Ever since I got into SF, I’ve heard the name Lois McMaster Bujold spoken with admiration and respect. This author of space opera and fantasy is also the winner of four Hugos, two Nebulas, the World Fantasy Award, the Locus Award and the Mythopoeic Award. You can’t argue with that kind of success, so I spent last night and some of this morning poking around to see which books to start with.

Bujold has written a whole slew of books and stories; to get an idea, just check out her entry at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database. When choosing a book to start with, for any author as prolific as Bujold, a reading order debate is inevitable, so I was not surprised to learn that there’s no real consensus. According to the Wikipedia article on her longest-running series, the Vorkosigan Saga, the most-recommended book to read first is The Mountains of Mourning (a Hugo and Nebula winning novella), which happens to be available as a free ebook at the Baen Free Library.

Choosing a fantasy to start off with might be easier; Bujold has two fantasy series to date, the Chalion universe, beginning with The Curse of Chalion, and The Sharing Knife, beginning with Beguilement.

While trying to figure out what to read first, I also found excerpts of a Locus Magazine interview with Bujold from 2005.

“Both historical fantasy and futuristic science fiction have the appeal of being very far away from here, that escapist element. Of course the more you read about history, the less you want to go live there, but it still has that romanticism — not in the sense of sexual romance but in the sense of exotic places. ‘Escapist’ is one of those terms that gets used with a sneer, but I’m getting to be more and more of the opinion that it has a value in its own right that isn’t being properly appreciated.”