The Vorkosigan Companion - Lillian Stewart Carl [74]
* * *
Okay. Those of you who left when we started talking about plots and suchlike can come back now.
The Warrior's Apprentice is, depending on how you count, either the second or the third novel of Lois McMaster Bujold's celebrated Vorkosigan cycle. Before you ask, no, it's not one of those dreadful one-chapter-in-an-endless-saga things. There are threads leading into and out of the story, but the book is complete in itself, and you needn't have read anything else to enjoy it. It's the first book to deal with Miles (the earlier ones are about his parents) and so an excellent beginning point if you haven't read any of the Vorkosigan stories before.
I suspect that, once you've finished this book, you'll probably want to read the others. Be happy: there are a dozen or so, they're all good, and Lois is likely to write even more. They're books that sketch out a big, roomy universe filled with, well, richly detailed worlds and complex and believable characters. They have nice complicated plot structures, too, for those of us who like that sort of thing.
Right. Off you go, and hold on to your hat.
—
Douglas Muir
June 2001
Foreword to Ethan of Athos
Marna Nightingale
(2007 note: I am grateful to Suford Lewis of NESFA Press for asking me to write this introduction in 2003 and for her stalwart support while I did so, to Lillian Stewart Carl for giving me the opportunity to revisit and revise it for this new volume, and to Lois McMaster Bujold for providing occasion for both.)
Those of us who are loud, joyous, unabashed lovers and partisans of science fiction—that is to say, nearly everybody reading these words—have learned to greet the remark that a book or a writer "transcends the genre" with narrowed eyes and brusque demands to be told exactly what the speaker means by that. Our response is remarkably similar to the one which used to baffle and sometimes hurt the well-meaning souls who once roamed the earth telling especially bright or competent women that they thought "just like men." We've learned to see the dismissal beneath some "compliments"—to ask, what's wrong with being a science fiction writer? What's wrong with being a woman?
The analogy I am drawing—between gender and genre—is not accidental, and it's not casual. The words are almost the same for a reason—genre is the French word for kind or type, and our word gender comes from the same root: a genre book is a certain kind of book. A genre writer is a certain kind of writer. A gendered person is a particular type of person—and there's nothing wrong with that. Genre is important, though not all-important—it's the bones under the flesh, the underlying structure.
Ethan of Athos could not be what it is, could not ask the questions it asks in the way it asks them, and be anything but a science-fiction novel, a supremely good one: herein are fascinating new technologies, space adventure, and mystery. Here are richly textured cultures at once alien and recognizable, endlessly surprising and at the same time inevitably and always products of their particular intersection of basic axioms and advanced technology. Ethan of Athos has suspense and trouble, people shooting at each other, and people in love with each other. It's got spaceships and space stations. It's got genetically engineered superhumans, heroes, villains, nice normal folks just trying to get through the day. It's got a wonderfully twisty plot, as Bujold books always do. It's even got a Mad Scientist (and a few who are just really annoyed).
(This is as good a time as any for a few public service announcements. First of all, if you're wondering whether you came in halfway through, you should know that Ethan of Athos is, as are all of the fourteen books of the Vorkosigan Saga, intentionally freestanding—in theory, you can read just one—though in practice, there are no known cases of this occurring. Secondly, this foreword therefore contains no series synopsis or anything