« In Which We Consist Of So Many Different Types Of Love »

by dave seeley

Until Dawn

by ALEX CARNEVALE

Captain Vorpatril's Alliance
by Lois McMaster Bujold
422 pp

It is easy to imitate other writers. I once knew a man who wrote only like Stanley Elkin. He was fantastic at it. But to imitate someone not so great, but take whatever part of it was great and drop the rest? That is far more difficult, but also a lot more rewarding than writing another ironic story about a white man with a funny name.

Lois McMaster Bujold's central figure is Lord Miles Vorkosigan, a battered, dwarfish scion whose bones have, as of 1989 our time and god knows what year on Barrayar, been replaced largely with synthetics. Bujold's saga has spanned eighteen novels and a litany of other apocaphyra since it began in the mid-1980s.

Making a fictional character live and breathe is no small thing. Keeping him alive for four decades is, again, even more difficult. Fortunately science fiction has given Bujold an excuse for rebuilding, re-murdering and reanimating Miles Vorkosigan any number of times. Modeled after C.S. Forester's Horatio Hornblower series, Miles is currently in early middle age and retired from his first military career, deep within his second as an Imperial Auditor akin to The Wolf in Pulp Fiction. The underlying theme of all these novels, even the ones in which Miles has yet to be born, is the dignity of all living things, and the threat to this virtue by unsympathetic parties.

But that is a small way to describe Bujold's great, broad comedy of manners, a gift from writers like Georgette Heyer whose conventions she so brilliantly appropriates in the Vorkosigan saga. There are a million spinning pieces in the bifurcated planet of Barrayar, and the universe that surrounds it, far more than Bujold's progenitors even took up. Until 100 or so years ago, this society had been cloistered from wormhole travel. Then the universe opened to the stars.

Foreign elements, chief among them alien invaders set on them by their enemies in Komarr, descended upon Miles' planet. (He was not yet born.) They brought with them a host of genetic techniques unavailable on Barrayar: uterine replicators to replace natural childbirth, gene splicing and screening, cloning. Something remarkable happened after that: nothing very much.

young LoisMiles eventually met his own clone. (Of course, the clone, Mark, had been trained from birth to kill him.) This was immaterial to Miles: the only pertinent fact was that he had a brother. There are a million different types of love in Bujold's novels, so many concrete varieties, including those I had not heard of. Did you know that a man can be loved by a servant, even one who he does not really know?

Bujold's latest novel is Captain Vorpatril's Alliance, nominated for a Hugo this year. It is an insanely mirthful book, making you realize from the start how rare a good romance is in any medium. Over time, Bujold's ability to drop you so quickly into a situation you are invested in has become her distinguishing signature. She is the master of subtle tension, of something world-shattering hinging on the slightest word or glance.

Miles' cousin Ivan Vorpatril is a basically new protagonist for Bujold. He is an apparently easily manipulated captain stationed on Komarr when the novel begins, ordered to watch a girl by a spy he knows. Things become complicated almost immediately, and unraveling such multilayered situations is the great fun of Bujold's work. It is amazing the woman was never a diplomat. She surely should have been.

art by Esad T. Ribic Taken by himself in Captain Vorpatril's Alliance, Ivan Vorpatril can seem like a bit of a buffoon. Later in the novel, he proves he never was one, but for Bujold's loyal audience, Ivan's heroism was never in doubt. Instead of constantly recapping events for new readers, Bujold expertly writes her way around this problem, creating a contextual layer that is rewarding for those who know without overwhelming the momentum of the present.

Bujold's characters are so fully realized and multi-faceted that they support a variety of interpretations — you know, like actual human beings. Besides China Mieville, she is the best in her field at taking the useful but trodden cliches of this genre and making them new. Cryosleep, genetic alterations, alien invaders, the collision of high and low tech: all are presented in a fashion slightly askew from their emergence in the science fiction stories that so rockily birthed a forward-looking genre.

photo by carol collins

While Mieville accomplishes this reinvention through superior style, Bujold uses more familiar tools. You know them already: character, plot and a talent for dialogue and banter that never gets old. These are scenarios and possibilities charted once before, by the mostly male generation that came before her, but not half as well.

Compared to the more sterile, even more conventional novels of her peers, reading Bujold's mannered and finely honed prose is like opening up a fresh window in a stale room. The most unexpected pleasures and sadnesses emerge from the Barrayaran social milieu; she fears nothing, not even the simplest satisfaction. There are as many different types of ways to show love as there are categories of the disease itself. We need only wait for Lois to reveal them.

Alex Carnevale is the editor of This Recording.

art by Esad T. Ribic

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art by Esad T. Ribic

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