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Lois McMaster Bujold

Edina, Minnesota, November 2007

CREATOR OF THE VORKOSIVERSE

Putting It Together:

Life, the Vorkosiverse, and Everything

Lois McMaster Bujold

Fans have dubbed my science fiction universe "the Vorkosiverse," after its most memorable and central (but far from only) character and his family. Science fiction and fantasy are the only genres I know where a series is defined by what universe it is set in (making mainstream fiction, looked at with the right squint, the world's largest shared-universe series).

The series is a family saga, as it has grown to center around one family where all the stresses of their changing worlds intersect. The tale begins in Shards of Honor (which I have also described as "a gothic romance in SF drag") where Cordelia Naismith, a survey scientist from the advanced planet of Beta Colony, first meets Aral Vorkosigan, soldier from war-torn Barrayar. Barrayar, settled early by humanity, had been cut off from the rest of the worlds by an astrographic accident, and regressed culturally and technologically in what they call their "Time of Isolation," until rediscovered in Aral's father's time. It has been scrambling to catch up ever since, an effort sabotaged by both external invasion and internal civil conflict. And so I can have my swords 'n' spaceships in a way that makes both historical and economic sense.

In that early work, when I was still feeling my way into such basics as how to write a novel at all, I used elements ready in my head. One such was the setting for what later came to be named the planet Sergyar, which was based on the landscapes and ecology I'd seen on a biology study tour of East Africa back in my college days. I never became a biologist, but it was nice to think the experience wasn't wasted; one of the best things about writing is how it redeems, not to mention recycles, all of one's prior experiences, including—or perhaps especially—the failures.

But, now that I'd hit my early thirties and had two small children in tow, failure was no longer an option. With a rather large amount of help from my friends, including the present editor of this volume, I clawed my way through the learning experience of writing that first book. These were pre-word-processor days, so it was all produced, first, with pencil and paper, then on a typewriter with carbon copies. The book went through a lot of revisions, including the title—its original working title was Mirrors, both a name and a theme that I revisited later.

Miles Vorkosigan grew out of the world and situation created in Shards of Honor. He came as real people do—from his parents. I have a catchphrase to describe my plot-generation technique—"What's the worst possible thing I can do to these people?" (Others have pointed out that this should have an addendum, "that they can survive and learn from.") Miles was already a gleam in my eye even when I was still writing Shards of Honor. For his parents, Aral and Cordelia, living in a militaristic, patriarchal culture that prizes physical perfection and has a historically driven horror of mutation, having a handicapped son and heir was a major life challenge, a test worthy of a tale.

Miles has a number of real-life roots—models from history such as T. E. Lawrence and young Winston Churchill, a physical template in a handicapped hospital pharmacist I'd worked with, most of all his bad case of "great man's son syndrome," which owes something to my relationship with my father. But with his first book, The Warrior's Apprentice, he quickly took on a life of his own; his charisma and drive, his virtues and his failings—and he has both—are now all his.

My initial ideas for The Warrior's Apprentice actually centered on Miles's complex quasi-filial relationship with his bodyguard Sergeant Bothari; Bothari's death was the first scene I envisioned, and the rest of the book was written, more or less, to get to that point and explain it satisfactorily to myself. Other characters and