BUJOLD, Lois McMaster

(1949-)

   US writer who began publishing sf with "Barter" for Twilight Zone in 1985. Almost all her published work is part of a loose series of humorous adventures set in a future of feuding galactic colonies connected by FASTER-THAN-LIGHT "wormhole jumps". Most of these stories feature members of the Vorkosigan family, part of an elite military caste from the planet Barrayar, recently rediscovered by galactic civilization after regressing into semifeudalism. Shards of Honor (1986) and its immediate sequel BARRAYAR (1991) which won a 1992 HUGO, deal with the romance between Lord Aral Vorkosigan and a sophisticated off-worlder; the child of their marriage is Miles Vorkosigan, born with severe physical handicaps due to a politically inspired attempt to poison his father. Miles grows up to become a supremely charismatic, witty, compulsively driven military genius who triumphantly transcends the difficulties caused by his brittle bones and 4ft 9in (1.45m) stature. His complicated double life in the Barrayaran Navy (as an ensign) and the Dendarii Mercenaries (of which he accidentally becomes the founder and admiral) is followed, in order of internal chronology, in The Warrior's Apprentice (1986)-assembled with Shards of Honor as Test of Honor (omni 1987) - THE VOR GAME (1990), which won a 1991 Hugo, Brothers in Arms (1989) and the ambitious Mirror Dance (1994) The short stories in The Borders of Infinity (coll 1989) - assembled with THE VOR GAME as Vorkosigan's Game (omni 1990) - including the Hugo- and NEBULA-winning "The Mountains of Mourning" (1989), feature Miles at various points in his career. Ethan of Athos (1986), set after THE VOR GAME, focuses on Elli Quinn, who eventually becomes Miles's lover. FALLING FREE (1988), LMMB's best known single novel and winner of the 1988 Nebula, is set 200 years before the start of the Vorkosigan tales and tells the story of a rebellion-by humans genetically engineered to live in zero GRAVITY - against the company which has created them and plans, once their commercial value has expired, to dump them on a planetary surface.LMMB is a writer whose books are both funny and humane. Her characters have strong feeling for each other and, when compared to similar military figures in the work of such male writers as Jerry POURNELLE, are often remarkably (and perhaps unrealistically) gentle. Though the ideas content in her work is generally low, her novels and stories succeed on their own terms.

   NT

   Other works:The Spirit Ring (1992), a fantasy.

   See also: ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION; COLONIZATION OF OTHER WORLDS; GENETIC ENGINEERING; SPACE OPERA; WAR.