Free The Vorkosigan Companion by Lillian Stewart Carl, John Helfers Page A

that some countries and cultures seem to be "science-fiction-friendly," and others less so. The most avid overseas markets for SF and fantasy at present seem to be Japan and Russia, then Australia and New Zealand, Europe and Eastern Europe, and a very little in South America. There does not appear to be as much SF activity in the rest of Southeast Asia (although I once received e-mail from a fan from Vietnam, he read in the original English), India, Africa apart from South Africa, or the Islamic countries, but that may be changing.
    Part of the problem, I think, is that SF has been so America-  centic and Britain-centric (with a nod to Jules Verne, here). If people look at a type of literature and don't see anyone like themselves represented in it, they tend to put it back on the shelf, thinking it isn't addressed to them. This has posed a problem for SF in our own country in the past with respect to women readers and black readers, whose selves and concerns seemed excluded from earlier works in the genre. In all the places where SF is popular, the cultures and countries in question seem to have taken up the genre and made it theirs, with the local writers assimilating the foreign model, but then taking off with it in their own directions with their own voices.
    LSC: Your work has been packaged as military SF. I don't recall this ever being your intention, though.
    LMB: At the time I wrote my first books, I don't think the sub-genre had split out yet; I certainly was not aware of it as a thing separate from adventure tales in general. Properly speaking, milSF as a label should be applied to works whose central concern is an exploration of the military in action, doing its job (well or badly, depending). My Miles-centric books, really, are explorations of the psychology of a fellow from a deeply conservative culture who starts out as an army-mad youngster, and grows out of it (well, partially), and along the way encounters other people who occasionally have to deal with the military as a human cultural artifact in the course of a larger story. The military adventures are sometimes occasions for my tales, but they are seldom the point of my tales, which are more usually about what's going on inside people's heads, and in their wider lives. "What are these people thinking?," again.
    LSC: The Vorkosigan series covers a lot of genres, and was doing so before genre-blending became marketable.
    LMB: I don't stick to one mode, which confuses people who think series books should be cut to standard shapes like cookies. Genre conventions—which I see as another term for reader expectations—are fun. There're so many things you can do with them—twist them, invert or subvert them, bounce things off them, ignore them, or even play them straight. Like the form of a sonnet, genre forms don't really constrain content, emotion, or meaning—you can write a sonnet about anything from love and death to HO-gauge model railroading, although I'm not sure anyone has done the latter, yet. Surprise, for example, is a literary effect that almost depends on the readers having expectations shaped by prior reads.
    My personal definition of a genre is, "Any group of works in close conversation with each other." As readers, we tend to encounter only the polished result of that uproar, as the book alone appears in our hand and the context drops away. Classics are particularly at risk of seeming to have been hung in air, having escaped the death of their original surround. But the reading context matters, since the ground changes the figure.
    I've long imagined the sort of SF critics who claim "We want to see writers stretch the boundaries of the genre!" taking one look at my work and crying, "No, but not like that!" (I suspect they really want to see SF link upward to genres of higher status, like mainstream, and not, say, sideways to mystery, or worse, downward to romance.) Within the Vorkosigan series, I've played with romance, coming-of-age, mystery,