A Conversation with Lois McMaster Bujold on Penric, The Physicians of Vilnoc, and the World of the Five Gods

Lois McMaster Bujold. Photo by Lisa Freitag

The eighth novella in author Lois McMaster Bujold’s Penric series, The Physicians of Vilnoc, is out in print this month. As with the rest of the Penric novellas, it was released first by the author as an e-book, but I like the solid feel of a book in my hands. Happily, while I’ve been waiting, the ninth novella and a full Penric novel have already appeared online. In addition, Bujold agreed to answer some of my questions about the series and the upcoming print book.

The fantasy series is officially called the World of the Five Gods because, according to Bujold in the introduction to Penric’s Progress, that’s what is engraved on her 2018 Hugo Award for best series. This is a world in which the gods are very real but mostly are obvious only at funerals, when death opens a narrow doorway for one of the Five to stake a definitive claim on the soul of the deceased. However, there are people—saints, and sorcerers such as Penric—whose lives are touched more firmly by the gods. The messages they receive are not always understandable or safe, but they are unmistakably life-changing.

It is not necessary to read the earlier trilogy set in the World of the Five Gods in order to follow the Penric novellas. However, I must recommend the first book in the trilogy, The Curse of Chalion, as one of my all-time favorite fantasy novels. The Penric novellas might best be enjoyed in order, though. The first six are readily available as e-books and collected in both hardcover and paperback. For those of you interested in a full account, Bujold recommends this reading-order guide on Goodreads.

Penric is, at the beginning of the novellas, an easygoing, vaguely contented man of 19 years who isn’t especially disappointed when his life is waylaid on the way to his betrothal ceremony. He is in the right (wrong) place at the right (wrong) time to become the host of a 200-year-old chaos demon, whom he eventually names Desdemona.

With Desdemona comes the power of a sorcerer and, since demon sorcery comes from the gods—the fifth god, called the Bastard, to be exact—the requirement to earn the rank of seminary-trained divine sworn to the Bastard’s Order. By the time of The Physicians of Vilnoc, Penric is 33 years old, an established Temple sorcerer of the Bastard’s Order in Vilnoc. When a mysterious plague strikes near the city, he is forced to return to his disavowed profession of physician.

Desdemona also brings with her 10 individual voices, all women, who have carried the demon previously and imprinted their personalities on it. This provides an amusing internal conversation to which the affable Penric takes rather well, considering. It is a bit like having assorted mothers-in-law inside your head. However, being formed from pure chaos, the demon is rather more inclined toward destruction than nagging. She provides moments of insight, intimacy, understanding, and wry humor, often at the same time, as does her author.

Baen

Lisa Freitag (TCG): This is an impressive number of books, particularly considering that you retired just before beginning the first Penric novella. How many books have you written since you “retired”?

Lois McMaster Bujold: The first Penric and Desdemona novella, Penric’s Demon, was the first thing I wrote under my new indie e-publishing scheme. So, counting up, 11 novellas and a novel since I “retired” in 2015-ish.

TCG: Are there any differences or advantages to writing in retirement?

Bujold: I’ve retired under a sort of reverse à la carte system, setting down the tasks I didn’t enjoy anymore—public speaking, book tours, deadlines, contractual obligations—and keeping the parts I did—the writing itself and contact with my readers online, mainly through my Goodreads blog. The Good Parts version of a writing career. So there’s much less worry about how my works’ sales will perform for people who have invested money and time in their publication, since that’s mostly just me now.

I’ve pretty much always written what I wanted, not as some brave artistic virtue, but because I can’t do anything else. Words won’t come to order. So not a lot of change to the core of things there.

TCG: Is it fun to write a 200-year-old chaos demon use who can, essentially, tell your hero exactly what she thinks of him?

Bujold: “Cranky older woman with opinions” is a fun type to write, yes, very much so. Any character who can bring the snark is gold for a for a writer.

TCG: Are all writers actually chaos demons—forming themselves, or at least their stories, from pure chaos?

Bujold: Heh. All writers generate their stories out of themselves, to be sure; how chaotic this will be will vary with the writer. Chaos demons form their personalities from imprinting by the people and world around them, much the way writers pick up story forms and content.

But we are wandering away from Desdemona here. Short answer is, yes, she’s a hoot to write. Her internal complexity and variety and underlying profound alienness are especially challenging to keep track of, but in a good way.

Subterranean Press

TCG: The Physicians of Vilnoc has become one of my favorites, partly because it deals with Penric’s career in medicine and partly because it features an older, more centered Penric, with whom I have already fallen a little bit in love. I’m also quite fond of the cover art. This may be the first time that one of your characters has been properly depicted on a book cover.

Bujold: For the limited hardcover reprint, Subterranean Press’s artist Lauren Saint-Onge has outdone herself with the best rendition of both the character and the story theme I’ve ever had, so I’m wildly happy with that.

TCG: Obviously, given the release date in early May 2020 for the e-book, you already had the story well in hand when the coronavirus pandemic hit last March, providing its own story about a mysterious disease. Did the pandemic alter the course of the story at all?

Bujold: Indeed, as I’ve been explaining ever since its e-publication in May of 2020, what became The Physicians of Vilnoc was conceived and begun at the end of 2019 before the pandemic appeared on my horizon, although it was finished very much during. While the pandemic didn’t affect the book’s content, it did affect its packaging, the title and cover, which were the last things to be settled upon. My original working title, Penric and the Blue Witch, elicited an e-cover from my artist, Ron Miller, that looked like a lurid ’50s horror-movie poster—totally the wrong tone for both the story and the moment. I scrapped both and spent a thoughtful day coming up with a more fitting title, and then a couple of weeks working out with him a more sober e-cover, which is the one now on the e-book and audio edition.

Lois McMaster Bujold

TCG: The coronavirus is, of course, not the first mysterious infectious disease to cause problems, though it may be the widest spread. Earlier generations were not able to determine a cause or study their sources so thoroughly. Even with a sorcerer’s magic, Penric has fairly limited resources to research his own plague. Without giving away any spoilers, can you name the source of your inspiration for the novella?

Bujold: Any reader of history, the history of science, or especially the history of medicine is well aware that the recent pandemic year brought nothing new to humanity, and all my springs of inspiration for this story were from older models, which were plenty enough.

Probably my earliest-encountered source was a book I read back in fifth grade, one of those kids’ chapter-book biographies, this one of Walter Reed and his work in the tropics as a young army doctor figuring out the real vectors of the deadly yellow fever. I don’t remember the name of my fifth-grade teacher or any of my classmates, but I vividly remember the account of Reed’s experiment. He and a crew of equally determined volunteers locked themselves in a well-screened cabin for a couple of weeks with a lot of horribly soiled bedding and other waste from fever victims who’d died, but no mosquitoes, thus dramatically proving that the disease was not spread by personal contact, which was the prevailing theory at the time. The characterization of Master Rede in my story is inspired by him.

TCG: Penric is particularly interesting to me because of his difficulties with his medical career. Events revealed as backstory in Penric’s Mission and again in The Physicians of Vilnoc show that he was training to become a physician-sorcerer. He was very good at it, partly because Desdemona holds the imprint of two women who had used sorcery for healing. But he was emotionally unable to continue and refused to take the final Temple oaths.

Penric is the only fictional physician I’ve seen who has declared himself unsuited to medical practice. I love that he has run dangerously close to the emotional perils of the practice of medicine, and yet he still comes to help when necessary and falls into the same trap. Can you expand on the emotional hazards you see in the practice of medicine? Where did you learn about those hazards?

Bujold: Real physician burnout has parallels with burnout from any other demanding professional or, indeed, personal task, but especially anywhere the practitioner is trying to do a good thing that can and sometimes does go horribly wrong—teaching and parenting, for just two examples.

As for the emotions of it, I suppose this aspect of Penric goes back to the decade of my 20s that I spent working as a drug administration technician—whose job it was to administer the medication to all the patients on a ward, under the supervision of the hospital pharmacists—at a major university hospital. Looking back from long after, I can see that a bookish, introverted, vaguely dissociative person who lived mainly up inside her own head was not especially well matched with the job, and by the end of the decade I couldn’t wait to be out of there. I haven’t had nightmares about it for a while now, but it still surfaces now and then.

I was unconscious at the time of just how very much human observation of all sorts I was putting under my belt, to the great benefit of the writer I eventually became. Scaling it up to Penric’s much, much more responsible and difficult medical duties is a typical creative move that writers do all the time, small experiences writ large.

As noted, The Physicians of Vilnoc is available online as an e-book, and soon also as a hardcover from Subterranean Press. There is a signed leatherbound edition, and locally, both Uncle Hugo’s online and DreamHaven Books have signed trade editions. The next two books in the series, the novella Masquerade in Lodi (which actually fits between earlier novellas) and a novel called The Assassins of Thasalon, are also available now as e-books. The print publication of these will by necessity take a bit longer.

I assume there will be more Penric books, but Bujold never divulges her writing plans until they are nearing reality. And she’s semiretired, so she doesn’t have to!