as many times as I need until I reach the end of the book . Page 64 ·**
cackling.
Eventually , I think the Chalion series ought to be a set of five books , one volume for each of the five gods and their concerns . If I ever get the chance to write the last two Chalion books , - Page 69 ·
I NEED THEM NOW - grabby hands - all of them! PLEASE, Lois.
**A satisfactory romance is the very opposite of a zero - sum game ; unless both win , both lose . I sometimes wonder if the root of the more vociferous discomfort and negative response to romance by these readers is in the mistaken notion that if the woman has won the man must have lost**
That is a really good point.
A little repetitive, but she warns you of that - she repeats speeches.
4 stars
March 21, 2017
Read this one on the new Kindle, which has more human voices than the old Keyboard, but is harder to search through and the voice I'm using, "Brian", can't pronounce either 'Baen' or 'Bujold'. Once you get over that, though, a lot of what she's writing makes sense and , of course, is very informative about her own books, which I/m currently bingeing on.
Of particular note are her essays describing the value that the readers giving in creating the work, tha by their experience and method of interpreting the text they being as valable a contribution to the writing as the author did inplunking the words down in the first place. Her travel memoir are pretty interesting, too, and I wish she had written one about going to Swancon in Perth so we could her Ohio-eye view of that sleepy little burg.
Highly recommended for a re-read once I get CryoBurn under my belt.
Of particular note are her essays describing the value that the readers giving in creating the work, tha by their experience and method of interpreting the text they being as valable a contribution to the writing as the author did inplunking the words down in the first place. Her travel memoir are pretty interesting, too, and I wish she had written one about going to Swancon in Perth so we could her Ohio-eye view of that sleepy little burg.
Highly recommended for a re-read once I get CryoBurn under my belt.
April 10, 2022
It is somewhat repetitive as you might expect talks for conferences might be but when talking about her characters and writing, it was interesting. I am always interested in hearing how writers write. I especially liked her Dialect and Dialogue, and her discussion fragment on Adverbs. I also liked her one political essay as she seemed to get more emotional than usual. It was written two days after 9/11 so who wasn't emotional.
November 25, 2018
This is a collection of Bujold's non-fiction - I'm just dipping into it in bits and pieces, so it will be here for a while. Very interesting collection includes forwards and afterwords from various books, speeches from conventions, articles from her blog, etc. There were also two interesting articles (travelogues?) about her visits to conventions in Croatia and Finland as guest of honor. Her skill with words is not limited to her fiction!
February 26, 2016
Sidelines is a patchwork of many pieces of cloth, woven during a long and fruitful career: talks, articles, written interviews, speeches, travelogues. These works share the common thread that they're non-fiction.
As one of SFF's most celebrated authors and a purveyor of both hard science fiction and fantasy, Bujold might agree that her novels speak for themselves. As a fan, I certainly think so. But these sidepieces do provide insight into the mind of the author and her works and are well worth the read.
I can find only two faults with this book. One is that there's an element of repetition for some of the pieces which were repurposed, reused, and excerpted form in later works. The other, which she remarks on directly, is the layout. As with the debate regarding whether it's better to read the Vorkosigan saga in chronological order or as written, these pieces might be arranged by date or by topic. The 'right' answer might be 'that depends.'
In any case, the works in this collection are a fascinating read for Bujold fans and writers everywere.
As one of SFF's most celebrated authors and a purveyor of both hard science fiction and fantasy, Bujold might agree that her novels speak for themselves. As a fan, I certainly think so. But these sidepieces do provide insight into the mind of the author and her works and are well worth the read.
I can find only two faults with this book. One is that there's an element of repetition for some of the pieces which were repurposed, reused, and excerpted form in later works. The other, which she remarks on directly, is the layout. As with the debate regarding whether it's better to read the Vorkosigan saga in chronological order or as written, these pieces might be arranged by date or by topic. The 'right' answer might be 'that depends.'
In any case, the works in this collection are a fascinating read for Bujold fans and writers everywere.
July 7, 2016
Food for fans
I love Bujold's science fiction, but I have only read one of her fantasy novels. Most of these speeches and essays deal at least in part with the earlier sci-fi yarns, so I enjoyed that aspect. As I have many of her books, the "afterward" essays I merely skimmed, as I had already read them.
I'm also a bit of a writer, so I really enjoyed the sections (regardless of category) about her career as a writer. Fans will find some delicious tidbits in this collection, and everyone else will probably end up scratching their heads.
I love Bujold's science fiction, but I have only read one of her fantasy novels. Most of these speeches and essays deal at least in part with the earlier sci-fi yarns, so I enjoyed that aspect. As I have many of her books, the "afterward" essays I merely skimmed, as I had already read them.
I'm also a bit of a writer, so I really enjoyed the sections (regardless of category) about her career as a writer. Fans will find some delicious tidbits in this collection, and everyone else will probably end up scratching their heads.
July 30, 2013
Really insightful look into Lois Bujold's writing. It's like having a personal conversation with the author about her work in various settings. Recommended for any big fan who wants to see how Lois thinks. Gave it 4 instead of 5 because some of the essays do borrow from other material so there are some rehashed bits, but it's still a very intriguing read, exciting enough to plow through in a single evening or two.
May 13, 2013
Great way of catching up with all the conferences that work kept me away from!
April 7, 2013
A fascinating collection of essays by brilliant author Lois Bujold. She shares her insights into writing, publishing, culture, and humanity.
April 23, 2013
A collection of essays, travel memoirs, and sundry other writing. A must read for rabid fans.
April 26, 2013
Probably mostly appealing to Bujold fans, but some really interesting insights into genre, SFF, and writing.
March 19, 2014
An enjoyable read from a favorite author.
Displaying 1 - 19 of 19 reviews