The Vorkosigan Companion by Lillian Stewart Carl, John Helfers

friends, and there is no limit to the number of times you want to be with your friends again.
    I have been, therefore, vastly pleased with the number of readers who have written to tell me that my stories have stood their friend in time of need: the mother of a handicapped child; a blind man who lived in rural Kentucky, and "read" the books on audio tape; a woman who reread them all over a weekend and went back to solve a problem at work that had seemed intractable; a soldier serving in a difficult post in the Middle East; a young woman who took them with her to reread during the week of aftershocks of the California earthquake, when she was camping in her backyard, unable to return to her damaged house; a woman fighting depression and an array of medical problems, who felt well enough after a reread to get up and continue coping with her life.
    One reader wrote to let me know that my books had informed his thinking, when he grappled with the task of composing a statement for his national church council on what its position was to be viz cloning and other looming biotechnologies.
    And then the writer gets one of those letters, as I suspect most writers do—paraphrased from memory—"Dear Ms. Bujold, I want to thank you for the very great joy your work gave my husband during the last six months of his life . . ."
    Joy to the dying? Where does that fall on any intellectual grid of "literary merit"?
    And then you realize that we're all dying, here. And so.
    I admit, though, my all-time favorite fan letter was from a woman in Canada. She wrote to tell me she had been reading Shards of Honor , and, not wanting to put it down, took the book along to read while standing in line at the bank. She is not, she added, normally very scatterbrained or oblivious, but she does like to focus on what she reads. Eventually, she got to the teller to do the necessary banking. The teller said she could not give her change, as the robber had taken all her money.
    "What robber?" my reader asked.
    "The one who just held us up at gunpoint," the teller explained. It turned out that while she had been engrossed in reading, a masked gunman had come in, robbed the bank, and made his escape, and she never noticed a thing.
    My reader wrote me, "All I can say is, it must have been a very quiet robbery. The security guard at the door asked if I could describe the thief for the police. Embarrassed, I said no, I didn't think I could."
    LSC: This story was told to me at a mystery convention—I was pleased to discover that it wasn't the equivalent of an urban legend, but quite true. Talk about escaping into a book!
    LMB: Years ago I read an interview with a forensic pathologist who said he had never gone into a bad crime scene, where he had to clean the blood off the walls and whatnot, in any place where there were a lot of books. It occurs to me that because books give us escape even though we may be physically trapped wherever we are, they give us a "time out" space. People who don't have this have to stay in the pressure cooker as the pressure goes higher and higher, until they finally explode into violence expressed either externally or internally in stress illnesses. Books give readers a place to go. This is good for your health and potentially good for the health of the people around you as well. In that sense, I think reading can be a form of self-medication.
    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 get 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.
    That said, if there is any meaning at all in any work of fiction that can be transposed back to real