Bujold is the daughter of Robert Charles McMaster[7][8] and attributes her early interest in science fiction, as well as certain aspects of the Vorkosigan Saga, to his influence.

[17] Bujold had been friends with Lillian Stewart Carl since high school, where they "collaborated on extended story lines [but where] only a fragment of the total was written out.".

Bujold has credited her friend Lillian Stewart Carl's first book sales with inspiring her to return to the field: "it occurred to me that if she could do it, I could do it too.

"[2] She originally planned to write as a hobby again, but discovered the amount of work required was too much for anything other than a profession, so she decided to turn professional.

Earlier titles are generally firmly in the space opera tradition with no shortage of battles, conspiracies, and wild twists, while in more recent volumes, Miles becomes more of a detective.

It centers on a catastrophic dinner party, with misunderstandings and dialogue justifying the subtitle "A Comedy of Biology and Manners".

The author has stated that the series structure is modeled after the Horatio Hornblower books, documenting the life of a single person.

Bujold has also said that part of the challenge of writing a series is that many readers will encounter the stories in "utterly random order", so she must provide sufficient background in each of them without being excessively repetitious.

Most recent printings of her Vorkosigan tales do include an appendix at the end of each book, summarizing the internal chronology of the series.

This time, she met with considerable critical and commercial success by tapping into a crossover market of fantasy and romance genre fans.

The fantasy world of Chalion was first conceived as a result of a University of Minnesota course she was taking about medieval Spain in her spare time.

[24] The next fantasy world she created was the tetralogy set in the universe of The Sharing Knife, borrowing inspiration for its landscapes and for the dialect of the "farmers" from ones she grew up with in central Ohio.

[27] Despite this, she no longer reads fan fiction about her own characters due to legal and financial concerns, "fascinating as [she] finds it".