Speak Stiltedly and Wear a Yellow Shirt

There are more spoilers in this entry than usual. Don’t make me say I told you so.

I’ve reached Mirror Dance in my Lois McMaster Bujold rereading project, and it’s certainly grown on me. With apologies to Liz, though, I still can’t add it to my favorites. I rank it above the pure space operatics, but below the moving themes of Shards of Honor, Memory and
Komarr.

Christine once said “psychology robs us of our complexity.” (John Irving?) The on-and-off psychoanalysis of Mark robbed him of his complexity for me. He starts out intriguingly clueless and inchoate, but then he overhears his parents talking about him, has some sort of Road to Damascus event right there on the library floor, and loses me completely.

I’m not knocking the presence of psychobabble itself - Cordelia’s analysis of Mark was wonderful, and the little bits about Gregor both taking after Cordelia and watching the watcher were lovely, too. Only Mark’s psychological insight into himself threw me, because to me self-knowledge is at the other end
of the mental health spectrum from psychological instability. This contradiction comes to a head when Mark tries to warn Kareen about his mental problems, and settles for letting Cordelia warn her. At that point, I didn’t see what was left to warn her about. (Apparently Cordelia didn’t either.)

I know Liz isn’t buying this, so let’s compare Mark to Miles. For at least the previous two books, Miles’ identity problems (Lt. Miles vs. Lord Miles vs. Admiral Miles, with a side of Amnesiac Miles) have been a significant theme, but never has anyone reduced Miles to a syndrome or a defense mechanism. Yes, Cordelia blamed it on Barrayar, but I didn’t buy that. For one thing, that’s LMB talking about how she
meant to write about the pain of a mutant in a military anti-mutant society, while the real pain has come mainly from his grandfather and his own screw-ups. More importantly, Miles has never looked for a therapeutic purpose behind “the little Admiral.” When he thinks about it at all, Miles is just as ignorant as the reader about the psychological underpinnings of his multiple personality - and just as disinterested.

That Mark can explain Mark to himself makes him fundamentally less complex than Miles. Perhaps in real life psychology does not rob us of our individuality, but in literature explaining a character too well amounts to explaining the character away. Yes, there are more pieces of Mark than of Miles at the end of the novel, but Mark’s pieces are all labelled and pinned to a board, while Miles’ pieces run free (and run him into serious trouble in Memory, as foreshadowed by Cordelia when she says she’ll only
start worrying about Miles when the little Admiral is taken away).

For all the fascinating parallels between Mark and Miles, Mark is not a mirror image of his big brother. Mark is, if you’ll pardon the math, a projection of 3-space Miles onto a rather dark plane. It does take the whole novel to get him properly pinned down, but I don’t see room for a Mark sequel beyond his comic subplot in A Civil Campaign.

Speaking of comic subplots, I think I’m in love with Ivan Vorpatril.

I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t read the whole thing myself - five hundred pages in the present tense, all from the same character’s perspective. I couldn’t put it down.

I know I should do the proper book review thing and summarize the plot,
but City on Fire is a series book. The war from last book was not
quite over, nor was Aiah’s ascent from minor clerk to major power. The book
carries both of these on - nothing much else happens, except for [spoiler
deleted]. Walter Jon Williams appears to be in the middle of a trilogy.
I don’t know that I would have been so drawn in if I hadn’t read
Metropolitan. There were few new characters, none of them major. The world was the same,
and the glimpse into space just a one-scene preview of, presumably, the next book.

City on Fire was about power. The world produces plasm,
a bit of technobabble for which WJW has called it fantasy rather than sf. Plasm
produces anything you want. The economics of near-infinite power are handled
without any obvious contradictions, but it’s the politics of power that make the
novel shine. This is not, to paraphrase “Falling Onto Mars”, a love story. The
first chapter makes that clear, fuzzy as it may get later on.

Maybe the next book will be a love story. You never can tell.

I enjoyed Ethan of Athos, perhaps because I wasn’t expecting much of my last unread LMB novel and one I knew all along had little to do with Miles. The beginning drew me in; I had no clue about Athos until it was made obvious, and I do love a good alien culture. I liked Ethan, especially his prejudices and his conflicted relationship with Quinn. Of course he was no Miles Naismith Vorkosigan, but who is?

I realized back in the second half of The Vor Game that I don’t particularly like the space-opera side of space-opera, and when Ethan of Athos turned into the usual hide-and-seek in spaceship/spacestation corridors, with arrests, escapes, thugs, interrogations and the whole nine meters, I was ready to write the novel off. It reclaimed my interest at the end, though, first with Quinn’s final contribution, then with the trick ending. I love a good trick ending. But then, I never claimed to have taste.

The latest Analog was good all around. I’d skipped the first part of the current serial until I ran out of the rest of the magazine to read, thinking of my bad experience with “Hominid“, which the letters section wouldn’t let me forget. When I started “Survival Instinct” by Ed Lerner, though, I thought immediately that it was a perfect piece of writing. I’m still not sure why, but that’s my recommendation for the month of October. (Sci-fi - it’s the future in more ways than one.)

First off, I must confess I’ve been mainlining LMB for a couple of weeks now, ever since Diplomatic Immunity. To get over my mild disappointment with the latest, I started over from Shards of Honor. There’s just something about Cordelia.

I stopped by the library for The Vor Game and hit unexpected paydirt - Miles, Mystery & Mayhem, the latest two-volume edition, and the last two novels I hadn’t read. I found Cetaganda a bit too much like Diplomatic Immunity - Miles running around knowing too much about the Star Creche and trying to keep his accidental discovery from touching off yet another war with the Cetagandans. A novel all about things not happening can hardly compare to a novella where they do happen, such as the weatherman half of The Vor Game, but I’m not complaining. The Cetagandans were interesting, if
something of a still-life, and I’ve always had a soft spot for that-idiot-Ivan. I suppose that’s one of the perils of having started with A Civil Campaign.

The date inflation at Analog never ceases to amaze me. I’m over a month behind on this one, but the date on the cover is September 2002. Anyway, my favorite story this time was “Protocol” by Timothy Zahn. It’s listed as a novelette; I would have called it a short story. The aliens were appropriately alien.

Promised Land was an experiment for me, and one that failed. If I had to guess, I’d say Connie Willis was the co- and Cynthia Felice was the author of this sci-fi/romance crossover. The romance side won. Nothing significant would be changed by transporting all the characters and plot events to the Wild West: the city girl returning to the family farm, the quiet but dependable cowpoke boy, the devilish rake, the flirt with a heart of gold, etc. Down to details of canning fruit, sewing sleeves and prairie fires, it’s a Western, not a sci-fi novel. The natives are fire-monkeys rather than Apaches; only the city girl’s alien pet is necessary to the plot, and you can see that resolution coming from three territories away.

Yes, I was warned by the back cover, but when I think of “an all-new novel that is not just sweeping science fiction, but an engaging romantic story as well” I think Shards of Honor. I don’t think Harlequin Romances set in space. There are genres and there are genres. Romance is one that drops anvils on your head every chapter or so. Ouch. Ouch. Ouch! The plot turns on the heroine’s slow, explicit, and stereotypical realization that the hero is her One True Love and not the neanderthal she thought. On the side, her guilt for flirting with the local Lothario dawns upon her - and I never even noticed she was flirting with him.

I don’t object to romance conventions per se, not even ones like the flirting issue that I just don’t grok. I firmly believe in a woman’s right to write off her education and spend the rest of her life on a farm pickling vegetables, baking compotes and reproducing. But that’s not science fiction. The genre is more than a sprinkling of spaceships and cute alien pets - there is a kind of story that is a sci-fi story and Promised Land isn’t that kind.

On the other hand, “K19: The Widowmaker” had a sci-fi plot, even though it was set in the past. I couldn’t help thinking of Spock in “The Wrath of Khan” when the sailors braved the reactor chamber. I’m not saying K19 was a great movie (Liam Neeson aside), but it was about the science. You could transport all the characters and plot events to a spaceship, and nothing significant would be changed.

Well, no one’s going to listen to me if I criticize Snow Crash, which was, I admit, a funny book. The dystopic future was spot-on; I especially appreciated Uncle Enzo. The characters didn’t rise to the same level of development - no surprise for sci-fi.

There was one twist of non-characterization that’s really beginning to annoy me, though - I call it lover ex machina. The last time I spotted it was in The Eyre Affair, in which the heroine’s ex-boyfriend is alluded to ad nauseum until the author finally produces him at the end. In Snow Crash, the hero’s ex-girlfriend makes a few cryptic remarks before disappearing for most of the novel. In the end, if you’ll pardon the spoiler, the known lead character is united with the unknown ex for happily ever after.

I object. If you’re going to write a romance, you should write it - with both characters on-stage for a significant amount of time. If you don’t want to write a romance, then don’t try to cash in on the happily-ever-after by pulling the ex out of a bag and awarding them to the hero as a literary bonus prize. It’s sheer laziness, and it’s jarring to the reader who has been rooting for the best supporting character of the opposite gender - not for some off-stage no-good ex who left Our Hero for an inadequately explained reason long before the novel began.

I would have thought that one was obvious.

I made a killing at the library last week: I snagged a copy of Diplomatic Immunity, Lois McMaster Bujold’s latest Vorkosigan novel. I have to admit, I was disappointed. I noticed about halfway through that the novel wasn’t going anywhere in particular - it really was just another case for Miles’ unique blend of detective work and one-man space operatics. At that point I thought the pacing was off; I had to finish the whole thing before I realized I was looking for something that wasn’t there. My other pacing problem came near the end, when Miles spends what could have been a significant portion of the novel semi-conscious. Instead of following Ekaterin’s actions, LMB just let the whole section drop. I wonder if she intended to all along, or if that was an unfortunate cut.

I think Diplomatic Immunity is a triumph of the series over the novel - there is nothing new here, either in plot or characterization. Instead, everything from the sidekicks to uterine replicators to lovable misfits from Jackson’s Whole to Cetagandans is taken, in whole or in spirit, from earlier in the series, and the setting is from Falling Free. A Civil Campaign was also heavy on series background, but at least it featured some character development.

The novel, people who write how-to-write books say, is the hero’s evolution under outside pressure. Miles does not evolve here, and neither do the secondary characters. That doesn’t make Diplomatic Immunity any less entertaining as space opera, but LMB herself might admit it’s not a real book:

If anyone (and it would probably have to be Liz) can tell me what Diplomatic Immunity was about, I’d love to hear it.

I didn’t expect much from Men in Black II, so I enjoyed it. It’s a bit short, like a plot twist has been left out, and it’s the little things that make the movie. If a string of jokes, cute aliens, inhabited lockers, ugly aliens and touching moments a movie makes, it’s a movie.

If a string of thousand-year flashbacks, alien flybys, feeble digs at religion, pointless childhood flashbacks and spontaneous technical setbacks a novel makes, then The Fountains of Paradise deserves its Hugo and Nebula awards.

Plotlessness and lack of characterization can be excused if the technology is flashy enough, but I found Kim Stanley Robinson did the space elevator thing better. Whatever his flaws (including rehashing material from older novels like this one), at least KSR put in the word count. The Fountains of Paradise, on the other hand, read more like excerpts from a novel than a novel.

I enjoyed Borrowed Tides enough to try again, but The Silk Code left me cold. I think it was a genre problem: I liked the detective, Phil D’Amato, but I got the feeling that he was a series I’d walked in upon (Paul Levinson has written short stories about him) rather than the main character of someone’s first novel.

And what sort of a novel was it, anyway? Sure, the binding had the Tor crest and the words “Science Fiction” in tiny print, but there was no other indication that this was a sci-fi novel. Set in the present time, it seemed more like a disaster novel with a bit of mystery thrown in. Yet if a mystery, the eighty-page flashback to the Dark Ages was a curveball that threw the whole thing off. If a disaster, the culprit was too small-time for the dark conspiracy of the ages built up over the past and present timeframes.

That may sound like there was something for all comers, but I’ll call the glass half-empty and say there was something to disappoint any reader — medical-thriller science instead of sci-fi science, flailing timeframe instead of a tight mystery plot, and an anticlimax instead of salvation from imminent disaster. I’m a glass-half-empty kind of reader.

Much more enjoyable was rereading Komarr again, in order to do my plot-book homework. I hereby declare LMB rereadable - I kept getting into the story, despite having just reread it two weeks ago, instead of taking my homework notes. (I would have used Shards of Honor for my homework instead, but I gave my copy to Veronica.) The plot outline impressed me with just how much was going on in the novel, especially on the science side. It’s easy to fall into the sci-fi mistake of overlooking whatever science is well-written as not hard enough. The only thing that bothered me after so much rehashing was the Barrayar-bashing from the ladies. At least Miles treated the Time of Isolation as more than just a feminist straw-man.

Someone’s been reading my blog and emailed me with a question. (No, it wasn’t Who the [insert 24th-century equivalent] do you think you are, talking about [insert opinion] in your own blog?) I’ve immortalized the Q&A here in the blog, in case anyone else is interested.

What’s the best book to start with, reading about Miles Vorkosigan?

That’s a complicated question. The books are freestanding, but they are a series and it’s hard to say how much you miss by going out of order. Reading Memory after any of the subsequent novels gives away a significant plot point, but otherwise I don’t think skipping around is a big problem, unless you’re a spoiler-averse person. Then you’d want to go exactly in order. So, here’s the order, with recommendations and anti-recs:

LMB’s universe starts with Falling Free, a Nebula-award winning hard sci-fi novel that has nothing whatsoever to do with Miles or his family. If you’re looking for her space opera proper (Falling Free is a little too hard sci-fi for some LMB fans), then you can skip ahead to the next book in universe-chronological sequence: her first published novel, Shards of Honor. At this stage, Miles is just a gleam in his parents’ eyes, but the two books of the Miles-making period are very good (I think Barrayar won a Hugo), and they’re now available in a convenient one-volume edition called Cordelia’s Honor (Baen books, paperback).

The true Miles purist would start at the next volume, The Warrior’s Apprentice, though I believe the subsequent novel, The Vor Game, was better received. (Better received, with LMB, means it won a Hugo. Less well received means being on the final Hugo list.) Again, these two are now conveniently available in a one-volume paperback edition. I don’t recall the title - I gave the trade paperback edition of it I picked up (remaindered) to my sister to spread the addiction. You can get titles and shop on-line at LMB’s official site, www.dendarii.com. (Several e-books and some free opening chapters are available as well.)

The chronology gets a little hazy at this point - there’s Cetaganda and Ethan of Athos, neither of which I’ve read. I hear the latter doesn’t involve Miles, or at least not much. The important volume of this period is Borders of Infinity, a novella collection. One of the novellas won a Nebula award. Borders of Infinity is a good book to start with if you’re just curious about Miles and wondering whether you’re up for the full twelve-novel commitment or not.

Next up is the clone period, consisting of Brothers in Arms and Mirror Dance, in that order. The latter won a Hugo (yes, it does get tiring pointing that out after a while) and is, if I had to guess, LMB’s most popular book. It’s not very high on my personal list, but my taste is far from the norm. If you want a one-book experience, Mirror Dance is the one book to go with.

The next two novels made me believe in scifi again: Memory and Komarr. If I were going to recommend one Miles novel, it would be Memory. Komarr barely slips past it to be my personal favorite, but there’s too much Ekaterin in it for it to be representative Miles.

That brings us to present-day Miles. I read A Civil Campaign first - it’s rather comic for LMB and probably the worst place to start in the entire series. The current novel out is Diplomatic Immunity. I can’t speak for it because I haven’t read it, but I haven’t heard it’s a new favorite in the series. We’ll see how the Hugos go…

After I stumbled over Orson Scott Card’s open letter about his Homecoming series, I had to try The Memory of Earth myself. I had an unsuccessful go once at the Book of Mormon, so I appreciated the opportunity to hear the story unencumbered by pseudo-King-James English far more than OSC intended anyone should. (Reflecting on the comparative literary merits of holy scriptures would probably not be wise. All I can say is, at least the Koran was short.)

I enjoyed The Memory of Earth, though possibly not quite enough to track down the other four volumes of the Homecoming series. Lifting the characters and plot from scripture sounds like a good, traditional epic plan, and the story rolls along quickly under this outside influence. The serialization of polygamy was especially apt. The novel’s moral focus was very sharp, of course, and Nafai’s pivotal decision a debatable one for us non-Mormons.

On the nitpicking side, the time frame was way, way off. I doubt a fleet of artificial satellites could remain in orbit of a planet with a lavendar moon for forty million years, nor do I believe human society could remain socially and genetically unchanged for that long, whatever the AI in the Sky. The cover-up of the source material was so good in general that I found myself unduly annoyed when the main characters took a more obviously Biblical jaunt into the desert at the behest of said AI in the Sky.

But that’s more nitpicking than the book deserves. OSC has evaded LMB’s line between sci-fi and fantasy, which she draws at the supernatural. Technically, an AI isn’t supernatural, but the characters react to it as if it were and the end result is more convincing than the explicit supernatural of LMB’s or Guy Gavriel Kay’s fantasy. (Let’s not even mention Gaiman, eh?)

I don’t consider the supernatural a hallmark of fantasy - it’s not required, and when something of that ilk is present, it can end up just as naturalized as OSC’s AI in the Sky. I don’t consider anything in LotR particularly supernatural, for instance. The Elves and even the Valar are integrated into the background. There are no burning bushes.

It’s not the supernatural but the unnatural that makes fantasy fantasy - the sheer lack of rational justification for elves and magic and rings and so on. (Note that I didn’t say scientific justification.) Fantasy is about what cannot be, science fiction about what can be. An invisible, divine hand moving the stars could be, but Middle Earth is purely, unabashedly counterfactual.

The moment you start justifying, say, Pern, with genetic engineering, you’ve moved into the realm of science fiction. Walter Jon Williams calls some of his work fantasy, but I didn’t see the counterfactual in Metropolitan and he doesn’t seem like the sort of person to write the fantastic. Nor, come to think of it, does LMB. She lets her deities do too much work, and that smacks of explanation. When she writes an elf, just one dying-immortal, fleet-footed, inhuman, unjustifiable elf, then I’ll enjoy her fantasy.

If you’re going to lie to me, then lie already.