The Vorkosigan Companion - Lillian Stewart Carl [9]
The novella was actually an outtake from the larger The Vor Game, rather than the novel being a later extension or continuation; but the rest of the tale involved such large shifts in tone and setting, I've often wondered since if they really ought to have been two separate books. Too late now.
In the case of Barrayar, a direct sequel to Shards of Honor, the first part of the tale was already written. I'd cut off the last six or eight chapters of Shards because at the time I didn't quite know how to end a book and had rather overshot the ending, and had to back up to find a good stopping place. I set this fragment aside in my attic for several years. So about the first third of the book was already written when I was moved to go back and explore those themes and characters. I think it was a stronger, better book for the wait and the extra writing experience I'd accumulated in between—and certainly with a somewhat different plot—than if I had gone on to write it directly instead of turning my attention to The Warrior's Apprentice instead.
Barrayar explores what happens after the "happily ever after," which in real life is usually where the unglamorous long-haul work starts. Since Aral's work is a rather deadly brand of politics, the failure of which devolves into civil war, the action plot was obvious. (Well, by then it was. It hadn't been when I'd set it aside back in '83.) But in this early example of my many explorations of the personal versus the political, the biological versus the social, which are still ongoing in my work, the real subject of the tale is reproduction through adversity, political and otherwise—and, of course, through technology, compared-and-contrasted through several parallel couples and their different choices and chances.
Mirror Dance is most truly Mark's book, in which I came around again to complete what I'd merely attempted when he was introduced back in Brothers in Arms. But in that first pass on the problem, I realized in retrospect, I undercut myself by not including Mark's point of view, so that was the very first thing I corrected in the next try. In order to give Mark his chance to grow onstage it was also necessary to ruthlessly suppress Miles, which proved not without its satisfactions, and fruitful consequences. But here Mark finally obtained the viewpoint, the voice, and the story he needed to step out of his progenitor-brother's shadow.
Cetaganda was a prequel that had been kicking around for a while in the idea-form of "Miles and Ivan go to the Cetagandan state funeral, and . . ." with no idea of what happened next. When I finally came to write the tale, it just seemed to call for younger and more naïve characters, so I set the way-back machine to their early twenties. The story might have fallen elsewhere in their timeline, but would have been a rather different tale.
In Cetaganda, I explored disparate consequences of the Vorkosiverse's reproductive technologies in a very different social milieu. The Cetagandan haut use replicators and associated genetic engineering to construct their race's entire genome as a community property under strict central control. Although spread among many individuals, the genome becomes conceptualized as a work of art being consciously sculpted by its haut-women guardians. Where this is finally going, even the haut women do not have the hubris to guess—one of their few saving graces.
In addition, Cetaganda allowed me to do something a writer can pull off especially nicely in a series—critique or comment upon the assumptions of earlier books. I had originally tossed off the Cetagandans as mostly-offstage and rather all-purpose bad guys to stir up some plot action for my heroes. But the Barrayarans had started out as bad guys too, from a certain point of view. The closer I came to them, the more complicated their picture grew. No one is a villain in their own eyes; when I brought