Lois McMaster Bujold is an American woman writer of speculative fiction. She is best known for her space opera series about a character called Miles Vorkosigan, who lives on a planet called Barrayar, where he is the cousin of the Emperor, and spends time as a mercenary Admiral. I’ll talk about the series later. The books are great fun, the character likeable, and an Australian YA novelist, Michael Pryor, was inspired by Miles to write his own steampunk series about a very Miles-like character called Aubrey Fitzwilliam. At least, Michael didn’t deny it when I asked him!
Lois doesn’t mind when fans write fan fiction set in her universes, and actually wrote fan fiction herself in her early days of writing, even producing a fanzine. If you are a fan of the Vorkosigan series, there are around 1000 stories set in that universe on fan fiction website Archive Of Our Own.
Those books are her best known, but she no longer writes space opera, having moved into fantasy. I’m not a huge fan of secondary world fantasy, even though I wrote a novel set in a secondary world inspired by the work of mediaeval poet Marie De France, Wolfborn. But that was set in a world that resembled the mediaeval Brittany of Marie de France.
That said, the first of her novels I read was The Spirit Ring, set in a fantastical Italian Renaissance with a heroine who is the daughter of an artist inspired by Benvenuto Cellini. I was reading Celliini’s autobiography at the time, so it interested me. I did enjoy it, but haven’t been able to get into her later fantasy series, though I tried.
She wrote that one while she was already working on the Vorkosigan novels but it was rejected several times. Baen published it on condition she give them some more Vorkosigan books.
The series has sold literally millions of copies over the years. She has won science fiction’s Hugo Award four times; the only other author who did that was Robert Heinlein. She has also won the Nebula Award for her Vorkosigan novella “The Mountains Of Mourning”; the Hugos are voted by the fans, the Nebulas by fellow writers, so she has been acknowledged by both.
You should be able to buy her books easily enough; I have her space operas in ebook.
I hope you enjoy them as much as I have.
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