The Vorkosigan Companion - Lillian Stewart Carl [11]
In Memory, Illyan's loss of his military career is closely contrasted with Miles's loss of his. (Parallels, spirals, and reflections are some of my favorite literary patterns.) Illyan gets to dump, after thirty grueling years, a job that had eaten his life. He was mortally tired, and ready for the change, however high the ransom he had to pay for himself.
When Illyan gives up being Chief of Imperial Security, it's as if he has a thousand-pound weight lifted from his shoulders. Punch-drunk, he is. No wonder he warbles a bit. Illyan's losses are great—removal of the chip returns him to normal temporal perception, but too dangerously absentminded to continue as an officer—yet there are surprising compensations. His emotional side that his job required him to suppress for years finally gets a chance to flower. And it's contagious; relationships that had been frozen in place for years thaw and change when he changes.
And there's another variant on the book's theme; even after such profound change, as another character remarks, what you get back is ". . . your life again. What else?" Illyan was ready to be finished with that earlier part of his life, and move on. Miles both was and wasn't; part of him had to drag the rest of him, kicking and bitching the whole way, onto higher ground. Watching Illyan adjust, Miles and his maniacal drive for achievement get a valuable nonverbal but very sharp critique from the man who was his most revered mentor. Trust me, it's very good for him.
Memory was published a couple of months before Trudie Senior's long, long death came to an end. I sent a copy to the dedicatees. Trudie Junior said: "I showed it to her . . . You do what you can."
I really, really wanted to write a lighter book after Memory. I didn't think I could, or should, attempt two thematically "big," emotionally draining books in a row. It's like spacing pregnancies too close together; it leaches the minerals out of your bones. But Komarr lay across my path to everything else; it had to be done first.
Komarr is the romantic drama; A Civil Campaign the romantic comedy. After all, Miles had two births, and will have two deaths, why shouldn't he have two romances? On a practical level, the split of the emotional plot of story into two halves was to solve a problem of tone. I could not have combined the material I dealt with in Komarr with a comedy of the goofiness I desired in the same book. It would have been too schizophrenic even for me.
Again, with military plots knocked out of the menu, mystery and suspense—and romance—took up the load. Miles is sent to Komarr, a planet his father helped conquer a generation before, in the unenviable position of a hated occupier, to investigate the possible sabotage of a solar mirror designed to help terraform the planet, a very long-range project. There he meets Ekaterin, his female opposite in most ways, whose life has been as restricted as his has been adventurous. Each, it turns out, has value to offer the other, this time across boundaries of culturally mandated gender splits. The backdrop of a cold world requiring decades of dedication to bring to fruitfulness is not accidental.
Meanwhile, I'd been itching to write a Barrayaran Regency romance ever since I realized I'd given Barrayar a regency period. I dedicated it to four inspiring female writers. I'd read Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre fairly early on, but I only came to Georgette Heyer and Dorothy L. Sayers in my twenties, when my reading branched out, and I've only picked up Jane Austen fairly recently. Heyer remains my favorite comfort reading—A Civil Campaign is very much a tribute to her—though there was a period when her inherent class-ism got up my nose. Sayers's work, even more than that of C. S. Forester and Arthur Conan Doyle, is a model for the kind of wonderful character development that can only be done over a long series.
The tale offered many delicious levels of play, not least that of dissecting