Yep. I can always count on Bujold for a great read. I have yet to read something of hers that I didn’t enjoy. And I absolutely love most of her stuff. Miles is one of my favorite fictional characters of all time.
looks up Vorkosigan Saga Apparently I have yet to read #15, Captain Vorpatril’s Alliance. Must add that one to my to-read list.
I’ve also liked everything I’ve read by Bujold.
She does have something of a weakness for Improbable Coincidences, but she uses that to very great effect in The Curse of Chalion (a fantasy novel rather than science fiction).
Okay, so I just got to that scene in The Vor Game - Miles meets Gregor in lock-up.
My first thought isn’t, ‘‘Gosh, what a distressingly improbable coincidence!’’
It was, ‘‘Cool, we get to learn more about Gregor.’’
Just goes to show people read things for wildly disparate reasons.
The coincidences have never really bothered me much, but if I stop and think about them, they are maybe a bit of a plot weakness.
There’s some great stuff in The Vor Game, though.
What I have enjoyed about this series is the author’s ability to keep it going without falling into a rut. Too many series with interesting central characters end up trying to hold the characters back in the time period the author favors. You end with same story, different setting. Retief of the CDT and Flynx and Pip I am looking right at you.
Miles grows throughout the series, changing duties,roles, and position while still being a good character.
Thinking on your response here, and comments from other posters; and my and my brother’s reaction to the coincidence thing. Without wanting to get too “battle of the sexes” – I have the impression that LMcMB does have rather more female, than male, fans. Tendency of the two genders to focus on different things, maybe: women incline to a big interest in, generally, people, and character development and growth – whereas us guys are liable to be more taken up with action stuff, and things logically fitting together, or not…?
There are more women readers in general, actually; especially of fiction. Unless the subject matter/genre is a major turn-off for most women it’s to be expected that a novel will have more female fans than male ones, because there’s more women readers to be fans in the first place.
That said, Bujold does get compliments from male fans on how well she writes male characters, including Vorkosigan. And she usually does mix in action, humor and characterization; something to appeal to everyone.
I really enjoyed that one, definitely worth picking up.
Heh, it didn’t even occur to me that it was a distressingly improbable coincidence until people started discussing it on this thread. (On the other hand, it drives me a little nuts that the Barrayarans and the rest of the galaxy seem to speak mutually intelligible dialects of English despite five hundred or so years of isolation with, in Barrayar’s case, no mass media and heavy influence from several other languages; and that Shakespeare, as temporally remote to them as Beowulf is to us, also remains intelligible. However, the Shakespeare stuff is also AWESOME, so I’m willing to handwave it quite a bit.)
The language matter: I rather suspect that this is something which Bujold consciously chooses not to get bogged-down in, to the likely detriment of themes which interest her more. She doesn’t so much “handwave away” the language barriers which there would, realistically, be in her universe; as, just ignores the issue, and by fiat, has everyone speaking much the same kind of English. A sort of precedent for that in Tolkien – though he gives a semi-explanation, re the “Common / Westron” speech being a kind of Esperanto, which different nations and kindreds use when dealing with each other.
Language / nationality stuff gets a bit of a mention by LMcMB, in reference specifically to Barrayar; though as “scene-building”, rather than directly impinging on action / conversation. It’s woven into the novels, that Barrayar’s original settlers from Earth were a mixture of Russian / French / English / Greek – with the Russian and Russian-culture “flavour” predominating; and a tendency toward correlating Greek-speaking, with poor-and-ignorant. The picture is got that the respective groups continue to speak their own languages among themselves; but all recorded conversation, between different groups or otherwise, is in standard English.
And remember we are mostly dealing with aristocratic and cosmopolitan individuals. Dialect and accents get mentioned when straying outside those world’s, like in Camp Permafrost and in the Dendarii mountains.
Ooh yes, you must! One of my faves. Mostly because it’s Ivan’s chance to shine, and shine he does.
It’s mentioned a couple of times that both Gregor and Ivan speak all four of Barrayar’s languages; the implication I draw is that most educated Vor do. LMcMB also points out that those four languages are Barrayaran versions of Russian, French, English and Greek, implying some divergence from their Terran originals.
The language problem is always an issue with spec fic authors, and handwaving the characters speaking English (or whichever) requires IMO an acceptable suspension of disbelief.
That said, I have no trouble believing that planets across the nexus maintain an intelligible lingua franca based on English, since all inhabited planets in the Vorkoverse were colonized from Earth. Mandarin Chinese is the most spoken language on the planet right now, but English is the second-most, and the most widely-spread. It is the international language of air travel, space flight, telecommunications, and information technology. And the rise of the Internet, as well as improved communications between communities (like better roads), has acted as a brake on language divergence. It’s not a stretch to imagine that this continues into the future, and thus spreads out to the various human-founded planets. As far as Barrayar being cut off from the rest of the Nexus, well, that was only for what, five hundred years? And most modern readers can puzzle their way through texts from the sixteenth century.
LMcMB is clever in her use of language, though. If you read closely, you notice that her Barrayaran characters speak British, rather than American, English. They handle collective nouns the way that the Brits do. I can’t off the top of my head think of any examples, but in real life where Americans might describe the result of the Super Bowl like this:
“Cleveland has beaten Dallas and wins the Super Bowl!” *
British English speakers would say:
“Cleveland have beaten Dallas and win the Super Bowl!”
And that’s how the Barrayarans speak. Which is appropriate, given that some of their settlers came from Great Britain.
The only quibble I have with Bujold’s use of languages on Barrayar is simply that I would expect Barrayaran English to have more loan words from the other three Barrayaran languages. Otherwise, she does a fine job handling the language problem.
*One day, dammit, one day…
I noticed that - for example Miles refers to chemical warfare experts (in “The Vor Game”) as “boffins.”
I’ve noticed they say ‘‘bloody’’ a lot.
Language isn’t an insignificant issue to overcome in a novel, particularly at that scale. I’m writing my first fantasy novel - which focuses only on one region of one planet, and it’s a tricky thing to grapple with. I have the dominant political force in the region, Asalta, influencing most other places so that various dialects of Asaltan are used as a kind of Common Tongue. In that way I guess I see Asalta kind of like colonial England. There is one country that is linguistically and culturally distinct, Levia, but even the Levians are bilingual because they’ve been annexed by Asalta. So whereas most of the world speaks the Common Tongue, Levians speak their own native language and the more proper form of Asaltan. The presence of Levian language is seen more often in code-switching than anything else (I heart code switching as a linguistic phenomenon so I could not resist.) Inventing language is fun, but creating a world where language differences are taken into account - when your reader only ‘‘knows’’ one of the many languages in your world - is a great big challenge.
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Tendency of the two genders to focus on different things, maybe: women incline to a big interest in, generally, people, and character development and growth – whereas us guys are liable to be more taken up with action stuff, and things logically fitting together, or not…?
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Possibly. I had no idea of the gender disparity in fiction readers! Whether I’m reading or writing, I want action and dialog or I am bored. I will suspend a lot of disbelief in the interest of those two things. One thing I really liked about Shards of Honor is it started right off the bat with a fire fight, but interestingly enough, my husband just started the book and he thought the first chapter was too slow because the fire fight didn’t start until halfway through! I’m reading Ancillary Justice right now, which won this year’s Hugo award, and it underscores why I have difficulty with science fiction at times. The protagonist is not even human, it’s a machine. It doesn’t appear to have any reaction to anything that happens around it. I’m only in the beginning so maybe it will get better. My general impression is that science fiction tends to favor ideas more than people. I like the Vorkosigan Saga because it deals with ideas by way of people having to confront them. These are ideas not in the abstract but in actual practice.
Paying attention to language in your world-building, though, is guaranteed to make language-nerds like me squee. So well done, you.
Exactly what I love about Bujold, as well. She writes stories about people with spaceships, not spaceships and the people who fly them. She’s interested in technology, but mainly as people use, interact, and relate to it. I’m especially fascinated by the way she works out the implications of uterine replicators and of cloning technology.
I’d never hitherto realised – though I’m sure (also in hindsight) that you’re right. Blame it if you will, on my being British – “fish in water”, etc.
In a completely real-life scenario, no doubt this would be so. I have the impression that here, Bujold sacrifices strict realism, in favour of eliminating stuff (here, potential puzzlement / necessary explanations) which she’d prefer not to be distracted by: this being an instance of “hard luck on those readers who would relish this particular kind of distraction” – which I get the impression that you, SMV, a self-confessed language-nerd (as below), would relish.
I admire Bujold’s seeming determination to focus on what she wants to, and to have no truck with stuff which does not engage her – even if it’s stuff which some actual or potential readers might wish for. For instance, language-related matters, as have been discussed: also, she chooses to have no ado with “bug-eyed monsters”. All beings in the Vorkosiverse above animal level, are homo sapiens sapiens or in-various-ways mutated variations thereof. As she has, I believe, put it: “We are the aliens”. For her, differing and varying human conventions / cultural practices, are weird enough to provide ample inspiration. I personally like “bug-eyed-monster” goings-on; but am ready to accept, “her universe, her rules”.
Actually, my bar for linguistic squee-worthiness is set pretty low. As I said, I can accept the convention that all space civilizations speak English (the bad guys, of course, speak it with an English accent; all the classic villains - Emperor Palpatine, Grand Mott Tarkin, Margaret Thatcher - speak Oxbridge RP).
What impresses me is when a spec fic author shows awareness of how languages work in the real world. Spice Weasel said the characters in her novel code-switched; that is squee-worthy, to me. Likewise Bujold’s descriptions of linguistic features - Miles’ Betan accent when being Admiral Naismith versus his native Barrayaran one when being Miles, for example, or Ivan’s explanation in Captain Vorpatril’s Alliance that Barryaran personal names are shortened versions of traditional Russian ones (Xav from Xavier, Serg from Sergei, Ekaterin from Ekaterina) - suggests a depth to her world-building that is a mark of a good wordsmith.
There is a minor scene that is hysterical later in one of the books at a meeting where some of the people there have gotten cheap cut rate translator earbugs …
[Diplomatic Immunity chapter 7
Also, recordings may slow down language divergence over time, or provide a sort of fixed reference point that a language will shift around.
Doesn’t Bujold use “gaol,” too? (Or perhaps I’m thinking of something else.)
Another nice bit on this theme, in Brothers in Arms: where during Miles’s spell on Earth, he is pressed into diplomatic-type service on behalf of the Barrayaran Embassy, to take part in a reception for the Baba of Lairouba and his four wives. Miles is partnered at the dinner table with one of the wives. They have no language in common, and “The box of keyed translation earbugs had unfortunately been mis-delivered to an unknown address on the other side of London, leaving half the diplomats present able only to stare at their counterparts and smile.” Miles and Mrs. B of L #? manage fairly well, per mime and sign-language.