The Vorkosigan Companion

by Lillian Stewart Carl

  In the case of Barrayar, a direct sequel to Shards of Honor, the first part of the tale was already written. I'd cut off the last six or eight chapters of Shards because at the time I didn't quite know how to end a book and had rather overshot the ending, and had to back up to find a good stopping place. I set this fragment aside in my attic for several years. So about the first third of the book was already written when I was moved to go back and explore those themes and characters. I think it was a stronger, better book for the wait and the extra writing experience I'd accumulated in between—and certainly with a somewhat different plot—than if I had gone on to write it directly instead of turning my attention to The Warrior's Apprentice instead.

  Barrayar explores what happens after the "happily ever after," which in real life is usually where the unglamorous long-haul work starts. Since Aral's work is a rather deadly brand of politics, the failure of which devolves into civil war, the action plot was obvious. (Well, by then it was. It hadn't been when I'd set it aside back in '83.) But in this early example of my many explorations of the personal versus the political, the biological versus the social, which are still ongoing in my work, the real subject of the tale is reproduction through adversity, political and otherwise—and, of course, through technology, compared-and-contrasted through several parallel couples and their different choices and chances.

  Mirror Dance is most truly Mark's book, in which I came around again to complete what I'd merely attempted when he was introduced back in Brothers in Arms. But in that first pass on the problem, I realized in retrospect, I undercut myself by not including Mark's point of view, so that was the very first thing I corrected in the next try. In order to give Mark his chance to grow onstage it was also necessary to ruthlessly suppress Miles, which proved not without its satisfactions, and fruitful consequences. But here Mark finally obtained the viewpoint, the voice, and the story he needed to step out of his progenitor-brother's shadow.

  Cetaganda was a prequel that had been kicking around for a while in the idea-form of "Miles and Ivan go to the Cetagandan state funeral, and . . ." with no idea of what happened next. When I finally came to write the tale, it just seemed to call for younger and more naïve characters, so I set the way-back machine to their early twenties. The story might have fallen elsewhere in their timeline, but would have been a rather different tale.

  In Cetaganda, I explored disparate consequences of the Vorkosiverse's reproductive technologies in a very different social milieu. The Cetagandan haut use replicators and associated genetic engineering to construct their race's entire genome as a community property under strict central control. Although spread among many individuals, the genome becomes conceptualized as a work of art being consciously sculpted by its haut-women guardians. Where this is finally going, even the haut women do not have the hubris to guess—one of their few saving graces.

  In addition, Cetaganda allowed me to do something a writer can pull off especially nicely in a series—critique or comment upon the assumptions of earlier books. I had originally tossed off the Cetagandans as mostly-offstage and rather all-purpose bad guys to stir up some plot action for my heroes. But the Barrayarans had started out as bad guys too, from a certain point of view. The closer I came to them, the more complicated their picture grew. No one is a villain in their own eyes; when I brought the story closer to the Cetagandans, they, too, became more complex and ambiguous. I was very pleased with the effect.

  Memory was pretty much a direct result of Mirror Dance. I didn't think a person should undergo so profound an experience as death and a return to life with no consequences or without learning anything, although I downplayed these at the end of the prior book so as not to alarm my publisher.

  In Mirror Dance, Miles gets killed—and cryonically frozen, and eventually revived and repaired. But the cryo-freeze does him subtler damage than brittle bones, resulting in an idiosyncratic (i.e., literarily convenient) form of epilepsy. The reward for a job well done is another job. After watching Miles overcome every physical setback in his passionate pursuit of his military career, in Memory I set him a problem that really would throw him out of the military, one inside his own brain, one he couldn't get around—and then sat back to see what would happen. What happened was that he grew up, in some extremely interesting ways. The epilepsy is surely a metaphor for something, in Miles's life; that his handicap has mutated from something external to something internal as he matures surely has significance, and if I ever figure out what it is, I'll let you know.

  I had my eye on the reintegration aspect of Memory, in its essences if not in its accidents, since at least Brothers in Arms; in fact, it was inherent from the moment Miles popped out his desperate creation of Admiral Naismith back in Chapter Seven of The Warrior's Apprentice. I knew that Miles's eventual destiny was to reassemble himself whole, sometime before age forty. How this was to come about was much less apparent.

  Somewhere I have a penciled outline of about seven chapters of a book involving Miles dealing with Simon Illyan's memory chip going glitchy. It was the oblique result of encounters with my sister-in-law's aging mother, who was undergoing a protracted Alzheimer's-like debilitation. While visiting, I stayed with her one afternoon while my brother and his wife ran errands. I found it was possible to carry on an oddly satisfactory conversation with her, if I didn't care where the conversation went. She still had interesting things to say, in a fragmentary sort of way; they just weren't in any order, and I had to take them as they came up, and maybe string them together later.

  To me, whose identity is so bound up with intellectual achievement and value, Trudie Senior's situation seemed boundlessly horrific, and Trudie Junior's unfailing day-by-day care of her rather more heroic than anything I'd ever put one of my fictional characters through. And so the idea came to me in techno-metaphor of Simon Illyan's eidetic memory chip failing, and Miles somehow coming to his rescue. One of the deep appeals of fiction is the ability, as my friend Lillian here once put it, "To heal with the stroke of a pen."

  I had a choice between starting that book, or doing the one where Miles reencountered his clone-brother Mark. Patricia Wrede, after listening perhaps once too often to my set speech about prequel determinism versus sequel free will, talked me into doing the Mark book first, rather than writing it as a prequel later, even though I was rather excited about the memory-chip idea. I am exceedingly grateful to Pat for that. Because the book that resulted changed Miles and his world.

  It had been plain to me, if not to my chief protagonist, that for a long time Miles had been getting along by living a lie, and at some point in his life, this ought to turn around and bite him. Miles was living his adolescent dream, which once had given him vital growth, but now was proving increasingly sterile; it was time for him to grow up and move into a more fully adult, fully rounded life. But he was also getting an enormous amount of validation out of his Naismith persona; it was equally clear that he would not willingly give that up, even if another part of him was, almost literally, dying to move on.

  Mirror Dance supplied the missing pieces for both plot and theme in Memory, in the form of Miles's own cryo-revival damage and subsequent seizure disorder, and it finally achieved critical mass.

  In Memory, Illyan's loss of his military career is closely contrasted with Miles's loss of his. (Parallels, spirals, and reflections are some of my favorite literary patterns.) Illyan gets to dump, after thirty grueling years, a job that had eaten his life. He was mortally tired, and ready for the change, however high the ransom he had to pay for himself.

  When Illyan gives up being Chief of Imperial Security, it's as if he has a thousand-pound weight lifted from his shoulders. Punch-drunk, he is. No wonder he warbles a bit. Illyan's losses are great—removal of the chip returns him to normal temporal perception, but too dangerously absentminded to continue as an officer—yet there are surprising compensations. His emotional side that his job required him to suppress for years finally gets a chance to flower. And it's contagiou
s; relationships that had been frozen in place for years thaw and change when he changes.

  And there's another variant on the book's theme; even after such profound change, as another character remarks, what you get back is ". . . your life again. What else?" Illyan was ready to be finished with that earlier part of his life, and move on. Miles both was and wasn't; part of him had to drag the rest of him, kicking and bitching the whole way, onto higher ground. Watching Illyan adjust, Miles and his maniacal drive for achievement get a valuable nonverbal but very sharp critique from the man who was his most revered mentor. Trust me, it's very good for him.

  Memory was published a couple of months before Trudie Senior's long, long death came to an end. I sent a copy to the dedicatees. Trudie Junior said: "I showed it to her . . . You do what you can."

  I really, really wanted to write a lighter book after Memory. I didn't think I could, or should, attempt two thematically "big," emotionally draining books in a row. It's like spacing pregnancies too close together; it leaches the minerals out of your bones. But Komarr lay across my path to everything else; it had to be done first.

  Komarr is the romantic drama; A Civil Campaign the romantic comedy. After all, Miles had two births, and will have two deaths, why shouldn't he have two romances? On a practical level, the split of the emotional plot of story into two halves was to solve a problem of tone. I could not have combined the material I dealt with in Komarr with a comedy of the goofiness I desired in the same book. It would have been too schizophrenic even for me.

  Again, with military plots knocked out of the menu, mystery and suspense—and romance—took up the load. Miles is sent to Komarr, a planet his father helped conquer a generation before, in the unenviable position of a hated occupier, to investigate the possible sabotage of a solar mirror designed to help terraform the planet, a very long-range project. There he meets Ekaterin, his female opposite in most ways, whose life has been as restricted as his has been adventurous. Each, it turns out, has value to offer the other, this time across boundaries of culturally mandated gender splits. The backdrop of a cold world requiring decades of dedication to bring to fruitfulness is not accidental.

  Meanwhile, I'd been itching to write a Barrayaran Regency romance ever since I realized I'd given Barrayar a regency period. I dedicated it to four inspiring female writers. I'd read Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre fairly early on, but I only came to Georgette Heyer and Dorothy L. Sayers in my twenties, when my reading branched out, and I've only picked up Jane Austen fairly recently. Heyer remains my favorite comfort reading—A Civil Campaign is very much a tribute to her—though there was a period when her inherent class-ism got up my nose. Sayers's work, even more than that of C. S. Forester and Arthur Conan Doyle, is a model for the kind of wonderful character development that can only be done over a long series.

  The tale offered many delicious levels of play, not least that of dissecting a lot of romance tropes under a true SF knife. What happens to the old dance between men, women, and DNA when new technologies explode old definitions of, well, everything? What happens to a tradition-bound society whose channels of property and power assume gender divisions and functions that new science throws into a cocked hat? Just what rude things do those butter bugs symbolize? What happens to two supposedly immiscible genres when you put them both in a bottle and give it a good shake? What can each say about the other? Chamomile tea and blasters: give me both!

  The butter bugs in A Civil Campaign have several sources. First, I was a biology major back in my college days, and my faculty advisor was an insect toxicologist. He raised various strains of cockroaches in his lab to test poisons and resistances. (For some reason, the animal rights people never hassled him. . . .) His most interesting strain was one which, when he sprinkled roach powder in their plastic boxes, would stand up on their hind two legs with their front four legs on the sides, a behavioral adaptation. I also did a great deal of insect photography during that period.

  Second were some wonderful old Robert Sheckley tales read in my youth about a pair of down-on-their-luck spacers and their misadventures with live cargo. Thirdly was the movie Joe's Apartment, and fourthly, at about the same time, was a trip to the Minnesota State Fair where I saw, among other things, a large apiary exhibit. I was scratching around for an idea for a short story when the notion of entrepreneur Mark's adventure in bioengineering with Doctor Borgos and his yogurt-barfing bugs first began to take shape. It quickly became apparent both that the idea could not be crammed into the length, and that it was much too good to waste on a mere short story, and so the Vorkosigan House butter bug scheme was born. Or hatched.

  The butter bugs have proved very popular with the readers, generating butter bug hand puppets, at least two fan-written songs, and a great deal of speculation as to their future. (Fans have written well over a hundred songs about my stories, to date. And then there are the limericks . . .)

  Life went on, for me and my characters. The opening situation of the book that became Diplomatic Immunity called for Miles, in his brand-new hat as a Barrayaran Imperial Auditor (a kind of high-level troubleshooter), to become involved in straightening out an imbroglio with a Barrayaran fleet at a deep-space station. I had an entire wormhole nexus to choose from for this setting, and it occurred to me that this gave me the long-awaited chance to visit Quaddiespace and finally see how Falling Free had come out. Because I rather wanted to know. It was unfinished business that still niggled, though the time and impulse for anything like a direct sequel was past and long past.

  A subplot featured the free-fall quaddie ballet. It's my favorite part of the book. I am pleased to note it, too, has inspired a filk song, and a good one; it seems a just reward that a chapter which is in effect an essay on the nature of art as an expression of cultural identity should garner a critique which is itself a worthy piece of art. That these most wonderful of dancers have neither legs nor feet, and after a short time neither their audience nor my readers notice, was another plus.

  Over and beyond the quaddie Nicol, several of the novel's other precursors are found in "Labyrinth." Most especially, of course, the tale of Bel Thorne, the Betan hermaphrodite, although some of the unfinished business with Bel stems most directly from the end of Mirror Dance. But I found a certain pleasing roundness to connecting the first tale in this universe to, if not the last, the latest.

  I'd also known I wanted to do something with the possibilities presented by the Cetagandan child-ships ever since I came up with the idea for them back when I was writing Cetaganda. And I've long wanted to play a bit with yet more varieties of bioengineering on humans in Miles's universe, so this tale also gave me a chance to introduce Guppy, the somewhat hapless prototype of an amphibian human species.

  So Diplomatic Immunity drew mainly on information I had in hand, or in brain, rolled with the usual themes: biology, bioengineering, we have met the aliens and they is us, plans not surviving contact with the enemy—or with one's friends, for that matter—and, above all, the transactional nature of parenthood.

  I'm asked frequently where I'm planning to go next with the Vorkosiverse. Have I written myself into a corner with Miles?

  Well, one of the things I like to do is take nonstandard heroes and run them through the wringer and see what happens. So coming up with a plot of the right weight for Miles in his current situation is an interesting challenge.

  Given powerful characters, there are still a lot of ways that the writer can play with them. The protagonist can be given a more powerful adversary, but then one gets into kind of a hero-villain arms race that ends up with the Superman–Lex Luthor scenario. A more interesting plan of attack is to look for the hero's uncorrected flaws, and focus on them. The hero may have all these new strengths, but he or she still has other weaknesses. One can separate a powerful character from his matrix of support, isolate and drop him back into a less-powerful position. Since Miles is a character sent out on galactic missions, that approach has a lot of scope for him.

 
; The possibilities just have to become more ingenious. The kind of simple physical plots that test younger characters are now not appropriate for Miles—not that he has ever dealt with anything but curve balls. The story has to find a different realm or level of challenge. For example, moral problems are not going to be particularly amenable to a character's having more power, because that's not the kind of thing that solves them.

  The wormhole structure of my universe gives the advantage to the defense. It requires and rewards interplanetary cooperation. But it also means that any planet has a limited number of immediate neighbors to conveniently have conflicts with, and Barrayar's neighborhood is pretty quiet at the moment. So if I want to stir up trouble for Miles I may have to stir it up someplace else than near his homeworld.

  The Vorkosiverse has eons of future history—a thousand before Miles, plus after. What's his world going to look like ten thousand years down his timeline, when this human speciation has exploded? I envision all these different aliens that were once us.

  I've thought about setting a story in another era, but these are ideas without characters and if it doesn't have a character it's not a story that picks up and runs. The Miles universe is presently snagged on Miles. He's such a pivotal character, such a world-changer, that I don't know where the universe goes after him—unless I jump so far ahead it becomes a matter of indifference whether he lived or died. Which is a rather sad notion.

  More people ask about whether Ivan is going to get married than how human evolution is going to go ten thousand years down the timeline (although, when you think about it, the two questions are profoundly related). We see Ivan a lot through Miles's eyes, and Miles is . . . opinionated, let's say, but beneath Ivan Vorpatril's lazy facade is a real lazy man. When we finally saw Ivan through his own mind, as a viewpoint character in A Civil Campaign, some people were disappointed because there wasn't more there. They had constructed Ivan as this man of mystery.