4
Building the Vorkosigan Universe

Edward James

Lois McMaster Bujold is one of the most popular writers in the world of science fiction and fantasy. The Hugo Award for Best Novel, based on a popular vote among science fiction fans, has been won by her four times, more than anyone else apart from Robert A. Heinlein; three of the wins were for novels in the Vorkosigan sequence. The Hugo Award for Best Series was created recently, and she won it in the first two years it ran: in 2017 for the Vorkosigan Saga and in 2018 for The World of Five Gods.

Apart from her early novel The Spirit Ring (1992), which was set in a fantasy version of Renaissance Italy, all her published books have been set in one of three created universes. The World of Five Gods books, sometimes called the Chalion series, so far consists of three novels and six novellas, set in a secondary fantasy world, which features not only magic but also the active participation of gods. The Sharing Knife sequence, which Bujold calls the “Wide Green World”, currently consists of four novels (or one long novel in four parts), and one long novella (or short novel). This is mostly interpreted as a fantasy set in a version of the American Midwest; I have argued elsewhere that it fits just as well in the long American tradition of post-apocalyptic science fiction, in which people live in a rural post-industrial world where “wild talents” such as telekinesis develop.1 And, finally, the series with which she made her name, the Vorkosigan Saga, whose first novels were published in 1986 and the most recent addition (the novella The Flowers of Vashnoi) in 2018: currently it runs to 16 novels and five short stories or novellas. It is set in a future in which humans from Old Earth have colonized numerous planets, and in which control of the wormholes which allow interstellar travel is crucial for ambitious planetary governments. The Vorkosigans are a leading family on one of those ambitious planets: Barrayar.

After the first few novels in the series it was generally categorized as “space opera”, because of its affinity with the science-fictional subgenre known for its “colourful action-adventure stories of interplanetary or interstellar conflict”.2 However, with Mirror Dance (1994) and Memory (1996), the books had started transforming into something much more interesting. Miles Vorkosigan, whose adventures as a self-styled Admiral had occupied much of the attention in the earlier books, reconciled himself to abandoning his career commanding a space fleet, and in the rest of the books a spaceship became just a convenient way to travel rather than a locale for action. The later books vary between political thrillers, comedies of manners (A Civil Campaign (1999) was even subtitled A Comedy of Biology and Manners) and detective novels. Miles Vorkosigan’s new career as Imperial Auditor — essentially a plenipotentiary investigator — allowed the series to escape the label “space opera”, but also to add a new dimension of plotting and character development. The appeal of the Vorkosigan novels to its fans is largely the result of Bujold’s attention to character, and of her ability to place them in interesting ethical dilemmas.

Before considering world-building in the Vorkosigan series, it is worth taking a brief look at how she did it in the Chalion books, as it is both a contrast and an interesting comparison. In both cases, the building blocks were to be found in our world. In the case of Chalion, the inspiration was a university course on medieval Spanish history which Bujold attended several years before she began writing the series. Chalion is a deliberately distorted and distorting image of the kingdom of Castile, in the generation before the marriage of Isabella of Castile and Ferdinand of Aragon paved the way for the creation of modern Spain. There is systematic distortion. The points of the compass have been reversed, to begin with: the Roknari princedoms to the north correspond to the Muslim kingdoms in the south of Spain or North Africa, with a dash of Viking. Darthaca in the south corresponds to France. Bujold’s own map, at www.dendarii.com, shows clearly that Chalion itself lies within an upside-down Spain, to its south, with a mountain frontier separating it from Darthaca. Other forms of disorientation were applied, such as using the word roya instead of “king” or royesse instead of “princess”. Some of the characters in the first two novels, The Curse of Chalion (2001) and Paladin of Souls (2003) clearly have their parallels in 15th-century Spain: Ferdinand and Isabella become Bergon of Ibra (Aragon) and Iselle of Chalion (Castile). The counterpart to Juan’s favorite Alvaro de Luna is Arvol dy Lutez, and Juana la Loca, Joanna the Mad, has two incarnations in Chalion, either Ista or Catillara. The world seems well-planned compared to the Vorkosigan universe, which seems to have gradually accreted, but Bujold remarked that stealing it from history wholesale “saves a lot of steps”.3 The really original part, which makes Chalion special, is the creation of the polytheistic theology; and there Bujold owes nothing to medieval Spain. With the Vorkosigan sequence, of course, Bujold is mostly dealing with alien planets (though in Brothers in Arms (1989) we do visit an Old Earth which has been seriously affected by climate change and a rise in sea level). There are some nods in the direction of the scientific details with which science fiction writers traditionally dealt with imaginary planets. Thus, the Barrayaran day is 26.7 Old Earth hours long; Sergyar has slightly less gravity than Beta Colony; Beta Colony has an atmosphere too poisonous and solar output too extreme for people to live on the largely desert surface for long; you need breathing apparatus to leave the domed cities of Komarr. Bujold is not particularly interested in alien zoology; her first novel introduced us to vicious six-legged crab-like predators and vampire balloons, but such exotica are not found again, although their presence in great numbers is mentioned in Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen (2015). There we briefly visit the Department of Biology at the University of Kareenberg (on Sergyar), which has a team that classifies and catalogs about 2,000 new species a year. Jole ventures to remark that it sounds impressive. “Does it?” is the response. “At this rate, we should have Sergyar’s entire biome mapped in about, oh, roughly five thousand years” (p. 206).

Bujold does recognize that environments can have a direct impact on the way those human societies develop, however. Beta Colony, for instance, had a high level of social cohesion in part because it was settled by slower-than-light generation ships, meaning that the colonists had a long time to develop cooperative systems in a closed environment. And once the planet was settled, that tendency was strengthened. Because the surface is so hostile, Betans live underground, and continue to restrict reproduction just as they had done in the even more cramped conditions of the generation ships. A desire to be protected from the environment was in part responsible for the near-universal use of the uterine replicator — an ideal environment for the development of a fetus during its first nine months of growth. But on the whole, environments do not play a large role in Bujold’s narratives, particularly for Barrayar, where the majority of plots unfold: to all intents and purposes, the landscape of Barrayar is indistinguishable from that of North America. On the whole, Bujold is much more interested in constructing imaginary societies than in imagining exotic planetary environments.

I am going to split my discussion of Bujold’s creation of the Vorkosigan Universe into two. First, I am going to look at the historical inspirations for her planetary cultures; and second, I will examine the way in which she slowly creates these cultures over multiple novels, or, at least, slowly reveals them to her readers. John Lennard, who has written on Bujold, suggests that there are two types of imaginative writers: the icebergs and the searchlights. Tolkien was an iceberg, in that much of what he wrote about Middle Earth — the languages, the history — did not appear in The Lord of the Rings (1954–1955) at all, but remained beneath the surface, in his notes and his memory. Much of this work was completed even before the publication of The Hobbit (1937). Bujold is a searchlight: “imagining only what necessarily fell within protagonists’ experience.”4 The Vorkosigan Universe (or Vorkosiverse, as some fans with no feeling for the English language call it) was created over several decades, with new parts being created when needed.

There are multiple forms of world-building involved. Our first protagonist is from Beta Colony, and in the first novel, Shards of Honor (1986), she meets her future husband, who is from Barrayar; they meet on the newly discovered planet that is later named Sergyar. In the very first novel, therefore, we are introduced, however superficially, to three different planets. In the sequence as a whole we get to know — again, sometimes superficially — some nine planets (including Old Earth) and three space stations. Three of the novels — Barrayar (1991), Cetaganda (1995), and Komarr (1998) — are named after the planet on which the action takes place. Beta Colony and Barrayar are exceptions in Bujold’s world-building, in that the Vorkosigan family members who are the protagonists of most of the early novels are so intimately connected with them: all our focalizing characters are either Barrayaran or Betan. (The exceptions are Ethan of Athos (1986) and Falling Free (1988), which is set at least 200 years before all the others.) The first novel, Shards of Honor (1986), which establishes the narrative background for what follows, is focalized through Cordelia Naismith, a Betan, and the next few novels are focalized through her son Miles, whose parentage is mixed and who is portrayed as a Barrayaran who often sees things through Betan eyes. He has spent some time on Beta Colony as a teenager, and even manages to maintain the Betan side of his personality by masquerading as a Betan, Admiral Miles Naismith. This masquerade lasts for six books, and it is only in Memory (1996) that he finally gives up his Betan persona and resigns himself to taking up his father’s role as a Barrayaran aristocrat. Even so, he has imbibed enough of his mother’s attitudes, and traveled enough, to be very different in his views from the average Barrayaran.

I have suggested that the differences between Beta Colony and Barrayar might be seen as representing different facets of American society, “which may very loosely be regarded as its progressive, egalitarian, and democratic aspects faced with the conservative and hierarchical”.5 But it is more helpful to think of all the varying cultures of the Vorkosigan Universe as having elements of applicability to contemporary Earth cultures; there is no direct relationship to any one of them. Bujold’s cultural creations are intended to force us to think about our own world, which is why I called the chapter in my book on Bujold which discussed her various cultures “Cultural Critique”.

Beta Colony is, in fact, the only extraterrestrial planet to be colonized directly from the United States. It is technologically predominant within the Vorkosigan Universe, both in military and medical technology, which is why the Betan dollar — and that is the word Bujold uses — is the strongest currency in the Vorkosigan universe. Like America too, or like America’s vision of itself, Beta Colony is very egalitarian. One of its earliest appearances in the narrative is when the Barrayaran Aral Vorkosigan makes fun of the Betan military’s tendency to argue rather than to obey: “You are no better trained than children at a picnic. If your ranks denote anything but pay scale, it’s not apparent to me” (Shards of Honor, p. 11).6 There is no hereditary aristocracy, and an elected president, though “I didn’t vote for him” becomes almost a catch phrase in Cordelia’s mind. The egalitarianism brings with it a political transparency unknown on Barrayar: Betan public ceremonies are all seen on “holovid” (3D television), and commented on at length. And with egalitarianism also comes a lack of deference. Miles, in his Betan guise, is instructed by a Barrayaran officer on the respect owed to a Barrayaran count: with the Betan half of his mind, Miles translates this into “Call him sir, don’t wipe your nose on your sleeve, and none of your damned Betan egalitarian backchat, either” (The Vor Game, p. 320; Bujold’s italics).

Along with egalitarianism came universal civil rights. An important element in the Vorkosigan family is the equal rights given to clones, thanks to which Mark, Miles’s clone, becomes recognized as his legal brother. Hermaphrodites, created by Betan science, have civil rights too; to Bel Thorne, who becomes a significant character in the Vorkosigan Saga, Miles reveals that he is not pure Betan by showing unconscious inability to accept hermaphrodites as naturally as Betans do. Criminals have civil rights too: crime is a disease, to be treated as such, by therapy. Aral gives the Barrayaran response: “at least we kill a man cleanly, all at once, instead of in bits, over years. . . Beheading. It’s supposed to be almost painless.” “How do they know?” asks the Betan Cordelia (Barrayar, p. 122). Betan medical technology gave the Vorkosigan Universe the uterine replicator, but also gave its citizens much longer lives: “all Betans expect to live to be 120. . . they think it’s one of their civil rights” (Warrior’s Apprentice, p. 47). Betans have a right to live without poverty, and with proper medical care. For Cordelia, the definition of poverty is “not owning a comconsole” (a personal computer with Internet access); and is horrified that for Barrayarans poverty may mean having no access to shelter, food, clothing or medical care.

Betan sexual customs are more relaxed than those elsewhere in the Universe. Sexual availability is advertised by clothing, or lack of it, or, for girls and women, the wearing of earrings. Cordelia is fitted with a contraceptive device at the age of 14, at the same time that her hymen was cut and her ears pierced; the event was celebrated by a coming-out party (Barrayar, p. 154). Because of the general permissiveness (and an aversion toward exploitation of any kind), the sexual role of prostitutes in fulfilled by Licenses Practical Sexuality Therapists (LPSTs)— men, women, and hermaphrodites who have gained licenses after a period of training.

To some Barrayarans, particularly women, Beta Colony appears almost utopian. Women seem to be treated as real equals, unlike the subordinated women of Barrayar. Cordelia becomes a role model for Elena Bothari — a Barrayaran daughter of a soldier forbidden by Barrayaran custom from going into the military — not just because Cordelia had chosen to go into the military, but because she had choice. However, Bujold has exercised her own choice to show Beta Colony as falling short of any utopian ideals. As early as Shards of Honor, we see that Betan security forces can be as amoral and ruthless as their Barrayaran or Cetagandan equivalents. Elena Bothari, on the point of visiting Beta Colony, is enchanted by the notion of “Betan freedom”. Miles has to correct her. Betans do not have “freedom” in the abstract. They cannot have children without applying for a license first. And because they live on a planet with a hostile planetary environment, Betans “‘put up with rules we’d never tolerate at home. You should see everyone fall into place during a power outage drill, or a sandstorm alarm. They have no margin for — I don’t know how to put it. Social failures?’” (Warrior’s Apprentice, p. 53). Despite the caveats, Betans stand for a level of freedom which has been aspired to, but never attained, by American radicals or utopians. In the two early books, with Cordelia as focalizer, we are inclined toward her evaluation of the levels of Betan civility and Barrayaran barbarism. And then, with some shock, the non-vegetarian reader realizes that Cordelia finds Barrayaran primitive cooking procedures, which involve taking protein “from the bodies of real dead animals”, really disgusting (Barrayar, p. 79); and all of a sudden we realize we are barbarians too.

Beta Colony seems to reflect many of the ideals of the United States, in however distorted a fashion. One might then presume that Barrayar reflects European ideals, or at least the attitudes common in Europe in the 19th century, since most of its colonists were of Russian, Greek, French, or British origin. One of the main themes underlying the whole Vorkosigan Saga, however, is that these attitudes are changing quite fast, under the influence of Beta Colony and other galactic powers. There is an historical event that was largely responsible for Barrayaran backwardness: the Time of Isolation. It is a reference to the historical event that was largely responsible for this backwardness. After the first 50,000 colonists had arrived on Barrayar — the Firsters — the wormhole through which they had come closed down. Their easy route to the rest of the human-settled Galaxy had disappeared, and the Firsters had to fend for themselves. The emergent terraforming program collapsed; imported Earth species broke loose, and largely wiped out native flora and fauna; and the Barrayarans did not share in Galactic scientific advances for 700 years. The Time of Isolation only ended just over a hundred years before the birth of Miles Vorkosigan, and revival and recovery was then set back by the Cetagandans, who invaded and attempted to colonize Barrayar, taking advantage of the newly opened wormhole. There is tangible evidence remaining on Barrayar of the wars fought with the Cetagandans, in the shape of areas devastated by nuclear attacks, whose radiation levels still exclude human habitation. In the past, mutations were a direct result of this pollution, and mutants were ruthlessly eliminated; now, in Vorkosigan time, the problem is rather how to stop people killing mutants, as we see in the novella The Mountains of Mourning (1989). The latest novella in the sequence, The Flowers of Vashnoi (2018), shows the attempt to cleanse affected areas of their radiation.

The Firsters had been drawn from various ethnic groups on Earth. Russians seem the predominant group, and many of the aristocrats have surnames derived from Russian. The name Vorkosigan was inspired by the name of Alexei Kosygin, a leading Soviet politician in the post-Khrushchev era. All aristocratic families have names preceded by the Vor suffix: when devising the Vor system for Barrayar, Bujold had not known that Vor was Russian for thief, although now she finds it strangely appropriate. Although most of the Vor names recall Russian origins, there are Vorsmythes, Vormuirs, Vorgustafsons, and Vorvilles. Most of these appear in the background, but two aristocrats presumably from a French tradition appear in the narrative: Etienne Vorsoisson and René Vorbretten. Other than the Russians, the group that maintains its sense of identity the most are Greeks, mostly associated with rural areas. Lady Alys Vorpatril diplomatically remarks that a particular custom has died out “except in some of the backcountry districts in certain language groups”, and frowns when her son Ivan adds “she means the Greekie hicks” (A Civil Campaign, p. 41).

Crucial to the story arc of the Vorkosigan Saga as a whole is the role of Cordelia in importing Betan ideas to Barrayar and thus bringing about a change in Barrayaran society. One of the sub-plots of later Vorkosigan novels concerns the impact of uterine replicators on Barrayaran society, as a direct result of Cordelia’s decision to import them: indeed, her son Miles would never have survived as a fetus without the uterine replicator. But the uterine replicator is just a symbol of the scientific and other advances which could be made on Barrayar with the judicious introduction of scientific techniques and social change. Aral is not averse to such changes, and change is greatly facilitated by Emperor Gregor, who as a child saw a lot of Aral and Cordelia, the Regent and Regent-consort. There are several rebellions led by conservatives when Aral as Regent tried to push through reforms; but the rebellions fail, and slow progressive reform does take place. One example: he makes it easier for ordinary Barrayarans to switch their oaths to a different district count, thus giving incentives to counts to actually attract new residents, by offering lower taxes, for instance. And the reforms continue after Aral resigns as Regent. In CryoBurn (2010), the novel which in terms of internal chronology is the penultimate one, Miles Vorkosigan is in charge of a committee designed to make the laws on reproductive technology as up-to-date as those in the rest of the Galaxy.

Barrayar appears so European in its make-up that it is a slight shock to realize that the inspiration for Barrayaran society comes actually from Japan. The clue was in the phrase Time of Isolation. “Isolation” is a word frequently used for the period in Japanese history between the 1630s and 1853: in that year four American warships arrived off Edo/Tokyo in order to force an ending to the maritime restrictions that had largely isolated Japan from the rest of the world. Bujold has explained that although the Barrayarans have the European culture inherited from the first settlers, in terms of history and “the shape of their culture”, it was Meiji Japan which provided the inspiration. She wrote: “It had its own time of isolation; it had its development of a military caste; and it had its very traumatic re-opening to the outside world.”7 She added that Japan did not almost immediately suffer an invasion (as Barrayar did from Cetaganda); but Russia has been invaded many times. “It is a blending of these two histories, of Japan and of Russia, with various and sometimes logical results — not always salutary results, but always logical results.”8 The young Emperor Gregor, then, stands in for the young Emperor Meiji, who in his long reign between 1868 and 1912 introduced reforms, many of which involved implanting in Western ideas in Japan, and built up the Western-style military forces that inflicted stunning defeats on China in 1894–1895 and above all on Russia in 1904–1905.

The second major culture in the Vorkosigan universe that owes something to Japanese culture and history is that of Cetaganda. We learn about this mostly in Cetaganda (1996), which recounts the visit of the young Miles Vorkosigan and his cousin Ivan Vorpatril to the Imperial Palace on Eta Ceta IV, from which the Empire’s eight major worlds, and various other dependent planets, are governed. We learn nothing about ordinary Cetagandans: only about the two different levels of the aristocracy, and about the ba, who are the neuter servants of the upper aristocracy. The lower-level aristocrats are the only ones whom most outsiders encounter: the ghem, whose men form the core of the armies that established the Empire, but who have, in recent years, met with a number of political reverses. Ghem warriors are distinguished from each other by bizarre and colorful patterns painted on their faces, which relate to their status and/or their grouping within the armed forces. The ghem are to be found in security positions on Eta Ceta IV itself: Miles finds Ghem-Colonel Benin, who interviews Miles in connection with a murder, to be not unlike a senior security man on Barrayar — in other words, a type that Miles had met many times before, and whom he therefore found both congenial and predictable. Benin wears face paint that indicates his Imperial allegiance rather than his clan: “a white base with intricate black curves and red accents that Miles thought of as the bleeding-zebra look” (Cetaganda, p. 116). Miles predicts, correctly, a promotion in Benin’s future; and thinks that perhaps Benin would be rewarded by having his genes taken up for inclusion in the genome of the upper aristocracy.

Genetic manipulation is at the heart of the Cetagandan system. Ghem ladies vie against each other in producing exotic creations, though using genetic material from animals and plants rather than humans. Miles and Ivan attend an exhibition of these creations (Cetaganda pp. 164–166), and Ivan is attacked by a hyperactive climbing rose. When he encounters a tree from which small kittens hang in pods, he assumes that they are glued in, and rashly attempts to rescue one: it dies in his hand as soon as he picks it. More fundamental, but equally questionable, genetic engineering is carried on by the haut, the upper level of the aristocracy, who seem to be invisible most of the time as far as ordinary Cetagandans are concerned. The haut are themselves the result of a program of genetic improvement — of eugenics — over several centuries. There is a question as to whether they are actually human any longer, but their long-term goal is certainly to create a post-human species. It was already flagged in Ethan of Athos, and alluded to in Cetaganda, that the Cetagandans might experiment with the importation of genes for telepathy into the genome. The genetic work is carried on by the Star Crèche, an all-female and all-haut group of scientists, ultimately under the control of the Emperor, but in practice under the direct control of the mother of the Emperor, or the mother of his heir. The Star Crèche controls the genome of the haut very strictly, allowing it to develop in part by the insertion of promising ghem genes. Each year, the Star Crèche on Eta Ceta IV send out haut fetuses to the eight planetary governors and their consorts (who are all themselves haut women closely associated with the Star Crèche). The story behind Cetaganda is the plan to decentralize this system, and to allow the consorts to take charge of genetic developments on their planet; however, one of the planetary governors wants to subvert this plan, and centralize matters on himself, with the help of senior ghem; Diplomatic Immunity (2002) revolves around a different attempt to subvert the genetic plans of the Star Crèche.

Cetaganda is immediately reminiscent of traditional Japanese culture: there is an Emperor; there is an apparently rigid aristocratic or caste system, and a military class; ceremony is an important part of aristocratic life; and there is high respect given (by aristocrats at least) to every aspect of art and aesthetics. Bujold has said that it was partly the Japan of Lady Murasaki Shikibu, who wrote the Tale of Genji in the early 11th century which lay behind Cetaganda (which might explain the importance of haut women in Cetagandan culture), but some elements were taken from Imperial China of the late Manchu period. There are no apparent clues from Cetagandan names, however. If the name of Ruyst Millisor, the first Cetagandan we meet in the Vorkosigan saga, has any ethnic origins it would appear to be European rather than Asian. Other names we encounter (in Cetaganda) are Fletchir Giaja, the Emperor; Lisbet Degtiar, his mother; Ilsum Kety; Dag Benin; and so on. They look very much like the made-up names of people in a Jack Vance space opera. If there is a specific Earth culture from which Cetagandans are intended to derive, it is concealed in points of detail. Indeed, that may be the purpose: after all, it is the policy of the Cetagandan Empire to develop and indeed evolve away from its primitive Earth roots, in the direction of the post-human.

There are other cultures that Bujold creates, for Komarr such as the Kibou-daini (another culture heavily influenced by Japanese culture), but perhaps one more is worth mentioning in detail here: Jackson’s Whole. Bujold’s cultural worlds frequently force us to think about our own world by taking facets of it and exaggerating or extrapolating them to extremes. Jackson’s Whole is a nightmare world in which free-market capitalism has been allowed to develop without any legal restraints. Bujold has commented: “Everybody says they want a world with no government. Here’s a world with no government. How do you like it?”9 It is run, if at all, by a relatively small number of desperately competing Great Houses, most of whose fortune is based on what other worlds would probably regard as criminal activities. A century or two before Miles’s time it was little better than a base for space pirates. Since then it has “senesced”, as Miles puts it, into a collection of syndicates which are “almost as structured and staid as little governments”, and Miles wonders whether one day they will all succumb to “the creeping tide of integrity”. Miles lists the main houses, when he first comes across them, in the story “Labyrinth”:

House Dyne, detergent banking — launder your money on Jackson’s Whole. House Fell, weapons deals with no questions asked. House Bharaputra, illegal genetics. Worse, House Ryoval, whose motto was “Dreams Made Flesh,” surely the damndest — Miles used the adjective precisely — procurer in history. House Hargraves, the galactic fence, prim-faced middlemen for ransom deals — you had to give them credit, hostages exchanged through their good offices came back alive, mostly.

(Borders of Infinity, pp. 103–104)

While Miles’s clone brother Mark was himself being grown on Jackson’s Whole, he learns about House Bharaputra’s life extension business, whereby wealthy people have their brains, with their personalities and memories, transplanted into the bodies of young clones in order to extend their lives. The operation is not always successful, as a certain percentage of the patients die: “Yeah, thought Miles, starting with 100% of the clones, whose brains are flushed to make room. . .” (Borders of Infinity, pp. 116–117). Jackson’s Whole is, of course, very useful to the rest of the galaxy, because it does offer services and products that are unavailable elsewhere. Jackson’s Whole has many skills; it is merely that those do not include any sense of corporate or medical ethics. Bio-engineering is particularly advanced on the planet, and in the course of the Vorkosigan books we meet a number of its products. Miles’s clone-double Mark heads the list, but there is also Sergeant Taura, who is constructed to be the ultimate warrior: when she dies, she says that she wants her ashes to be buried anywhere in the universe — anywhere except Jackson’s Whole. Gupta, whom we meet in Diplomatic Immunity, is an amphibian human, with gills and webbed extremities, created by House Dyan on Jackson’s Whole. Jackson’s Whole also creates slaves, either by conditioning or by genetic manipulation: they are called jeeveses (possibly Bujold’s only direct Wodehouse reference). “They’re said to pine if they are separated from their master or mistress, and sometimes even die if he or she dies” (Captain Vorpatril’s Alliance, p. 41). The jeeves is a symbol of the creative, yet totally exploitative and immoral, spirit of uncontrolled capitalism on Jackson’s Whole.

For the second part of this paper I want to look at the way in which Bujold introduces her planetary cultures. She does not use some of the familiar methods: brief extracts from a text-book or scientific manual or long expositions within the text (the “as-you-know-Bob” technique which used to be common in early science fiction). She drops slow hints, and misdirections, and then (usually by visiting the planet in question) fills in the details. It allows her to invent the details as she goes along, of course, but also enables readers to find out about other cultures in a slow and natural way. I shall take examples from the way in which she builds up the readers’ knowledge of Beta Colony, Barrayar, and Cetaganda.

The first three Vorkosigan books all appeared in 1986: Shards of Honor (June), The Warrior’s Apprentice (August), and Ethan of Athos (December). None are direct sequels. The first deals with the meeting of Cordelia Naismith, from Beta Colony, and Lord Aral Vorkosigan, from Barrayar, and ends shortly after their marriage. The Warrior’s Apprentice describes the early years of their son Miles (the main protagonist for eight of the novels), and the origins of his career in space. Ethan of Athos has Elli Quinn, one of Miles’s officers sent on a mission to Kline Station; as the book’s title suggests, she is not the main protagonist, and Miles does not appear at all. Ethan of Athos is an interesting book, and deals in passing with Athos, possibly the only planet in popular science fiction inhabited solely by gay males, but in terms of the building of the Vorkosigan Universe, the other two are much more significant, and introduce us to the two most important characters in the whole saga — Cordelia Naismith and her son Miles Vorkosigan — and to the worlds they inhabit.

Shards of Honor begins with Cordelia Naismith on the surface of an unnamed planet, with just one comparative detail: “the gravity of this planet was slightly lower than their home world of Beta Colony” (p. 3). They are in the mountains. There is forest, and dense vegetation; beyond rocky mountains with a central peak “crowned by glittering ice” (p. 4). The sun shone in a turquoise sky, onto banks of white clouds below the mountains and onto the grasses and flowers. So far there is little that could not be a description of Earth (Bujold is in fact not good at visual descriptions of otherness). They discover that their camp has been destroyed while they were away. “Aliens?” (p. 5), queries Cordelia. And then “Multiple choice, take your pick — Nuovo Brasilians, Barrayarans, Cetagandans, could be any of that crowd” (p. 6). There are actually no intelligent aliens in the Vorkosigan Universe, and no further reference to them throughout the Vorkosigan Saga; indeed, as far as I can see Nuovo Brasilians are not mentioned again either. But we have learned for the first time that there are rival political groups in space (two of these are going to be important later in the series). Before the end of Chapter One, Cordelia realizes that the aggressors are Barrayarans, has met Captain Aral Vorkosigan, and discovered that he commands a Barrayaran war cruiser, and we learn that she is in command of a scientific team under the auspices of the Betan Astronomical Survey. From the beginning, Betans are categorized as peaceful, and Barrayarans as aggressive; and Cordelia and Aral have a conversation that shows the contempt of the Barrayaran military officer for the lack of discipline and military training of the Betans. Before the end of the chapter, we have discovered that Betans are sympathetic to the injured or disabled; the Barrayaran suggests putting the wounded Betan out of his misery. Another crucial piece of information comes in Chapter Two. Aral has been talking about his family. His maternal grandmother turns out to be Betan; the grandfather met her while serving as Barrayaran ambassador on Beta Colony. “‘Outsiders — you Betans particularly — have this odd vision of Barrayar as some monolith, but we are a fundamentally divided society. My government is always fighting these centrifugal tendencies’” (p. 33). Aral is addressing Cordelia, of course; but Bujold might well be addressing her readers. It had long been one of the failings of space opera to imagine that each planet, if inhabited by an intelligent species, had one language and one culture. Star Trek was a major offender, and Bujold had been an enthusiastic fan as a teenager (she was co-founder of a fanzine, StarDate, which was possibly only the second fanzine in the United States to be devoted to a single TV show).10

The world-building of the two main planets of Beta Colony and Barrayar is conducted mainly in terms of comparisons and contrasts between the two, and above all in Shards of Honor. Much of it is stems from conversations between Cordelia and Aral, although we do also see the inner thoughts of Cordelia, on whom the narrative focalizes in both Shards of Honor and its immediate sequel Barrayar. Sometimes we learn about Barrayar from odd facts that Cordelia dredges up from her memory. Interestingly, the dialog between Beta Colony and Barrayar does not end when, with The Warrior’s Apprentice, Miles Vorkosigan takes on the focalizing role, because, as we have seen, he belongs in both cultural worlds.

In terms of world-building, however, it is a slow build-up of information, which continues throughout the series. One crucial fact about Beta Colony, for instance, is as far as I can see, not mentioned until the most recently published Vorkosigan novel, Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen (2015): it is revealed that on Beta Colony, unlike Barrayar, there are no clearly distinguished ethnic groups: “the Betans had been using gene cleaning and rearranging for generations, which meant anyone’s ancestors could be anything” (p. 25).

Our knowledge of Barrayar increases once Cordelia actually arrives there, which does not happen until two chapters before the end of Shards of Honor. There are some verbal descriptions of the countryside and of the capital city, but, as before, much of what we learn about Barrayarans comes through Cordelia’s reaction to them when she meets them: first Sergeant Bothari and Aral’s father, Count Piotr, and then Prime Minister Vortala and Emperor Ezar. This increased density of reality continues in the novel which is the direct sequel, Barrayar. But that sequel (really the second half of one long novel) did not arrive until 1991, by which time the conscientious reader has already learned a lot more about Barrayar through Miles’s eyes, in the four Miles-centered novels which intervened.

Part of the learning process is through the device of a travelog: that is, as the protagonist travels about the planet, we learn more. Although Cordelia ventures into the countryside in Barrayar (thanks to a revolt which causes her to go into hiding), we had already seen something of the countryside beyond the boundaries of aristocratic villas through the eyes of Miles. The true state of Barrayaran backwardness, for instance, is not really apparent until Miles is sent, for his own education as much as anything else, on a mission deep into the countryside, in “The Mountains of Mourning”, a novella in the Vorkosigan sequence.11 He is sent as “the Voice” of his father, Count Aral Vorkosigan, to Silvy Vale, to investigate the murder of an infant with a hare-lip. That he himself is a cripple, whose growth was stunted by being poisoned in the womb, is very relevant. Country people regarded him with horror as a “mutie”, a mutant. (Disability and people’s reaction to disability are major themes throughout Bujold’s work.) He, in his turn, is horrified at the poverty, and at the absence of an electrical supply, but above all at the backward attitudes of these people from the “backbeyond”. The dead baby was “only a mutie” (p. 55). Miles sees the ignorance of the hill-folk not as their fault, but as shaming the Vorkosigans. It is an event crucial to his own education, and for his preparation as the future Count.

Cetaganda has been introduced slowly too. As we have seen, in Shards of Honor, Cordelia at first wonders whether her encampment had been destroyed by Cetagandans. Later in that novel, we learn two further things about the Cetagandans: that Aral’s grandfather was an ambassador to Beta Colony before the First Cetagandan War (p. 32), and that the old Emperor Ezar had fought in the war as the military apprentice to Aral’s father (p. 234). The Warrior’s Apprentice adds more details, with Miles’s grandfather reminiscing about fighting the Cetagandans in the Dendarii mountains, in Vorkosigan territory (p. 14), and Aral himself remembering the Third Cetagandan War. The city of Vorkosigan Vashnoi was destroyed by a Cetagandan nuclear bomb (p. 67); Miles pledges the worthless real estate to a Betan in return for a spaceship. And, much later in the same novel, “Admiral” Miles Naismith discovers that he has recruited into his mercenary force “two dozen Cetagandan ghem-fighters, variously dressed, but all with full formal face paint freshly applied, looking like an array of Chinese temple demons” (p. 212). A certain amount of tension follows, but no more information, and no explanation of that word ghem.

This slow drip of information reaches a different level in the third novel published in the Vorkosigan Universe, Ethan of Athos. The action takes place almost entirely on Kline Station, a space station, and the protagonist Ethan is being chased by a Cetagandan counter-intelligence team led by ghem-colonel Millisor. And it is here, at the very end, that Commander Elli Quinn, acting for Miles Vorkosigan, shows us that Miles has an interest in Cetaganda. (It is not for another ten years that Bujold would publish Cetaganda, revealing that Miles had visited Cetaganda on a diplomatic mission before the events of Ethan of Athos.) Quinn refers to Cetaganda as “a typical male-dominated totalitarian state, only slightly mitigated by their rather peculiar artistic cultural peculiarities” (p. 65), which is because Miles has not told the details of his mission, or (more likely) because Bujold had not yet worked out the complexities of Cetagandan society. But we do learn a crucial fact about Cetaganda here, that Cetaganda only reinforces: that they have a serious interest in genetic engineering. Millisor was in charge of security for a military-sponsored genetics project, and “Millisor and his merry men have been chasing something around the galaxy ever since, blowing people away with the careless abandon of either homicidal lunatics, or men scared out of their wits” (p. 65).

We learn little about Cetagandans in subsequent books, except that they are clearly the villains who can be blamed for anything, such as the kidnapping of Miles, and his subsequent cloning (in Mirror Dance [1994]). In 1987 Bujold published “The Borders of Infinity”, in which Miles organizes an escape from a brutal Cetagandan prison; in Brothers in Arms (1989) Miles has to dodge Cetagandans in London (of all places); and in The Vor Game (1990) he foils a Cetagandan invasion of Vervain. Cetaganda only comes to the forefront in Cetaganda (1996). This contains a scene which retrofits the action very carefully in relation to the previous novels. Miles overhears a mysterious communication from ghem-colonel Millisor, who is in pursuit of some very important missing genetic material (p. 153). Clearly this is before the events of Ethan of Athos, but only just before: Miles has time to send Commander Quinn to follow Millisor as far as Kline Station to discover what has been lost, and thus to meet Ethan of Athos. Miles is 22 when he and his cousin Ivan Vorpatril are sent to a state funeral on Cetaganda to represent Emperor Gregor. He already shows the talents for which he was a few years later appointed as Imperial Auditor, solving a murder and getting mixed up in Cetaganda’s internal politics, and coming out of it, to his embarrassment, with a Cetagandan Imperial Order of Merit. When, ten years later in Vorkosigan time, Miles, his wife Ekaterin, and the Betan hermaphrodite Bel Thorne, all help save Cetaganda’s bacon for them a second time, in Diplomatic Immunity (2002), only Ekaterin and Bel get the Imperial Order of Merit; Miles is asked to donate a genetic sample to the banks of the Star Crèche, the highest honor that Cetagandan can conceive. That Miles is aiding the traditional enemies of Barrayar is certain; that he does it for reasons of Barrayaran policy is also clear. Miles’s main worry is that the haut would lose control over the ghem in this struggle for genetic power. The ghem have an aggressive expansionist past, while the haut were much more concerned with their genetic project than with extending the Cetagandan Empire.

We began by seeing Cetaganda as yet a rather brutal militaristic society intent upon expanding across the Galaxy, and ended by realizing it is a complex, tiered society, devoted to artistic and scientific endeavors, which is ultimately under the control of a secretive group of aristocratic women. Bujold has worked this sort of switch before: Barrayar initially appeared as similarly brutal and militaristic, and it was only gradually that it was revealed to be a complex and many-layered society with much to admire. Do not judge people or societies until you have grown to know them might be one of the lessons of the Vorkosigan Universe.

First Publications of the Vorkosigan Saga, in Order of Internal Chronology

“Dreamweaver’s Dilemma”, in Bujold, Dreamweaver’s Dilemma: Short Stories and Essays, edited by Suford Lewis (Framingham, MA: NESFA Press, 1996), pp. 69–103.

Falling Free (Riverdale, NY: Baen, 1988). Previously serialized in Analog, December 1987-February 1988.

Shards of Honor (Riverdale, NY: Baen, 1986).

Barrayar (Riverdale, NY: Baen, 1991). Previously serialized in Analog July–October 1991.

The Warrior’s Apprentice (Riverdale, NY: Baen, 1986).

“The Mountains of Mourning” (novella), Analog May 1989, pp. 14–74.

“Weatherman” (novella), Analog February 1990, 12–75.

The Vor Game (Riverdale, NY: Baen, 1990), incorporating “The Weatherman”.

Cetaganda (Riverdale, NY: Baen, 1996). Previously serialized in Analog October-mid-December 1995.

Ethan of Athos (Riverdale, NY: Baen, 1986).

“Labyrinth” (novella), Analog August 1989, pp. 2–84

“The Borders of Infinity” (novella), in Free Lancers, edited by Elizabeth Mitchell (Riverdale NY: Baen, 1987).

Brothers in Arms (Riverdale, NY: Baen, 1989).

Borders of Infinity (Riverdale, NY: Baen, 1989), incorporating “The Mountains of Mourning”, “Labyrinth” and “The Borders of Infinity”.

Mirror Dance (Riverdale, NY: Baen, 1994).

Memory (Riverdale, NY: Baen, 1996).

Komarr (Riverdale, NY: Baen, 1998).

A Civil Campaign (Riverdale, NY: Baen, 1999).

“Winterfair Gifts” (novella), in Irresistible Forces, edited by Catherine Asaro (New York, New York: New American Library, 2004), pp. 1–71.

Diplomatic Immunity (Riverdale, NY: Baen, 2002).

Captain Vorpatril’s Alliance (Riverdale, NY: Baen, 2012).

The Flowers of Vashnoi (novella) (Riverdale, NY: Baen, 2018).

CryoBurn (Riverdale, NY: Baen, 2010).

Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen (Riverdale, NY: Baen, 2015).

Notes

  1. 1 Edward James, Lois McMaster Bujold (Modern Masters of Science Fiction), Chicago and Springfield: University of Illinois Press, 2015, pp. 62–72. Parts of this chapter are drawn and repurposed from this book, with permission of the publisher.

  2. 2 Brian M. Stableford and David Langford, “Space Opera” in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction. edited by John Clute, David Langford, Peter Nicholls, and Graham Sleight. Gollancz, 21 May 2019, available at http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/space_opera.

  3. 3 James, Bujold, p. 53.

  4. 4 J. Lennard, “(Absent) Gods and Sharing Knives: The Purposes of Lois McMaster Bujold’s Fantastic Ir/Religions” in Lois McMaster Bujold: Essays on a Modern Master on Science Fiction and Fantasy (Critical Explorations in Science Fiction and Fantasy, p. 37), edited by Janet Brennan Croft (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2013), pp. 172–194, at 176.

  5. 5 James, Bujold, p. 75.

  6. 6 All quotations come from the first editions listed above.

  7. 7 Bujold, Dreamweaver’s Dilemma: Short Stories and Essays, edited by Suford Lewis (Framingham, MA: NESFA Press, 1995), p. 210.

  8. 8 Bujold, Dreamweaver’s Dilemma, p. 211.

  9. 9 Dreamweaver’s Dilemma, p. 212.

  10. 10 James, Bujold, p. 6.

  11. 11 Published in Analog May 1989, and later forming part of Borders of Infinity (also 1989). It won both the main science fiction awards, for Best Novella, in 1990: it was the first of her seven Hugo Awards, and the second of her three Nebula Awards.