Miles, Mutants and Microbes - Lois McMaster Bujold [2]
I was about five chapters into the tale when my father died of a long-standing heart condition, in July of that year. At the timely invitation of then senior Baen editor Betsy Mitchell, I took a needed break to write my first novella—also the first work I'd ever sold before I wrote it, a scary step into a larger world for me as a writer. But "The Borders of Infinity" turned out well, and found its place in Betsy's novella collection series in Free Lancers, along with tales by Orson Scott Card and David Drake, which may well have served as the first introduction of this new writer Bujold to some of their readers. After a few months, I was able to return to work on Falling Free and, my confidence boosted, send it to contract.
I turned at that point for technical research answers to my brother and, through him, to an engineer friend of his named Wally Voreck, who sent me the fascinating material on ice die formation, which is a real industrial process. With such a cool (literally) gimmick, I reasoned my way backward to a plot development that would use it as a solution. (Writers cheat with time, you know. We can run it both ways.)
So the tale wended to its conclusion, or at any rate, grew long enough to qualify as a publishable book. At the time, it seemed to suggest further developments. It was clearly a kind of Exodus story, which implied that maybe forty years in the wilderness should be volume two, and arrival at the Promised Land volume three, a proper trilogy. But I wandered off instead to write Brothers in Arms, and never got back to the idea of continuing the quaddie-genesis adventure. I already knew how it would come out, after all.
But I did manage to sell the novel to Analog Magazine as a four-part serial, which ran from December 1987 through February 1988. This brought my work to the attention of a whole pool of new readers who might not necessarily have picked the paperback (which came out in April of 1988) off the bookstore shelves. This was the first of several happy sales to Analog, one of my Dad's favorites back in the '50s and '60s, and one of the first SF magazines I'd read when I was discovering the genre in my early teens. Since Falling Free was very much a tribute (if slyly updated) to the science fiction of that era, it felt much like coming full circle. The serial also was splendidly illustrated by Vincent di Fate; I still have five of the scratchboard originals, my first real art purchase. (He kindly adjusted his rates to my budget.)
I was always horribly conscious of being a slow writer, by some genre standards. When the time came to negotiate my next contract with Baen (Jim called me up again, come to think), I hit on a time-saving idea: to offer a novella collection of my own, rescuing "The Borders of Infinity" and adding two new tales to it to make up the weight. Looking up the contracts for that period, I see this was the triple-header including Borders of Infinity (the proposed novella collection), Miles to Go (the first of many uses of that placeholder title—the book I actually wrote was Brothers in Arms) and something called Quaddies, the proposed Falling Free sequel that never came to fruition—I wrote The Vor Game in its place. My Baen contracts were always very flexible.
"Labyrinth" was the last-written of the Miles-adventure novellas. With two rather dark tales already in the bag, I decided to make this one something of a comedy, for balance. The character of the quaddie Nicol, though a rather minor player, got me thinking again about the quaddies and my lost promise to complete their saga, and how their exodus might have come out. But other stories were crowding for my attention, and the impulse slipped away yet again.
It was over a decade later before I had the chance to return to these notions. The opening situation of the book that became Diplomatic Immunity called for Miles,