Sidelines: Talks and Essays

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 show more 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. show less