Talk:Beguilement (novel)

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I created this entry as part of an effort to have content for each of Ms Bujold's fantasy novels. It still lacks content for the Awards heading, as I have so far been unable to locate reliable names and dates. Quantamike08 (talk) 16:58, 18 March 2008 (UTC)

"Well, for one thing, it’s my first duology. It topped out at 217,000 words, which will fall into approximate halves of 105,000 and 111,000 words respectively. The duology was written and is meant to be read as a single story, but the break point falls at a nice natural place.

As the story opens, Fawn is a young farmer girl running away from home for some very traditional reasons, and Dag is a rather weary Lakewalker patroller, engaged in a generations-long war and hunt against a peculiar and recurring supernatural menace called by the farmers, "blight bogles", and by the Lakewalkers, "malices". The history and mystery of the Lakewalkers' magical "technology" for dealing with this threat drives much of their culture and hence this tale.

Because Lakewalkers’ magical abilities are inherited, their culture is set up to preserve pure bloodlines, and actively discourages liaisons between Lakewalkers-born and “farmers”, i.e., anybody who isn’t a Lakewalker. These urgent cultural constraints drive the main opposition to the romance between Dag and Fawn; their dodgy situation in turn gives me a vehicle to explore both of their cultures, their underlying world, and its history. The first volume, Beguilement, concentrates on Fawn and her farmer culture and family; the second volume, Legacy, focuses more on Dag and his Lakewalker heritage, and goes on to examine the tensions between the two cultures and their fragile hopes for a less divided future. (And, of course, there’s plenty of action as well.)

The first volume is scheduled for October '06. "

http://www.ibdof.com/viewtopic.php?p=1775542#1775542 —Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.158.88.53 (talk) 10:19, 21 November 2008 (UTC)

Not necessasrily a Future North America

Ms. Bujold has been very wary about desctiptions of the setting of these novels as a future or post-apocolyptic North America. She used the map of North America but there is no internal evidence of our culture or history preceding the time of the books. 65.79.173.135 (talk) 16:42, 26 June 2009 (UTC)Will in New Haven65.79.173.135 (talk) 16:42, 26 June 2009 (UTC)