Royce's Random Thoughts

I have come to praise, Bujold, not to bury her.

Okay, almost every sci-fi fan loves Lois McMaster Bujold, but with a publishing history going back thirty years there's going to be some clunkers even in her bibliography. And I'll admit some of her books just didn't grab me. In publishing order, not order of annoyance, here are the ones that you'd have to pay me to re-read at this point (and I'm no James Nicoll, so it's unlikely to happen).


1. Shards of Honor: Yeah, this is the entry point to the Vorkosiverse. Yes, this introduces Aral and Cordelia. Yes, it's a good character study. But Lois's famous skill at tight plotting has yet to develop. The initial trek of Aral and Cordelia from the burned out remains of her survey camp back to his regaining his command is enjoyable, but then it switches to an episodic series of events as Cordelia becomes a hero, falls from grace, and then flees to Barrayar, Further, Beta Colony is portrayed as a questionably democratic dystopia, with Soviet style psychotherapy, in sharp contrast to it's distant idealized portrayal in later books.

2. The Warriors Apprentice: Again, this is probably a controversial choice, given it's Miles' introduction to the series. But again the plotting is crap, Miles is notably unsympathetic as his Wacky Scheme snowballs into torture/murder and he lies his way into command, and Bothari is killed abruptly and without much lead up.

3. Ethan of Athos: Actually there isn't that much wrong with this book, but it's problematical in the series given the 25-year old time bomb of Ethan introducing the telepath gene to Athos' population, and Barrayar also gaining it for study. Niether of which have really been followed up since, in a series well known for distantly placed Chekhov's Guns. Also the Cetas are notably underdeveloped compared to later in the series. I could read it again if I wanted to without much pain. I just don't want to.

4. Mirror Dance: Or more accurately, the first third of Mirror Dance. It's not that it isn't well written, it's just too painful watch as Mark self-destructs, Miles dies, and there's the squicky bit with Mark and the female clone. I usually skip ahead to Mark starting on his eating disorder and go from there.

5. Komarr: Again, nothing actually bad here, but the painfully rendered relationship between Tien and Ekaterine is too difficult to re-read, especially given it's there mostly to establish that Tien needs to die.

Hmm, if Tien hadn't died, and Ekaterine had just divorced the bastard, A Civil Campaign would have been a very different book.

6. Diplomatic Immunity: After the comic heights of ACC, this is a severe letdown. If it had been done from both Miles and Ekaterine's points of view it might have been better, especially in the rushed denouement, but it wasn't, so we have an ending where Stuff Happens that has to be explained to Miles in a painful infodump.

7. Cryoburn: Ugh. There would have been a fasciniating book here if Aral had died earlier, and Miles, Ekaterine and Cordelia had to deal with the immediate fallout. Instead we get a shock ending after following Miles in a bog standard, not terribly interesting sci-fi plot. Probably the low point of the series so far.

8. The Hallowed Hunt: If this had been a standalone novel from a different author it might have been a minor classic. But as it was it, it was the third book in the Five Gods universe, which abandoned the characters from Curse of Chalion and Paladin of Souls for a nearly completely different setting, and a pair of leads who honestly don't have much chemistry together.

Comments? Commiserations? Brickbats?

...I'm not excited by a new Bujold novel coming out. To the point that I'm wondering whether I should buy the ebook, or just wait until the paperback comes out.

Just thinking about seawasp's Grand Central Arena books.

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One of the background details is that some decades past a very ethically questionable genetic/social engineering project was begun by a group of intelligent yet remarkably clueless science fiction fans, trying to create Real World versions of classic characters from sci-fi and fantasy literature. Most of the end results were various levels of crazy by the time things broke down, but one of the more remarkable successes was Marc DuQuense, based off the classic supervillain from E.E. Smith's Skylark series.

Now most of the characters from the project seem to be from myth (like the Monkey King) or Golden Age sci-fi. Likely if only to avoid Ryk Spoor from treading on living author's copyrights. But if the Hyperion Project managers went a little further forward I can see one character they'd almost have to try and recreate....

Except I think their version of Miles Vorkosigan would likely be more even nuts than his fictional brother Mark...

And I just hit two magic words.

Sonic mapping.

Oh, Ivan. You've never been as dumb as you desperately wanted to be, and Miles isn't the only one in the family capable of panic induced acts of brilliance.

I'm not finished yet, and I've managed to avoid the discussion spoilers on the Bujold listserve, but so far this book, while not in the rarified heights of Mirror Dance or A Civil Campaign, is a vast improvement over Diplomatic Immunity and Cryoburn.

Vorkosigan looked very thoughtful. "Bothari . . . does not have a good sense of self. No strong center. When I first met him, at his most ill, his personality was close to separating into multiples. If he were better educated, not so damaged, he would have made an ideal spy, a deep-penetration mole. He's a chameleon. A mirror. He becomes whatever is required of him. Not a conscious process, I don't think. Piotr expects a loyal retainer, and Bothari plays the part, deadpan as you please. Vorrutyer wanted a monster, and Bothari became his torturer. And victim. I demanded a good soldier, and he became one for me. You . . ." his voice softened, "you are the only person I know who looks at Bothari and sees a hero. So he becomes one for you. He clings to you because you create him a greater man than he ever dreamed of being."

-Barrayar, Lois McMaster Bujold

For sraun 's prompt of "Mark Vorkosigan hires Agatha Heterodyne to build a special piece of equipment."

The girl in the green tweed dress looked over the plans carefully. "So what's this mirror for anyway?"

"A focusing element in a telescope," Mark lied smoothly.

"Are you sure? With that kind of curvature…" She frowned, humming to herself as she pulled out a pencil and made rapid notes in the margins of the blueprint. "Hey, if you had some way of identifying unrelated connecting points in the spacetime continuum, you could build a ship that would…" She was cut off as she dropped face first onto the drawing table when Mark's stunner fire struck her.

"It took her all of thirty seconds to make a major breakthrough in five-space physics," Kareen noted glumly beside him.

"Yeah, and all the other "Sparks" we met who might be able to do the job are crazier than I am," Mark said. "We are never going to get off this benighted planet."

Like every non-professional and many professional writers, I've got two factors driving my writing bug. The first is just getting the damned story out of my head and onto paper/pixels, so I can see and shape it into coherence instead of letting it float nebulously around in my brain like rest of the hundred or so story fragments I've got in there.

The second of course is the ego boost a writer gets when someone leaves feedback and you can read those magic words, "I loved this story!" Because for that brief moment you know that the idea that was once alone in your head, that you dared to commit to and release to wider world, has connected with someone. That's what makes writing (and by extension acting, medicine and other emotionally involved professions) so satisfying. For that one brief moment what you did made an emotional connection, inducing pleasure, happiness or even sorrow. There's no better feeling for a writer to know that their story was able to do that.

As a fanfic writer, there's a secondary but for my money almost equally important bit of praise you can give, that goes beyond merely pleasure, and it's the line, "You really know the characters." For me it's of paramount importance because it makes the difference between a good story and Diana Gabaldon's suggestion that all you need to do is global replace her character's names with your own. When I write Miles Vorkosigan he's not going to act like Tez, and not just because one lives in a sci-fi universe and the other a fantasy one. Likewise Sgt. Taura would never act like Maria, even if their backgrounds could be argued as being similar.

I absolutely loved writing the crossover fic A Slight Detour just because the characters were so different from each other. Leeza working with Sam Carter was neat, and writing Teal'c going into Mentor Mode with the always troubled Terinu was marvelous. But if I had changed the names around it wouldn't have been a story worth reading because the characters would have been pulled out of their respective worlds and plopped together willy nilly, and the only reaction I would have induced in the reader would have been the Eight Deadly Words. [1]

For that reason, it's for characterization's sake that I don't try to write in some worlds, because I know I couldn't capture the characters' voices and personalities properly. For example: For almost a year now I've had a story set in M.C.A. Hogarth's (haikujaguar) Kherishdar universe that's been demanding to be put down. I'm not going to write it for two reasons. For one I don't know her position on fanfic. Since I have interacted with her on LJ I feel closer to her than say Lois McMaster Bujold, and I wouldn't want to play in her sandbox without permission. Even more importantly I know I can't match her lyrical and contemplative writing style in these stories and I'd be damned fool to try. My own prose can be politely described as "workmanlike" and I don't pretend otherwise. I wouldn't be satisfied with the results and neither would any reader who has appreciated Mrs. Hogarth's original work.

I suppose in the end it's a matter of love and respect. I love and respect LMB, chaypeta and haikujaguar's worlds and characters so much that I want to play in their sandboxes. But I also love and respect them enough that I want to do it right, and not make a mockery of what they've written.

[1] "I don't care what happens to these people."

I recently made myself re-read LMB's The Sharing Knife, Legacy in anticipation of the next book in the series coming out later this month. Knowing what was coming ahead in the plot made me feel much more charitable towards it, in comparison to my initial reaction of "Dag and Fawn got screwed!" I also think I have a much more evenhanded understanding now of Dag's actions and the reactions of the Lakewalker community around him, especially after reading kikibug13's post about non-conformist dystopias

The important thing, I think, is that Dag is a non-conformist by his society's standards. He's a Patroller, when by all rights he ought to be a patrol captain. He's living with his birth family (as much as he tries to avoid them) rather than his late wife's clan. At the start of TSK: Beguilement he's also practically a monk, when his genetic duty is to make more little Patrollers, especially given his extraordinary Groundsense. He gets away with this because he's a damned fine Patroller, and has enough Malice kills to his credit that no one can argue he's shirking that duty at least. The other Lakewalkers, his mother excepted, have learned to swallow it.

Then he marries his little Farmer child-bride Fawn, and like Miles' grandfather in "The Mountain's of Mourning", they just can't swallow that.

The thing to remember is that the Lakewalker's duty to destroy Malice is a serious one, and that up until the Farmers' tech level started to seriously outpace their own, the system was working. Every Malice that had ever appeared had been killed. If they were to miss one, then the world would surely be destroyed. That's a powerful reinforcement to keep doing what you were always doing. That means Dag bucking the system, asking for something no other Lakewalker has ever been permitted to get away with, has definite and unavoidable consequences.

But at this point, I think, the system that the Lakewalker's always counted on isn't going to work anymore. They can't can't stop Farmers from settling above the cleared line. There have been two major Malice outbreaks in Dag's lifetime now, both of which were only barely contained. Another way of doing things has to be found, and it'll be up to Dag and Fawn to find it.

Otherwise the next Malice the Lakewalkers confront, might be the one that finally does destroy the world.