Unsettling Futures - Issue #6: Miles Vorkosigan has mountains in his soul
"The Count's justice is for everyone, now. Even if they're small. And weakly. And have something wrong with them. And cannot even speak for themselves…" – The Mountains of Mourning
When you pick up one of Lois McMaster Bujold's Vorkosigan Saga books, it looks like you're getting a known quantity. The Baen publisher tag and the cover art and the titles and the back-cover blurbs all promise Space Opera of some variety or other. And they're not lying; everything they advertise is included.
But actually get into the series, and you find you've been deceived. Sure, it looks like run-of-the-mill vehicle for space adventures, a Honda Civic of a book. In truth, someone's smuggled a nitro-injected, hand-built racing engine under the hood, every piece precision fitted, capable of doing zero to sixty in half a second, stopping on a dime, driving up walls, and probably doing the Lindy hop if need be.
The series sprawls across nearly 20 novels, novellas, and short stories, with a few standalones, but the bulk of them feature Miles Vorkosigan. I want to talk about one, early entry in the series, but let's meet Miles first.
Miles' parents are dashing space opera heroes. His father Aral is a square-jawed feudal lord of the planet Barrayar, admiral, war hero, later prime minister, honourable guardian of the orphaned emperor. Miles's mother is an off-worlder, from a much more progressive and democratic society, a ship captain and explorer in her own right and carving a polite swathe through an archaic society she can't believe won't just get some damn therapy already.
Miles wants to be a space opera hero too!
Miles was poisoned when he was still in his mother's womb.
Miles is 4'9", his bones are barely stronger than chalk, he wears leg braces, and he's self-conscious as hell about all of this on a planet that despises "muties" after a recent history with tactical nuclear bombardment.
Miles becomes a space opera hero anyway, because his brain moves at 100 miles a minute and his mouth is twice as fast. Miles, at 17, accidentally takes over a medium-sized space mercenary company because each step seemed like the right thing to do at the time.
What makes Miles so great isn't just watching him win against impossible odds (eventually, one of the great pleasures of the series is watching cruel, stupid people underestimate Miles, and then get absolutely curb stomped) but by how carefully Bujold works him into the society in which he lives.
You can see that particularly in one of the great Vorkosigan stories, the 1989 Hugo and Nebula award winning novella The Mountains of Mourning.
The plot is simple. Miles is home after graduating from the military academy and at loose ends awaiting assignment. He's feeling a bit of the deflation that comes from achieving something you've wanted for years and then realizing it didn't quite fill you with the sense of triumph you expected.
Harra, a young woman from the Dendarii Mountains (think: Ozarks, Appalachia, dire rural poverty) arrives seeking an audience with Miles' father, her lord. Someone's killed her baby, Raina, for having a minor "mutation," a cleft palate. She wants justice. She thinks her husband did it.
Aral sends Miles, both in official capacity as the Count's Voice, and as a living message – no more infanticide in the hills. Raina's killer will be punished, and by the young "mutie lord."
Miles, armed with accurate truth drugs in a society with zero compunctions about using them on unwilling people, knows he'll be able to find the killer pretty easily. But he worries about what it means to dispense justice. Justice on Barrayar usually means a quick execution.
Bujold never has Miles overtly come out and think "If I'd been born in Silvy Vale instead of in the house of my parents, I'd have been smothered in my crib, too." She doesn't have to. It informs everything in The Mountains of Mourning, and much of the rest of the series, while Barrayar's feudal culture slowly changes, Miles and his friends and family greasing the gears here and there.
Bujold's genius in this story, and in most of her other work, is that she doesn't quite go where you'd expect.
She never forgets the overlapping layers of privilege and prejudice at work in Miles' life.
Officials and adults are at least outwardly polite to Miles, but kids who don't recognize his military uniform throw hex signs with their hands when he passes. Miles self-consciously deploys every piece of privilege he has – military, feudal, financial – and sets it against the prejudice.
Another facet appears when someone slashes the throat of Miles' beloved horse in the night. The doctor with Miles quickly patches the wound, leaving a local woman to breathe "All that, for a horse."
Miles refrained, barely, from leaping to a hot defense of the value of this particular horse. How many people in Silvy Vale had Ma Karral seen suffer and die, in her lifetime, for lack of no more medical technology than what Dea was carrying under his arm just now?
Miles finds the killer, and it's no grand moment of justice, but one of sorrow and pity.
"And now you call me a murderer? Damn you! What use is your justice to me now? I needed it then – where were you then?" Suddenly, shockingly, she burst into tears…
Miles finds a measure of justice, and then, remembering the oblige part of noblesse oblige, Miles offers to pay Harra's way through a teaching college. The backwoods towns aren't going to get any better without proper schools, and Harra is smart and determined.
And that would be enough for a lot of series. But the books aren't done with Harra yet.
In Mountains of Mourning, Miles is a callow twenty-year-old. When he returns to Silvy Vale, in Memory, he's thirty, and he's just blown up his entire career and been thrown out of the armed forces in a disgrace that's only private because it's highly classified.
But he tells Harra what happened, enough for her to understand. Because she's stubborn and honest, and because she had her life torn apart when she was even younger than he is now.
"You go on. You just go on. There's nothing more to it, and there's no trick to make it easier. You just go on."
"What do you find on the other side? When you go on?"
She shrugged. "Your life again. What else?"
It's advice Miles will carry around and dispense himself years later.
The mountain folk are referenced as far in as the tenth book starring Miles, A Civil Campaign, which is a full-on romantic comedy with slapstick elements. (You think your favourite series has range? This series has so much range you could use it to test heavy artillery!) Miles is often off on other worlds, dealing with politics and terrorism and investigation, but part of him is always back in the hill country, with Harra and Raina.
Bujold delights in setting up multiple versions of Miles. There's the dashing mercenary commander, the intelligence operative, the investigator, the feudal lord, the insecure kid with something to prove. All of them have a tendency towards being a hyperactive git that only fades slowly as he matures. But Miles carries around a self conception that includes something of the backwoods and the hill country through the series. His stubbornness is his own; it's also Harra's, it's also his guerilla-fighter grandfather's, it's that of any people who live with their back up against it. Miles' problems aren't poverty or lack of political power, but he knows his own kind of hardship, and he certainly knows pain.
The writer Bujold most resembles in style is probably Robert A. Heinlein, though she shares few to none of his politics. Heinlein was never a top-tier prose stylist, but he had a tremendously engaging voice that was one of the main keys to his success. Bujold's prose is more precise (and less prone to wandering off into lectures), but her voice is even stronger – it takes you closer in to the characters, to their fears and joys. Her voice carries you along; the biggest difficulty with Bujold novels is stopping with just one.
But the writer she shares the most in common with as far as world view is probably Terry Pratchett. There's a deep humanism in Bujold's world. Her characters are flawed but never seen dispassionately – the killer in The Mountains of Mourning was a victim, too. One never erases the other, but people are not dehumanized by their crimes and failings.
It's easy when reading the Vorkosigan series to skip over The Mountains of Mourning. While it's collected in omnibus collections, it's possible to miss it if collecting the books as individual print novels.
If you do read Bujold, though, don't skip this one. The Mountains of Mourning is one of the keys of the series, and the series is one of the greatest humanist explorations of character in science fiction.
Self-Promotion Corner
Not much to promote this week, but if you want to follow me on Twitter, I'm at @ouranosaurus, where I sometimes rant (much more briefly) about SFF stuff, and also about how the filming of the Sonic the Hedgehog movie sequel has filled my home town's streets with tanks, cripes, it's just weird.