The Vorkosigan Companion - Lillian Stewart Carl [13]
So Diplomatic Immunity drew mainly on information I had in hand, or in brain, rolled with the usual themes: biology, bioengineering, we have met the aliens and they is us, plans not surviving contact with the enemy—or with one's friends, for that matter—and, above all, the transactional nature of parenthood.
I'm asked frequently where I'm planning to go next with the Vorkosiverse. Have I written myself into a corner with Miles?
Well, one of the things I like to do is take nonstandard heroes and run them through the wringer and see what happens. So coming up with a plot of the right weight for Miles in his current situation is an interesting challenge.
Given powerful characters, there are still a lot of ways that the writer can play with them. The protagonist can be given a more powerful adversary, but then one gets into kind of a hero-villain arms race that ends up with the Superman–Lex Luthor scenario. A more interesting plan of attack is to look for the hero's uncorrected flaws, and focus on them. The hero may have all these new strengths, but he or she still has other weaknesses. One can separate a powerful character from his matrix of support, isolate and drop him back into a less-powerful position. Since Miles is a character sent out on galactic missions, that approach has a lot of scope for him.
The possibilities just have to become more ingenious. The kind of simple physical plots that test younger characters are now not appropriate for Miles—not that he has ever dealt with anything but curve balls. The story has to find a different realm or level of challenge. For example, moral problems are not going to be particularly amenable to a character's having more power, because that's not the kind of thing that solves them.
The wormhole structure of my universe gives the advantage to the defense. It requires and rewards interplanetary cooperation. But it also means that any planet has a limited number of immediate neighbors to conveniently have conflicts with, and Barrayar's neighborhood is pretty quiet at the moment. So if I want to stir up trouble for Miles I may have to stir it up someplace else than near his homeworld.
The Vorkosiverse has eons of future history—a thousand before Miles, plus after. What's his world going to look like ten thousand years down his timeline, when this human speciation has exploded? I envision all these different aliens that were once us.
I've thought about setting a story in another era, but these are ideas without characters and if it doesn't have a character it's not a story that picks up and runs. The Miles universe is presently snagged on Miles. He's such a pivotal character, such a world-changer, that I don't know where the universe goes after him—unless I jump so far ahead it becomes a matter of indifference whether he lived or died. Which is a rather sad notion.
More people ask about whether Ivan is going to get married than how human evolution is going to go ten thousand years down the timeline (although, when you think about it, the two questions are profoundly related). We see Ivan a lot through Miles's eyes, and Miles is . . . opinionated, let's say, but beneath Ivan Vorpatril's lazy facade is a real lazy man. When we finally saw Ivan through his own mind, as a viewpoint character in A Civil Campaign, some people were disappointed because there wasn't more there. They had constructed Ivan as this man of mystery.
But the Ivan that you see is pretty much the Ivan that you get. He could be challenged, and he would rise to the occasion. Without the challenge, he would just lie there. Nothing is more life-disrupting for a hapless character than to accidentally stumble into one of my books. When I was writing A Civil Campaign and it was time for one of Ivan's scenes, I always had the feeling that he was hiding out from me much the way he hid out from his mother when she had unpleasant chores for him. He whined pitifully whenever I dragged him back onstage. Clearly, I'll have to think about something