INTRODUCTION
The first thing new readers who have picked up Penric’s Progress need to know is that it doesn’t require them to have read any other of its series-sibling books, or indeed any other Bujold work, before diving in. The book itself will teach you how to read it.
The Penric & Desdemona novellas were written to be stand-alones, fresh entry points for a still-growing fantasy series that has come to be dubbed The World of the Five Gods. The present collection of three tales (all previously appearing separately, but only as e-editions or limited deluxe hardcovers) starts with “Penric’s Demon,” Penric kin Jurald’s very first adventure as written, as published, and in his internal chronology, so pretty inescapably first.
For a quick overview of all my stories and how they relate to one another, I’ve provided a reading-order guide at the end of this volume. For this novella collection, the chronological arranging has been done for you.
So from my point of view, the ideal reader should now put down this introduction and turn to the start of the actual story, spoiler-free. Come back later; these words will wait, and the leisurely chat that follows will make more sense in context.
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My books, and my series, tend to grow organically, rather than being bolted to some grand over-arching plan. I have to write my way into a story in order to find out what happens, and along that road find opportunities for invention and surprise that could never have occurred on day and page one. I can’t create in a vacuum, of course. Research reading and viewing (in the broadest sense) plus the general pool of my life experiences come first. From that, story notions will begin to coalesce in my mind and link up with each other, working toward some critical mass, but nothing happens until I glimpse and then grasp characters that interest me; in seed form, to be sure, but with their genetics set. It is also possible for me to begin with settings, plots, or themes, and lay in the other elements as needed, but mostly my characters generate their worlds.
Characters can’t grow in a vacuum either, but must be created by their actions as they move through their tales. So setting, character, and plot are all tightly interlinked in a connected circle. When that wheel starts rolling, story happens. For a novel I will typically produce maybe fifty pages of hand-written notes on all aspects of the proposed piece, until Scene One come glimmering up out of the fog. Once gripped, the first link of the chain begins to pull up the rest into view scene-by-scene, each completed section both constraining and changing the possibilities for the next, in a sort of continuous-flow creative process.
As far as settings go, and risking the hazards of revealing how sausages are made, I often use real places and historical events much the way working artists use reference photos when arranging their compositions; not because I am trying to draw a portrait of the model, but as a quick way to get proportions and perspectives right for a coming overlay pursuing quite another purpose. Readers who try to process the result as portraiture—either as historical fiction with the serial numbers filed off, or as historical critique—are using inappropriate viewing protocols for this style of composition. Attempts to draw exact one-to-one correspondences between my impressionist fiction and history thus naturally tend to go awry. Granted, spot-the-references can be a fun game, especially if it leads to more reading.
One of the side-effects of my methods is that I tend to resist naming my series—coming up with book titles is hard enough—until well into them. This results in the fans naming them for me. “The Vorkosiverse” is not what I would have titled the science fiction series centering around the planet Barrayar, nor even “The Miles Vorkosigan Stories.” I might have picked something to do with its wider space-setting of the wormhole nexus, but “wormhole” is kind of an ugly word, so I dragged my feet. Thirty-something years in, I’ve still never given the set of, by accretion, seventeen books and a few stray novellas a name, but it says “The Vorkosigan Saga” on my first Hugo award for best series, so I guess that’s official now.
My more recent fantasy work was similarly slow to grow its series title. First, it was just one book, The Curse of Chalion, written, and published by HarperCollins, around the turn of the millennium. It spawned a sequel, the way books do, taking up some unfinished business with a key minor character who quickly grew into a major one with her own themes in Paladin of Souls. From its setting and the needs of marketing, this was dubbed “The Chalion Series.”
By this time, I was thinking about a series connected not by continuing action, but by a thematic pattern or template of one book for each of my world’s five gods, a grand over-arching plan at last. (Turns out that trick never works, at least not for me, but I had intentions.) Inspired and informed by my history research reading, I went off in a different direction with the third book, back almost three hundred years in time and over to another realm, god-of-focus, local system of magics, and new cast of characters for what became The Hallowed Hunt. This took aback a lot of readers who plunged into it expecting a standard series development of their favorites from the first two books. So the third “Chalion” book had nothing to do with the country of Chalion, which created a conundrum. The fans started dubbing it “the 5GU” for the five-gods universe, which sounded like some kind of computer part to me.
Then the series and the grand-plan notion foundered on my general disinclination to write books for the two remaining gods, and I turned instead to what became the tetralogy The Sharing Knife, which also permitted me to explore yet another series structure, the one-tale-in-multiple-volumes. That one was named early and officially. And after that I returned to some unfinished business with the Vorkosigan saga, which eventually turned into three more books and one trailing novella.
The last novel, which eventually became Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen, had stalled out in the middle due to a combination of life issues—house moves and major surgery are both very distracting, it turns out—and the stubborn refusal of the material to be dragged into any kind of expected action-adventure genre template. Some writers talk about characters running away with their story. Mine go on sit-down strikes. We were at loggerheads for a long time, as I could neither abandon the project midway nor, apparently, write anything else till it was finished. I finally said rude words to myself, and wrote it as it wanted to be. Much better.
I had by that time reached retirement age—not that writers stop until tackled to the ground; I have a theory that writing fiction is actually a dissociative disorder—so, having no one else to do it, I discharged myself from the working army. I decided to re-compose my career ala carte, taking only the parts I enjoyed onto my plate and leaving the stressful bits on the table. (The first thing to go was travel and public speaking. This entailed learning to say “No” to nice people who like me, which is not easy. Keeping tax records alas continues to death and beyond.)
Having had good experiences by this time with e-book reprints of my older material, I was also keenly interested in what would happen if I tried an original piece as an indie e-pub. I also wanted to write something shorter. I also hankered for the fun of writing about a really powerful magician of some sort.
And I had also had recent experience with the beneficial results of tossing out rigid templates. If the plan of five novels was preventing me from writing more in the world of Chalion, it obviously was not serving me anymore, nor my readers.
All these alsos came together in the somewhat unexpected person of Penric.
My first inner vision was of an older Penric. Not wishing to make extra work for myself, because, semi-retired!, though mostly because there were a lot of implications about magic hinted at but left under-explored in the prior Chalion books, I settled him into that fictional universe, where he immediately put down roots. With that choice, a great many aspects of his magic and how it could work—and, importantly for drama, be constrained—slotted right in.
This also gave occasion to rename the series to something having a wider scope, so, taking direction from the fans, it became “The World of the Five Gods.” A little unwieldy, but flexible and informative, so I think it will stick henceforth. It’s now engraved on my second Hugo for best series, so is set in, if not stone, metal.
I immediately knew I wanted to fit Penric’s possibilities into novellas. It was a form familiar from my youthful reading, not only from magazines, but from the old Ace Doubles, which used to present two novellas, each too short for a proper paperback, glued back-to-back to make up market weight, and also from several much-beloved fix-up collections. These latter models included John Brunner’s The Traveller in Black, Roger Zelazny’s Lord of Light, and Fritz Leiber’s tales of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, not to mention a lot of Sherlock Holmes, among many others. By this early imprinting, I associated novellas with grand adventure, but wait, there’s more . . . all kinds of story-aspects that novellas, swift and light on their feet, can take on.
I actually wrote my very first novella, “The Borders of Infinity,” back in 1986 for a Baen invitational anthology called Free Lancers, which introduced me to the pleasures and advantages of the form from the writer’s side. I’d already captured ideas for that Miles story in penciled notes, but they’d just sat fallow, obviously failing to be novel-length. Here was a chance to write the tale at exactly the length it wanted to be. Without subplots, it had the exhilaration of speeding down a freeway with no exits: one subject, tight scope, less getting mired in the middle.
The arrival of e-books as a publishing medium blew open the market for the length and likewise for subject matter, formerly constricted to a very few paper magazine slots with limited editorial needs. E-novellas gave Penric a place to go, and their ala carte publication offered great flexibility for series content, sequence, setting, production—everything. Like trading a straitjacket for wings.
Various disconnected scenes from my sorcerer’s possible future life sloshed around in my imagination for a while, while I focused in on some more directed research reading. I eventually decided to wind him back and begin him at his beginning, when he first contracted his magic as a naïve and earnest young man.
In the world of the five gods, magical powers are not inborn but obtained, by—among other methods—acquiring a chaos demon, an invisible bodiless entity stemming ultimately from the fifth god, known as the Bastard in His holy family. This led me to the need to make up the character of the demon, which, in this system, opened up a huge range of possibilities, since demons, all beginning as identical blobs of escaped chaos, learn their diverse personalities from the succession of sorcerers they symbiotically inhabit over, potentially, many lives. This also, to my vast amusement, gave me the chance to combine the fetching young male protagonist beloved by the market with the cranky older woman so familiar from the inside of my own head.
But the reader can better learn all about what came of that beginning just as I did, by starting at page one and going on.
Ta, L.
July 2019