Read Online The Vorkosigan Companion by Lillian Stewart Carl, John Helfers - Free Book Online Page A

put into a story tells you something about the background, potentially. If you have a character wearing a nylon jacket, it's implied that you have a petrochemical industry around there somewhere. You can't use any metaphors from a technology that doesn't exist in that world, and so on. But that kind of thoughtful attention to what all your details imply can allow you to get more bang for your buck, more information than appears on the page.
    Effects must have causes. That's deeply inculcated into the modern mind and so we want to see these causes, these costs. That's what storytelling is all about. For all the physical action, eventually it always comes down to someone making a choice somewhere, to do one thing and not another, and those choices are the turning points, if you like, of history. Historians tend to fall into two camps. You have the people in the Impersonal Historical Forces camp, who want to say that all history is these great movements—vast things happen but no people ever do anything. And on the opposite pole are the Great Man theorists, who want all of history to be the effects of certain individual acts by a rather limited cast. I think the actual truth lies somewhere in between. It's far more chaotic. Small causes can have enormous effects and it's very fractal, really.
    LSC: For the want of a nail, the horseshoe was lost, and so forth.
    LMB: What if—and there's the beginning of many a story—what if at certain key critical junctures, certain things had happened differently; might some of the horrors of history have been averted or healed? In real life, we can't know. In books, healing becomes possible.
    LSC: Healing is one of your themes. Do you do much research into the science, medical and otherwise, in your science fiction?
    LMB: Sometimes; sometimes I draw on what I already have in my bag. And I've several times had real doctor-readers review both my fantasy and SF manuscripts for medical accuracy. But foregrounding the characters, necessarily, entails backgrounding the technological speculation, however much those new technologies are in fact affecting characters, settings, and plots all three. Because the tech is mostly in the background, some readers don't seem to notice how much is actually there, mostly in biology and medicine.
    But I'm interested in the impact of technology on the characters' lives, the new moral choices and dilemmas it presents them with. Sometimes the details are important. When I was writing from an engineer's viewpoint, and he was facing an engineering problem in Falling Free , I had to provide enough to give some sense of how the problem-solving was going on inside of his head. But the reader doesn't usually retain all that anyway, so why clutter the page? The stuff should work, and the implications should be displayed, ideally. I don't do this across the board—some of my technologies are complete hand waving, such as the faster-than-light travel. Other technologies, like the design of the uterine replicator as described in Ethan of Athos , are very carefully thought out, and would actually work, more or less, as described.
    So it depends on the focus of the story. If the plot turns on the tech, or the viewpoint character thinks in detail about it, then one needs to give it more attention.
    LSC: Paying attention to the plot. And the characters, and all the rest of the package.
    LMB: All at once, all the time, yep.
    LSC: But the words have to go down in a row. What's your particular method of developing the story and getting it down?
    LMB: I will start to work up ideas for a story from all sorts of sources—other reading, history, film, television, my own life experiences, my prior books, debates with friends about ideas or other books. When my eyes or brain burn out on reading, I'm quite fond of all the nonfiction DVDs I can get from the local library or, now, Netflix, science and travel and history. At some point, all this will spark or clot into notions for a