A Game Of Consequences
Aug. 21st, 2006 11:01 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mtvessel25 Jul 06
Miles Errant - Lois McMaster Bujold - Baen Books, 2002
* * * *
Any series in which the books are not written and published in the chronological order of their internal timeline presents the reader with a problem. Should they be read in the sequence in which the author wrote them, allowing one to appreciate the development of their ideas and style, or in their chronological order, with the story unfolding in a natural way? Is it better to read, say, the Silmarillion before the Hobbit before the Lord of the Rings? What about the Alliance/Merchanter/Union chronicles of C.J. Cherryh?
Obviously it depends on the author; I wouldn’t recommend anyone coming to Tolkien for the first time to start with the Silmarillion (has anyone ever tried?), and with Cherryh the books are sufficiently distinct that the order in which they are read doesn’t really matter. But with the Vorkosigan sequence, in my view, there is really no argument. One of its great joys is the way in which the plot of each chronologically succeeding novel results from the consequences of Miles’ actions in the preceding ones. This game of consequences makes reading the series in timeline rather than written order much more satisfying, and the fact that Bujold has taken the trouble to publish the earlier Vorkosigan novels in compendia suggests that she thinks so too. Quite remarkably (given that they were composed at such different times) the stories gathered in each compendium also share a common theme - in this case the deep psychological reasons for Miles’ bifurcated personality as Vor lord and mercenary captain - which is explored from a different angle in each one. The connections between the stories are so clever that one would almost have thought she had planned the whole sequence from the outset.
The three stories in Miles Errant are the novella The Borders of Infinity and the novels Brothers in Arms and Mirror Dance. The first is set in a prison colony, where the captured soldiers of Cetaganda’s campaign against the planet Marilac are imprisoned under conditions which meet the letter of the interstellar Geneva Convention but not its spirit (I wonder who Bujold had in mind when she came up with this scenario?). Food rations are dropped through the force-shielded dome that protects the prisoners from the poisonous planetary atmosphere in random locations, leading to a brutal gang culture as they fight to get their share. And one of those prisoners is Miles Vorkosigan, for reasons which are initially mysterious.
Anyone familiar with Miles’ modus operandi will be unsurprised to hear that he soon starts to organise things via a religious eccentric called Suegar, who has Words that suggest that Miles is The Other One (and thinking about it, the whole plot is like a massively shortened version of Dune, except that Miles turns out not to have god-like powers). The way in which he does this is an inspiring tale of how shared values like fairness can be made to triumph over greed and brutality using the power of quasi-religious gobbledigook spouted by a charming and plausible con-artist. It’s a reminder that religion is a tool that can be used for positive as well as negative social ends.
Brothers in Arms is by comparison somewhat disappointing despite being set in an interesting location - London, old Earth. Though to be honest I wish it wasn’t. Bujold is not particularly interested in projecting that city hundreds of years into the future, and her depiction is bland and unrealistic (compared with the Mediaeval-with-modern-bits world of Barryar, with which she is clearly much more comfortable - it is perhaps unsurprising that in her recent books she seems to have given up SF settings in favour of fantasy). The plot is also not quite up to the usual standard, being largely concerned with Miles’ attempts to keep his mercenary captain and Vor lord personae straight as he tries to arrange a re-fit for the Dendarii fleet following the events of Borders of Infinity, deflect questions about his past from an overly curious journalist and chase a missing payment from the Barryaran secret service, which appears to have gone astray due to the actions of a Komarran bureaucrat (Komarr being a planet that Barryar had invaded some years previously). A conspiracy plot does eventually emerge, but it is frankly rather silly and serves mainly to introduce Miles to a relative (called Mark) that he didn’t know he had. However the climax, set on a futuristic Thames Barrier, is enjoyably filmic, and full marks to Bujold for predicting several years before global warming became fashionable that a) the Barrier would be much bigger than it now is and b) in use on every tide.
Mark’s actions provide the springboard for the much superior Mirror Dance, which starts on Jackson’s Whole, a mafia-like society run by barons who make their money from the dodgy business of human cloning for replacement body parts. Bujold evidently realised that there was one truly awful thing that she hadn’t yet done to Miles and duly does it, as the consequences of the previous novella Labyrinth hit home. The action eventually shifts to Barryar and reintroduces Miles’ formidable mother Cordelia. Pleasingly, in this novel she is closer to her original persona in Cordelia’s Honor, a steely and forceful scientist who is not afraid to criticise the things she loves most. Her analysis of Miles’ knight errant tendencies and the reasons for them is brutally frank but accurate (and true to life - mothers say that sort of thing). There are hints that she has plans for the whole-scale transformation of Barryar’s militaristic and male-dominated society into something more civilised, which suggests that this might be the overriding plot for the sequence as whole. Mark’s character is also nicely developed from troubled and impetuous young man to something like Miles’ but entirely distinctive. This is, of course, the Mirror Dance of the title, for Mark’s personality develops by both copying and reflecting what he sees in Miles, just as Miles’ two personae develop and reflect off each other.
So how will Mark’s development (not to mention the awful thing that happens to him in this novell) affect Miles? I guess I’m just going to have to read the next one (Memory) to find out
Miles Errant - Lois McMaster Bujold - Baen Books, 2002
* * * *
Any series in which the books are not written and published in the chronological order of their internal timeline presents the reader with a problem. Should they be read in the sequence in which the author wrote them, allowing one to appreciate the development of their ideas and style, or in their chronological order, with the story unfolding in a natural way? Is it better to read, say, the Silmarillion before the Hobbit before the Lord of the Rings? What about the Alliance/Merchanter/Union chronicles of C.J. Cherryh?
Obviously it depends on the author; I wouldn’t recommend anyone coming to Tolkien for the first time to start with the Silmarillion (has anyone ever tried?), and with Cherryh the books are sufficiently distinct that the order in which they are read doesn’t really matter. But with the Vorkosigan sequence, in my view, there is really no argument. One of its great joys is the way in which the plot of each chronologically succeeding novel results from the consequences of Miles’ actions in the preceding ones. This game of consequences makes reading the series in timeline rather than written order much more satisfying, and the fact that Bujold has taken the trouble to publish the earlier Vorkosigan novels in compendia suggests that she thinks so too. Quite remarkably (given that they were composed at such different times) the stories gathered in each compendium also share a common theme - in this case the deep psychological reasons for Miles’ bifurcated personality as Vor lord and mercenary captain - which is explored from a different angle in each one. The connections between the stories are so clever that one would almost have thought she had planned the whole sequence from the outset.
The three stories in Miles Errant are the novella The Borders of Infinity and the novels Brothers in Arms and Mirror Dance. The first is set in a prison colony, where the captured soldiers of Cetaganda’s campaign against the planet Marilac are imprisoned under conditions which meet the letter of the interstellar Geneva Convention but not its spirit (I wonder who Bujold had in mind when she came up with this scenario?). Food rations are dropped through the force-shielded dome that protects the prisoners from the poisonous planetary atmosphere in random locations, leading to a brutal gang culture as they fight to get their share. And one of those prisoners is Miles Vorkosigan, for reasons which are initially mysterious.
Anyone familiar with Miles’ modus operandi will be unsurprised to hear that he soon starts to organise things via a religious eccentric called Suegar, who has Words that suggest that Miles is The Other One (and thinking about it, the whole plot is like a massively shortened version of Dune, except that Miles turns out not to have god-like powers). The way in which he does this is an inspiring tale of how shared values like fairness can be made to triumph over greed and brutality using the power of quasi-religious gobbledigook spouted by a charming and plausible con-artist. It’s a reminder that religion is a tool that can be used for positive as well as negative social ends.
Brothers in Arms is by comparison somewhat disappointing despite being set in an interesting location - London, old Earth. Though to be honest I wish it wasn’t. Bujold is not particularly interested in projecting that city hundreds of years into the future, and her depiction is bland and unrealistic (compared with the Mediaeval-with-modern-bits world of Barryar, with which she is clearly much more comfortable - it is perhaps unsurprising that in her recent books she seems to have given up SF settings in favour of fantasy). The plot is also not quite up to the usual standard, being largely concerned with Miles’ attempts to keep his mercenary captain and Vor lord personae straight as he tries to arrange a re-fit for the Dendarii fleet following the events of Borders of Infinity, deflect questions about his past from an overly curious journalist and chase a missing payment from the Barryaran secret service, which appears to have gone astray due to the actions of a Komarran bureaucrat (Komarr being a planet that Barryar had invaded some years previously). A conspiracy plot does eventually emerge, but it is frankly rather silly and serves mainly to introduce Miles to a relative (called Mark) that he didn’t know he had. However the climax, set on a futuristic Thames Barrier, is enjoyably filmic, and full marks to Bujold for predicting several years before global warming became fashionable that a) the Barrier would be much bigger than it now is and b) in use on every tide.
Mark’s actions provide the springboard for the much superior Mirror Dance, which starts on Jackson’s Whole, a mafia-like society run by barons who make their money from the dodgy business of human cloning for replacement body parts. Bujold evidently realised that there was one truly awful thing that she hadn’t yet done to Miles and duly does it, as the consequences of the previous novella Labyrinth hit home. The action eventually shifts to Barryar and reintroduces Miles’ formidable mother Cordelia. Pleasingly, in this novel she is closer to her original persona in Cordelia’s Honor, a steely and forceful scientist who is not afraid to criticise the things she loves most. Her analysis of Miles’ knight errant tendencies and the reasons for them is brutally frank but accurate (and true to life - mothers say that sort of thing). There are hints that she has plans for the whole-scale transformation of Barryar’s militaristic and male-dominated society into something more civilised, which suggests that this might be the overriding plot for the sequence as whole. Mark’s character is also nicely developed from troubled and impetuous young man to something like Miles’ but entirely distinctive. This is, of course, the Mirror Dance of the title, for Mark’s personality develops by both copying and reflecting what he sees in Miles, just as Miles’ two personae develop and reflect off each other.
So how will Mark’s development (not to mention the awful thing that happens to him in this novell) affect Miles? I guess I’m just going to have to read the next one (Memory) to find out