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Vorkosigan Saga: Mirror Dance

A painting of a pair of baby twins, both swaddled in white. The twins have similar appearances and expressions, but one is much paler than the other. They lay on a black background.
Because they're twins.

Big news in weird decisions by me: I’ve started reading a lengthy novel series by picking up a random installment in the middle. That series is The Vorkosigan Saga, and that installment is Mirror Dance.

Now, in my defense, I didn’t go in entirely unprepared. I had previously read several of the Vorkosigan short stories and skimmed a scan of A Civil Campaign, and most importantly I had received a tremendous blow-by-blow description of every single major event in the series from my sister, Daisy, a certified Vorkosigan maniac. When I happened upon a cache of Vorkosigan novels left out for the taking, I captured them and brought them back home, determined to see what enchanted my sister so.

I started with Mirror Dance because I was going on a train trip and the pile of free Vorkosigans I found included two copies of Mirror Dance, so I didn’t have to fear retribution from Daisy if the book was damaged by Amtrak’s tender mercies. At last, I would immerse myself in Vorkosimania.

The Vorkosigan Saga, written by Lois McMaster Bujold, comprises a number of novels, novellas, and short stories concerning the adventures of one Miles Vorkosigan, the son of space nobility, who is a minor genius and deals with a number of chronic health problems. As he is the son of a major Vor Lord (yeah, really) of the planet Barrayar, he has many terrible responsibilities and constantly confronts the prejudices of a planet set against people with visible disabilities. He also goes through a lot of Drama, on both the interplanetary scale and the interpersonal, as well as sometimes the cringe. The publishing dates on the series extend from the late eighties to the late twenty-tens, so journeying back into the deep archives uncovers its fair share of uncomfortable material. Mirror Dance specifically has some moments of unpleasantness regarding the narration around Miles’ nonbinary coworker, as well as some eye-rolling but comparatively minor moments of orientalism.

On the plus side, Mirror Dance is a truly soap opera or Bollywood-level plot. Miles’ somewhat deranged clone brother, Mark – originally grown by villains to kill Miles and family – comes out of hiding to suborn Miles’ private mercenary group in an ill-fated attempt to rescue other young clones who will soon be harvested for their organs. Miles discovers Mark’s altruistic treachery and rushes off to try and stop him. He catches up to Mark just slightly too late. That’s when it gets complicated.

There’s soooooo many moments of twin hijinks in this. Mark and Miles continually switch identities, including another cover identity of Miles’, Admiral Naismith. One gets abducted and pretends to be the other, then the other gets caught and has to pretend to be the first one. Miles’ friends, romantic interests, and coworkers are tormented by the doubling of their Vorkosigan-related troubles. The Vorkosigans’ enemies are entirely reduced to despair by the end.

Mirror Dance also goes to some very dark places. The tone of the Saga as a whole is interesting. Bujold possesses a solid, straightforward prose style with a wry edge which keeps the reader bumping along comfortably with every plot twist, and she throws in jokes and humorous encounters with near-clockwork regularity. But every so often, she pulls back the curtain to remind us that humans in space are just as capable of depravity as humans here on Earth.

The vessel of much of the darkness in Mirror Dance is Mark. While Miles, despite the challenges of his youth, could count on a loving, powerful, wealthy family to support him through everything, Mark grew up in the hands of violent men with dark intentions and a profound hatred for the people from whose DNA Mark grew. He trained as an assassin, but he was also relentlessly victimized by his creators: bullied, tortured, and eventually sexually assaulted. This damage causes Mark to act in some very unwise and unethical but realistic ways. His trauma around intimacy drives him to nearly reenact his own abuse on someone very vulnerable, which will understandably turn a certain subset of readers against the character and story entirely. But Mark’s journey to redemption gives the story a hard core of genuine feeling which elevates it above a simple space romp, and his tremendous failings make him more poignant and sympathetic in my eyes. As someone who’s made my own mistakes and had my own mental challenges, I felt for Mark, even if some of the mistakes he made were much worse than mine.

I won’t try to claim that Mirror Dance is the best entry point for The Vorkosigan Saga. But it worked for me. More than any of the previous stories I’d read in the series, Mirror Dance captured my interest because of the strong and compelling central relationship between Miles and Mark. This relationship grounded the sillier and soapier moments and leavened the darkest and most serious ones. I would like to read more of Miles’ adventures, if only to make sure Mark is okay.

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Stations of the Tide: Intimate Apocalypse

Woodblock print of the Biblical Flood showing heavy clouds raining down on a vast sea full of dead animals and people
This is us in 2050.

Two questions, to begin with: Do you wish there was more Disco Elysium? And do you wish the original Disco Elysium had contained more tantric sex rituals? If you answered yes to both questions, 1) I never want to meet you, and 2) boy howdy, do I have a book recommendation for you!

That book is Stations of the Tide by Michael Swanwick. Stations won the Nebula for Best Novel some time back in the ‘90s, which is interesting because it is completely nutty and fairly baffling. The protagonist is “The Bureaucrat”, both in that bureaucracy is his job and in that he has no other name revealed in the text. He lands on the planet Miranda days before the vast majority of the planet is to be flooded by a recurrent world-ending deluge. His assignment: hunt the fugitive wizard Gregorian and recover powerful technology Gregorian stole from the floating space government which (apparently?) rules humanity.

Along the way, he has weird and consistently sexual encounters with Gregorian’s friends and family, with various Miranda locals (all of whom are mildly Cajun?), and with a giant monster woman who is the puppet mouthpiece of the AI collective which now rules the Earth (maybe? Or she’s something weirder?). The Bureaucrat spars administratively with his rival bureaucrats, who are all safely ensconced within the Puzzle Palace, their spaceborne headquarters. He becomes obsessed with the species which previously occupied Miranda, a type of fish people called “Haunts”. He gets anally fingered by a hot witch named Undine. Throughout it all he keeps looking for Gregorian.

The reason this book reminds me of Disco Elysium is its cusp-of-the-apocalypse setting and its consequently unusually philosophical take on the science fiction procedural. Throughout Stations, the Bureaucrat is confronted by the local people of Miranda, who, rather than help him with his manhunt, probe his motivation and self-conception until they break him down into something new, someone who sees the limits and flaws of the system he serves. He is forced to confront the destructive vacuity of the culture which formed him. Behind these revelations the hovering threat of the jubilee tides rises. The tides will sweep away centuries of development, restoring Miranda to something like it was before humans arrived. For those of you who would have preferred to see Disco Elysium end with a more emphatic rejection of policing and control, this book may reward you in ways the game did not.

But I must address the elephant in the room: wow, this book has a lot of explicit sex and sexuality in it. I have no objections to the right of authors to include sex and sexuality in their work, including pornography, but the descriptive material surrounding the book did not telegraph this part of the narrative very effectively, so I am telegraphing it to you now. There are several extended, plot-essential sex scenes, and by plot-essential I mean the acts themselves are critical to the development of the Bureaucrat’s character. If that’s something which is hard for you to read, you may need to pass. On the other hand, if you wondered how hard a middle-aged space bureaucrat could get down, wonder no longer.

Aside from the value of a fearless approach to putting the horn one wants to see in one’s own work, I’m not sure what to take away from Stations of the Tide. Swanwick is a very talented descriptive writer (though he shades into the purple every so often), and his worldbuilding for Miranda is fascinating, its true shape revealed slowly and deliberately over the course of the novel. The subtlety of the Bureaucrat’s evolution as a character is impressive, taking the protagonist out of his dogged loyalty to the affectionless government he serves and into…something else, I won’t spoil it. Let’s say, something earthier. The book is a compelling one, and a strange one, and for some of us that alone will make it worth reading. There’s not much else like it, except Disco Elysium, in my estimation.

Oh, and the Bureaucrat’s sidekick is a talking briefcase. It’s no Kim Kitsuragi, because nobody is, but it has a notable supporting turn nonetheless. Its final fate is perhaps the most powerful moment of the book.

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Report on Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy 2024

A grayscale stereograph slide of a person sitting in front of a large waterfall

Every December (or January) I buy the annual Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy (BASFF) collection. Every year I suffer a certain amount of trepidation, knowing that the guest editor will swing the pendulum on the selections in an unpredictable direction which may or may not align with my tastes. Some years it has been a real trainwreck (for me; I’m happy for anyone who enjoyed the years I didn’t [even though they’re wrong]). The risk is the point. I want to read stories I wouldn’t read elsewhere or of my own volition. Otherwise, I would just edit my own anthology every year.

This year the guest editor was Hugh Howey, the author of the Silo series. I’ve not read the Silo books or seen the Silo show, but my sister hates the show. My trepidation level was medium. Thankfully, Howey pulls it off. I enjoyed about 75% of the stories in this year’s anthology, which is a very solid run. I’ll restrict myself to mentioning only my very favorites here.

There are some big names here doing stylish bits. In “How It Unfolds”, James S.A. Corey pull off one of the only constructive SF stories about a guy being extremely divorced that I’ve ever read. Ann Leckie does colonization, evolution, and most importantly slug life in “The Long Game”. With “John Hollowback and The Witch”, Amal El-Mohtar delivers an account of restorative justice via witch which proves, for the perpetrator, even more painful than retributive justice aims to be.

There are a couple compelling stories in throwback styles. I deeply enjoyed the pulpy refreshments of Jonathan Louis Duckworth’s “Bruise-Eyed Dusk”, with its swamp witches and ride-able gators and hovering sadness. This is a fantasy that is willing to play and explore and surprise so we can enjoy its strange world. Christopher Rowe’s “The Four Last Things” is an explicit Cordwainer Smith tribute, and that’s a great taste. Wild and literary and straining at the edges of conception and perception, Rowe’s story sets all the brain bits sizzling, hopefully to productive ends.

If there was something to criticize in this year’s BASFF, when the vast majority of the stories were ones I enjoyed, it is that most of the work included is Not That Deep. The themes, the meanings, the feelings elicited are Right There. You get it at the beginning, you get it in the middle, and in the end you Get It. There’s nothing wrong with that; there are lots of things that shouldn’t be veiled or disguised or thematized until they’re hard to see. But after a while the thundering horns of right-thinking get a little hard to distinguish from the thundering horns of wrong-thinking. It’s all just thundering horns.

When I think about the best that speculative fiction – sci-fi and fantasy – is capable of, I think of a shadow play. When you watch shadow puppets, you’re not looking where the light is shining, you’re looking at what appears behind, the shape made by the play between light and object. It’s hard to write about real life, what literally is. It’s even harder to write about the things that are hidden behind real life: the abstract, uncertain, and ineffable. The mysteries. The addition of the blatantly unreal is the bright light producing the shadow of a mystery, which is what allows us to contemplate it.

There weren’t a lot of stories about the shadows in this year’s BASFF. But there were a few. Thomas Ha’s “Window Boy” draws up a unique and weird dystopia to ponder the mechanisms which close people off to the suffering of others, ending in an appropriately ambiguous place. Kel Coleman’s “Disassembling Light” confronts the selfishness of mentors who fail their students, using a wondrous and disgusting fantasy discipline as its canvas. The final two stories included deliver an exceptionally strong and troubling ending to the collection. In “Falling Bodies”, Rebecca Roanhorse pushes the limits of what we might consider agency for the truly alienated with a protagonist pinned between colonizers and manipulators on all sides. Sam J. Miller, a reliably strong contributor, closes up the shop with “If Someone You Love Has Become a Vurdalak”, a story that takes the vampire addiction metaphor to a truer and infinitely more painful place as it questions what lengths we ought to go to when imprisoned by poisonous love (and for once, when it comes to vampires, it is specifically familial love). 

It’s these last few stories I’m still thinking about after finishing the anthology. They press at uncertain and uncomfortable places, artfully, and ask something in return for the imagining. That’s the high heights to which sci-fi and fantasy can aspire. And the other stories in BASFF 2024 rest comfortably at the medium heights of sincerely entertaining and compelling and interesting, which is a height to which all of us unpublished writers must aspire 😂

If you read this year’s BASFF and have something to say, comment. I dare you. I will respond. Even if you didn’t read this year’s BASFF, comment-I-dare-you-I-will-respond.