The Vorkosigan Companion - Lillian Stewart Carl [14]
Addressing some of the more common general questions about the Vorkosiverse's roots: Miles's world, Barrayar, is steeped in Russian culture, while their rivals the Betans are more Californian. It was likely my Cold War milieu that inspired me to create a world peopled by the descendants of Russians—plus, it must be admitted, the lingering influence of The Man from U.N.C.L.E.'s most personable hero, Illya Kuryakin. When I started the work in late 1982, it looked like the Cold War would go on forever. But in a moment of canny something-or-another—I know it wasn't foresight—I did not make my future Russians necessarily descended from the Soviet Union. I was more strategically vague than that, which put me ahead of the curve when the Soviet Union fell in 1989.
Vor society is not based on Soviet society. Its Time-of- Isolation social structure had devolved to a species of neo-feudalism, for the same reasons of poor communications that the original feudalism evolved to address. I've selected bits and pieces of social inspiration from sources as diverse as Meiji Japan, Imperial Russia and Germany, and whatever other historical sources came my way, building up my own mental picture about how the real world, and therefore fictional worlds, work.
I don't know whether the planet is called Barrayar in honor of the ruling family VorBarra or vice versa. I make up my backgrounds as needed for the tale I'm writing, and I don't fix the details until they are needed (they might, after all, need to be something else). So we won't find out until I set a tale in an earlier period, which doesn't look likely to happen any time soon.
Whether the Galaxy common language is English or not depends on the region. In Miles's neck of the woods, it appears to be English. Some English-descended dialect may be the interstellar lingua franca the way English is the language of international air traffic, for the same practical reasons (it got there first, everybody needs to be able to communicate with everyone else for safety reasons, whatever). I haven't explored the probable effects of really good automatic/computerized real-time translations that we may presume would be developed by then, except in passing at that dinner scene in Brothers in Arms where the earbugs were late arriving.
There is the usual rainbow of human races in the Vorkosiverse, too, beyond Barrayar and Beta Colony. The homogeneity of those rather suburban planetary settings is simply a result of their colonization histories. Both were, in quite different ways, "lost" colonies. The original colonizing groups were likely up to eighty percent Caucasian, and the minority racial phenotypes present among the founders were subsumed over time. The mixed genes are still in there, which is why the most common coloration on Barrayar is black hair, brown eyes, and olive skin. "Race" is an arguable concept anyway in a universe where anyone can alter any genetic trait at will in their offspring, and, with rather more medical difficulty, even in themselves. Even "species" turns out to have fuzzy borders.
I tried to use as many ethnic names as possible to reflect Barrayar's colonization history. French, Russian, Greek, and British names thus should appear a lot, with an odd smattering of names of totally unrelated ethnic origins depending on who chanced to be among the fifty thousand Firsters.
I'm occasionally asked whether Miles's mother Cordelia could be a secret agent of Beta Colony. I think while she is certainly not an agent of the Betan government, she is a vector of Betan culture. She feels that her homeworld has many strengths that Barrayar can learn from, not least a great deal of practice at living with what advanced technologies and biotechnologies can do to a society. So, she is an agent of change and for progressive thinking. Although that's plenty enough to work up a great conspiracy theory with, and I'm sure those Barrayarans who resent and resist change have.
As to how Cordelia, a soldier of an enemy planet, could not only