Young Miles - Lois McMaster Bujold [324]
I never got the useful rejection letter, though. In August the book passed the first reader, in September it passed Betsy, and in mid-October Jim Baen telephoned me and offered for all three completed books, two of which he had not yet seen. My God, I thought, after I stopped hyperventilating, a publisher that operates in real time! (Warning to aspiring writers: this was twelve years ago now. Baen's slush piles were much smaller then.)
I then began Falling Free, as a conscious attempt at a "more serious" form of SF than Miles's "space opera." (I care much less about such labels nowadays.) By chance, during a pause in the middle of it, Betsy at Baen called me up and invited me to contribute a Miles story to an anthology of mercenary novellas she was editing, as a result of which I wrote "The Borders of Infinity." I finished Falling Free, then went on to write Brothers in Arms.
Miles's potential as a series character was acquiring a serious kinetic wallop by this time. I was conscious that I was a rather slow writer by commercial standards. Both because I had very much enjoyed the novella form, and because it would allow me to produce a book in two-thirds my usual time, I'd suggested as part of my next three-book contract to recycle the "Borders" tale and add two more novellas to it, making an all-Miles volume. So I wrote "The Mountains of Mourning" next, followed by "Labyrinth," incidentally establishing a pattern of writing at will anywhere in Miles's timeline, and accidentally setting up the subsequent perpetual readerly argument of whether it is better to read the Miles stories in publication order or by internal chronology. In these omnibus volumes you are getting them by internal chronology, by the way—until I wreck the nice arrangement by writing another prequel someday.
I can name where many of the elements of "Mountains" came from; Fat Ninny was based on a real horse, and I share Miles's love of the semi-wild country. Ma Mattulich was an extreme version of a certain female type I knew from real life, both victim and enforcer of her culture's life-denying mores. The river of roses might seem to have wandered in from some fairy-tale, sign and signifier of transformations to come, but I have met those wild roses in person, in banked-up masses, while riding in the Ohio fields of my childhood. I borrowed the title from a friend's working title of a fantasy, The Mountains of Morning, that she didn't use for her story's final version. "Mountains" was a contrary story, based on the "What's the worst possible thing we can do to this guy?" plot-generator, taking my new-minted Ensign Miles, his face to the stars, and forcing his head around to take a look at what his feet were planted in. At the time I was having an amiable debate with Jim Baen whether the series should be called "Miles Naismith Adventures" or "Miles Vorkosigan Adventures"; "Mountains" was in some degree the last word in this argument. It won me my first Hugo award, and my second Nebula, for best novella of 1989.
The third book in my three-book contract had been sold on what I fancied was the world's shortest synopsis: one word, "Quaddies." I really had intended when I'd finished Falling Free to write its sequel, but when I came to it, I still was not ready. (I am now even less ready.) It was very apparent, though, looking at the Miles tales I'd already written, that there was an important gap between "Mountains" and "Labyrinth." I knew how Miles had left the Dendarii Mercenaries, but I didn't know how he'd got back to them. I did know it couldn't have been simple. A lot must have happened in the three years