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silverflight8I’m going to put my reviews of these two together because to me, although they’re very different in tone and in novel structure (and intent), the introduction of Ekaterin and the change in Miles’s life make them two halves of a heterogenous whole. I’m going to skip back and forth a bit.
Komarr! Finally we get to see the last planet of Gregor’s tri-planetary empire. I was worried at first that we were only going to get Ekaterin’s POV, which as it happens, I like, but it always takes more emotional energy to open up to a new character’s perspective. But the novel alternates, and I enjoy that we get both Ekaterin’s restricted POV and Miles’s expanded role but with more maturity. In the previous books, it’s not as though Miles was unaware of his responsibilities, but the catastrophic events of Memory and the awareness of his new power make him a very different character from the earlier character running on forward momentum. I think the setting of Komarr is thematically in line with this, too. Lots of discussion of feeling claustrophobic, the preparations that one has to take before going outside, but one thing I really like about Bujold is that while she’s thoughtful about setting symbolically, it’s not just symbolic. The domes play a role in the plot too and she explores the science fictional potential. They make Tien’s death possible through sheer carelessness, in keeping with his character. More on that later. They place economic strain on the residents of Komarr, because it takes a lot of technical/scientific expertise (plus money) for life support, which is free on Earth; that economic cost comes out in the plot as the instigating incident, because the solar array is damaged. I love the layers.
Tien! What a mundane villain and so unpleasant. It’s hard to go through life without meeting someone like him. All his motivations are just so plausible. Fear of exposure. Thinking he can get away with it. One more bet, and it’ll all work out and I’ll win big. Most of all, the way that you can justify your actions to yourself, over and over, even when the actions slide from neutral to criminal or morally wrong. It’s a step by step process and the capacity for self-delusion is pretty endless, for some. Many of the fears, like the fear of exposure and just admitting that something is wrong with your body, that fleshy prison, is scary. So he’s both pitiable and also such an awful little petty villain. There’s a psychological realism that I really like about Memory and Komarr, and also to some extent in A Civil Campaign.
If Memory is the dark night for Miles, then Komarr is Ekaterin’s. She has spent the last ten years with the love wearing away bit by bit, and in this book it finally ruptures irrevocably. Like Tien, I think it’s just so juicily real. She started this relationship (like presumably Tien) with the highest hopes, and then over time was just worn down. She values Nikki’s health and unconsciously or not on Tien’s part, it’s the threat of Nikki that Tien can wield, thanks to Barrayar’s laws. Though, even in a jurisdiction without the automatic “male children belong to the father”, Nikki means that they’re connected forever. Even sole custody of a child does not mean you won’t have to deal eventually with your kid wondering about the absent parent and wanting to connect. It’s just such an ugly trap, and parallels our world. You see this too in A Civil Campaign where Ekaterin thinks to herself that as much as she wants to fly off the handle at the completely wrong conclusions her cousin/brother have come to about the safety of Vorbarr Sultana, Nikki’s fate means she takes a deep breath and is reasonable in the face of unreasonable people.
Tien’s death is both central and yet not that important somehow – I certainly did not miss him. Jo Walton (on Reactor) notes that his death looks like the easy way out for the author in Komarr, and then it returns transformed into a monstrous problem that has no solution in A Civil Campaign, and frankly, I love that. Just from a book construction point of view, it is so satisfying. It immediately cuts the knot for Ekaterin – though it doesn’t spare her from the last parting scene, which for character reasons (sorry Ekaterin) I’m glad is still in the book. But it comes back to bite her. It’s not an easy resolution. It’s also one of the more horrifying deaths in the series. Tien panics till he dies of asphyxia, Miles gets to watch helplessly. It’s awful.
Again from a science fiction perspective – it’s so realistic. It’s so easy to make a mistake, and in colonizing hostile planets we humans probably would die a lot, honestly. The more hostile to our biology, the more likely all of the colonists die. “Why didn’t he [do this logical thing]?” Well, the older I get, the more I realize that taking the ‘ideal’ action can be so uncommon. The minute you start panicking, you are inebriated, you are tired or fatigued, your hand slips, you go into shock, you take your eyes off the road a second, you think of something else, you are angry, you forget to check once…you see it all the time in accounts of emergencies where people just get totally fixated on the wrong thing, even. Even for people who are not stupid, or careless, or impractical. In Tien’s case, he’s habitually careless, of course. But in situations where humans are on a knife edge for something as vital as breathing, we just can’t maintain that kind of crystal vigilance all the time. In our day to day life there just aren’t scenarios that are so immediately deadly as stepping out of the dome and being without oxygen. (And when we are in such circumstances, it happens so often that everyone dies, like all hands lost on a ship. How many sailors have died at sea? That’s so much less deadly than going out-dome, too – you can float for a good while.) It kind of makes me wonder how successful a true space colony would be. We can be very clever in designing systems, but all systems have blips and problems. Even the most robust energy system may still have a failure, and when the stakes are so high! Think of how often the power might get knocked out. You can design for common failure points but there’s also a cost to elaborate designs – more chance of failure, more complicated to repair which might cause further silent problems that eventually blow up.
Most of the novels are from a Barrayaran perspective, especially the Miles ones, but he butts up against other cultures’ perception of Barrayar. There’s Duv and his deliberate open-eyed choice to join the Barrayaran Imperial Service, in his mid-twenties with a doctorate and a Komarran rebel childhood behind him. Komarr the planet and the uneasy relationship they still have with their conquerors-maybe-turning-partners-eventually culture is in a transitional state. The rebels are defeated even in their “bloodless” revolution, but the people who support them are by no means villains. I like the professor who figured out what was going on and then had to figure out what she wanted to do. She must have wanted to freeze time to think, but she came down on the side of trying to isolate them from Barrayar, which is pretty understandable. Honestly, even the rebels are portrayed pretty sympathetically, even if their timing is terrible. All their planning has come apart. Like Miles points out, the Butcher is on the wrong side of the wormhole, good grief! Further on, Diplomatic Immunity and the quaddie laws which are much more protective of individual rights are definitely in stark contrast to Barrayar’s rough-and-ready ends justify the means reasoning, and the quaddies are pretty disgusted by the overreach. Hard to blame them, and Barrayar doesn't exactly come off great there.
A Civil Campaign puts us back on Barrayar, with a full cast of characters from previous books.
I know a lot of people find the dinner scene excruciating, but I honestly really love it for its excruciatingness. Well, I think I’d struggle to watch this, but in print, I absolutely love it. I think it comes from the way it displays character. We are sitting down to dinner – badly planned and also then hamstrung by Mark’s interference – with characters we have known for many books, some of them for decades. We know what Barrayar’s culture is like and the influences pushing it in galactic directions. We know Miles really well, and also we have watched him “plan” this dinner party, i.e. consult the number of chairs he owns, with no thought whatsoever to diplomatic considerations. All the characters we’ve come to know and love mostly act according to their inclinations and history, and as someone who loves character, it’s so great to see them all interact. “What if all of them were in the same room and bounced off each other?” I worry about integrating my friend groups and try to choose carefully who gets invited together to social events, and while my worries may be overblown, Miles doesn’t think of it at all! Miles is sitting on too big a secret to carry out this dinner without problems.
Also Miles’ and what he describes as a near-suicidal impulse to repeat his proposal, as though Ekaterin had not heard it, when she doesn’t say anything. AHHH it’s so bad but it’s so good! I could not imagine a more Miles impulse.
I liked Ivan’s conscription into the wedding planning. I love that he carries his mother’s top secret hand-written document about political alliances to the little strategizing meeting. And I really love that he was giving Miles grief about always being dragged into schemes, reflexively prepared to say he had no involvement, and then was upset that he wasn’t being dragged in after all. That is exactly right. Then he did get to save Miles’ bacon! And tell him so! I also enjoyed his uncomfortable adventure with the entire Dono Vorrutyer saga. “I thought Gregor was fairly easygoing, for an emperor.”/” “No,” said Ivan firmly. “He is not. He is merely rather quiet. It's not the same thing at all. You don't want to see what he's like pissed.” Byerly and Ivan also had a fun dynamic going. When Ivan finally gets fed up and gets Byerly to tell him he’s in ImpSec…and finds out who Byerly’s blind drop is! The denoument of the wedding scene is delightful.
Also we get to see more Counts and it was interesting to see Vorfolse for instance. We mostly have seen politically prominent Counts, since Aral is so politically active, or wealthy ones who are also prominent in the public sphere. But there are the struggling ones, there’s clearly a new upstart nouveau-rich class. There was a lot more politicking too, with various parties trying to consolidate power, or push through their bills, making alliances and breaking others. Gregor attempting to stay out of it and be neutral.
I don’t mind the bug butter scene with Enrique. Definitely slapstick and a bit silly – and kind of unkind to the officers attempting to arrest him after jumping through that many hoops, but I mean, extradition is hard, especially if you’re not involving the home jurisdiction, get them on your side first, this is why you have Interpol and other established policing agreements in the first place, and also why people do things like flee. Intergalactically. Oddly enough my least favourite scene in the book is where Nikki cheers his mom on in the Council of Counts. I don’t know why it gives me more secondhand embarrassment than the entire dinner party scene. I really dislike author mouthpieces in children, I guess, especially when they seem to be motivated purely by plot considerations (i.e. the kind where the kid wants the couple to get together and the author uses kids’ outspokenness to force confessions, say the thought out loud for the first time, etc).
My favourite scene between Ekaterin and Miles is the one in the attic, where they discuss the malicious gossip swirling about, and then the question of honour. It’s a discussion Miles couldn’t have had ten years ago, or maybe even three years ago. Ekaterin, too. “[The problem with such oaths is] they separate the world into just two sorts of people: the dead, and the forsworn.” Miles tells Ekaterin about his discharge. I love a good admission of a secret – the uglier it is, the more rooted the secret is to the deepest self, the better. That even in this discussion Miles keeps reaching to paint himself as the worst and that Ekaterin brings it up, gently. Miles runs through the gamut of scenarios he can think of, how the political scandal might play out, and Ekaterin rejects totally the suggestion that he just fold and let Richars get what he wants. The discussion about the saddle is also one that I’m completely with Miles and Ekaterin on. I think I grew up with too much of an emphasis on the archival side, desperate to preserve everything and document and make it survive, but it can go too far. Art is partly the process, and partly the enjoyment. It’s not meant to be made and then forever preserved, possibly hidden. Objects should be used, and enjoyed to their fullest extent, if it can be managed. Life isn’t meant to be watched for the thorough documentation, it’s meant to be lived. I’d rather send any of my silly art to my friends who will feel happy to get it and know I’m thinking of them than preserve them forever as raw materials, or even as finished products. While there’s definitely value to museums and preservation, most of the things in museums are valuable for the usage they have had.
Finally I loved Illyan in this! We have gotten much more of him starting from Memory and he was moved up from tertiary to secondary character. The scene where he visits Ekaterin after the disastrous dinner, to apologize, he is being kind, he really could have just avoided her forever. He also observes:
I think it’s the differing assessments of character from different POVs that tickle me. I really like character! He also mentions that he wanted to go into the space force and his life began to diverge literally day 1 after he graduated, when he got assigned ImpSec for whatever ungodly reason. I love that after his forty-plus years in the Imperial Service he’s finally getting around to doing other things. I love him and Alys together.
And on a final observation, I feel like Bujold is good at endings. She usually wraps up the plot in a satisfying way and then gives it some character room to breathe. This is so rare, in my opinion, especially in SFF where so many books are high-concept with enticing premises, and then the follow through is disappointing. Endings are hardest to stick. Most of her Vorkosigan books have good denouements, too, which might help. A lot of the earlier Miles ones have catchups with Gregor, for instance, where the galactic plot gets wound up and made human-sized by focusing back in on the human figures. The Warrior’s Apprentice doesn’t just end with the dramatic trial scene, but a quieter private trial and clearing his name. There’s emotional closure with his father being proud of him, and an epilogue with him overcoming the barrier he failed in the beginning of the book with Kostolitz. The Vor Game doubles up both the eating-pastries-in-a-garden-with Gregor scene, as well as Miles’ promotion (with again two important personal connections in that scene with him – Illyan and Gregor.) I notice that Cetaganda does not close with the medal ceremony on Cetaganda which is large and alien and anonymous, but with Ivan and Miles discussing their trip. A Civil Campaign closes traditionally with a wedding, but there’s a reason a wedding is a classic! They’re well constructed plotwise and also close the loop emotionally.
Komarr! Finally we get to see the last planet of Gregor’s tri-planetary empire. I was worried at first that we were only going to get Ekaterin’s POV, which as it happens, I like, but it always takes more emotional energy to open up to a new character’s perspective. But the novel alternates, and I enjoy that we get both Ekaterin’s restricted POV and Miles’s expanded role but with more maturity. In the previous books, it’s not as though Miles was unaware of his responsibilities, but the catastrophic events of Memory and the awareness of his new power make him a very different character from the earlier character running on forward momentum. I think the setting of Komarr is thematically in line with this, too. Lots of discussion of feeling claustrophobic, the preparations that one has to take before going outside, but one thing I really like about Bujold is that while she’s thoughtful about setting symbolically, it’s not just symbolic. The domes play a role in the plot too and she explores the science fictional potential. They make Tien’s death possible through sheer carelessness, in keeping with his character. More on that later. They place economic strain on the residents of Komarr, because it takes a lot of technical/scientific expertise (plus money) for life support, which is free on Earth; that economic cost comes out in the plot as the instigating incident, because the solar array is damaged. I love the layers.
Tien! What a mundane villain and so unpleasant. It’s hard to go through life without meeting someone like him. All his motivations are just so plausible. Fear of exposure. Thinking he can get away with it. One more bet, and it’ll all work out and I’ll win big. Most of all, the way that you can justify your actions to yourself, over and over, even when the actions slide from neutral to criminal or morally wrong. It’s a step by step process and the capacity for self-delusion is pretty endless, for some. Many of the fears, like the fear of exposure and just admitting that something is wrong with your body, that fleshy prison, is scary. So he’s both pitiable and also such an awful little petty villain. There’s a psychological realism that I really like about Memory and Komarr, and also to some extent in A Civil Campaign.
If Memory is the dark night for Miles, then Komarr is Ekaterin’s. She has spent the last ten years with the love wearing away bit by bit, and in this book it finally ruptures irrevocably. Like Tien, I think it’s just so juicily real. She started this relationship (like presumably Tien) with the highest hopes, and then over time was just worn down. She values Nikki’s health and unconsciously or not on Tien’s part, it’s the threat of Nikki that Tien can wield, thanks to Barrayar’s laws. Though, even in a jurisdiction without the automatic “male children belong to the father”, Nikki means that they’re connected forever. Even sole custody of a child does not mean you won’t have to deal eventually with your kid wondering about the absent parent and wanting to connect. It’s just such an ugly trap, and parallels our world. You see this too in A Civil Campaign where Ekaterin thinks to herself that as much as she wants to fly off the handle at the completely wrong conclusions her cousin/brother have come to about the safety of Vorbarr Sultana, Nikki’s fate means she takes a deep breath and is reasonable in the face of unreasonable people.
Tien’s death is both central and yet not that important somehow – I certainly did not miss him. Jo Walton (on Reactor) notes that his death looks like the easy way out for the author in Komarr, and then it returns transformed into a monstrous problem that has no solution in A Civil Campaign, and frankly, I love that. Just from a book construction point of view, it is so satisfying. It immediately cuts the knot for Ekaterin – though it doesn’t spare her from the last parting scene, which for character reasons (sorry Ekaterin) I’m glad is still in the book. But it comes back to bite her. It’s not an easy resolution. It’s also one of the more horrifying deaths in the series. Tien panics till he dies of asphyxia, Miles gets to watch helplessly. It’s awful.
Again from a science fiction perspective – it’s so realistic. It’s so easy to make a mistake, and in colonizing hostile planets we humans probably would die a lot, honestly. The more hostile to our biology, the more likely all of the colonists die. “Why didn’t he [do this logical thing]?” Well, the older I get, the more I realize that taking the ‘ideal’ action can be so uncommon. The minute you start panicking, you are inebriated, you are tired or fatigued, your hand slips, you go into shock, you take your eyes off the road a second, you think of something else, you are angry, you forget to check once…you see it all the time in accounts of emergencies where people just get totally fixated on the wrong thing, even. Even for people who are not stupid, or careless, or impractical. In Tien’s case, he’s habitually careless, of course. But in situations where humans are on a knife edge for something as vital as breathing, we just can’t maintain that kind of crystal vigilance all the time. In our day to day life there just aren’t scenarios that are so immediately deadly as stepping out of the dome and being without oxygen. (And when we are in such circumstances, it happens so often that everyone dies, like all hands lost on a ship. How many sailors have died at sea? That’s so much less deadly than going out-dome, too – you can float for a good while.) It kind of makes me wonder how successful a true space colony would be. We can be very clever in designing systems, but all systems have blips and problems. Even the most robust energy system may still have a failure, and when the stakes are so high! Think of how often the power might get knocked out. You can design for common failure points but there’s also a cost to elaborate designs – more chance of failure, more complicated to repair which might cause further silent problems that eventually blow up.
Most of the novels are from a Barrayaran perspective, especially the Miles ones, but he butts up against other cultures’ perception of Barrayar. There’s Duv and his deliberate open-eyed choice to join the Barrayaran Imperial Service, in his mid-twenties with a doctorate and a Komarran rebel childhood behind him. Komarr the planet and the uneasy relationship they still have with their conquerors-maybe-turning-partners-eventually culture is in a transitional state. The rebels are defeated even in their “bloodless” revolution, but the people who support them are by no means villains. I like the professor who figured out what was going on and then had to figure out what she wanted to do. She must have wanted to freeze time to think, but she came down on the side of trying to isolate them from Barrayar, which is pretty understandable. Honestly, even the rebels are portrayed pretty sympathetically, even if their timing is terrible. All their planning has come apart. Like Miles points out, the Butcher is on the wrong side of the wormhole, good grief! Further on, Diplomatic Immunity and the quaddie laws which are much more protective of individual rights are definitely in stark contrast to Barrayar’s rough-and-ready ends justify the means reasoning, and the quaddies are pretty disgusted by the overreach. Hard to blame them, and Barrayar doesn't exactly come off great there.
A Civil Campaign puts us back on Barrayar, with a full cast of characters from previous books.
I know a lot of people find the dinner scene excruciating, but I honestly really love it for its excruciatingness. Well, I think I’d struggle to watch this, but in print, I absolutely love it. I think it comes from the way it displays character. We are sitting down to dinner – badly planned and also then hamstrung by Mark’s interference – with characters we have known for many books, some of them for decades. We know what Barrayar’s culture is like and the influences pushing it in galactic directions. We know Miles really well, and also we have watched him “plan” this dinner party, i.e. consult the number of chairs he owns, with no thought whatsoever to diplomatic considerations. All the characters we’ve come to know and love mostly act according to their inclinations and history, and as someone who loves character, it’s so great to see them all interact. “What if all of them were in the same room and bounced off each other?” I worry about integrating my friend groups and try to choose carefully who gets invited together to social events, and while my worries may be overblown, Miles doesn’t think of it at all! Miles is sitting on too big a secret to carry out this dinner without problems.
Also Miles’ and what he describes as a near-suicidal impulse to repeat his proposal, as though Ekaterin had not heard it, when she doesn’t say anything. AHHH it’s so bad but it’s so good! I could not imagine a more Miles impulse.
I liked Ivan’s conscription into the wedding planning. I love that he carries his mother’s top secret hand-written document about political alliances to the little strategizing meeting. And I really love that he was giving Miles grief about always being dragged into schemes, reflexively prepared to say he had no involvement, and then was upset that he wasn’t being dragged in after all. That is exactly right. Then he did get to save Miles’ bacon! And tell him so! I also enjoyed his uncomfortable adventure with the entire Dono Vorrutyer saga. “I thought Gregor was fairly easygoing, for an emperor.”/” “No,” said Ivan firmly. “He is not. He is merely rather quiet. It's not the same thing at all. You don't want to see what he's like pissed.” Byerly and Ivan also had a fun dynamic going. When Ivan finally gets fed up and gets Byerly to tell him he’s in ImpSec…and finds out who Byerly’s blind drop is! The denoument of the wedding scene is delightful.
Also we get to see more Counts and it was interesting to see Vorfolse for instance. We mostly have seen politically prominent Counts, since Aral is so politically active, or wealthy ones who are also prominent in the public sphere. But there are the struggling ones, there’s clearly a new upstart nouveau-rich class. There was a lot more politicking too, with various parties trying to consolidate power, or push through their bills, making alliances and breaking others. Gregor attempting to stay out of it and be neutral.
I don’t mind the bug butter scene with Enrique. Definitely slapstick and a bit silly – and kind of unkind to the officers attempting to arrest him after jumping through that many hoops, but I mean, extradition is hard, especially if you’re not involving the home jurisdiction, get them on your side first, this is why you have Interpol and other established policing agreements in the first place, and also why people do things like flee. Intergalactically. Oddly enough my least favourite scene in the book is where Nikki cheers his mom on in the Council of Counts. I don’t know why it gives me more secondhand embarrassment than the entire dinner party scene. I really dislike author mouthpieces in children, I guess, especially when they seem to be motivated purely by plot considerations (i.e. the kind where the kid wants the couple to get together and the author uses kids’ outspokenness to force confessions, say the thought out loud for the first time, etc).
My favourite scene between Ekaterin and Miles is the one in the attic, where they discuss the malicious gossip swirling about, and then the question of honour. It’s a discussion Miles couldn’t have had ten years ago, or maybe even three years ago. Ekaterin, too. “[The problem with such oaths is] they separate the world into just two sorts of people: the dead, and the forsworn.” Miles tells Ekaterin about his discharge. I love a good admission of a secret – the uglier it is, the more rooted the secret is to the deepest self, the better. That even in this discussion Miles keeps reaching to paint himself as the worst and that Ekaterin brings it up, gently. Miles runs through the gamut of scenarios he can think of, how the political scandal might play out, and Ekaterin rejects totally the suggestion that he just fold and let Richars get what he wants. The discussion about the saddle is also one that I’m completely with Miles and Ekaterin on. I think I grew up with too much of an emphasis on the archival side, desperate to preserve everything and document and make it survive, but it can go too far. Art is partly the process, and partly the enjoyment. It’s not meant to be made and then forever preserved, possibly hidden. Objects should be used, and enjoyed to their fullest extent, if it can be managed. Life isn’t meant to be watched for the thorough documentation, it’s meant to be lived. I’d rather send any of my silly art to my friends who will feel happy to get it and know I’m thinking of them than preserve them forever as raw materials, or even as finished products. While there’s definitely value to museums and preservation, most of the things in museums are valuable for the usage they have had.
Finally I loved Illyan in this! We have gotten much more of him starting from Memory and he was moved up from tertiary to secondary character. The scene where he visits Ekaterin after the disastrous dinner, to apologize, he is being kind, he really could have just avoided her forever. He also observes:
"Do you know all those old folk tales where the count tries to get rid of his only daughter's unsuitable suitor by giving him three impossible tasks?"
"Yes . . ."
"Don't ever try that with Miles. Just . . . don't."
I think it’s the differing assessments of character from different POVs that tickle me. I really like character! He also mentions that he wanted to go into the space force and his life began to diverge literally day 1 after he graduated, when he got assigned ImpSec for whatever ungodly reason. I love that after his forty-plus years in the Imperial Service he’s finally getting around to doing other things. I love him and Alys together.
And on a final observation, I feel like Bujold is good at endings. She usually wraps up the plot in a satisfying way and then gives it some character room to breathe. This is so rare, in my opinion, especially in SFF where so many books are high-concept with enticing premises, and then the follow through is disappointing. Endings are hardest to stick. Most of her Vorkosigan books have good denouements, too, which might help. A lot of the earlier Miles ones have catchups with Gregor, for instance, where the galactic plot gets wound up and made human-sized by focusing back in on the human figures. The Warrior’s Apprentice doesn’t just end with the dramatic trial scene, but a quieter private trial and clearing his name. There’s emotional closure with his father being proud of him, and an epilogue with him overcoming the barrier he failed in the beginning of the book with Kostolitz. The Vor Game doubles up both the eating-pastries-in-a-garden-with Gregor scene, as well as Miles’ promotion (with again two important personal connections in that scene with him – Illyan and Gregor.) I notice that Cetaganda does not close with the medal ceremony on Cetaganda which is large and alien and anonymous, but with Ivan and Miles discussing their trip. A Civil Campaign closes traditionally with a wedding, but there’s a reason a wedding is a classic! They’re well constructed plotwise and also close the loop emotionally.
