Read The Vorkosigan Companion for Free Online

had an entire wormhole nexus to choose from for this setting, and it occurred to me that this gave me the long-awaited chance to visit Quaddiespace and finally see how Falling Free had come out. Because I rather wanted to know. It was unfinished business that still niggled, though the time and impulse for anything like a direct sequel was past and long past.
    A subplot featured the free-fall quaddie ballet. It's my favorite part of the book. I am pleased to note it, too, has inspired a filk song, and a good one; it seems a just reward that a chapter which is in effect an essay on the nature of art as an expression of cultural identity should garner a critique which is itself a worthy piece of art. That these most wonderful of dancers have neither legs nor feet, and after a short time neither their audience nor my readers notice, was another plus.
    Over and beyond the quaddie Nicol, several of the novel's other precursors are found in "Labyrinth." Most especially, of course, the tale of Bel Thorne, the Betan hermaphrodite, although some of the unfinished business with Bel stems most directly from the end of Mirror Dance . But I found a certain pleasing roundness to connecting the first tale in this universe to, if not the last, the latest.
    I'd also known I wanted to do something with the possibilities presented by the Cetagandan child-ships ever since I came up with the idea for them back when I was writing Cetaganda . And I've long wanted to play a bit with yet more varieties of bioengineering on humans in Miles's universe, so this tale also gave me a chance to introduce Guppy, the somewhat hapless prototype of an amphibian human species.
    So Diplomatic Immunity drew mainly on information I had in hand, or in brain, rolled with the usual themes: biology, bioengineering, we have met the aliens and they is us, plans not surviving contact with the enemy—or with one's friends, for that matter—and, above all, the transactional nature of parenthood.
    I'm asked frequently where I'm planning to go next with the Vorkosiverse. Have I written myself into a corner with Miles?
    Well, one of the things I like to do is take nonstandard heroes and run them through the wringer and see what happens. So coming up with a plot of the right weight for Miles in his current situation is an interesting challenge.
    Given powerful characters, there are still a lot of ways that the writer can play with them. The protagonist can be given a more powerful adversary, but then one gets into kind of a hero-villain arms race that ends up with the Superman–Lex Luthor scenario. A more interesting plan of attack is to look for the hero's uncorrected flaws, and focus on them. The hero may have all these new strengths, but he or she still has other weaknesses. One can separate a powerful character from his matrix of support, isolate and drop him back into a less-powerful position. Since Miles is a character sent out on galactic missions, that approach has a lot of scope for him.
    The possibilities just have to become more ingenious. The kind of simple physical plots that test younger characters are now not appropriate for Miles—not that he has ever dealt with anything but curve balls. The story has to find a different realm or level of challenge. For example, moral problems are not going to be particularly amenable to a character's having more power, because that's not the kind of thing that solves them.
    The wormhole structure of my universe gives the advantage to the defense. It requires and rewards interplanetary cooperation. But it also means that any planet has a limited number of immediate neighbors to conveniently have conflicts with, and Barrayar's neighborhood is pretty quiet at the moment. So if I want to stir up trouble for Miles I may have to stir it up someplace else than near his homeworld.
    The Vorkosiverse has eons of future history—a thousand before Miles, plus after. What's his world going to look like ten thousand years down his