The Vorkosigan Companion (3 page)

I decided to make my protagonist a welding engineer because I knew the type—my father was a professor in the subject, and one of my brothers had taken his degree in the specialty. This also seemed to handily solve my technical research problems; wrangling preschool children at the time, I knew I wasn't going to be able to get very far from home to do research, or much of anything else. This would have been early 1986.

I was about five chapters into the tale when my father died of a long-standing heart condition, in July of that year. At the timely invitation of then senior Baen editor Betsy Mitchell, I took a needed break to write my first novella—also the first work I'd ever sold before I wrote it, a scary step into a larger world for me as a writer. "The Borders of Infinity" had its start in about four pages of notes I'd scratched out for a potential Miles tale that drew on my early reading about WWII military prison camp breaks, an interest I shared with this volume's editor—Lillian lent me
Escape from Colditz
and other works on World War II way back in high school. Then there was the copy of
Bridge Over the River Kwai
that surfaced in my house. My notions didn't support a novel, but turned out to be perfect for the shorter length. Updating the technology of confinement—but not its psychology—provided the rest of the plot.

It found its place in Betsy's novella collection series in
Free Lancers
, along with tales by Orson Scott Card and David Drake, which may well have served as the first introduction of this new writer Bujold to some of their readers. After a few months, I was able to return to work on
Falling Free
and, my confidence boosted, send it to contract.

I then turned for technical research answers to my brother, and through him, to an engineer friend of his named Wally Voreck, who sent me the fascinating material on ice die formation, which is a real industrial process. With such a cool (literally) gimmick, I reasoned my way backward to a plot development that would use it as a solution. (Writers cheat with time, you know. We can run it both ways.)

But I did manage to sell the novel to
Analog
magazine as a four-part serial, which ran from December 1987 through February 1988. This brought my work to the attention of a whole pool of new readers who might not necessarily have picked the paperback (which came out in April of 1988) off the bookstore shelves. This was the first of several happy sales to
Analog
, one of my dad's favorites back in the Fifties and Sixties, and one of the first SF magazines I'd read when I was discovering the genre in my early teens. Since
Falling Free
was very much a tribute (if slyly updated) to the science fiction of that era, it felt much like coming full circle. The serial also was splendidly illustrated by Vincent di Fate; I still have five of the scratchboard originals, my first real art purchase. (He kindly adjusted his rates to my budget.)

Back in
The Warrior's Apprentice
, Miles was forced to split himself into two personas, the constrained Lord Vorkosigan and the active Admiral Naismith. (I leave it as an exercise for the reader to figure out how this relates to Mrs. Lois Bujold, housewife, and Lois McMaster Bujold, successful science fiction writer.) When in
Brothers in Arms
it became apparent to outsiders that there was going to be more than one of these books, I had a conversation with Jim Baen over what to dub the series in the little red banner on the front cover. He was voting for "A Miles Naismith Adventure," correctly identifying the admiral as by far the more charismatic of the pair. I held out for "A Miles Vorkosigan Adventure," and then wrote the novella "The Mountains of Mourning" to demonstrate to him why. I heard no complaints about the choice thereafter.

That novella was also a chance to explore mystery elements with an SF setting, in which Miles, a new-minted ensign, is sent up to his own District's backcountry to investigate a case of infanticide for mutation. This brings him face-to-face with those uglier aspects of Barrayar that he would most like to avoid, and foreshadows his future need to reintegrate himself, and, through himself, Barrayar's past and future.

Inherent in Miles's split into his two sub-personas—something that was vital for his growth at the time (and most useful for my adventure series)—was the necessity for his ultimate reunion into an integrated maturity. In
Brothers in Arms
, which may otherwise appear a mere adventure series sequel, I began my first halting exploration of these ideas, where Miles, trapped on Earth, meets the clone who was made to replace him in a political plot aimed against his father. Miles's clone-brother Mark represented yet another mirror-split, of the dark and light aspects of a fully rounded person, as is traditional for doppelgänger suspense tales, but those were precisely the traditions I wanted to explode. In one of the many triumphs of the personal over the political in my books, Miles instead frees him.

"Labyrinth" was the last-written of the Miles-adventure novellas collected in
Borders of Infinity
. With two rather dark tales already in the bag, I decided to make this one something of a comedy, for balance.

The novella allowed me to ring changes through still another social milieu: in this case, Jackson's Whole, and what it might do with the new biological options. On this planet, laissez-faire capitalism has gone completely over the top, as the rule of law enforced by governments with guns is replaced by the rule of guys with enough money to hire guns. Here, the only limits of biotechnology are "whatever money can buy." For chaotic results, this serves up a smorgasbord to make an adventure author's mouth water. Since Miles is the master of chaos, this was a character and a setting made to bring out the most in each other, and indeed they did.

In every society, no matter its response to technology, the test of humanity comes out the same, and it has nothing to do with genetics. No one can be guilty of their own birth, no matter what form it takes. We need not fear our technology if we do not mistake the real springs of our humanity. It's not how we get here that counts; it's what we do after we arrive.

The character of the quaddie Nicol in "Labyrinth," though a rather minor player, got me thinking again about the quaddies and my lost promise to complete their saga, and how their exodus might have come out. But other stories were crowding for my attention, and the impulse slipped away yet again.

Usually, I can't reliably trace where my story ideas arise from, but in one case I can. The first element to trigger the "Weatherman" sequence that opened
The Vor Game
was a memoir. T. E. Lawrence (better known as Lawrence of Arabia), after his WWI adventures left him with what we would nowadays call a bad case of post-traumatic stress disorder, attempted to change his identity and life by enlisting in the British air corps as a grunt under a pseudonym ("Aircraftman Shaw"). He wrote a memoir about going through enlisted basic training, titled
The Mint
, which pretty much summed up the dismal horrors of army basic upon a nervy, intelligent man. I read this, heavens, sometime back in the early Seventies; it went into the bag of authorial data and lay there pretty much dormant.

The second element was a story from Roman times. A Roman legion was deployed in, I believe, Dacia, somewhere off the Black Sea that had horrible cold winters. The high command was going through flip-flops over whether Christianity was to be an allowed religion among the troops. They decided it wasn't, and the order came down that everyone who had become Christian must recant. Forty men refused. To punish them, they were sent to go stand on the ice of a frozen lake naked until they changed their minds. One man broke, and decided to come back in. The other thirty-nine stood out on the ice, and one of the watching Roman officers was so impressed with their fortitude that he went out to join them, to make up their numbers. They all died together, and so became the early Christian martyr story known as "The Forty Martyrs of Sebastiani."

The third element goes back, again, to my father. He had a moonlighting job as a television weatherman in Columbus, Ohio, when I was growing up. And he was very good at this. His weather reports—analyses and predictions—were better than the military weather reports that the Strategic Air Command pilots at the local Air Force base were getting, as he discovered when they began to call him for forecasts. In addition, one of the things I had from my father was a picture, which hung on his home office wall for years, of an arctic weather station. It was a stylized watercolor print of a man in a parka who has come out into the snow and is checking his instruments. (I still have this.)

I was doing the dishes and listening to music, a tape by the Irish singer Enya, and on the tape was a song she sang in Latin. Now, I don't understand Latin, and I really have no idea what the song is really about, but somehow the sort of military-  ecclesiastical rhythms made all the ideas cross-connect in my mind for the first time. And so I thought, "Ah, I know! I will send Miles to a miserable arctic army base as his first assignment, where he'll be assigned to be a weatherman and get in all kinds of trouble and replay 'The Forty Martyrs of Sebastiani' and he'll be the fortieth man." That would be the opening of the story and how he gets into trouble and gets reassigned back to ImpSec, all this in aid of eventually reconnecting him with the Dendarii Mercenaries.

The novella was actually an outtake from the larger
The Vor Game
, rather than the novel being a later extension or continuation; but the rest of the tale involved such large shifts in tone and setting, I've often wondered since if they really ought to have been two separate books. Too late now.

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.