Spoiler-free thinking about where Bujold could go with the VORKOSIGAN universe

[xiphias]

I think there's a general consensus CRYOBURN is the weakest Vorkosigan novel Bujold has written. Maybe not the most flawed -- personally, I count ETHAN OF ATHOS as more flawed -- but certainly the weakest Vorkosigan novel, and possibly the weakest book, period. (And it's still readable -- the "worst" of an excellent bunch may still be objectively okay.) And that this is partially because she ran out of stories she wanted to tell about Miles before she stopped telling stories about Miles. And that CAPTAIN VORPATRIL'S ALLIANCE might well be pretty darned good, because she might well still have stories she wants to tell about Ivan.

In a friend's LJ, people were thinking about this, and it was observed that, in the Vorkosiverse, "having kids" means "no longer being the protagonist." Oh, you still have a life, you still have adventures -- Count Admiral Viceroy Aral Vorkosigan and Countess Captain Vicerine Cordelia Naismith Vorkosigan certainly didn't stop doing stuff once Miles was born, but, for purposes of the novels, they became "Miles's parents" -- supporting characters. Ekaterin is something of an exception, having come into the story with a kid in tow, but, once she has her NEW batch of kids, she's backgrounded. Therefore, by Vorkosiverse rules, Miles shouldn't have been protagonist-ing during CRYOBURN. Miles and Ekaterin ought to have become background characters during the last chapter of DIPLOMATIC IMMUNITY, the way Cordelia and Aral did during the last chapter of BARRYAR. Ekaterin is, but Miles doesn't become backgrounded until the last chapter and epilogue of CRYOBURN, which is among the reasons the book doesn't work.

Incidentally -- as far as I can see it, Admiral Quinn is the only person in-universe whose noticed this rule . . . Quinn could still carry a book, but Elana and Baz Jessek-Bothari stopped having that option when THEY had kids. . . Kareen and Mark could be protagonists, until and unless they decide to breed . . . Ivan's still available to be a protagonist, because he's spent his whole adult life screwing around rather than settling down.

The story that Lis wants to see, though, is the Barraryan Kel, from Tamora Pierce's FIRST TEST/PAGE/SQUIRE/LADY KNIGHT quadrology.

I can only think of three all-male militaries in the Vorkosigan universe. Athos, obviously, but that almost doesn't count. Cetaganda. And Barryar. And the Barryaran situation is REALLY not at all stable -- not when at least a third of the Barryaran Empire is already egalitarian. No Komarran woman is going to understand why she can't join the Imperial Service Academy. Including, for instance, Empress Laissa. . .

Some time soon, a girl from Komarr, or maybe from Sergyar -- or, for that matter, on Barryar itself, is going to want to enter the Emperor's Service. What's going to happen then? Who's that girl going to be?

THAT'S the story that Lis wants to read.

Of course, one of the other problems with the Vorkosiverse is that we're so far beyond it. I mean, the United States is already closer to Beta Colony than to Barryar. Western Europe, closer still.

And as far as technology goes, I think that the comconsole I'm currently typing on is at least as powerful and versatile as the ones Miles Vorkosigan uses. That's a ubiquitous problem along all science fiction worlds created more than, oh, ten or fifteen years ago, though . . . I mean, it's not merely that my communicator is more powerful than Kirk's, it's that, if someone WANTED to, we could make one that's more powerful than Picard's . . .

Comments

[tylik.livejournal.com]

Huh.

That is really, really not my take on Cryoburn, and not that of most of the folks I've spoken with. It's a much quieter novel, but I would put it as generally on the stronger side (say, not as strong as Memory, but stronger than Diplomatic Immunity, and stronger than most of the earlier ones). And pretty brilliant.

It's about being a grown up, and it's about death. And it's not about madcap adventure. Which makes it pretty different than many.

[goljerp]

I came to the Vorkosigan books fairly recently; I got a couple of the books from work, and then (once I started), worked methodically through them, working very hard to slow down enough so I didn't read them all in one weekend. (Having a life helped there, as well as trying not to read too many books from the CD which came with Cyroburn.)

I'd say that I liked Cyroburn too. It's hard for me to say exactly which one I like the best, but I feel it was worth my time.

[browngirl.livejournal.com]

*contemplates*

[navrins]

I think Cryoburn is only - well, primarily - flawed in that it's not the story that needed to happen and that we (well, I) were prepared for. It was stalling because LMB didn't want to write the story that begins in its last paragraph.

As for parents ceasing to be protagonists, I've always seen the Vorkosigan series as the Story of Miles, with Shards and Barrayar as, perhaps, prolog. They *are* part of Miles's story, in that he is who he is *because* his parents went through those events. But I think there's no reason the story can't continue to be the Story of Miles as Miles becomes a parent, a grandparent, and even a legend. While a story could be told about Miles's child's reaction to his eventual death, there's no reason that story couldn't still be *about* Miles (although it doesn't have to be), just as a story about Miles's reaction to Aral's death could be about Miles, or about Aral, or even about Pyotr. Or all three.

[metaphortunate.livejournal.com]

There's no reason the story couldn't be about Miles, and I'd like it to be: I'd like to see Bujold stretch herself as an author and write about a parent as protagonist. (Ista doesn't count, her kids are grown. Ekaterin does count, and I'd like to see more of that!)

[jsburbidge.livejournal.com]

I think that Cryoburn, like DI, is "slight" because it skates over the issues it handles rather than grappling with them, and they displace the personal issues the reader does identify with, birth and death, by having their Barrayaran locus offstage or at least deferred to the end and then handled only as cameos.

I will also note that of the Nexus novels, many of the ones which seem to be the densest and most compelling are the ones where Barrayar itself is effectively a character, as it were: Barrayar, Mirror Dance, Memory, A Civil Campaign, and (at one remove, but still thematically Barrayaran Empire) Komarr. This is partly because, (Watsonianly) N centuries from now, it's only a relatively backward society like Barrayar with which we're likely to have any points of contact at all (even if some of them are negative). DI and Cryoburn suffer because by definition our viewpoint is the transitory outsider Miles on a society which is very much more different from our own.

[phantom_wolfboy]

I, personally, won't be reading any more Vorkosiverse stories that are set on Barrayar or feature Miles as agent of Barrayar. I just hate Barrayar.

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

So, FALLING FREE and ETHAN OF ATHOS, then?

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

Thinking about it more, I see Barrayar as "the only planet in the Vorkosiverse that Jim Baen would publish." (Not fair, of course -- Baen published ETHAN OF ATHOS, but that was a bit out of their core demographic.)

Barrayar is the wet dream of a particular type of American conservative -- patriarchal, militaristic, feudal, personal. The stories themselves aren't, so much -- many of the stories are about how Barrayar is being dragged, kicking and screaming, into the thirtieth century. The pace of societal change seems glacially slow, considering the fact that they've got the rest of the universe as models, and I think that the modern United States is changing faster than Barrayar is.

Figure that the Time of Isolation ends at about 2800, and the current year is something like 2900. Barrayar has been part of the wider galactic culture for about a hundred years, or about three or four generations.

For us, the idea of women being given the right to vote was first floated seriously around, when, 1865? So we went from the very idea of women participating in politics all the way to Woodstock in about the same amount of time that Barrayar has advanced to, well, maybe 1910 or so.

Honestly, it seems that women's integration into the political and military structures of Barrayar is unrealistically slow. The timing assumes that Cordelia and Aral are the first Barrayarans EVER to have noticed that women are full citizens EVERYWHERE ELSE IN THE UNIVERSE INCLUDING ON A PLANET THAT IS NOW PART OF THEIR EMPIRE. And even THEN, it seems slow.

[goljerp]

Yes, but... the whole planet has been under serious military pressure for a lot of the time, and (even after they throw off the Cetagandans) most people don't get to see a lot of the nexus. They didn't even annex Komarr until Aral was, what, 25-30 something? That's not a ton of time. I don't think that the average Barrayaran was tootling around the nexus at that point. By the time of The Civil Campaign, yes, it's more reasonable for the sister of a count to go off to Beta colony, or for a young woman to go there to study -- but it's still the exception, rather than the rule. I think that the reader gets a distorted view of how Barrayar is integrated into the nexus because the Vorkosigan family in general (and Miles in particular) are.

And are, in fact, women full citizens everywhere else? Are they full citizens in the Cetagandan empire? And, sure, Komarr is egalatarian -- but they're also the despised, conquered, planet.

So, no, I don't find the integration to be unrealistically slow.

[adrian-turtle.livejournal.com]

Honestly, it seems that women's integration into the political and military structures of Barrayar is unrealistically slow.

I'm not sure of that. I don't recall Cordelia arguing for women's suffrage, or for women being able to own their own property. She's shocked by how hard it is for Drou to compete in sports and have a military career. (Title IX passed in 1972. The first women graduated West Point in 1980.) She's shocked by the fact that Barrayaran women, especially those wanting to be thought "respectable," had so little control of their childbearing. (The Comstock Act was not fully repealed until 1972.) It doesn't seem very far off from what happened here, in the 1960s. It may not be a coincidence that Bujold herself was a teenager then.

[tylik.livejournal.com]

I've often felt that she comes back to Barrayar so much because it allows her to write about contemporary issues that any self respecting future world would hopefully deal with. The tension between culture and tradition and modernity is, well... now. Especially wrt women's issues.

Though I know as many men who have been given copies of Komarr in hopes that it would help them come to terms with how awful their marriage really is as women.

Lying in bed with my husband and realizing just how much he was like Etienne... yeah. Took me a bit, but yeah.

[bradhicks.livejournal.com]

This is more generous than my personal take on it. I haven't even picked up Cryoburn, I stopped with Diplomatic Immunity when I concluded that, frankly, the Vorkosigan saga really ends with Memory. Everything after that feels like just crapping out another one just to collect a paycheck.

At best? It's an entirely less interesting series. A Civil Campaign sets the tone that this is no longer about a period in time when soldiers and mercenaries and spies conduct deadly campaigns over the course of history for this wormhole nexus. The shape of politics in the wormhole nexus is set, for the forseeable future. And that's great, if you live in that era. But what comes next is internal politics and quiet diplomacy and social change, hence the whole Regency romance/comedy of manners feel of the last couple of books.

And I can't make up my mind if it's just that I find that kind of story less interesting, or if McMaster Bujold just doesn't know how to write them as well. I'm inclined towards the latter, though, because I don't find mil-fic interesting, except for hers.

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

What were your feelings about CIVIL CAMPAIGN itself? CC is, personally, my favorite Vorkosiverse book, and general consensus seems to be that it does what it's setting out to do fairly well. So that might help figure out whether it's a "category is not to your taste" situation, or an "item is a poor quality example of its category" situation.

[(Anonymous)]

Bah! Starfleet communicator technology is way superior to anything we have.

Sure, handheld satellite phones exist; Motorola makes one. And had the market not collapsed straight away because they're fairly useless, others were planned, like the Teledesic. But look at them — they're big and bulky. And they need to be to deal with a signal from a satellite a mere few hundred miles away.

In Star Trek, the Enterprise usually orbited at a much greater distance, the communications were faster than light, and it could punch a signal through a planet if the ship was on the opposite side at the time or if the away team were in caves, unless this was inconvenient for the plot.

Sure, ours have more functions, but that seems to be because Starfleet likes to have communicators only be communicators. Angry Birds is probably to be found loaded onto the tricorders instead.

[(Anonymous)]

My thought exactly (except I don't know as much about the satellite phone market).

C.

[phaedra-lari.livejournal.com]

Duv and Delia's daughter, if they have one, would be a fantastic Barrayaran Kel.

I have mixed feelings about Cryoburn. I liked a lot of the themes it worked with, the tech was interesting, the end was incredible. The action throughout felt... insufficiently motivated a lot of times. I liked the book overall, but did not feel as pulled into it as I did when reading the others.

I really look forward to reading about Ivan.

[tylik.livejournal.com]

I really want to read more about Dono and Olivia - particularly Olivia.

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

I so don't want Barrayar to wait that long. My Barrayaran Kel would be from Sergyar, maybe. Imagine a girl who was born in the hill country in the Dendarii mountains, somewhere upland of Hassadar, maybe someone who went to Raina Csurik Primary School. Her family followed the Viceroy and Vicereine from the District to Sergyar, and she's grown up worshipping Vicereine Countess Captain Cordelia (and, for that matter, also Viceroy Count Admiral Aral), just like most every other Sergyaran kid her age.

She's done just as much sodbusting and soil conditioning as her brothers, suffered from the same worm plague, and has absolutely no conception of why she SHOULDN'T serve the Empire the way her heroes Cordelia and Aral have. And neither does Cordelia.

[burgundy.livejournal.com]

I like reading stuff about this series. Years and years ago, a friend gave me an old battered copy of Ethan of Athos. I loved it. I still have it, and reread it from time to time. I'd never read any of her stuff before, and it was years before I realized that the book was part of a much larger universe.

And I have never read any of it. Partly because, reading posts like this, it seems impenetrable, like it would just take too much of an investment of time and energy to get to a point where I had even a basic understanding of the worlds and characters. But partly because I like how things are now - it's like following the career of a band I saw when they were still in college and who I am fondly nostalgic about without actually liking their music very much. "Aww, they're talking about Ethan of Athos's cousins! Wow, that sure does look like a big epic series. I'm so proud of Ethan of Athos, being part of a series like that."

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

ETHAN OF ATHOS is my least-favorite Vorkosigan novel, because I feel like it just hasn't aged well. Its ideas of gender are just so weird.

[thnidu.livejournal.com]

thnidu has either too much or too little to say to get into the topic right now.

Dr. Whom, however, walks to the whiteboard and writes:

• Barrayar
• Cryoburn

thnidu slinks away in embarrassment.

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

At least my spelling errors weren't of real words . . . .

[trinker.livejournal.com]

Gah, I hate Cryoburn with an intense passion.

As strongly as I love many other works in the Vorkosiverse, in fact. Interesting speculation.

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

Do you think that your reaction has to do with the appropriation of a Japanese-ish culture? I mean, in addition to the weak characters, non-compelling plot, and general flabby writing. I could totally get hating it on purely artistic merits, rather than being personally offensive to you and yours.