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lightreads) wrote2006-09-01 03:36 pm
lightreads) wrote2006-09-01 03:36 pm
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Brothers in Arms by Lois McMaster Bujold
I was completely incapable of settling on anything to read this week, so I picked this up for a second read. It’s from the middle of her Miles Vorkosigan science fiction series, when said protagonist is in his manic, paranoid, splintered, brilliant mid-twenties. Miles ends up on Earth for complicated reasons, and trouble ensues when the identities of Lieutenant Lord Miles Vorkosigan, loyal barrayaran Imperial officer, and Admiral Miles Naismith, free mercenary, begin trying to co-exist in very close quarters, spatially and in Miles’s head. It’s a rollicking but thoughtful adventure in the good old style, though with foresight you can definitely see the stress fractures beginning to show as Bujold prepares to drop the world on Miles’s head in the next few books.
This is an odd book. It’s a story about identity and politics and identity politics, played out like shadow puppets against the backdrop of the Komarr problem (the strategically vital planet socially Medieval Barrayar took over thirty years ago, with attendant atrocities, and with which it is now trying to integrate). The book weaves threads of personal destiny and determinism with the future of the greater social problem, and it comes out rather . . . strangely.
“You are what you do. Choose again, and change,” Miles says to Mark, which is a damn funny thing for Bujold to have put in the mouth of her protagonist, considering how many times she has said “biology is destiny.” Not to mention the way Miles argues out of both sides of his mouth to Mark – on the one hand Mark is free to choose his life and his purpose and he has to in order to be a person in his own right, and on the other Mark already has a destiny just by existing, by being blood of Miles’s blood and DNA of his DNA. He has a name ready and waiting for him, encoded with the deepest traditions of Barrayar, and there’s nothing he can do about it, whether he ever chooses to meet his parents or not.
Galeni and his father are the other familial pair of significance, and their relationship is of course a microcosm of Komarr’s internal social change. It’s a nice little parable, actually, about how being a victim can force you to be a perpetrator, or alternately let you choose to walk away from vengeance and work for a better future (a choice Miles has made, too). Galeni has chosen again, and he has changed. And though the familial ties yank hard at them both, this bit of biology wasn’t destiny, and never the twain shall meet again.
And then there’s Barrayar and Komarr, and Aral Vorkosigan’s integration scheme. Because as Galeni says, it’s better for everyone if there’s no war at all, and so you do what you can with what you’ve got. Or as Aral puts it through Miles, “between justice and genocide there is, in the long run, no middle ground.” It’s this whole “people over principles” argument, the idea that saving lives and working for a better future should trump ideology, though in my mind that can be simplified to “the principle of people.” And on the one hand the integration scheme is brilliant, just right, pretty much the only thing that could work, because biology might be destiny for some, but demography is destiny for all. But on the other, it seems wildly unlikely to actually work. Can anyone name for me a pair of geographically non-contiguous states in history who shared an imperial, not colonial, relationship that actually lasted, let alone peacefully? Nope, thought not. The non-contiguity seems to be the sticking point, because it limits the effectiveness of these exact integration schemes. And wormhole neighbors or not, you don’t get much more non-contiguous than two different planets. Now whether this historical trend would bare out when the imperial power in question is actually socially and technologically behind the curve as compared to the subject power, I don’t know. I suspect that’s the angle Bujold is going for, because I think she’s far too astute a student of history to have missed the facts. Komarr is Barrayar’s gateway onto the rest of the nexus in more than just astrography, and the relationship is an unprecedented dynamic.
Anyway. The dialogue about personal destiny and the dialogue about Komarr’s destiny don’t quite meet at the edges in this book, and it ends up feeling a bit inconclusive and scrambled. I suspect Bujold hadn’t worked out a lot of the kinks in her own mind – she gets a much more coherent shot at analogizing personal identity with Komarr’s troubled past in Komarr. The clearest message I can come away with is that there are some things which just will be -- DNA is one of them, and the fact that Barrayar simply cannot let go of Komarr and be secure is another. That’s destiny, but its up to each person to decide who he is when it finds him.
This is an odd book. It’s a story about identity and politics and identity politics, played out like shadow puppets against the backdrop of the Komarr problem (the strategically vital planet socially Medieval Barrayar took over thirty years ago, with attendant atrocities, and with which it is now trying to integrate). The book weaves threads of personal destiny and determinism with the future of the greater social problem, and it comes out rather . . . strangely.
“You are what you do. Choose again, and change,” Miles says to Mark, which is a damn funny thing for Bujold to have put in the mouth of her protagonist, considering how many times she has said “biology is destiny.” Not to mention the way Miles argues out of both sides of his mouth to Mark – on the one hand Mark is free to choose his life and his purpose and he has to in order to be a person in his own right, and on the other Mark already has a destiny just by existing, by being blood of Miles’s blood and DNA of his DNA. He has a name ready and waiting for him, encoded with the deepest traditions of Barrayar, and there’s nothing he can do about it, whether he ever chooses to meet his parents or not.
Galeni and his father are the other familial pair of significance, and their relationship is of course a microcosm of Komarr’s internal social change. It’s a nice little parable, actually, about how being a victim can force you to be a perpetrator, or alternately let you choose to walk away from vengeance and work for a better future (a choice Miles has made, too). Galeni has chosen again, and he has changed. And though the familial ties yank hard at them both, this bit of biology wasn’t destiny, and never the twain shall meet again.
And then there’s Barrayar and Komarr, and Aral Vorkosigan’s integration scheme. Because as Galeni says, it’s better for everyone if there’s no war at all, and so you do what you can with what you’ve got. Or as Aral puts it through Miles, “between justice and genocide there is, in the long run, no middle ground.” It’s this whole “people over principles” argument, the idea that saving lives and working for a better future should trump ideology, though in my mind that can be simplified to “the principle of people.” And on the one hand the integration scheme is brilliant, just right, pretty much the only thing that could work, because biology might be destiny for some, but demography is destiny for all. But on the other, it seems wildly unlikely to actually work. Can anyone name for me a pair of geographically non-contiguous states in history who shared an imperial, not colonial, relationship that actually lasted, let alone peacefully? Nope, thought not. The non-contiguity seems to be the sticking point, because it limits the effectiveness of these exact integration schemes. And wormhole neighbors or not, you don’t get much more non-contiguous than two different planets. Now whether this historical trend would bare out when the imperial power in question is actually socially and technologically behind the curve as compared to the subject power, I don’t know. I suspect that’s the angle Bujold is going for, because I think she’s far too astute a student of history to have missed the facts. Komarr is Barrayar’s gateway onto the rest of the nexus in more than just astrography, and the relationship is an unprecedented dynamic.
Anyway. The dialogue about personal destiny and the dialogue about Komarr’s destiny don’t quite meet at the edges in this book, and it ends up feeling a bit inconclusive and scrambled. I suspect Bujold hadn’t worked out a lot of the kinks in her own mind – she gets a much more coherent shot at analogizing personal identity with Komarr’s troubled past in Komarr. The clearest message I can come away with is that there are some things which just will be -- DNA is one of them, and the fact that Barrayar simply cannot let go of Komarr and be secure is another. That’s destiny, but its up to each person to decide who he is when it finds him.