Miles, Mystery & Mayhem - Lois McMaster Bujold [254]
Her eyes were huge and gold and molten. "You did say you liked to practice what you were great at."
Miles had never realized how susceptible he was to flattery from tall women. A weakness he must guard against. Sometime.
They retired to his cabin and practiced assiduously till halfway to Escobar.
Afterword
The stories in this volume are grouped by an internal series chronology that I could scarcely have imagined when I wrote the first of them. Not only did I not know then how important certain ideas were going to be to my later work, I didn't realize just how long "later" was going to run. It is not quite serendipity that they also form a thematic unit, all touching variously on meditations of mine regarding human evolution, reproduction, bioethics, and gender issues.
Ethan of Athos was my third novel, written in 1985 (published 1986), Cetaganda my eleventh, written in 1995 (published 1996), making these two stories slices of my thinking on these issues exactly a decade apart. "Labyrinth" fell in between, written in 1988 to be part of a planned novella collection, Borders of Infinity, which was published by Baen Books in late 1989. The story also appeared in Analog magazine that August with delightful cover and interior art by Frank Kelly Freas, an artist whose work always signaled "Fun fiction here!" to me back when I read Analog in my teens. Other readers must have agreed, because "Labyrinth" won the Analog reader's poll for best novella that year.
At the time I wrote Ethan of Athos, I had not yet sold any novels, though two completed works were making the rounds of New York publishers. I had, however, made my first short story sale, and on the boost to my morale so provided, I embarked on my third novel. I was groping around for the magic trick by which I might break in, and among the advice I collected was "Try something short. The editors are less daunted by thinner manuscripts on their slush piles, and maybe they'll read it sooner!" So I was determined to keep the length under strict control. I still wasn't sure I would be able to sell the books as a series, although I quite liked the universe I had begun to develop, so I also wanted the next thing to be series-optional, not dependent on the two prior books but connectable to them if some editor did see the light. But more importantly—in the course of my first novel, Shards of Honor, I had tossed off as a mere sidebar the idea of the uterine replicator. Upon consideration, this appeared to me more and more a piece of technology that really did have the potential to change the world, and I wanted to explore some of those possible changes.
Extra-uterine gestation is not a new idea in SF. Aldous Huxley first used it way back in the early thirties in Brave New World, but being who and where he was, used it mainly as part of a metaphoric exploration of specifically British class issues. I was a child of another country and time, with a very different worldview, and other issues interested me a lot more. Primary among my beliefs was that, given humanity as I knew it, there wasn't going to be just one way any new tech would be applied—and that the results were going to be even more chaotic than the causes.
One obvious consequence of the uterine replicator was the possibility of a society where women's historical monopoly on reproduction would be broken. All-male societies exist in our world—armies, prisons, and monasteries to name three—but all must re-supply their populations from the larger communities in which they are embedded. This technology could break that dependence. I discarded armies and prisons as containing skewed, abnormally violent populations, and instead considered monasteries as a possible model for an all-male society both benign and, provably, viable over generations.
About this time—the winter of 1984–85—I went to a New Year's Eve party given by a nurse friend, and fell into a conversation about some of these nascent ideas with two men. One was an unmarried and notably macho surgeon, the other a hospital administrator