Young Miles - Lois McMaster Bujold [322]
"I know," said Miles bleakly. But he opened his collar and began switching tabs on the spot.
Illyan softened slightly. "Your father will know better, though. And Gregor. And, er . . . myself."
Miles looked up, to catch his eye directly for almost the first time this interview. "Thank you."
"You earned it. You won't get anything from me you don't earn. That includes the dressing-downs."
"I'll look forward to them, sir."
Author's Afterword
The Warriors Apprentice was my second novel. I began it in the fall of 1983, just six or so weeks after sending the manuscript of my first novel, eventually named Shards of Honor, off to a New York publisher, in blind hope and without a literary agent, in what is called, variously for unpublished writers, "on spec(ulation)," "over the transom" or "into the slushpile." The character of Miles Naismith Vorkosigan was a gleam in my eye when I began the story of his parents in that first book; by the time I had finished it, he'd already begun to take more substantial form. In the beginning I knew only three things about Miles: he was born crippled in a militaristic society, he was very bright, and he was extremely energetic. Since one of my own chronic complaints is that I never have enough energy, this last aspect of his character can legitimately be classified as author's wish-fulfillment fantasy.
Miles's first name was stolen from the character of Miles Hendron, in Mark Twain's The Prince and the Pauper. I was at the time innocent of the fact that "miles" means "soldier" in Latin, but I'll bet Twain wasn't. Miles's vaguely posited physical handicaps acquired a real-life template from a certain hospital pharmacist I used to work with; the height, the hunch, the head, the chin-tic and the leg braces were all lifted from this brilliant man. I took at least one of Miles's subtler psychological qualities from T.E. Lawrence. Lawrence had to a marked degree what one of his more prominent biographers, John Mack, described as a power of "enablement"; somehow, people around him in many different contexts found themselves doing more and better for the strength of his example and encouragement than they might have on their own. On a still deeper level of characterization, Miles's "great man's son syndrome," the fountain of so much of his drive and therefore my plots, owes much to my relationship with my own father. It is a curious comment on our culture that this particular psychological profile, which to my observation appears in both genders, is never called a "great man's daughter's syndrome." I wish that were only an artifact of the power of alliteration.
By the time I'd finished Shards I'd also developed the much more unexpected character of Konstantine Bothari. Bothari and Miles were a magnetic pairing. The very first image I had for the book that eventually became The Warrior's Apprentice was the death of Bothari, initially visualized defending Miles from some yet-to-be-conceived enemy on a shuttleport tarmac, far from home. The subsequent challenge to Miles, to survive without Bothari's quasi-parental support, was inherent in that initial vision. So while the book was written, largely, from beginning to end (a method I'd learned to prefer while writing Shards), it was generated from the inside out. I've described my usual writing process as scrambling from peak to peak of inspiration through foggy valleys of despised logic. Inspiration is better—when you can get it.
I began Warrior's exactly where it starts now; I made very few revisions to that first scene later. In the very first draft, however, Miles had a younger sister. Elena Bothari was originally named Nile, after the character of Nile Etland in a couple of James H. Schmitz stories I'd read back in Analog magazine in the '60s. The sister was deleted before I got to Chapter 3, as I realized she and Elena/Nile occupied the same ecological niche. Test