I'm going to talk about his disability in the Vokozekin novels by Lois McMaster Bujold.
How many people here have read Lois McMaster Bujold?
A minority.
Well, you have enormous pleasures waiting for you.
Bujold is one of the most popular science fiction and fantasy writers in the USA.
She has won the Hugo Award for best novel four times and if you look at the records,
the only other person to equal that is someone called Robert A. Heinlein and no one has actually
surpassed that.
And her space operas featuring her hero Miles Vokozekin and his family are her most popular
works and so far she's, and she's been writing this since 1986, I mean the first three Vokozekin
books came out in 1986 and since then they have come along at fairly regular intervals
although not very many recently.
There have been five novellas and 13 novels in the Vokozekin sequence so far and the 14th
novel is due out on October the 19th.
On my trip over to Hamburg I've been reading the advanced reading copy of this but I have
not incorporated anything from Cryoburn, the 14th novel, into this paper.
She writes fantasy as well, in fact more recently than her Hugo's for her Vokozekin book, she's
won one for her Paladin of Souls which is a fantasy novel and her most recent publications
was a quartet of fantasy novels called The Sharing Knife.
And if you want to sort of assure yourself of her popularity, this is sort of meaningless
perhaps, obviously no guarantee of quality, but if you want to assure yourself of her
popularity go to the net and see how much fuss, for instance, there has been about her
forthcoming novel and see the amount which I've not even begun to scratch yet though
I shall be looking at it, the amount of fan fiction and slash fiction that have been produced
as a result of these Vokozekin novels.
But despite all this she's received very little popular attention, sorry she's received very
little academic attention.
A few articles, one published in Foundation, one published in Extrapolation, about two-thirds
of Sylvia Kelso's 2009 book from Aqueduct Press is devoted to Bujold, Sylvia Kelso is a critic
based in Queensland, Australia, but really very, very little academic recognition of
her work or her popularity.
Male critics tend not to take space opera very seriously, male critics perhaps tend
not to take space opera written by females very seriously and that might have something
to do with, look at the tiny amount of academic criticism that's been on the amazing CJ Cherry
for instance, must have something to do with the fact that CJ Cherry, one of the best space
opera writers around is female.
Male fans have more than once told Bujold that she writes like a man, which I presume
is intended as a compliment, but Bujold has replied, I don't write like a man, you just
read like one, which is pretty good.
Bujold space opera can be compared with that of CJ Cherry or perhaps David Webber among
others but it's very different from either, it's very different from the space opera
produced by anyone else, I think.
Marianza McBradley once repeated a comment made about her own books.
Someone said apparently in her hearing, you can always tell a Bradley story, it's got
a baby in it and in a way Bujold is like that, only a lot more so.
Bujold is space opera with motherhood and babies and relationships built in.
One of her characters has a baby in a closet while hiding from her killers.
Her central character in the Vauguet, as you can see, is poisoned while still a fetus.
Childbirth and childhood is actually central to these novels, it's very, very rare in
space opera.
Bujold's characters are mothers and fathers, relationships between parents and offspring
are well developed, artificial wounds, uterine replicators are a standard plot feature in
her novels.
In fact, Ethan of Athos is rather dependent on them since Ethan of Athos is about a planet
where there aren't any women, which is not a very common theme in science fiction but
treated very interestingly by Bujold.
But the chief way in which her space opera stands out is that her main protagonist is
not a standard space opera hero.
Not a standard male hero and not a female hero like Weber's Anna Harrington, who's basically
just a female version of a standard male hero.
Anna Harrington, of course, in literary terms, is based very closely on C.S. Forrester's
Horatio Hornblower, but set in space in several centuries in the future.
Bujold's central character is Miles Warkosikin, Miles, she didn't realize that that was Latin
for soldier when she named him, but it's sort of appropriate.
Miles is the child of a marriage between a leading politician from the planet Barriar,
his mother is the commander of a space survey ship from the planet Beta Colony.
In the earlier novels, Miles Warkosikin takes on the leadership of a mercenary fleet with
the pseudonym of Admiral Naismith, and in more recent novels, Miles has acted as imperial
auditor, a man with great political authority.
But Miles is above all distinguished by his disability.
He's physically far weaker than any of the men or women who surround him.
He depends entirely on his intellect for his survival.
Though his deep familiarity with pain, to which he's become accustomed over years and years
of operations to curious disability, is also an important factor in his survival, and as
is actually his sense of humor.
I didn't mention that Bujold's space opera has much more wit and humor than the space
opera of most writers.
So this paper will focus on the theme of disability, and disability is very rarely treated, I think,
in science fiction and fantasy, but it's ubiquitous in Bujold's work.
Miles is by no means the only character who can be described as disabled in her science
fiction, and in fact we find the theme explored in her fantasy as well.
The main male character in the four sharing knife books, her most recent series, is Dag,
who's lost one hand in a fight and has to make do with various strapped on prosthetics,
a hook, a carved wooden hand, a clamp for his bow, and so on.
Before continuing, maybe I ought to offer a brief definition of disability, which as
it's now used by governmental organizations, covers a much wider range of physical and
mental problems than was once covered by the word.
The US Social Security Organization, for instance, look it up on the web, uses 14 categories
for adult disability, including impairment of the muscular system, the sensory system,
the respiratory system, the digestive system, et cetera.
The Canadian government characterizes it very differently in their advice to employers,
listing 41 different types of disability under main headings like cognitive impairment, deaf,
blind, dexterity impairment, hearing impairment, learning disability, et cetera, et cetera.
But basically this is just to underline the wide range of conditions which can be subsumed
under the all covering name of disability.
And a space opera universe might be one where you might in a sense not expect to find disability,
but that would be to forget most notably a character in Robert A. Heinlein's, namely
Waldo Farthing Waite Jones.
He's the hero of the story Waldo, published in a astounding August 1942 under Heinlein's
most usual pseudonym, Anson MacDonald.
It's about a scientist who suffered from myasthenia gravis, extreme muscular weakness, and he
coped with this by living on a satellite in zero gravity and by inventing what in the
story, in Heinlein's story, and what subsequently in our real world has come to be called a Waldo,
a device for mechanically magnifying, amplifying weak muscular movements.
And it's an integral part of Heinlein's story that Waldo didn't think of himself as being
disabled.
Indeed, because of his intellect and the physical strength which his Waldos gave him, he thought
of himself as superior to the humans living on the surface of Earth, whom he called smooth
apes.
And that sort of, you know, one can see aspects of Miles Vokosigan's character in that.
Miles Vokosigan is Bujold's hero.
But you know, reading between the lines, one can quite see he would have been an impossible
person to actually deal with, extraordinarily egotistical, positively manic, all created
no doubt as ways of coping with his disability.
I suspect he was thinking about Waldo that gave Bujold her own anomalous disabled characters,
inverted commas, the quadies in her novel, Falling Free, chronologically the earliest
in the Vokosigan universe.
Bujold was a reader of Heinlein in her youth in the 60s, as almost all science fiction
readers were in the 60s or at least early 60s.
Now the quadies have been produced by genetic engineering to form an ideal population for
working in zero gravity conditions.
They're much cheaper than providing artificial gravity in space stations, for instance.
They don't get motion sickness, they're much more resistant to radiation than standard
human stock.
And most visibly, they have arms where they ought to have legs.
In other words, they're four-armed, four-handed genetically produced humans, hence, quadies.
On a space station, of course, they're not disabled at all.
It's ordinary humans who are in a sense disabled in zero gravity conditions.
Quadies are far better adapted for zero gravity conditions than standard humans.
But on planets, they suffer from severe mobility impairment.
They can move around only with difficulty by crawling on all fours.
Thus, an official Bariaraan report mentioned in the novel Diplomatic Community referred
to them as, quote, horrible spider mutants.
And the narrating voice there, which often reproduces Miles's thoughts, comments the
difference between deleterious mutation and benign or advantageous modification, was not
readily grasped by Bariarans from the back country.
It wasn't, in fact, very much better elsewhere in the galaxy.
The ghastly bureaucrat Van Atter, who features in the novel Falling Free, who controls the
quadies in that novel, he's apparently from Earth, commented, I about puked when I first
saw one and I was prepared, but you get used to the little chimps pretty quick.
And, of course, that gives us the clue to one of the themes of Buja when she's dealing
with disability.
It's her commentary on people who observe and how people deal with the disability of
others.
In the Bukozigan universe, there are two reasons why deviations from the human norm are regarded
with horror.
There's a general fear of genetic manipulation of the human body, as Van Atter comments in
that novel, after that Nuevo Brazilian military cloning fiasco, an event that's otherwise
not referred to.
And on Bariar, specifically, there's a real fear of genetic mutation following nuclear
warfare during the time of isolation, capital T, capital I, that familiar historical period
in space opera during which a planetary colony loses contact with other planets, hence the
comment about deleterious mutation in that quotation above.
Even in Miles' day, it was by no means unknown for minor disabilities such as a hair lip
to be the occasion for infanticide.
That's the theme of the novella, The Mountains of Mourning, about how the young Miles deals
with the prejudice against mutations of that sort.
Things are changing in Miles' day.
It was considered progress in Miles' day that people actually thought it was a scandal,
quote, I'm not taken for granted, when a crippled man was attacked and mutilated in
Bariar's capital city.
And one look at Miles' for Kurzigan, he's a hunchback.
He's less than five feet high, convinces most Bariarans that he's a mutant.
When he was young, he used to explain, very carefully, no, I'm not a mutant.
My fetus was, my disability is a result of poisoning when I was in the womb, though they're
not genetic mutation, the result of an attack by a political opponent to his father.
But even before he was out of his teens, he realised that he would be a role model for
other mutants.
In his maturity, he would accept the insult mutant without bridling, since his achievements
and high social status could prove to all that being, that a mutant could be a valuable
member of society, a mutant that is someone who is disabled.
Michael Kurzigan suffers from brittle bones and other physical problems for many years
until numerous bouts of painful surgery have replaced most of his bones by plastic.
But Miles suffers from another problem, too.
He's got a creator called Lois MacMaster Verjold, who believes that plotting should
often involve doing, I quote, the worst possible thing to the protagonists.
In part, that does account for making disability one of the main things that Miles has to deal
with.
He's living in a militaristic society in which physical prowess is highly prized.
So he has to struggle throughout his youth, throughout his life, really, with his problems,
with his disability.
As a child, he frequently broke limbs, partly as a result of his own driven audacity.
As an adult, he's tortured and beaten up, and eventually he's killed.
And after his revival, he suffers blackouts.
His own experience is the most serious reverse that he can imagine, apart from death in
his world, is dismissed from the imperial service and loses control of the mercenary
fleet, which is operated for years secretly on behalf of Barry Yarr.
In the last two novels, Miles seems to have achieved quasi-normality and gained a wife.
It's yet to be seen whether this means that Bojold is losing interest in him.
It's quite possible that future novels, if there are any after Cryoburn, and she is
getting a bit fed up with the Vukasian universe, apparently, will be about Miles' clone brother,
Mark, produced as an exact replica of Miles, down to the disabilities.
He was produced as a double who could function as an infiltrator and assassin.
Now Miles' disability is not just a result of the author's desire to weaken him and deny
him the usual role of a space opera action hero.
It's also a result of Bojold's desire to feminize him.
Bojold has called Miles, quote, a female in disguise.
Someone socially disadvantaged by disability, I quote her again, just as women in patriarchal
society are made to feel deformed.
Sylvia Kelso has speculated that Miles quotes, quote, achieves all the masculine things that
women would like to do, winning through intellect and manipulation, retaining his compassion
and sensitivity.
He is, quote, the daylight version of the codedly feminine.
While his clone brother, Mark, is the nighttime version.
I quote again, the codedly feminine that women do not like to face.
Mark, not Miles, Mark uses bulimia as a defensive mechanism.
He has multiple personality disorder that he also uses as a coping mechanism.
He suffers from extreme low self-esteem.
He suffers from hate and envy, a response to his lack of love in his childhood.
And unlike Miles, he's been trained to kill people, and he does.
If these two brothers are feminized in different ways, then Miles is surrounded by women who
are in part masculinized, or at least take roles seen on barrier as roles which could
only be held by men, their mercenary commanders or their soldiers.
Miles has sex with most of them, including the fanged and clawed genetically manufactured
super soldier, Tauror, who is nearly twice his height.
Height difference only matters when you're standing up, Miles decided.
But since she's a virgin, Miles warns her before intercourse that intercourse might
hurt her.
That's all right, she replies.
I have a very high pain threshold, but I don't, is Miles's internalized scream.
But it's all right.
About the only powerful woman in his life he doesn't sleep with is, we may be thankful
for that perhaps, is his mother, Cordelia Naismith for Cozigan, the heroine of two of
the novels, Shards of Honor and Barriar, both largely concerned with his life before Miles'
birth.
One might see Cordelia as the perfect balance between the masculine and the feminine in
Bujold's novels, A Woman of Action, A Woman in Uniform, who is nevertheless involved
in survey work rather than military action, although she does manage a bloody military
coup almost on her own at the end of Barriar.
She becomes a wife and mother, while at the same time wielding a lot of political power.
The uniform she wears may be significant.
Cordelia herself noted that her husband-to-be, Miles' father, was attracted primarily to
men in uniform.
He was sexually attracted to men in uniform, and perhaps that was the reason in the mind
of the author for the attraction which determined their marriage.
Now the very first Vokozigan novel to be published, Shards of Honor, May 1986, features Cordelia
and her husband-to-be, Errol Vokozigan, but also introduces the first disabled character.
Cordelia's aide, Ensign Du Bower, is shot by a nerve disruptor near the beginning of
the book.
And for most of the time during which Cordelia and Errol trek across the planet, he has to
be led like a child because of his disability, but without a child's awareness.
As that example illustrates, disability as a plot feature is not about the disabled person
really, but about how those around him or her deal with it.
Du Bower has no reaction, he's too disabled.
The way that Cordelia and Errol interact with Du Bower has a profound effect on the
way we understand their personalities and the way in which they interact with each other.
Cordelia's refusal to leave the disabled man, Du Bower, behind sparks Errol's own sense
of honor, which is what first makes Cordelia realize that this militaristic, patriarchal
guy from Barriar may actually be someone she could respond to.
And this theme is amplified into one which resonates throughout the vocation sequence.
A person's humanity can be measured by the way in which that person regards and treats
those who are marked out as different through disability or some other characteristic.
And Cordelia is important here, Miles's mother, because she comes from Beta colony, a planet
whose toleration of difference, above all the difference produced by genetic manipulation,
far exceeds that to be found on Barriar or other planets.
It's Bayton culture absorbed from his mother that allows Miles to befriend eight-foot-tall
fanged women, or to flirt with Belle Thorne, a Bayton hermaphrodite.
Barriarian culture may be symbolized by Miles's grandfather, who actually attempted to kill
Miles's fetus while still in the uterine replicator.
I don't have time here to discuss Bujol's rather complex views of abortion, though clearly
they feature throughout her use of this uterine replicator.
It's obviously significant that Bujol has imagined a period in Barriarian history in
which is one of rapid transition from traditional ideas about sexuality and disability to a
world in which more progressive views are dominant.
And the tensions within the family that this creates are to be found within Arul Vukosigan's
immediate family in the early books, and in Comar, a more recent one there to be found
within the family of Ekaterina.
Ekaterina is the woman that Miles eventually marries, but her first husband Etienne Voswason,
he's called, he's an aristocrat, seems more worried about the social implications of his
genetic disease, which will make him more and more disabled than about the medical effects.
It's more and more difficult for him to hide his disability, opening himself up, he believes,
to feelings among those around him that he's a mutant.
These ideas, the fear of being thought a mutant is actually something that, in Miles'
day, is being regarded as old fashioned.
Ekaterina, his wife, is the progressive one, she's the one who's focused on the possibility
of curing her son of this disabled, this genetic disability before it emerges.
Well, I've only been able to sketch this, and I've only been at the beginning of this
project, I've been commissioned to write a book on Bujol, disability is one of the themes
I'm going to look at, there's lots of other ones, like honour and leadership and women
and so on.
Her treatment of disability is a complex one, as I hope you'll have seen, obviously she's
got a message of tolerance, of empathy, of appreciation of circumstance, but she's using
disability in other ways too, she's using disability to torture her characters, to put
her characters in difficult positions.
As I say, it's a complex, to understand how she's using disability is complex, I think
the very fact she's using it at all makes her an interesting author.
Thanks very much.