What Makes This Book So Great

by Jo Walton

  Cetaganda is about Cetaganda, the mysterious empire that has, thus far in the series, been seen only as a mysteriously aggressive enemy. It’s first mentioned in Shards of Honor (1986) when Cordelia thinks her camp might have been trashed by Barrayarans, Cetagandans or Nuevo Brasilians—maybe we’ll see some of those one day. We then hear that there have been three wars between Cetaganda and Barrayar, and later encounter Cetagandans, always as bad guys. They are the invaders in The Vor Game, and the prison guards in “The Borders of Infinity.” They’re pursuing Admiral Naismith across London in Brothers in Arms (1989), and we know they have painted faces, ghem-captains, and itchy trigger fingers. In Cetaganda we find out a lot more about them … and unfortunately, I don’t find them that interesting.

  One of the things I’ve noticed on this re-read is that the amount I like the books tends to be directly proportional to how much Barrayar there is in them. It seems that the thing I really like about this series is the Barrayaran roots. So that’s my new complaint, not enough Barrayar. The book starts with arriving on Cetaganda and ends with leaving it. That also means we don’t see any of the familiar Barrayaran characters except for Miles and Ivan, though Illyan is referenced.

  However, my original complaint about Cetaganda when I first read it was that it doesn’t have any Admiral Naismith or Dendarii Free Mercenaries—Miles is Lieutenant Vorkosigan all through. So not only do we not have any of the familiar Dendarii characters, but there’s no Miles duality to make it interesting either. And compared to the Miles I just left in Mirror Dance, Miles at twenty-two seems strangely shallow, without everything he has learned since—and the same goes for Ivan. I don’t think this is a complaint because I wanted a MilSF adventure and got a mystery. It’s more that I wanted a novel and got a romp. This is particularly noticeable in publication order.

  The stakes are also fairly low in this book. We know Miles and Ivan escape pretty much unscathed. What happens to them is amusing enough, but that’s all. There’s no real possibility of a Cetagandan explosion, because we know it didn’t happen. We know they did attack Marilac, and seeing the complacent Marilacans beforehand is one of the nice touches.

  What else do I like, apart from the Marilican Embassy? Ivan and the anti-aphrodisiac and the consequences of him getting away with it. Yenaro, the descendant of the General who failed to defeat Barrayar, who is a perfumer. The garden with the luminescent frogs who sing in chords. Miles getting the medal and saying he won’t wear it unless he needs to be really obnoxious—which looks forward to the scene in Memory where he wears all his medals. Ghem-Colonel Millisor calling in from Ethan of Athos, which I had totally forgotten about until reminded here.

  I don’t find the Cetagandan political setup very plausible, and worse, I don’t find it very interesting. The same goes for the actual mystery and solution, which I’d half-forgotten. I don’t like Miles’s desire to keep information to himself and be a hero charming, in the context of what’s going to happen when he, as Elli puts it at the beginning of Mirror Dance, runs out of hairs to split with these people. I don’t much care for the supernatural beauty of the haut ladies floating around in their bubbles. (“Mutants on purpose are still mutants.”)

  The duality here is between sincere (if rough around the edges) masculine Barrayar and highly civilised (if not all the way over into decadent—that kitten tree!) feminine Cetaganda. It’s interesting that there’s more to Cetaganda than a tendency to shoot first and ask questions later, but did they have to be quite this effete? This depth of Cetaganda is setup for Diplomatic Immunity (2002), but I don’t like the Cetagandan bit of that either. Maybe it’s just me and everybody else loves Cetagandans, the haut and the ghem?

  It may be worth noting here that despite coming after three consecutive Hugo-winning novels this was not even nominated for a Hugo, as discerning Hugo-nominating Bujold fans, far from being mindlessly adoring of everything she writes, noticed that this was a minor work.

  APRIL 13, 2009

  44. This is my old identity, actually: Lois McMaster Bujold’s Memory

  Memory (1998) is in my opinion the worst place to start the Vorkosigan saga, because it is a sequel to all the books that have gone before it. I know that by saying this I’ll be prompting several people who started with it to say that no, it absolutely hooked them, but even so, I think you will get more out of Memory if you come to it with knowledge of the earlier books, and the most if you come to it with all of the earlier books fresh in your mind. It contains some very sharp spear points on some very long spears. Memory was nominated for a Hugo but did not win, and I suspect that might have been partly because it is so very much a sequel. (It was a very strong year, though. There are three of my all-time top favourite books on that ballot.)

  The themes of Memory are temptation and elephants.

  This is the book where everything Miles has been getting away with from the beginning catches up with him. The text—the universe—has always been on Miles’s side. He has always been right, against all odds, he has always won, he has always got away with things. It hasn’t been without cost, but he has always got away with everything. He’s been incredibly lucky and he’s even survived death. It’s been the kind of life that real people don’t have, only protagonists of series with the author on their side. In Memory, it appears at first that Bujold has stopped being on Miles’s side. The first part of the book is really grim, and really hard to read. Then the plot begins, and it gets really distressing. I’m not safe to read Memory in public because it always dissolves me into a pool of tears. Then Miles wrestles temptation two falls out of three and wins, and wins through. The whole book is about Miles’s identity, Miles’s split identity as Naismith and Vorkosigan, Miles’s discovery of his own identity, his own integrity.

  Sasha, reading the first part of Memory, still ten years old, asked me if Miles ever got off the planet. I deduced from that that he wanted Miles to run off to the Dendarii, and when he’d finished reading it I asked if he was sorry Miles hadn’t made that choice. “Jo!” he said, furious with me, “The one thing you can’t give for your heart’s desire is your heart!” After that, I let him read whatever he wanted, because once you know that, you can’t go far wrong.

  The elephants are an underlying motif, they keep cropping up. I thought about tracking all of them this read-through and decided not to bother. Somebody has probably done it. There are a lot of them. The temptations—well, there’s the central one of Miles’s temptation to run off back to the Dendarii. The first time I read it I, like Cordelia, would have bet he would go. But the centrality of his Barrayaran identity, of what he’s fighting for, goes back to “The Mountains of Mourning” (1989), and the central turning point of Memory is his visit to Silvy Vale, where nothing has been standing still. He’s tempted again afterwards, he’s tempted, not to say bribed, by Haroche. Miles resists the temptations, he comes to his central (and much quoted) realisation that “the one thing you can’t give for your heart’s desire is your heart.” The author is still on his side, he finds integration and integrity, and he gets to be an Imperial Auditor—which might work slightly better if we’d ever heard of them before, but never mind.

  Haroche though, Haroche was tempted and gives in. The Haroche plot totally fooled me the first time through—of all the books in this series with mystery plots, this one is the best. All the clues are hidden in plain sight, it all makes perfect sense when you’re re-reading remembering exactly what they are, and so does the reason you didn’t see them the first time. The whole plot is brilliant. And the way it’s interleaved with the themes and the incidentals is incredible. I would be in awe reading it, if I wasn’t always in tears. The plot is against Illyan, who we have seen constantly in the background since Shards of Honor (1986) and who now comes into the foreground. I don’t think for a moment that when Bujold wrote about his memory chip in 1986 she thought “and in 1998 I can write about it breaking down.” This isn’t that kind of series. I like Illyan. The description of his disintegra
tion remains very distressing. The first time I read it I actually broke down and sobbed on the line, “Ivan, you idiot, what are you doing here?” Yesterday, on a bus, and expecting it, I just had tears in my eyes. The whole section is almost unbearably brilliant.

  There’s a lot of romance in this book. There’s Gregor’s marriage plans, Galeni’s marriage plans, Ivan proposing to Delia and Martya Koudelka on the same day, Alys and Illyan, Miles and Taura at the beginning, Miles and Elli Quinn giving each other up at the end. That looks forward to the other books in the series, where romance becomes increasingly a theme.

  Cetaganda (1995) is the last of the books to be written out of order. The series preceding Memory was written all over the place, chronologically. From Memory on it marches straight forward, one book succeeding the next, chronological and publication order are the same.

  I’ve talked about the different ways the series begins, and I’ve talked about the way all the books stand alone and recapitulate important information so you don’t necessarily have to have read the other books. I started this re-read thinking about how this is a series that got better as it went on, instead of starting with a brilliant book and declining. I think a lot of what made it get better was starting with adventures and a deeper level of realism than adventures normally get and then going on taking those adventures seriously and making the realism more and more realistic. There’s this thing where a reader accepts the level of reality of fiction as part of the mode, part of the “givens” of the text, the controlling axioms. So we don’t really think that a seventeen-year-old could create the Dendarii out of bluff and illusion, but we go along with that because we get enough details, and because the emotional level of plausibility is there, and the cost is there—Bothari, and Elena, and Naismith not being Miles’s name. And by Memory, the mode is different, and what we have is a psychologically realistic novel about the psychological cost of having got away with all of those things for so long.

  Endings are a problem with an unplanned series, because the series isn’t working towards an end point, just going on and on. Bujold is particularly good at endings on individual volumes, there isn’t a single book that doesn’t have a satisfactory climax. But the series as a whole doesn’t have an end, doesn’t go anywhere. Memory is one possible place for the story to end. It’s a capstone for all that’s gone before. It’s not as if there isn’t more that can happen to Miles—and indeed, we have three more (and a fourth being written) books about Miles. But what happens from Memory on is a set of different things, going on from there, not really reaching back to the earlier books. You can see it as two series—three. One about Cordelia, one about Miles growing up and being Admiral Naismith, stretching from The Warrior’s Apprentice to Memory and the third post-Memory, a series about Miles’s love life and his career as Imperial Auditor. Memory is a climax for the whole series so far, and I think if it had ended there there would have been a feeling of rightness, a satisfaction, about that. I do not urge people to stop reading at Memory, but when you’re looking at the series as a series and how it works, it’s worth considering it as a possible end.

  It is also my opinion that Memory is the point where the series stopped getting better. The other three books, while they’re a new direction for the series, while they’re never repetitive or just more of the same, are no better than Memory. (The new one when it comes may well prove me wrong, as Bujold has certainly gone on getting better as a writer in her post-Miles career.)

  APRIL 14, 2009

  45. But I’m Vor: Lois McMaster Bujold’s Komarr

  Komarr (1998) has two alternating points of view: Imperial Auditor Miles Vorkosigan, on a mission to investigate an accident to the artificial sun of Barrayar’s conquered subject planet Komarr, and Ekaterin Vorsoisson, the wife of a minor administrator in Komarr’s terraforming project.

  The plot of Komarr is one of the best and tightest in the series. Like Memory it’s a perfect mystery, with all the clues in plain sight for a re-read but cleverly misdirected. It also has plausible villains who think of themselves as heroes.

  The strength of the book stands or falls on Ekaterin. If you like her, you’ll like the book, because it is largely a character study. What we have here is someone repressed to the point of inhibition, in an abusive relationship, and struggling to have any little piece of ground for herself. It’s very well done.

  This is the first of the books where Miles is having an adventure as Lord Auditor Vorkosigan, where Naismith and the Dendarii are entirely behind him. It’s a mystery, and it’s a new direction for the series—the direction was indicated in Memory, but this is where it settles into it.

  We don’t see any of the familiar recurring characters except Miles. I think this is the only book in the series with only one familiar character since Ethan of Athos. Lots of them are mentioned, but none of them appear.

  I love the way we see Komarr here as a real place. I really like the way Komarr has developed throughout the series, from Aral’s bad reputation in Shards of Honor to a source of terrorist plots throughout, with the Galen/Galeni stuff and then Laisa. Here though we actually get down onto the planet and see some ordinary Komarrans. The plot to close the wormhole is very clever—and I like the way the physics all fits with everything we have had back to The Warrior’s Apprentice about how the wormholes and Necklin rods work—but what I really like is what a sensible idea it is, from a Komarran point of view, how a bloodless engineering coup fits with their culture, how they’re not raving loons like Ser Galen. It’s Dr. Riva who really makes it work for me, Dr. Riva who figures it out and doesn’t want to tell ImpSec, because she is a Komarran and it’s such a beguiling idea. If your planet was conquered a generation ago and despite their paternal assimilationist policies you weren’t quite equal to the conquerors and weren’t quite trusted, well, doing something that would get rid of them forever would seem attractive. We get a lot of angles on Barrayar in this series, and this is one of the most interesting. The conquered Komarrans who don’t want to become Barrayaran get a voice, and it’s a reasonable one.

  When Miles says to Ekaterin that he would like to be famous and have his father mentioned primarily as being his father, and she laughs, it’s worth noting that for us he has that. We as readers are much more interested in Miles than in Aral.

  The Betan/Barrayaran dynamic throughout the series is settled in Memory in favour of Barrayar, and the ways that’s a male/female dynamic (even when internal to Miles, and oh, consider Bel in that context!) mean that in Komarr there has to be a new female angle. Ekaterin, as a female Vor Barrayaran, provides that. Ekaterin strikes me as just a little too obviously planted as a mate for Miles. She may well be what he needs, now that he has decided to be his Barrayaran self, she’s Vor, she’s not a silly girl but a grown-up woman. Her decision to leave Tien just before he’s killed is necessary and effective but his death makes things very tidy and easy. I like Ekaterin as herself, I don’t like her when I see her as a prize for Miles. I’ve talked about how the universe, the text, is for or against Miles in different ways, and Ekaterin, Tien’s death, the whole thing, seems like a little too much of the text being on Miles’s side. In a conventional series he’d have married Elena, and he has spent a lot of time looking for a Countess Vorkosigan, but Ekaterin seems to come a little too patly to hand.

  Komarr begins and ends with Ekaterin. She’s in a much better position at the end than she was at the beginning. The thing that works best for me about her is the Vorzohn’s Dystrophy. We’ve heard a lot about how Miles isn’t a mutant, and how mutants are treated on Barrayar, so seeing an actual mutation and the shame and panic it causes is clever. Any normal person would get it fixed, the way it affects Tien is uniquely Barrayaran and Vor. Ekaterin has been supporting him long after love has gone because she gave her word. It takes an awful lot to get her to break it. Her act of leaving him is far braver than her actual act of heroism and saving herself, her planet and everything when she destroys the device on the space stat
ion.

  Bujold talked about SF as being “fantasy of political agency” in the way romance is “fantasy of perfect love” and mysteries are “fantasies of justice.” Thinking about this, the political agency plot of Komarr is just about perfect, but the personal and emotional plot isn’t quite in step with it, so the climax and resolution are a little out of balance. It’s great that Ekaterin saves herself and doesn’t wait to be rescued by Miles, and it’s even better that Miles (for whom rescuing people has been such a huge thing) is pleased about that, but the climactic moment of them sharing the same sense of sacrifice (“I’m Vor”) is undercut by his babbling about his romances and her declaration, “Can I take a number.” This needs resolution, which it doesn’t get until the next volume. Komarr definitely does not contain a series ending. It has a whole (and very good) political plot but only half (or perhaps two-thirds) an emotional plot. It’s a new departure for the series in that it isn’t entirely self-contained.

  APRIL 15, 2009

  46. She’s getting away! Lois McMaster Bujold’s A Civil Campaign

  A Civil Campaign (2000) is another one that I don’t think stands alone, as it is in many ways a continuation of the emotional and romantic plot of Komarr (1998). The two books are now available in one convenient volume as Miles in Love.

  The Vorkosigan series began with books that looked like military adventure, developed unexpected depths, had a few volumes that look like investigative mysteries, and now this volume is an out-and-out comedy-of-manners romance. It’s dedicated to “Jane, Charlotte, Georgette, and Dorothy” which I take to be Austen, Brontë, Heyer and Dunnett. The title is of course an homage to Heyer’s A Civil Contract, though it bears no relationship to that story. If there’s one Heyer to which it nods, it is The Grand Sophy.