What Makes This Book So Great

by Jo Walton

  Again, though, this isn’t a great first book that sets a pattern for the series. It’s a lot closer to most of the books—it’s Miles-centred, it features the Dendarii Mercenaries, it introduces some key recurring characters, Ivan, Alys (barely glimpsed), Emperor Gregor, Elena, Bel Thorne, Elli Quinn. I suppose some of the others are even on this pattern. The Vor Game (1990) and Brothers in Arms (1989) are both “adventures with the Dendarii where the heart of the thing is Barrayar.” But none of the others have that shape. And on the writing level, this is perhaps a little smoother than Shards, but only a little. If you look at this as the beginning, it’s a good book and I’m deeply fond of it, but the series does get a lot deeper and more complex as it goes on from here.

  APRIL 2, 2009

  37. Quest for Ovaries: Lois McMaster Bujold’s Ethan of Athos

  Ethan of Athos (1986) is Lois McMaster Bujold’s third published novel and the third book in the Vorkosigan saga. It’s absolutely nothing like the other two. Athos is a planet where, like Mount Athos in Greece, women are not allowed. Ethan is an obstetrician there, before he gets sent on a mission to the wider galaxy to bring back new ovarian cultures. There he meets the mercenary Elli Quinn, who upsets all his ideas about women, and becomes involved in a complicated plot involving two sets of interstellar thugs (from Cetaganda and Jackson’s Whole), a telepath, and the whole future of his planet.

  The thing that makes this good is Ethan’s unruffled innocence; the charming utopian Athos, where you have to earn social duty credits to be entitled to a son; the quiet acceptance of homosexuality as the norm on Athos (there is no actual onstage sex in the book); the ecologically obsessed Kline Station; and the fast-paced plot that doesn’t give you time to think.

  My favourite moment is when Terrence Cee reveals himself as a telepath to Ethan:

  “If you truly possess such a talent it would seem a shame not to use it. I mean, one can see the applications right away.”

  “Can’t one, though,” muttered Cee bitterly.

  “Look at pediatric medicine—what a diagnostic aid for pre-verbal patients! Babies who can’t answer Where does it hurt? What does it feel like? Or for stroke victims, or those paralysed in accidents who have lost all ability to communicate, trapped in their bodies. God the Father!” Ethan’s enthusiasm mounted. “You could be an absolute savior!”

  Terrence Cee sat down rather heavily. His eyes widened in wonder, narrowed in suspicion. “I’m more often viewed as a menace. No one I’ve met who knew my secret ever suggested any use for me but espionage.”

  “Well—were they espionage agents themselves?”

  “Now that you mention it, yes for the most part.”

  “So there you are. They see you as what they would be, given your gift.”

  It’s interesting that Athos is a Planet of Men, because it’s the only one I know of, and I can think of quite a few examples of Planets of Women (Russ’s Whileaway, Griffith’s Ammonite [1992]) and others of Women and Men Live Apart (Sargent’s Shore of Women [1986], Tepper’s The Gate to Women’s Country [1989], Brin’s Glory Season [1992]). I couldn’t have imagined what a feminist notion a planet of men is, and how tied up with nurturing children Athos is, accounting for the costs in a way that doesn’t dismiss it as “women’s work.” In the end Ethan comes to realise that Athos has mothers too, or at least ovarian donors.

  Elli Quinn, who was a very minor character in The Warrior’s Apprentice but who will be important in the series later, is the only repeating character in this book. Other things that will later become important are the Cetagandans and (especially!) House Bharaputra of Jackson’s Whole. Barrayar is barely mentioned. The name Vorkosigan is not mentioned. And in the rest of the series, the things that are so important here are barely mentioned. Kline Station is never revisited; neither is Athos, and they’re barely mentioned again. Terran-C is mentioned once briefly in one of the stories in Borders of Infinity (1989). It’s possible that Bujold is planning to revisit the planet of peaceful gay guys in a few generations when they’re all telepaths, but so far she has done no more with it. So it’s perfectly possible to see this book as a detachable appendix to the series, like Falling Free. But it was written immediately after the first two books, and published immediately after them. It was as if Bujold had three tries at starting the series. She began it with Cordelia, again with Miles, and then a third time with Ethan and Elli before settling down to write a lot more about Miles. Was she waiting to see what people wanted? Or was it just that she had a lot of different interesting ideas and working them out within the context of one universe gave her a solid base of history and geography to go on from?

  APRIL 3, 2009

  38. Why he must not fail: Lois McMaster Bujold’s Borders of Infinity

  Borders of Infinity (1989) is a collection of short stories about Miles. One of them, “The Mountains of Mourning,” is about Miles Vorkosigan on Barrayar, and the other two are about Admiral Naismith, galactic mercenary (daring rescues a specialty).

  Brothers in Arms and the collection Borders of Infinity were both published in 1989. When I re-read the way I normally do, chronologically, I’m never sure which order to read them in, as the stories take place at such different times. The frame story is clearly after Brothers in Arms and yet Brothers in Arms opens with Miles surveying the damage from “The Borders of Infinity.” (It’s probably a good thing the collection doesn’t exist in that form anymore except for hardback collectors so people who want everything chronological can have it in the new versions.)

  But I’m reading in publication order, and they were both published in 1989. With the computer off, I couldn’t tell which had actually been published first. So I grabbed Borders of Infinity on the grounds that at least some of the stories are earlier. Looking around, it seems I was wrong, sorry.

  The frame story is set immediately after Brothers in Arms and does not develop the main internal chronological plot of the series at all. Miles is having the bones of his arms replaced with plastic bones, and ImpSec is being audited. It’s a very shallow frame, barely an outline to hang the three novellas from. It’s a fairly clunky device. Having said that, I kind of like it. It gives us a bit more Miles, a bit more Simon, and it actually does some setup for Memory, though it probably could have done that better if it had known what it was doing. In losing the collection in favour of inserting the stories at the right chronological points, the frame is lost entirely, and I think I’d miss it.

  “The Mountains of Mourning” is set immediately before The Vor Game, which of course she hadn’t written yet. It’s the best written thing in the series so far. Miles, fresh out of the Imperial Academy, goes up to the backwoods of the Dendarii mountains and discovers what he’s fighting for. It’s the most significant part of the whole sequence as far as understanding Miles goes, because Miles doesn’t work without his heart in Barrayar. Miles is interesting most especially because he’s pulled in many directions, and this one is what matters most. This is Miles’s emotional core. The story is quiet and understated and people mentioned in the Warrior’s Apprentice post that it’s online.

  “Labyrinth” gives us a close-up look at Jackson’s Whole and thus sets up Mirror Dance. It also introduces Taura, and has a quaddie, connecting back to Falling Free and forward to Diplomatic Immunity. It’s an interesting model of daring rescue, actually. Miles is sent in to kill a monster, when what’s necessary is to rescue a princess. He thinks this himself, and Taura’s transformation from monster to princess (or at least mercenary) is what the story is about. It all goes very smoothly.

  “The Borders of Infinity” is clearly a thought experiment of Miles carrying on naked. I noticed that in Shards of Honor Cordelia thinks Aral could do it, and here Miles does it. It’s another daring rescue, he rescues thousands of prisoners of war from a prison camp after getting them organized using nothing more than willpower. This gets the Cetagandans really mad at him, which becomes important in Brothers in Arms. He also traumatises himself by losing a
woman out of the shuttle, as if he needed to be any more traumatised.

  Through all of these Miles continues convincingly manic-depressive and to make his physical problems seem trivial. He sometimes manages to carry on through unconvincing amounts of pain, or at least sufficiently more pain than I could carry on through, and I’m fairly used to it myself. Having said that, she never really pushes it into total unbelievability—and here the frame story helps, by showing us Miles completely helpless.

  In the context of the series, she wrote these three stories that are oh-so-definitely about Miles, and contextualising the whole universe around Miles, while at the same time writing the next Miles novel, so she must have definitely made some decisions about direction. It’s a good place to start the series, or at least a lot of people seem to have happily started it here and gone on to love it. It’s taking the series forward by focusing on Miles. I mentioned that the most interesting thing about Miles is his dual nature, the way his heart is on Barrayar and yet he can only really relax, and only really succeed, and only really serve when he’s being Admiral Naismith. The novels all play on that. These stories divide him up, one on Barrayar, two in space. The frame roots them to Barrayar.

  APRIL 5, 2009

  39. What have you done with your baby brother? Lois McMaster Bujold’s Brothers in Arms

  Brothers in Arms (1989) is the first Bujold book I read. I didn’t like it much. I can therefore confidently say that it isn’t a good place to start the series. The reason why I didn’t like it relates to my spearpoint theory. Briefly, a spearpoint is a tiny sharp point that needs a whole long spear behind to make it go in. Similarly the weight of significance of things in fiction sometimes need long buildups to make them get proper impact. This is a book that needs the weight of earlier books to have the impact it needs. A lot of what’s good about it depends on knowing things already, out of the context of this book. So it’s weird really that it’s only the second novel about Miles, in publication order.

  Six months after I read this, when I picked up Shards of Honor, all I remembered about it was the cat blanket, mercenaries and lots of running around after a clone. So much of what’s good about it went right over my head without context. I can’t believe Galeni made no impression on me, but he didn’t. (Galeni is one of my favourite characters in the whole series, perhaps my very favourite after Mark and Miles.)

  In the thread about The Warrior’s Apprentice, JoeNotCharles talks about how much better Bujold has got at setting up implausible situations and making them believable. For me as a reader I’ve never had any problem with the implausibility of her situations except in Brothers in Arms, where the clone of Miles being controlled by Galeni’s father didn’t convince me. If I’d already known Miles as Naismith and as Vorkosigan, if I’d had the grounding in Barrayar you get by reading the other books, I’d probably have had no problem with this either. But it’s not just that. I’d have cared already. With spear-building a lot of it is ensuring that the reader cares about the right things. I came to this book without already caring, and it didn’t make me care. I liked it enough to finish it, and to pick up another book by the same author when I came across one, but it took Shards to hook me.

  Having said that, when you do already care about Miles, Ivan, Barrayar and the Dendarii Free Mercenaries, there’s a lot more here. Galeni is introduced, and with him the complexities of another generation on Komarr. It’s very nifty to see how Komarr is introduced as a title for Aral, pretty much, “The Butcher of Komarr” in Shards, and of course everything we hear about it there is in the context of Aral’s career and Barrayaran politics. Then we hear about the battle from Tung in Apprentice, and here we see how things have played out. We get more Komarr again later, especially in Memory, and more Galeni too. I love the way politics and technology move and change and interact and things go on outside of the stories. This is one of Bujold’s real strengths.

  Mark is especially interesting, and so is Miles’s attitude to Mark. Miles thinks of Mark almost at once as a brother, and as something he wants, and as someone to rescue, not as an enemy. Mark is a shadow of the way we see him in Mirror Dance (1994), but having a clone of Miles is a very interesting thing to do, and in only the second novel she’d written about Miles. Miles is already doubled and torn, Naismith and Vorkosigan, now he’s literally doubled too.

  If this were a normal series, and she’d decided to write about Miles, you’d expect another book like The Warrior’s Apprentice, a caper with mercenaries, and with Miles’s loyalties being stretched. You wouldn’t expect this book about a clone, you wouldn’t expect an eight-year gap, you wouldn’t expect Elli Quinn, who was a fairly minor character the last time we saw her, to be such a significant love interest. You would expect Ivan to make an appearance, which he does, but you wouldn’t expect him to be so intelligent. Ivan’s eight years older too, and he doesn’t do anything idiotic in this volume at all. (I’m fond of Ivan too.) Aral and Cordelia do not appear. Indeed, there isn’t much Barrayar at all. Barrayar is represented by the embassy, and we don’t see much of that except for Galeni, and for Galeni to work you need the Barrayar/Komarr contrast.

  The other thing this book really needs is “The Borders of Infinity,” the novella. Now, that was published in 1987, two years before the book, but it takes place immediately before, and an awful lot of the action of Brothers in Arms is a direct consequence of the events of the novella. I’m very glad it’s now bound in with it, and I think it always should have been.

  One last thing—this is the only time we see Earth in the series, and I remain unimpressed by it. The other planets are much more interesting.

  APRIL 6, 2009

  40. Hard on his superiors: Lois McMaster Bujold’s The Vor Game

  The Vor Game (1990) was Bujold’s first Hugo-winning novel, and it’s here that the series really hits its stride, and also where it (briefly) starts to look like a normal series. Chronologically, The Vor Game follows on from The Warrior’s Apprentice, with the novella “The Mountains of Mourning” (which also won a Hugo) coming between them. And Young Miles gives you just that, and I think that every single time I’ve read this series (certainly every time I’ve re-read it) I’ve read them in just that order. I had never actually consciously realised that Bujold had written Brothers in Arms first and come back to fill in this piece of the continuity.

  I think The Vor Game would probably be a perfectly reasonable place to pick up the series, and as this is the first published novel where the writing quality is really high, it might even be a good place. It has an entirely self-contained and very exciting plot. And it’s largely about what it means to be Vor, and Miles’s subordination problems.

  At the end of The Warrior’s Apprentice, Miles’s reward is entry into the Imperial Academy. In The Vor Game he has just graduated from it and been given an assignment—weatherman on an infantry base on Kyril Island. He’s told if he can keep his nose clean he’ll get ship assignment in six months, and of course he doesn’t keep his nose clean. He is sent on a secret mission to the Hegen Hub for ImpSec. He’s along to deal with the Dendarii, his superiors are supposed to find out what’s going on. He finds out what’s going on, and goes on to rescue the emperor and defeat the Cetagandans.

  As a plot summary this does read just like more of The Warrior’s Apprentice and kind of what you’d expect in another volume—“Barrayar and duty” vs “the mercenaries and fun.” And there’s a lot about this story that is pure bouncing fun. He does retake the mercenaries wearing slippers. (He’s so like his mother!) At one point Miles has his three supposed superiors, Oser, Metzov, and Ungari, all locked up in a row, and Elena remarks that he’s hard on his superiors. In The Warrior’s Apprentice, it’s MilSF fun with unexpected depths. Here the depths are fully integrated and entirely what the book’s about. Practically all the characters are as well-rounded as the best of them are in the earlier books. We see a little bit of Ivan, a lot of Gregor, a little of Aral, of Elena, Bel, and there are the villains, C
avilo and Metzov, complicated people, and interesting distorting mirrors of Miles.

  And Miles here is the most interesting of all. For the first time we see Miles longing to be Naismith almost as an addiction—Naismith is his escape valve. In Brothers in Arms there’s the metaphor of Miles as an onion, Admiral Naismith being encompassed by Engisn Vorkosigan who is encompassed by Lord Vorkosigan who is encompassed by Miles. Here we see that working. It isn’t just his subordination problem, the way he sees his superiors as future subordinates. (All my family are teachers, and I had the exact same problem in school of failing to be awed by the people assigned to teach me.) The most interesting thing about Miles is the tension between Betan and Barrayaran, between his personalities. He says to Simon at the end that he couldn’t keep on playing ensign when the man who was needed was Lord Vorkosigan, and thinks, or Admiral Naismith. He genuinely feels that he knows best in all situations and he can finesse it all—and so far, the text is entirely on his side. Miles does know best, is always right, or at worst what he does is “a” right thing to do, as Aral says about the freezing incident.

  The book is called The Vor Game because one of the themes is about what it means to be Vor and bound by duty. I disagree with people who think “Weatherman” should be in Borders of Infinity and not here. Even if it wasn’t absolutely necessary because it introduces Metzov and dictates what comes after, it would be necessary to introduce that Vor theme—Miles can make threatening to freeze stick not because he’s an officer but because he’s Vor, and because he’s Vor he has to do it.