The Vorkosigan Companion

by Lillian Stewart Carl

  But the Ivan that you see is pretty much the Ivan that you get. He could be challenged, and he would rise to the occasion. Without the challenge, he would just lie there. Nothing is more life-disrupting for a hapless character than to accidentally stumble into one of my books. When I was writing A Civil Campaign and it was time for one of Ivan's scenes, I always had the feeling that he was hiding out from me much the way he hid out from his mother when she had unpleasant chores for him. He whined pitifully whenever I dragged him back onstage. Clearly, I'll have to think about something special for Ivan. He'll hate it, but he doesn't get a vote.

  Addressing some of the more common general questions about the Vorkosiverse's roots: Miles's world, Barrayar, is steeped in Russian culture, while their rivals the Betans are more Californian. It was likely my Cold War milieu that inspired me to create a world peopled by the descendants of Russians—plus, it must be admitted, the lingering influence of The Man from U.N.C.L.E.'s most personable hero, Illya Kuryakin. When I started the work in late 1982, it looked like the Cold War would go on forever. But in a moment of canny something-or-another—I know it wasn't foresight—I did not make my future Russians necessarily descended from the Soviet Union. I was more strategically vague than that, which put me ahead of the curve when the Soviet Union fell in 1989.

  Vor society is not based on Soviet society. Its Time-of- Isolation social structure had devolved to a species of neo-feudalism, for the same reasons of poor communications that the original feudalism evolved to address. I've selected bits and pieces of social inspiration from sources as diverse as Meiji Japan, Imperial Russia and Germany, and whatever other historical sources came my way, building up my own mental picture about how the real world, and therefore fictional worlds, work.

  I don't know whether the planet is called Barrayar in honor of the ruling family VorBarra or vice versa. I make up my backgrounds as needed for the tale I'm writing, and I don't fix the details until they are needed (they might, after all, need to be something else). So we won't find out until I set a tale in an earlier period, which doesn't look likely to happen any time soon.

  Whether the Galaxy common language is English or not depends on the region. In Miles's neck of the woods, it appears to be English. Some English-descended dialect may be the interstellar lingua franca the way English is the language of international air traffic, for the same practical reasons (it got there first, everybody needs to be able to communicate with everyone else for safety reasons, whatever). I haven't explored the probable effects of really good automatic/computerized real-time translations that we may presume would be developed by then, except in passing at that dinner scene in Brothers in Arms where the earbugs were late arriving.

  There is the usual rainbow of human races in the Vorkosiverse, too, beyond Barrayar and Beta Colony. The homogeneity of those rather suburban planetary settings is simply a result of their colonization histories. Both were, in quite different ways, "lost" colonies. The original colonizing groups were likely up to eighty percent Caucasian, and the minority racial phenotypes present among the founders were subsumed over time. The mixed genes are still in there, which is why the most common coloration on Barrayar is black hair, brown eyes, and olive skin. "Race" is an arguable concept anyway in a universe where anyone can alter any genetic trait at will in their offspring, and, with rather more medical difficulty, even in themselves. Even "species" turns out to have fuzzy borders.

  I tried to use as many ethnic names as possible to reflect Barrayar's colonization history. French, Russian, Greek, and British names thus should appear a lot, with an odd smattering of names of totally unrelated ethnic origins depending on who chanced to be among the fifty thousand Firsters.

  I'm occasionally asked whether Miles's mother Cordelia could be a secret agent of Beta Colony. I think while she is certainly not an agent of the Betan government, she is a vector of Betan culture. She feels that her homeworld has many strengths that Barrayar can learn from, not least a great deal of practice at living with what advanced technologies and biotechnologies can do to a society. So, she is an agent of change and for progressive thinking. Although that's plenty enough to work up a great conspiracy theory with, and I'm sure those Barrayarans who resent and resist change have.

  As to how Cordelia, a soldier of an enemy planet, could not only get access to Barrayar but thrive there, several factors contributed. First of all, Aral wanted her, and he has a certain amount of power in this situation. Aral was also expected to marry and have a son, since Barrayar is one of those cultures where it is part of one's social duty as a member of the aristocracy to create the next generation. His father Piotr certainly wanted Aral to get on with the job, and Piotr is also a man with a great deal of clout.

  Cordelia also created her own status by being an enemy soldier, and a successful one. She became admired, rather the way some American military history buffs admire General Rommel ("The Desert Fox" of WWII fame in North Africa), who although he was the enemy was good at what he did and had some interesting positive qualities. It is quite possible to admire an honorable enemy, especially if one is a militarist and attached to the military virtues oneself. And most critically, Emperor Ezar wanted Aral married so that he would not be trying to stage a coup by marrying Kareen, the dowager crown princess. Cordelia might not have been Ezar's first pick, but she was the woman on the spot.

  As for villains in the Vorkosiverse—I have some realistic ones and a few extraordinary ones, and I have to admit, the more over-the-top sorts are very handy to have around. Though I've always wondered, looking at the high-end villains in James Bond movies for example—if they have all the resources they display in the course of the plot, why haven't they just invested them all in mutual funds and retired? They clearly don't need to be villains in order to meet any rational need they could have. Few real people just go out and say "I'm going to be villainous today!," barring the sort of resentful unbalanced loser who has become wound up in his own personal status emergency, which he has decided to share with everyone around him. There is a natural preference for the high-end villains in adventure fiction, however, because the satisfaction of defeating them is unimpaired by messy ambiguities. Waxing the bad guy fixes the problem simply and cathartically, and now the reader can close the book, turn out the lights, and go to bed.

  But for the majority of ordinary people not in books who find themselves doing evil things, it's because they've fallen into a situation that they don't understand, didn't predict, didn't anticipate. Sometimes they get drawn into evil just because they don't realize that they can say "No!" Or the cost of saying "no" means that they will be shot. That sort of situation is especially ambiguous and difficult. There are hundreds of ways people can be psychologically manipulated into acts they would never have thought they could or would do, both good and bad—it happens all the time, in wars, in political or economic crises, in domestic violence. Army basic training is an example; so are propaganda and atrocity stories and news spins and religious indoctrination, and on and on. Human beings are immensely malleable. But these realistic sorts of resultant evil are more usually in the background than the foreground in my action-oriented tales, being much harder to bring to closure.

  The very last Miles story I wrote before breaking off, or out, of the SF milieu to try my hand again at fantasy was the novella "Winterfair Gifts," set against the backdrop of Miles and Ekaterin's wedding. I came to it after completing Diplomatic Immunity, violating my rule against prequels, but not by much. Like "The Borders of Infinity" novella, it had its seeds in some ideas and images I'd been kicking around earlier that did not seem to support the weight of a whole novel. And like the prior work, their right-sized container found them when I was approached by an editor, in this case Catherine Asaro. She wanted to try some crossover blending between the usually immiscible genres of F&SF and Romance, a project that appealed to me on many levels. (Reintegration across boundaries, again.) The tale gave me a chance to follow up on Sergeant Taura, and explore the
character of Roic, whose development had intrigued me in Diplomatic Immunity. A wedding seemed a fitting, if not end, resting place for the series, symbolic as it is of the triumph of the comic, the domestic, and the personal. And the universal.

  A Conversation with Lois McMaster Bujold

  Lillian Stewart Carl

  Lillian Stewart Carl: Let's begin as all biographies begin. To paraphrase Bill Cosby—whose 1960s records we almost memorized—you started life as a child.

  Lois McMaster Bujold: Yep. I was born in Columbus, Ohio, in 1949, third child and only daughter of the family. My parents were originally from Pittsburgh; they graduated from high school in 1930 straight into the Depression. My father, through work and scholarships, put himself through night school and, eventually, graduate school at Cal Tech. He ended up teaching welding engineering at Ohio State University. So I grew up in the white-bread suburb of Upper Arlington in the Fifties and Sixties.

  My father gave me a model for the writer-at-work; one of his projects during that period was editing the Nondestructive Testing Handbook, a major work in his field that was the world standard for twenty years. He did this largely at home in his upstairs office and in the spare room, where a secretary labored to track and collate the pounds of paper and worldwide correspondence. Memories of my dad center around the clack of his IBM Selectric, the scent of professorial pipe smoke, and the constant strains of classical music (WOSU-FM) from his hi-fi.

  Falling Free has an engineer character based loosely upon my father and his work, and was dedicated to him; Lord Auditor Vorthys owes much to his professor-emeritus mode.

  LSC: Your father was a remarkably patient man, letting us use his recording equipment and his typewriter for our own projects. Or we'd just sprawl in his chairs and read.

  LMB: I fell in love with reading early, but hit my stride in third grade when I discovered that I wasn't limited to the thin "grade level" picture books they laid out for our class during library periods, but could take any book from the shelf. I fell ravenously on Walter Farley and Marguerite Henry (this was my horse-obsessed period), and never looked back. I started reading science fiction when I was nine, because my father read it—he used to buy Analog magazine and the occasional paperback to read on the plane during consulting trips. With that introduction, no one was ever going to fool me into thinking SF was kid stuff!

  LSC: Kid stuff?

  LMB: Well, one must admit, SF has roots in boys'-own-adventure genres; I dimly remember reading SFnal tales in my older brother's copies of Boy's Life (a Boy Scout magazine) back then. But the term "adolescent" when applied to SF is not necessarily a pejorative, in my later and wider view. The great psychological work of adolescence (in our culture, anyway) is to escape the family, especially the mother but in some families the father, depending on which parent is more intent on enforcing the social norms, in order to create oneself as an autonomous person. This is why, I theorize, so much fantasy and SF is so hell-bent on destroying the protagonist's family, first thing, before anything else. Villages must be pillaged and burned, lost heirs smuggled off to be raised elsewhere, SFnal social structures devised that eliminate family altogether—because before anything at all can happen, you have to escape your parents. It's their job to prevent you having adventures, after all.

  When I was a kid, my favorite writers included Poul Anderson and James H. Schmitz—who had great female leads in his tales—the usual Heinlein (the juveniles, not his later work), Asimov, and Clarke, Fritz Leiber, L. Sprague de Camp, Mack Reynolds, Eric Frank Russell, Zenna Henderson; toward the end of that period there was Anne McCaffrey, Randall Garrett, Roger Zelazny, Tolkien, Cordwainer Smith, and so on. There was a lot less SF on the library shelves in those days; you could read it all up, and I did.

  I discovered the SF sections at the public libraries I could occasionally get to. Since we lived on the outer edge of the suburbs, and there was no public transportation, getting to a library involved getting my mother to drive me the ten or twenty miles there, which became easier when I reached age sixteen and could drive myself.

  LSC: For a while you were getting around on a bicycle. That's devotion to reading, risking getting run off a narrow black-topped road in order to reach the library. But that was after I entered your life—or you entered mine—thanks to some faceless bureaucrat who put us both into Section 7-2 at Hastings Junior High School in Upper Arlington.

  LMB: Dear God, you even remember the section number? Scary . . .

  LSC: Do you remember trying out for the school talent show by singing Tom Lehrer's "Poisoning Pigeons in the Park"? The silence after we finished could have swallowed a planet.

  LMB: I'm so glad we didn't make the cut. . . . The experience of making the attempt was likely good to have, I suppose. Maybe. Actually, I still don't like getting up on stage, come to think.

  LSC: It's a good thing we found each other—no one else could have put up with us. (Although I must admit to having been immensely gratified at sitting around a conference recently, singing Lehrer songs with the other writers!)

  LMB: Well, we didn't know fandom existed till after high school. In junior high we shared our love of books, watched favorite television shows and fell in love with their heroes together (The Man from U.N.C.L.E.! Star Trek! The short-lived TV version of The Wackiest Ship in the Army!), and became each other's first readers for the (mostly highly derivative) stories, scripts, and poetry that boiled up in both our heads—we were inspired to write because we loved to read, and because stories poured through our heads, welling up uninvited from wherever these thoughts come.

  I introduced you to SF and fantasy, and you introduced me to history and archaeology. This was the early 1960s, and American television was filled with World War II shows. It was all around in the culture. We shared books like Escape from Colditz, which was about WWII prisoner of war camp escapes in Germany. I think it is because we were trapped in high school and the idea of breaking out of the prison camp was a very captivating idea. "Maybe if we dig a tunnel we could get out of the classroom. . . ."

  LSC: One of our history teachers was a big fan of the movie Stalag 17, so I suppose the thought of breaking out wasn't exclusive to the students. I well remember writing a brief piece where I was magically transported from the crowded halls of the high school to the Pelennor Fields, hearing the horns of Rohan in the dawn.

  LMB: My Tolkienesque epic, embarked upon at age fifteen and never finished, at least has the dubious distinction of having been written in Spenserian verse, the result of having read The Lord of the Rings and The Faerie Queene twice that year.

  LSC: It was you who introduced me to Tolkien, something for which I'm profoundly grateful.

  LMB: I bought an Ace pirated edition of The Fellowship of the Ring on a family vacation to Italy, and found the ending to be a huge disappointment; it just sort of trailed off. Oh, lord, I thought, it's one of those darn dismal British writers. . . . There was nothing on the cover, spine, blurb, nor after the last page that indicated there was more, except for a brief reference buried at the end of the "about the author" paragraph to it being a heroic romance published in three parts. Marketing was more primitive in those days, I suppose.

  Half a year later, it was with overwhelming joy, still remembered vividly, that I found its two sequels. I don't remember the names of most of my high school teachers, mind you, but I can still remember where I was sitting when I first opened up The Two Towers and read, with a pounding heart, "Aragorn sped on up the hill . . ." My father's home office, the air faintly acrid with the scent of his pipe tobacco, in the big black chair under the window, yellow late-afternoon winter light shining in through the shredding silver-gray clouds beyond the chill bare Ohio woods to the west. Now, that's imprinting.

  The chair, the room, the man, the world are all gone now. I still have the book. It has stitched itself like a thread through my life from that day to this, read variously, with different perceptions at different ages; today, my overtrained eye even proofreads as
it travels over the lines, and sometimes stops to rearrange a sentence or quibble with a word choice. Is it a perfect book? No, doubtless not. No human thing is. Is it a great book? It is in my heart; it binds time for me, and binds the wounds of time.

  "And he sang to them . . . until their hearts, wounded with sweet words, overflowed, and their joy was like swords, and they passed in thought out to regions where pain and delight flow together and tears are the very wine of blessedness" is no bad epitaph for a writer. I could crawl on my knees through broken glass for the gift of words that pierce like those.

  LSC: It grieves me to hear someone say, "I don't have to read The Lord of the Rings, I've seen the movies"—even though the movies are amazing accomplishments. And had the side effect of allowing us to get back in touch with our inner fan-girls.

  LMB: It all comes back around, doesn't it? I tried sporadically to write through early college, but then got sidetracked—although there was a period during college when several of the members of the local SF club I'd discovered (in Columbus, Ohio) met at the house of a graduate student in English Literature who was himself trying to become a novelist, and who eventually succeeded, too. He went on in academia—I ran into him again a few years back at a con.

  LSC: Then my family had moved to Texas. We didn't see each other for five years, during which time real life overwhelmed the murmurs of our muses.

  LMB: Ray Bradbury, in a speech he gave at a Nebula banquet in the late eighties, told a tale of having one day decided he needed to "grow up"; endeavoring to put away childish things, he burned his comic book collection. About a month later, he woke up to himself and said, more or less, "What have I done?!" I was a slow learner; it took me about a decade to find that lost real self again. I married, worked for several years as a drug administration technician at the Ohio State University Hospitals, and finally had my two children.