The Vorkosigan Companion - Lillian Stewart Carl [4]
Over the course of the next decade of his life, and several books, Miles gradually acquires more and more repairs; by age twenty-eight, almost all of his original bones have been replaced with synthetics. He's still short, but can scarcely be described anymore as handicapped. This invited new challenges.
Miles's inferiority complex and bad case of Great Man's Son syndrome give him an enormous amount of drive, which is both attractive and gets him into a hell of a lot of trouble, particularly when he drives first and looks later. (He simultaneously has what is popularly called a superiority complex. I figure you can't be that smart and not know it.) As his author, I find his drive an enormously valuable characteristic for kicking my plots into motion, but I'm pretty sure any people who have to live with him in book-world (his cousin Ivan, for instance) find him pretty obnoxious at times. Miles has a dangerous tendency to try to turn the people around him into his annexes, a trait most spectacularly resisted by his clone-brother Mark. It's the main reason feminist scholars trying to construct Miles as codedly feminine get about halfway through the analysis and go, "Um, but . . ."
I didn't write the volumes about Miles Vorkosigan in strict chronological order. Shards of Honor and The Warrior's Apprentice are the first two novels I ever wrote. Nevertheless, the proper direct sequel to Shards of Honor is actually Barrayar, written six years later—they are literally two halves of one story—and the proper sequel of The Warrior's Apprentice is The Vor Game, also written years later.
The series grew organically as I scrambled from book to book; neither I nor my readers—nor Miles—have known what would be next. Quite like real life, that way. I admit, by the time I'd finished The Warrior's Apprentice, the structural model of C. S. Forester's Hornblower books had entered my mind. In this series about a British navy captain in the Napoleonic Wars, Forester began in the middle of Hornblower's life and career, then jumped forward and back as the spirit moved him. Each book stood alone as a complete and independent novel, yet when you put them all together, they turned into something larger than the sum of their parts, the character's overarching biography—stories within a mega-story. That structure gives a great deal of creative freedom, on a book by book basis. I've also found it allows each book to comment thematically and in other ways upon all the others, via a sort of literary hyperspace; an extra reward for the series reader's faithful dedication.
However, I have found by experiment that prequels suffer from certain constraints. The ending of the tale told has to not disrupt or contradict events that come later, and a character cannot grow beyond the bounds the writer has already shown. And there needs to be some explanation of why events are not causal in the intervening books, why an episode important enough to write a novel about is never subsequently-in-book-time thought about by the point of view character. Tricky. Lately, I've been sticking more to chronological order for these reasons.
My advice to new readers is: Begin reading the series where you are, and go on as you can. Which is not bad advice for life generally, come to think of it.
The next novel to be written wasn't about Miles, except very indirectly. It was Ethan of Athos, about an obstetrician from the planet forbidden to women. Charming fellow. Thereby hangs a tale that could only be science fiction.