The Vorkosigan Companion Read Online Free PDF

chip failing, and Miles somehow coming to his rescue. One of the deep appeals of fiction is the ability, as my friend Lillian here once put it, "To heal with the stroke of a pen."
    I had a choice between starting that book, or doing the one where Miles reencountered his clone-brother Mark. Patricia Wrede, after listening perhaps once too often to my set speech about prequel determinism versus sequel free will, talked me into doing the Mark book first, rather than writing it as a prequel later, even though I was rather excited about the memory-chip idea. I am exceedingly grateful to Pat for that. Because the book that resulted changed Miles and his world.
    It had been plain to me, if not to my chief protagonist, that for a long time Miles had been getting along by living a lie, and at some point in his life, this ought to turn around and bite him. Miles was living his adolescent dream, which once had given him vital growth, but now was proving increasingly sterile; it was time for him to grow up and move into a more fully adult, fully rounded life. But he was also getting an enormous amount of validation out of his Naismith persona; it was equally clear that he would not willingly give that up, even if another part of him was, almost literally, dying to move on.
    Mirror Dance supplied the missing pieces for both plot and theme in Memory , in the form of Miles's own cryo-revival damage and subsequent seizure disorder, and it finally achieved critical mass.
    In Memory , Illyan's loss of his military career is closely contrasted with Miles's loss of his. (Parallels, spirals, and reflections are some of my favorite literary patterns.) Illyan gets to dump, after thirty grueling years, a job that had eaten his life. He was mortally tired, and ready for the change, however high the ransom he had to pay for himself.
    When Illyan gives up being Chief of Imperial Security, it's as if he has a thousand-pound weight lifted from his shoulders. Punch-drunk, he is. No wonder he warbles a bit. Illyan's losses are great—removal of the chip returns him to normal temporal perception, but too dangerously absentminded to continue as an officer—yet there are surprising compensations. His emotional side that his job required him to suppress for years finally gets a chance to flower. And it's contagious; relationships that had been frozen in place for years thaw and change when he changes.
    And there's another variant on the book's theme; even after such profound change, as another character remarks, what you get back is ". . . your life again. What else?" Illyan was ready to be finished with that earlier part of his life, and move on. Miles both was and wasn't; part of him had to drag the rest of him, kicking and bitching the whole way, onto higher ground. Watching Illyan adjust, Miles and his maniacal drive for achievement get a valuable nonverbal but very sharp critique from the man who was his most revered mentor. Trust me, it's very good for him.
    Memory was published a couple of months before Trudie Senior's long, long death came to an end. I sent a copy to the dedicatees. Trudie Junior said: "I showed it to her . . . You do what you can."
    I really, really wanted to write a lighter book after Memory . I didn't think I could, or should, attempt two thematically "big," emotionally draining books in a row. It's like spacing pregnancies too close together; it leaches the minerals out of your bones. But Komarr lay across my path to everything else; it had to be done first.
    Komarr is the romantic drama; A Civil Campaign the romantic comedy. After all, Miles had two births, and will have two deaths, why shouldn't he have two romances? On a practical level, the split of the emotional plot of story into two halves was to solve a problem of tone. I could not have combined the material I dealt with in Komarr with a comedy of the goofiness I desired in the same book. It would have been too schizophrenic even for me.
    Again, with military plots