The Vorkosigan Companion (2 page)

One of the things about being disabled is that you are disabled every damned day, and have to deal with it. Again. So this aspect of Miles's character has necessarily followed him into all his stories. And yet, the theme isn't just Miles; we have Taura, the genetically engineered super-soldier-monster, Elli Quinn of the reconstructed face, Bel Thorne the hermaphrodite, Miles's clone-brother Mark, the list goes on. While it's possible all these people were got up as plot-mirrors for Miles, the quaddies appear independently of him. So disability, and difference, have become ongoing subjects, directly or obliquely.

I've sometimes wondered if this theme is a personal metaphor. I grew up in a family with a remarkable father, strong older brothers, a close grandfather who'd been widowed in 1916 and never remarried, no sisters, and a mother whose attempts to feminize me I fought from age two onward. I had no extended family nearby to provide alternate models for women's lives, nor did the culture of the Fifties and Sixties offer much relief. In the lexicon of (some) feminist critique, disabled Miles becomes "codedly feminine": he's smaller than those around him, can't win a physical fight, is in a "wrong"-shaped body—has lots of medical problems—and has to beat the bastards using only brains, wit, and charm. The sense of being "wrong" is deeply inculcated in females in our society; I recall a pretty woman of my early acquaintance who wouldn't go out without her makeup on. "I have to put on my face," she explained. Sad, and scary. But regardless of gender, almost everybody harbors some cripplement, emotional if not physical. You can't judge anybody—you never know what backbreaking secret burdens they may be carrying. There is scarcely a more universal appeal to the reader.

The most important feedback I've received from handicapped (and non-handicapped!) readers is the sense that my fiction is energizing for them. Somehow, watching Miles operate gives them the emotional edge they need to tackle, as I described it above, just one more damned day. I think it's a variant of the Dumbo-and-the-magic-feather effect. When I reflect how much Miles's world is stacked in his favor, and how much their world is not stacked in theirs, the idea of anyone trying to use Miles's life as a blueprint gives me cold chills. Yet it seems to work. Miles models success.

I also note in passing that the definition of a handicap goes by majority rule. The fact that I cannot flap my arms and fly is not considered a handicap in Minnesota, because nobody else here can, either. On another world, in some avian evolution such as constructed by several wonderful SF stories, this disability would severely limit my social opportunities.

But, of course, since Miles lives in the future, one must allow that future medical technology will be better and cleverer than our own. In general I see technology as an annihilator of handicaps. I am increasingly convinced that technological culture is the entire root of women's liberation. But technology, outside of science fiction, is as awkward as any other bit of reality. It arrives sideways, it never works right at first, the interface problem is always a bitch, and for every problem it solves, several more are created. Still, I adore technology, medical and most other kinds.

Prior to the time his books open, Miles has already undergone many invasive repairs. I had a curious conversation with a fan once, comparing and contrasting the childhoods of Miles and his clone-brother Mark, one of the contrasts being the degree to which Mark was abused and Miles was not (it's a long story, spread through two novels). "But what about all that medical treatment Miles had to endure?" my bright fan inquired. "Oh," I said. I hadn't thought of it like that, but she had a point. There's a scene somewhere in
The Warrior's Apprentice
where Miles remembers how his father extracted cooperation from him when no one else could: "You must not frighten your liege-people with this show of uncontrol, Lord Miles," his father earnestly addresses the hysterical child-Miles. A consummate politician, that man.

Over the course of the next decade of his life, and several books, Miles gradually acquires more and more repairs; by age twenty-eight, almost all of his original bones have been replaced with synthetics. He's still short, but can scarcely be described anymore as handicapped. This invited new challenges.

Miles's inferiority complex and bad case of Great Man's Son syndrome give him an enormous amount of drive, which is both attractive and gets him into a hell of a lot of trouble, particularly when he drives first and looks later. (He simultaneously has what is popularly called a superiority complex. I figure you can't be that smart and not know it.) As his author, I find his drive an enormously valuable characteristic for kicking my plots into motion, but I'm pretty sure any people who have to live with him in book-world (his cousin Ivan, for instance) find him pretty obnoxious at times. Miles has a dangerous tendency to try to turn the people around him into his annexes, a trait most spectacularly resisted by his clone-brother Mark. It's the main reason feminist scholars trying to construct Miles as codedly feminine get about halfway through the analysis and go, "Um, but . . ."

I didn't write the volumes about Miles Vorkosigan in strict chronological order.
Shards of Honor
and
The Warrior's Apprentice
are the first two novels I ever wrote. Nevertheless, the proper direct sequel to
Shards of Honor
is actually
Barrayar
, written six years later—they are literally two halves of one story—and the proper sequel of
The Warrior's Apprentice
is
The Vor Game
, also written years later.

The series grew organically as I scrambled from book to book; neither I nor my readers—nor Miles—have known what would be next. Quite like real life, that way. I admit, by the time I'd finished
The Warrior's Apprentice
, the structural model of C. S. Forester's Hornblower books had entered my mind. In this series about a British navy captain in the Napoleonic Wars, Forester began in the middle of Hornblower's life and career, then jumped forward and back as the spirit moved him. Each book stood alone as a complete and independent novel, yet when you put them all together, they turned into something larger than the sum of their parts, the character's overarching biography—stories within a mega-story. That structure gives a great deal of creative freedom, on a book by book basis. I've also found it allows each book to comment thematically and in other ways upon all the others, via a sort of literary hyperspace; an extra reward for the series reader's faithful dedication.

However, I have found by experiment that prequels suffer from certain constraints. The ending of the tale told has to not disrupt or contradict events that come later, and a character cannot grow beyond the bounds the writer has already shown. And there needs to be some explanation of why events are not causal in the intervening books, why an episode important enough to write a novel about is never subsequently-in-book-time thought about by the point of view character. Tricky. Lately, I've been sticking more to chronological order for these reasons.

My advice to new readers is: Begin reading the series where you are, and go on as you can. Which is not bad advice for life generally, come to think of it.

The next novel to be written wasn't about Miles, except very indirectly. It was
Ethan of Athos
, about an obstetrician from the planet forbidden to women. Charming fellow. Thereby hangs a tale that could only be science fiction. . . . 

Ethan of Athos
had two mainsprings: consideration of what extra-uterine gestation might do to human society, and reaction to earlier SF works from the Fifties and Sixties, when I grew up and imprinted on the genre, that dealt with gender relations in the future, particularly the "Amazon planet" meme, which I now take (with half a century of hindsight) as that era's attempt to grapple with the impending issues of women's lib.
Ethan
was my contribution to the SF gender argument. The future universe in which all my SF plays out is not culturally uniform, and so I can explore more than one take on all these intertwined issues. Settings in the future also allow one to detach the underlying issues from current events and their emotional baggage, a standard useful SF hat trick.

At the time I wrote
Ethan of Athos
, I had not yet sold any novels, though two completed works were making the rounds of New York publishers. I had, however, made my first short story sale, and on the boost to my morale so provided, I embarked on this third novel. I was groping around for the magic trick by which I might break in, and among the advice I collected was "Try something short. The editors are less daunted by thinner manuscripts on their slush piles, and maybe they'll read it sooner!" So I was determined to keep the length under strict control. I still wasn't sure I would be able to sell the books as a series, although I quite liked the universe I had begun to develop, so I also wanted the next thing to be series-optional, not dependent on the two prior books but connectable to them if some editor did see the light. But more importantly—in the course of
Shards of Honor
I had tossed off as a mere sidebar the idea of the uterine replicator. Upon consideration, this appeared to me more and more a piece of technology that really did have the potential to change the world, and I wanted to explore some of those possible changes.

Extra-uterine gestation is not a new idea in SF. Aldous Huxley first used it way back in the early Thirties in
Brave New World
, but being who and where he was, used it mainly as part of a metaphoric exploration of specifically British class issues. I was a child of another country and time, with a very different worldview, and other issues interested me a lot more. Primary among my beliefs was that, given humanity as I knew it, there wasn't going to be just one way any new tech would be applied—and that the results were going to be even more chaotic than the causes.

One obvious consequence of the uterine replicator was the possibility of a society where women's historical monopoly on reproduction would be broken. All-male societies exist in our world—armies, prisons, and monasteries to name three—but all must resupply their populations from the larger communities in which they are embedded. This technology could break that dependence. I discarded armies and prisons as containing skewed or abnormally violent populations, and instead considered monasteries as a possible model for an all-male society both benign and, provably, viable over generations.

About this time—the winter of 1984/85—I went to a New Year's Eve party given by a nurse friend, and fell into a conversation about some of these nascent ideas with two men. One was an unmarried and notably macho surgeon, the other a hospital administrator with two children of his own. The two men took, interestingly, opposite sides of the argument of whether such an all-male colony could ever be workable. The macho surgeon rejected the notion out of hand; the man who'd actually had something to do with raising his own children was intrigued, and not so inclined to sell his gender short. (The surgeon, note, did not perceive that he was slandering his gender; in bragging about what he could not possibly do in the way of menial women's work, he was positioning himself and his fellows as ineluctably on the high-status end of human endeavor.) It was clear, in any case, that the topic was a hot one, of enormous intrinsic interest to a wide range of people.

My reader reaction has been pretty positive—or they wouldn't be my readers, QED. A somewhat circular proposition, there.
Ethan of Athos
has not been my top seller, and I do get echoes of negative response from unreconstructed homophobes now and then, who bounce off the very idea of the book. (A quick scan of the reviews on Amazon.com can give a self-selected slice of response from the general public.) But in general, if a straight person is open-minded and bright enough to read SF in the first place, they don't have a problem taking that book in stride. My gay readers like it that earnest physician Ethan was a fairly early positive portrayal (the book was first published in 1986), and that he's a fully-rounded person, not just an agenda with legs.

Falling Free
came to be written as a result of a phone conversation with Jim Baen. I had written my first three science fiction novels "on spec," that is, without a prior contract or even contact with a publisher, which is pretty much the norm for first-time novelists. They'd sold on one memorable day in October 1985, in my very first phone conversation with Jim, when, after reading
The Warrior's Apprentice
, he called me up and offered for all three books. I was then faced, for the first time, with writing a novel with a known publishing destination, and intimidating expectations.

I had been thinking of following up a minor character from
The Warrior's Apprentice
named Arde Mayhew, a jump pilot afflicted with obsolete neural implant technology who would be on a quest for a ship that would fit him. I pictured him finding his prize among a group of people dwelling in an asteroid belt whose ancestors were bioengineered to live in free fall, and who were eking out a living, among other ways, as interstellar junk dealers. Jim was not much taken with Arde, but he seemed to perk up when I came to describe my proto-quaddies, and opined that a tale about them might be more interesting and science-fictional.

The quaddies' reason for being, or rather, being made, would be knocked asunder when a practical artificial gravity was developed. As I researched what was then known about free-fall physiology, it seemed to me that most of the obvious changes wouldn't necessarily leave people unable to return to a gravity environment. I came up with the notion of a second set of hands to replace legs after conversing with a NASA doctor about the dual problems the astronauts faced of leg atrophy, and their hands growing excessively tired as they took over the task while working of bracing oneself in place that on Earth is done by gravity. Having reasoned my way backward to their two-hundred-years-prior genesis, I decided to begin the quaddies' tale at the beginning, came up with the main characters, and from there, just followed their actions to their logical conclusions.