The Vorkosigan Companion - Lillian Stewart Carl [15]
Cordelia also created her own status by being an enemy soldier, and a successful one. She became admired, rather the way some American military history buffs admire General Rommel ("The Desert Fox" of WWII fame in North Africa), who although he was the enemy was good at what he did and had some interesting positive qualities. It is quite possible to admire an honorable enemy, especially if one is a militarist and attached to the military virtues oneself. And most critically, Emperor Ezar wanted Aral married so that he would not be trying to stage a coup by marrying Kareen, the dowager crown princess. Cordelia might not have been Ezar's first pick, but she was the woman on the spot.
As for villains in the Vorkosiverse—I have some realistic ones and a few extraordinary ones, and I have to admit, the more over-the-top sorts are very handy to have around. Though I've always wondered, looking at the high-end villains in James Bond movies for example—if they have all the resources they display in the course of the plot, why haven't they just invested them all in mutual funds and retired? They clearly don't need to be villains in order to meet any rational need they could have. Few real people just go out and say "I'm going to be villainous today!," barring the sort of resentful unbalanced loser who has become wound up in his own personal status emergency, which he has decided to share with everyone around him. There is a natural preference for the high-end villains in adventure fiction, however, because the satisfaction of defeating them is unimpaired by messy ambiguities. Waxing the bad guy fixes the problem simply and cathartically, and now the reader can close the book, turn out the lights, and go to bed.
But for the majority of ordinary people not in books who find themselves doing evil things, it's because they've fallen into a situation that they don't understand, didn't predict, didn't anticipate. Sometimes they get drawn into evil just because they don't realize that they can say "No!" Or the cost of saying "no" means that they will be shot. That sort of situation is especially ambiguous and difficult. There are hundreds of ways people can be psychologically manipulated into acts they would never have thought they could or would do, both good and bad—it happens all the time, in wars, in political or economic crises, in domestic violence. Army basic training is an example; so are propaganda and atrocity stories and news spins and religious indoctrination, and on and on. Human beings are immensely malleable. But these realistic sorts of resultant evil are more usually in the background than the foreground in my action-oriented tales, being much harder to bring to closure.
The very last Miles story I wrote before breaking off, or out, of the SF milieu to try my hand again at fantasy was the novella "Winterfair Gifts," set against the backdrop of Miles and Ekaterin's wedding. I came to it after completing Diplomatic Immunity, violating my rule against prequels, but not by much. Like "The Borders of Infinity" novella, it had its seeds in some ideas and images I'd been kicking around earlier that did not seem to support the weight of a whole novel. And like the prior work, their right-sized container found them when I was approached by an editor, in this case Catherine Asaro. She wanted to try some crossover blending between the usually immiscible genres of F&SF and Romance, a project that appealed to me on many levels. (Reintegration across boundaries, again.) The tale gave me a chance to follow up on Sergeant Taura, and explore the character of Roic, whose development