Miles, Mutants and Microbes - Lois McMaster Bujold [1]
Old readers will note that the novella "Labyrinth" also appears in the Baen omnibus Miles, Mystery & Mayhem, in its due position in a strict series timeline. Up until the novel Memory, the series grouped in internal-chronological order in a very tidy fashion, with two novels and a novella for each collection. (With the exception of the first, Cordelia's Honor, which is more the re-marriage of two halves of one intended tale, as explained in its afterword.) From Memory on, however, there was no way to make the books divide up evenly no matter how they were sliced. All the grouping schemes had a different defect: too much text, too little, the separation of strongly thematically linked tales that truly belonged together, and so on.
So the repackaging effort stalled out for a long time. But when the time came around on the guitar again to relicense the books, I was finally inspired to cut the Gordian knot in this fashion: the pivotal Memory left as a stand-alone, the Miles-and-Ekaterin sequence collected together in the upcoming Miles in Love (an inevitable title if ever there was one), and the quaddie-linked tales put together, here.
You are not—all you internet complainers, and you know who you are—being ripped off by your faithful publisher by being tricked into buying the same story twice. Due to the vagaries of tree-ware economics, this volume would have been the exact same price (if much less comprehensible) if the novella hadn't been included at all. It's being thrown in for free as a gift to the new readers. And it was my idea, so don't kvetch at Publisher Toni. (You can kvetch at me, I suppose; I hang out pretty regularly on Baen's Bar in the "Miles to Go" conference, so I'm not too hard to find.) This was an artistic decision, not an economic one.
So there. On to the history.
Falling Free actually came to be written as a result of a phone conversation with Jim Baen. I had written my first three science fiction novels "on spec," that is, without a prior contract or even contact with a publisher, which is pretty much the norm for first-time novelists. They sold on one memorable day in October, 1985, in my very first phone conversation with Jim, when, after reading The Warrior's Apprentice, he called me up and offered for all three books. I was then faced, for the first time, with writing a novel with a known publishing destination, and intimidating expectations.
I had been thinking of following up a minor character from The Warrior's Apprentice named Arde Mayhew, a jump pilot afflicted with obsolete neural implant technology who would be on a quest for a ship that would fit him. I pictured him finding his prize among a group of people dwelling in an asteroid belt whose ancestors were bioengineered to live in free fall, and who were eking out a living, among other ways, as interstellar junk dealers. Jim was not much taken with Arde, but he seemed to perk up when I came to describe my proto-quaddies, and opined that a tale about them might be more interesting and science fictional. We all know what happens when technological obsolescence hits the products of engineering; what would happen if (always a key SFnal question) technological obsolescence hit the products of bioengineering?
Taking the hint, I turned my thoughts to developing the quaddies' world, culture, and history. It seemed to me best to begin at the beginning, and I reasoned my way backward to their two-hundred-years-prior genesis. 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