Young Miles - Lois McMaster Bujold [325]
As long as my novels of character were being packaged as military SF anyway, I figured I might as well take a whack at the sub-genre more nearly head-on. So I set out to make the book which became The Vor Game as military as I could, as a sort of delayed present to Jim for raising me out of the slush-gutter back in '85. Unusually, I can describe exactly the moment at which the ideas came together in my head for the book's opening sequence. I was standing at my kitchen sink doing the dinner dishes, and listening to an Enya tape which contained a song sung in Latin titled "Cursum Perficio." What the actual lyrics of the song may be about I have no clue, but somehow its rhythms sounded both military and ecclesiastical to me, and I was put in mind of an early Christian martyr tale I'd once run across called "The Forty Martyrs of Sebastiani." The fast-forward version of this goes: a certain Roman legion was wintering in Dacia, up beyond the Black Sea, at a period when the high command was flip-flopping over the acceptability of this new religion. Orders came down for the Christians to recant. Forty men refused, and were ordered to stand out naked on the ice of a frozen lake until they changed their minds. Only one man broke. A watching Roman officer was so impressed with their fortitude, he went out to join them, to make up their round lot again, and they all froze to death. It seemed a very Barrayaran sort of tale to me, somehow.
I had also read T.E. Lawrence's The Mint, an account of his basic training when he re-enlisted in the British Army after World War I, under a pseudonym, as an enlisted man. Now, admittedly ex-Colonel Lawrence was not in the best psychological shape at this point in his life, but the account was nonetheless relentless in its description of the brutality and banality of training camp life.
Hanging on the wall of my father's home office for years, and now on mine, was a print titled "Alaskan Outpost," an almost art-deco stylized scene of an arctic weather station, with a parka-clad man out collecting data from his instruments, a snow-covered glacier sliding down the mountain in the background. It was a gift dated 1952 from his colleagues at the Battelle Memorial Research Institute, where he worked as a physicist and engineer till moving to his teaching post at the Ohio State University. In addition to his research and teaching, my father moonlighted as the second television weatherman in the United States, at Channel 10 Columbus, Ohio; most of the many Central Ohioans who knew him as "Bob McMaster, TV Weatherman," had no idea of his professorial day job. When the show first appeared, the weather segment used to be fifteen minutes long and he would always get in a short meteorology lesson as well as the forecast. He was so good, the Strategic Air Command pilots at Lockbourne Air Force Base used to call him up for pre-flight weather reports, in preference to their less reliable military weather sources, till their command caught up with them and made them stop.
So somehow, between one dish and the next, Enya; The Mint, "Alaskan Outpost," Strategy, the Forty Martyrs, and Miles all crashed together in my head, and came out the opening section of The Vor Game. Boom. The rest was mere logic, fine-tuning the connections.
I had set out to return Miles to the Dendarii fleet, but when that blasted dead body turned up in the drain in Chapter 3, the book tried very hard to turn into a military murder-mystery of some kind, set wholly on Kyril Island. The packet Miles retrieved had originally contained money, which had my test-readers jumping up and down in anticipation of all sorts