What Makes This Book So Great

by Jo Walton

  There is a political plot, in the narrowest sense, maneuvering in council chambers for votes, and there’s a scientific and economic plot about the invention of butter bugs, but the important heart of A Civil Campaign is all romantic.

  I’ve complained about the covers before, but I think A Civil Campaign has the ugliest cover of any book in the house except the U.K. Vlad compilation. I took the dust jacket off the hardcover, and I wince whenever I look at the paperback. If ever there was a case for a brown paper cover this is it. The colours are horrible, it’s made of nasty shiny stuff, and the picture is unspeakable.

  To get back to the text as rapidly as possible … The other books either use one point of view or alternate between two. A Civil Campaign has five points of view: Miles, Mark, Ekaterin, Kareen and Ivan.

  There are a number of lovely things about A Civil Campaign. There are a lot of laugh-out-loud funny bits. There’s Ivan’s point of view. There’s the couch scene. There are the twin problems of Rene Vorbretton, whose gene scan shows him one-eighth Cetagandan, and Lord Dono, formerly Lady Donna, Vorrutyer. There’s Lord Vormuir and his daughters. There’s Mark, though not enough of him. There’s Kareen, torn between Barrayar and Beta and trying to figure out what she wants. There’s Nikki calling Gregor, and indeed, a lot of Gregor, who seems to have grown up very happily. There’s every Barrayaran character from earlier in the series, entirely making up for Komarr’s lack of familiar characters.

  It contains a good deal of embarrassment comedy (the dinner party in particular, which is excruciating) and rather more physical comedy than I care for—the bug butter custard pie fight has not grown on me (if anything the reverse).

  Uniquely for this series, it retcons. At the end of Komarr, Ekaterin asks to take a number. That’s the resolution of the emotional arc of the novel. As of the beginning of A Civil Campaign, that resolution hasn’t happened, and Miles is trying to woo Ekaterin in secret—in secret from her. This goes spectacularly wrong, as anyone but Miles would have predicted, and then goes right again. I find the going wrong much more convincing than the going right. This could just be me. I often have this problem with romance novels, where I find the descriptions of women falling in love adhere to emotional conventions that are as stylised as a Noh play and bear no relationship to anything I have ever felt or imagined feeling.

  Miles’s feelings for Ekaterin are no more or no less love than what he has felt for all his women since Elena, a genuine fondness, sexual passion, and a strong desire for a Lady Vorkosigan and a family. Miles always proposes—well, not to Taura, but he has proposed to every genetically human woman he’s been involved with, however unsuitable. He pursues her, sometimes literally, he loves her, as he understands love, but he demonstrably can’t give her space to let her be herself. He apologises, and he knows what he did, but he’d never have figured it out on his own and he’ll do it again because that’s who he is. Ekaterin’s feelings for him are, as I said, beyond me. I liked her in Komarr, and I understood her horrible marriage to Tien. I can’t get my head around her in A Civil Campaign. Miles gets the girl, finally. OK.

  What I do find effective is that Tien’s death, far from being the easy way out it seemed in Komarr, comes back to almost literally haunt them with the implications that Miles murdered Tien, which can’t even be denied without revealing the whole plot. And speaking of hidden plots, Miles doesn’t know the truth about the Sergyar war and the mountain of corpses Ezar buried Serg under. Aral mentions it was a lucky shot for Barrayar that killed Serg, and Miles just accepts that. The secret Cordelia fled to Barrayar to keep is a very closely held secret, still—when Illyan and Aral and Cordelia die, nobody will know it. Unless they’ve told Gregor? But the strong implication of that scene is that they haven’t. That secret, not her love for Aral, is why Cordelia immured herself in Barrayar all this time. I was pleased to see Enrique mention that she was wasted on that planet. (Incidentally, I find Cordelia’s love for Aral as we see it in her own POV utterly convincing.)

  Meanwhile, Kareen loves Mark and wants to be herself, and Mark wants her to be. This pair are charming and I am charmed by them. Sure Mark needs more therapy and Kareen needs more Betan education, but they’re growing up fine, and consistently with where we last saw them in Mirror Dance.

  As for Ivan, he’s just a delight, whether it’s by running rings around him, or Miles accepting his refusal to help, or his disgust at being seconded to his mother for pre-wedding chores. Oh, and his romantic panic is also just right.

  Barrayaran law, all we see of it, gives the perfect illusion of making sense, fitting with everything we have seen of it before, and with the human oddities that real legal systems have. That’s quite an achievement. And how nice to see Lord Midnight mentioned again as a real precedent. And if it contrasts with the many forms the Escobarans have to fill in to extradite Enrique, well, we know about the runaround offworlders are given, from Calhoun back in The Warrior’s Apprentice. You can’t trust their word, bury them in forms. I love Nikki giving his word as Vorsoisson for the first time, too. In the best Heyer style, all the plots and plotting come together in a hectic climax where the obstacles go down like dominoes to reveal a happy ending. I mentioned the bug butter fight already, and I wish it wasn’t there, it isn’t necessary. The scene in the Council of Counts is terrific though. The bit with all the Koudelka girls finding such different partners is cute. And how nice to see Lord Vorhalas alive and well and as honourable as ever.

  This is another potential ending for the series. Miles is betrothed, Mark is the next thing to betrothed, Gregor is married. I half-expected the next book to be set a generation ahead, with Aral and Cordelia dead and Miles and Ekaterin’s children (and Mark and Kareen’s) ready to get into trouble. The end of this book, with so many loose ends tied up so happily, would have made a good resting point. But with this kind of open series there’s no reason ever to stop, as long as the characters keep interesting the author and there are new adventures to be had. There’s no end, no climax that completes anything, just history going onwards. I think that’s a strength and a weakness. It’s certainly been a strength—the Vorkosigan saga has never been repetitive, and in doing new and different things it broke new ground—but it can also start to seem that it isn’t headed anywhere. The things I like in this book (apart from the Ivan POV) are all little series background details, the kinds of things I call “sandwiches on space stations” as shorthand. (A friend and I once exchanged a lot of detailed emails with the title “Cheese Sandwiches in Cherryh.”) If this had been the end of the series, I’d have been quite satisfied, but I don’t think I’d have been as satisfied with this end as I would have been if Memory had been the end. But they’re neither of them ends, and the series is ongoing.

  APRIL 15, 2009

  47. Just my job: Lois McMaster Bujold’s Diplomatic Immunity

  Diplomatic Immunity (2002) is one of the most exciting books in the universe ever. The first time I read it, it gave me an asthma attack—those Cetagandan bioviruses are so effective, they incapacitated me through the eyes, in text! It almost did the same this time, it was only remembering that it did last time and breathing carefully that got me through the incredibly tense bit.

  I don’t think there’s anything else I can safely say about it without spoilers, not for it but for the rest of the series. It would be a perfectly reasonable standalone book, or place to start, I think. It probably helps if you’ve read Cetaganda and Falling Free, and a fair sprinkling of the others, and it would certainly contain spoilers for them, but it wouldn’t be a problem for enjoying what’s going on and having fun.

  Miles and Ekaterin, married for a year, go off for a galactic honeymoon while twin babies are being cooked up in uterine replicators. On their way home they’re diverted to Quaddiespace where mysterious things have detained a Komarran trade fleet and its Barrayaran escort. Miles is designated to deal with the problem. He meets Bel Thorne, now living with Nicol from “Labyrinth,” investigates the problems and
finds out they’re being caused by a Cetagandan Ba, disguised as a Betan herm under the common Betan name Dubauer (very clever bit of misdirection there, because I instantly started thinking he must be related to poor Ensign Dubauer from Shards of Honor) who is trying to steal a load of Cetagandan haut babies and start his own empire, while starting a war between Cetaganda and Barrayar as misdirection. Miles and Ekaterin manage to stop the war, but not without much tense excitement and bioweapons, and Miles being infected by being too clever for his own good. There’s some excellent broadening of the scope of the problem.

  This is only the second time I’ve read Diplomatic Immunity, the first time since it came out in 2002 and we all read it in relays. Most of these books I know backwards and forwards, but I’d forgotten the details of Diplomatic Immunity until they came back to me while I was reading.

  This is another surprising departure for the series. It’s a mystery, which isn’t surprising, but it’s galactic, which is, and there’s almost a war. We thought Miles had put away the Little Admiral for good, but here we have him signing off “Nai—Vorkosigan out!” in a top-speed full-steam-ahead crisis. Naismith is still there for Miles to draw on when he needs to be him. It’s not a Dendarii Free Mercenaries adventure, but it’s much closer to The Vor Game than it is to Komarr. After all these books centred on Barrayar and Barrayaran problems and politics and interactions with Komarr, we’re suddenly back in space, and the problems turn out to be Cetagandan.

  What’s wrong with it is the end. The book is going along at a zillion miles an hour, and I am hyperventilating (or, this time, deliberately stopping for chocolate to avoid hyperventilating) and everything is going along fine and then … it pulls back. It’s like the end of Mansfield Park. The text withdraws into tell-mode. Miles succumbs to the sickness, and Ekaterin deals with the crisis, but we don’t see it, we hear about it later. We get caught up with the plot, we do not get to see it firsthand, which, after the extremely close tension up to that point, is just weird. The epilogue is fine, and the rewards and medals from the Cetagandans are fine as well, I suppose, but there’s a big hole in between Miles passing out on the ship and there.

  This could very easily have been plugged by giving us some Ekaterin point of view, and Bujold has not been stingy with Ekaterin POV in the last two books. Indeed, the whole of Diplomatic Immunity could have been enhanced with some Ekaterin alternating chapters, like Komarr. How is marriage to Miles settling down from Ekaterin’s POV? Ekaterin goes shopping with Bel and they talk about Miles. Ekaterin looks at quaddie hydroponics. Ekaterin deals with Admiral Vorpatril and the Cetagandan Empire. It could have been so cool! It would have made such a great intercut with Miles trying to solve the problems and then it getting all so exciting. Unfortunately, thinking about this Ekaterin-shaped shadow makes the book feel to me as if it has an Ekaterin-POV-shaped hole in it, and that’s why I hadn’t re-read it, despite having re-read several other bits of the series on different occasions since then.

  The book ends with Aral Alexander and Helen Natalia being decanted. Would this make a good series end? Well, it has been the de facto series end for the last seven years, and it certainly isn’t leaving anything trailing, but it definitely doesn’t feel like a good conclusion—both Memory and A Civil Campaign come with better places to stop.

  APRIL 19, 2009

  48. Every day is a gift: Lois McMaster Bujold’s “Winterfair Gifts”

  All right, I can take a hint. I could have ignored the number of people here asking me if I was going to write about “Winterfair Gifts” but when the author herself sends me a copy? Thanks again, Lois!

  “Winterfair Gifts” comes chronologically between A Civil Campaign and Diplomatic Immunity, but it was published last, and thus despite myself I stick to my goal of reading in publication order. It’s a novella, not a whole book, and I think it’s weaker for not having the strengthening themes and context that being part of a novel would have given it—Bujold is generally best with room to stretch herself. (If there are authors, Ted Chiang, John Varley, Robert Reed, whose most natural length is the short form, and others whose most natural length is a novel, are there others whose most natural length is a fourteen-book series?) It’s from the point of view of Miles’s armsman Roic, who first appeared in A Civil Campaign and who is a major character, though not a point-of-view character, in Diplomatic Immunity.

  I wouldn’t recommend starting with it. But I can’t see that it would do any harm either.

  This story is set around Miles and Ekaterin’s wedding. It’s another romance, and it was written specifically to be published in a genre romance anthology. It’s a romance between Roic and Taura, around the wedding, and around a plot to hurt Miles by killing Ekaterin on her wedding day by giving her poisoned pearls, and trying to frame Quinn. This story got snarled for me by my going to a reading at Minicon at which Lois read the first half. I then had to wait months and months for the second half, during which time I deduced the shape of what had to happen in it, and figured out that Quinn hadn’t done it. I’m pretty good at doing that if you give me half a story, which is why it’s a terrible idea to give me half a story. Give me a whole story and I’ll swallow it whole. I no longer go to readings at cons for this very reason. Re-reading it now, I notice it doesn’t actually have pacing problems, they were an illusion caused by this. It’s well paced, like all Bujold except the very end of Diplomatic Immunity.

  The romance is sweet and nicely done. Taura and Roic are convincing, Taura’s philosophy is just what one would expect, and the obstacles of Roic’s prejudices against mutants and female soldiers go down very nicely. It’s also a nice touch that she’s as much taller than him as normal women are to Miles. (Normal tall women. I’d only be a couple of centimetres taller. But Miles likes tall women.) I’m not sure how readers of genre romance would see it, as it isn’t a “here is the destined One Person” romance but a “gather ye rosebuds” one, and much the better for that in my opinion. I hope they liked it, as I hear there are a lot of them and they buy a lot of books.

  Roic’s POV is great. I like his hesitancy about having been a (heroic) policeman instead of a military man, like the other armsmen. I like the way this plays into Diplomatic Immunity, where Miles finally assures him he’s glad that Roic is the one he brought. And it’s an interesting point of view, too, proletarian Barrayaran, Vorkosigan district, entirely impressed with Miles but more so with Aral, easily embarrassed, quite different from anyone else we’ve seen.

  The wedding. Well. On the sandwich level, I was just as delighted as Nikki was to see Arde Mayhew, and I was upset that Mark and Kareen didn’t get home. I liked Quinn sending the cat blanket. I liked Elena calling her daughter Cordelia. I liked the ice garden. I love Lady Alys using Roic as a reaction test to how Taura looks, and also that she looks great. I didn’t like Ekaterin being so nervous or Miles thinking she wanted to back out. I like Ekaterin saying of the poisoned pearls: “I’d have worn them as a courtesy to your friend, I’ll wear them now as a defiance to our enemies.” That’s the spirit. Maybe she can keep up with him. I do hope so.

  The plot seems a little rushed. But that’s not much of a problem. All in all it’s a charming little story with a lot of nice shout-outs to fans that shouldn’t spoil the flow for new readers. It’s minor in the context of the series, but it is an interesting perspective and very nice to see Miles and Ekaterin settled. As an end for the series—nope. It’s too slight to bear the weight of that. But it’s a lot of fun to read.

  APRIL 17, 2009

  49. Choose again, and change: Lois McMaster Bujold’s Vorkosigan saga

  The Vorkosigan saga began to be published in 1986, there are thirteen volumes so far, the most recent one published in 2002, and there’s a new one being written. It’s a series of stand-alone volumes that you can start almost anywhere, a series where very few of the books are like each other, where the volumes build on other volumes so that you want to read them all but you don’t need to for it to make sense. It’s sci
ence fiction, specifically space opera set in societies where the introduction of new technologies is changing everything. Some volumes are military science fiction, some are mysteries, one is a romance (arguably two), some are political and deal with the fates of empires, others are up-close character studies with nothing more (or less) at stake than one person’s integrity. It’s a series with at least three beginnings, and with at least two possible ends, although it is ongoing. Lots of people love it, but others despise it, saying that technologies of birth and death are not technological enough. As a series, it’s constantly surprising, never predictable, almost never what you might expect—which may well be what has kept it fresh and improving for so long.

  I started it first in the middle, went back to the beginning, read the books in entirely random order until I was caught up, and subsequently read the books as they came out. My shelves started off with scruffy secondhand British paperbacks, graduated to smarter new British paperbacks, then new U.S. paperbacks, then U.S. hardbacks. Over time I’ve replaced the secondhand British paperbacks (except for Shards of Honor) and for this re-read where I’ve been reading really fast and carrying the books around with me, I replaced my hardcovers with paperbacks. (I’d never buy hardcovers if it wasn’t for impatience. I often end up buying a hardcover and then replacing it with a paperback. When we finally get print on demand, I’m going to demand trade paperbacks instantly at hardcover prices.) I first started reading them in the early nineties and I’ve re-read them often in the two decades since, but always in internal chronological order. I started reading with Brothers in Arms and got hooked on Shards of Honor.