However, at one point, the cryonics technique becomes much more important, as it impinges very closely on Miles Vorkosigan himself (Mirror Dance). The consequences of this particular use reverberate through to the following book as well (Memory).
For the cryonics technology to work, the person must be drained of blood, filled with cryo-fluid within four minutes of death, and then frozen in a cryo-chamber. The cryo-revival involves careful thawing and complete healing of the original injuries, which could include the cloning and growth of organs. The patients often end up with amnesia, which may or may not resolve. In the Vorkosiverse, doctors specialize in cryonics, and ethical questions arise when all the cryo-chambers are already in use and yet another person dies. Bujold has again explored a fascinating technology as well as some of the ethical debates that follow from its use.
Is cryonics simply a science-fictional invention or is there current-day scientific research that supports it as a future advance? Some frogs freeze in the winter, then revive in the summer, and appear to do so by having extraordinarily high urea levels, which serves as an "anti-freeze." They are not the only organisms to survive freezing: the nematodes (worms) used as a model organism by many researchers are regularly frozen to be stored in liquid nitrogen and thawed for reuse. Organs from mammals, including the brain, have been frozen and brought back to some levels of function.
In addition, pigs have been taken down to very low temperatures (10 degrees Celsius core temperature for 60 minutes) using a method that sounds very similar to Bujold's description of cryonic techniques: the blood is drained quickly and replaced with a cold cryo-protectant fluid. After they were reanimated, the pigs were tested for brain function by learning and memory assessments, and they performed equivalently to pigs that had not been cryonically frozen and revived.
Along the lines of reproductive technology mentioned earlier, there have been advances in the freezing of sperm, eggs, and embryos for later fertilization/gestation. A group of well-respected scientists have even signed an open letter (www.imminst.org/ cryonics_letter/) that supports cryonics as "a legitimate science-based endeavor that seeks to preserve human beings, especially the human brain, by the best technology available." They emphasize that this is a credible hope for future technological developments rather than a current possibility. Thus, cryonics could be a very real possibility for the future, and some have estimated it happening within the next thirty to fifty years.
Lois McMaster Bujold's Vorkosiverse is an imaginary universe, yet its advanced biological technology still allows us to picture it as a future that we could see following from where we are today. The solid biological principles it is based on have stood the test of time for over twenty years. In my view, they are likely to be relevant and possible for at least twenty more.
Actually, as all four of the main technologies covered in detail here are currently progressing along the lines of Bujold's projections, the technologies may become everyday realities in exactly the way Bujold has described. The realization of many "futuristic" biological technologies may be closer than previously thought.
I hope that excellent science fiction authors like Lois McMaster Bujold will continue to write about and explore the ethics of such technologies so that readers and society as a whole will think about how to handle them when they arrive.
"What's the Worst Thing
I Can Do to This Character?":
Technology of the Vorkosiverse
Ed Burkhead
Lois loves her characters. As she says, when you are writing character-based books, each character tries to take over the story. Oh, but the things she does to her characters . . .
Some of Lois's best character tortures are biological, but she supports and tortures her characters awfully well with other technologies, too.
Interstellar flight in the series is through jump ships, using mapped, fixed wormholes from star to star. Finding wormholes is dangerous survey work and wormholes may not take you to somewhere useful. Usually, there are several wormhole jumps and solar system traverses to move from one useful system to the next along a route. Interstellar travel can take days and even months depending on the distance, connections, and speed of the ship.
The opening of Shards of Honor is based on discovery of a route enabling the Barrayaran invasion and conquest of Escobar. Barrayar has found and mapped and is stocking supplies on a planet midway along the invasion route. Independently finding that planet from another entry, Cordelia Naismith's Betan Astronomical Survey ship begins surveying the planet for its potential, since science and research are the dominant products of Beta Colony. From Barrayar's point of view, allowing the Betans to report back could compromise the route and the invasion.
Many of the military technologies are established in the first dozen pages as Cordelia finds her survey camp torched and "nothing short of a plasma arc could have melted the fabric of their tents." Within minutes, she finds Lieutenant Rosemont dead, shot by a nerve disruptor. Moments after that, at a rustle in the grass, Cordelia snaps her stun gun to the aim.
We've been introduced to three of the main weapons used throughout the series. And the very civilized Cordelia Naismith, captain of a peaceful, exploratory Betan Astronomical Survey ship and pretty strongly anti-military-stupidity, is involved in the opening shots of a war.
Not all the technologies are military, certainly. Cordelia is wearing her short-range wrist comm, and the scientific party has assorted instruments and tough, durable equipment. Cordelia pulls out of a drawer a long-range communicator, powerful enough to contact her ship now pulling away from the planet.
Making its escape, the fast Betan ship can easily stay away from the slow Barrayaran warship. The means of propulsion are never mentioned throughout the series. Normal space accelerations are high, in the dozens of gravities range, with acceleration compensated by the ships' artificial gravity system.
Spaceships never land and shuttles are used which can land without problems with exhaust or blast effects, apparently supported by an anti-gravity effect.
Once the invasion of Escobar starts, technology comes into play in the plot twists. Beta Colony has a defense against the major Barrayaran ship-to-ship weapon, the plasma arc—the plasma mirror reflects the plasma-arc beam back to the sender. Beta Colony helps its neighbor Escobar by providing this technology.
A bit of side plot involves Escobar's female military people raped in Barrayaran captivity. Using uterine replicators, Escobar gives the raped prisoners' fetuses back to Barrayar.
In Barrayar, technology is the thumbscrew used to torture Cordelia and Aral Vorkosigan.
Modern Barrayar may have jump ships, energy weapons, comconsoles and more, but the technological revolution is still new as Barrayar comes out of the Time of Isolation. Parts of even the capital city are still the old slums. The former city center, with narrow lanes and alleys and run-down buildings, has no electricity—old technology that is used well in the story.
Since Aral Vorkosigan is the regent for the child emperor, an attempt on his life is made with a "class four sonic grenade, probably air tube launched . . . Unless the thrower was suicidal."
In the next attempt, poison gas is used. Though failing to kill Aral, the gas poisons him, Cordelia, and their unborn child, who suffers permanent bone-destroying damage from the poison's antidote.
But now the thumbscrew is turned again. The child might be saved if he could be given heroic treatments which would poison and kill Cordelia. Enter the uterine replicators given to backward Barrayar by the Escobarans at the end of their war. If the fetus, Miles, can be transferred to the uterine replicator, heroic measures could be tried.
That's good till the next crisis.
Civil war breaks out as an opportunistic count sees a chance to make himself Emperor. In the fighting, we see the use of aircars (lightflyers) and scanners which can find people. Separating the animals from the people through a forest canopy is a lot harder, allowing General Piotr Vorkosigan, Cordelia, the c
hild emperor Gregor, and Bothari to escape on the high technology of the Time of Isolation—horses.
The backcountry of Vorkosigan's district, the Dendarii Mountains, runs on old technology—no electricity, modern vehicles extremely rare, outhouses and wood-burning fireplaces.
Then comes one of the implications of having your baby in a uterine replicator—the unborn baby can be kidnapped and held for ransom. The unborn baby is in a technological device not understood by the kidnappers and needs heroic medical treatment to reverse the poison gas cure's damage. The kidnappers could never manage the treatment even if they knew of it!
Cordelia takes action, using car, truck, monorail, sewers, and the high technology of an actual sword to drive the dynamic final quarter of the book.
By the beginning of The Warrior's Apprentice, Miles, at seventeen, has already undergone "an inquisition's worth" of medical treatment to his ruined bones. He can walk, even run and do most physical activities, if he's very careful of his bones. He's short, at "just-under-five-foot," and distinctly hunchbacked. He looks like a mutie on a mutation-hating world.
Miles is the child of one of the youngest ship captains and admirals of Barrayar, who was then chosen as regent for the child emperor and later made prime minister of Barrayar. His astrogator mother was captain of a ship of the Betan Astronomical Survey, exploring and mapping wormholes and exploring new worlds. The least members of her crew were the cream of Beta Colony's intelligent and scientific elite. Miles is not dumb.
Miles fails the physical entrance test to the Barrayaran military academy, but, being Miles, he goes off to find something to do.
On Beta Colony, Miles buys a junkyard-ready starship, serviceable but old and not economical. Jump-ship pilots use neural interfaces to control their ships, particularly during the jump. The pilot of Miles's obsolete ship has the neural interface for the obsolete drive system and has been medically down-checked for a new interface. If he's ever to fly a jump again (which he thinks is "better than a woman—better than food or drink or sleep or breath"), he has to go with the ship.
Miles finds his cargo and supplies via the comconsole in a process quite similar to using the World Wide Web—noteworthy since the story was written a half-decade before the invention of the World Wide Web and a decade before most of us noticed it.
The logistics of paying and supplying a mercenary fleet become important. When receiving the fleet's pay Miles has a "fantasy of glittering diadems, gold coins, and ropes of pearls. Alas that such gaudy baubles were treasures no more. Crystallized viral microcircuits, data packs, DNA splices, bank drafts on major planetary agricultural and mining futures; such was the tepid wealth men schemed upon in these degenerate days."
On planets, most financial transactions are done with credit cards and electronic transfers; however, paper money is still used as currency on most planets.
The range and intermixing of technologies is a key part of "The Mountains of Mourning" as Miles investigates an infant murder in the backcountry hills of the Dendarii Mountains.
As deputy for his father, the district count, Miles meets the locals on their own terms by riding horseback into the mountains rather than using a lightflyer. The village speaker has a small, battery-powered radio to pick up news from the outside and that's about all the modern technology in Silvy Vale. Miles's armsman, Pym, uses a hand-scanner to search the brush for threats when Miles seems threatened.
It comes down to convincing the locals that Miles can't make a mistake on identifying the true murderer because he's going to use the modern technology of fast-penta, an effective truth drug.
The Vor Game technologies are similar to those in The Warrior's Apprentice. The action takes place on spaceships and space stations that are gearing up for war. When this resolves into the Cetagandan invasion of Vervain and the Hegan Hub, we see the only major space battle shown in the Vorkosigan Saga as Miles's Dendarii Mercenaries join in the defense of the Hegan Hub's jump point.
Since the development of the plasma mirror the plasma beam is less effective and several ships need to gang up on one to overwhelm the plasma mirror defense. The few ships with the short-range gravitic imploder lance try to find chances to use it. Another navy with longer-range gravitic imploder lances is much more effective.
One of the few uses of major automation in the series is the tactical computer. As Miles sits idly in the tactics room, he's reminded of the academy jape "Rule 1: Only overrule the tactical computer if you know something it doesn't. Rule 2: The tac comp always knows more than you do."
The main technologies in "Labyrinth" tend to be biological. Prototype 9, for instance, is a wholly engineered human. Nine is a constructed warrior human and a sixteen-year-old girl, albeit eight feet tall with fangs and claws. Other characters include Nicole, the quaddie (four arms, no legs), and Bel Thorne, a Betan hermaphrodite.
On the side is House Ryoval, purveyor of depravity in a bordello using bioconstructed and surgically altered slaves. Not somewhere you'd want to be taken captive—yet Nine, the girl, has been sold to Ryoval.
At one point, the Dendarii find themselves barreling along in a float truck, over the trees at a paltry 260 kilometers an hour, all the speed that crate would do.
On a space station, we see Nicole, the quaddie, in something like her natural environment as she floats in a null-gee bubble. In null-gee, she can play her two-sided hammer dulcimer using all four hands at once, with virtuoso skill. Quaddies use a cup-shaped anti-gravity float chair when they visit planets and one-gee space habitats. They control it with their lower hands, leaving their upper hands and arms free.
The plot in Cetaganda keys on computer technology. Lois lets the surprisingly decent Cetagandans suffer the utter folly of having a single point of failure of their most important resource.
The Cetagandans are masters of chemistry and especially genetics. The ghem compete with genetic wizardry on plants and animals. The haut only work with human genetics. They gene-engineer their race as they work for something higher than human and it looks like they're making progress. All haut children are engineered from the single master gene bank.
In the Emperor's Celestial Garden's Star Crèche is a frozen genetic sample of every haut who has ever lived—in randomized order. There are hundreds of thousands of samples. But there is only one master-index Key with no backups. "It is a matter of . . . control," said haut Rian Degtiar, Handmaiden of the Star Crèche.
The previous Empress decided that the haut race was getting stagnant and new competition and expansion was needed. So she ordered the gene bank to be duplicated and distributed to the governors of the eight Cetagandan planets to make eight new, competing centers of expansion. But the one, master, Great Key is not yet duplicated and distributed. Instead, it is stolen.
The Celestial Gardens, home to the Emperor and the haut, is permanently covered by a force dome six kilometers across requiring an entire power plant to maintain it. The haut-women's float chairs use force bubbles for safety and privacy, as the haut-women are never seen by those unworthy. Even a penthouse rooftop garden has its own force dome and the Empress's cremation is contained inside a force bubble.
Little things that show up include marvelous perfumes, technically enabled art and sensitized asterzine, the fabric that can be formable, dyeable, and totally inert until it comes in contact with the liquid catalyst, at which point it explodes.
Ethan of Athos begins on Athos, an all-male planet which gets away from the sin of women's influence over men by using the uterine replicator and cultured ovarian tissues. But a couple of hundred years after the colony's founding, the ovarian tissue cultures are dying of old age.
An attempt to buy ovarian tissue cultures on the market has returned junk tissues, the real ones never having been sent or having been stolen along the way. Ethan Urquhart, a senior reproductive doctor, is sent out into the galaxy to buy new ovarian cultures. Kline Station is the first stop on the route from Athos to the rest of the galaxy.
De
ndarii Commander Elli Quinn follows Cetagandan agents from Jackson's Whole to Kline Station in pursuit of something biological but she doesn't know what. The Cetagandans are pursuing tissues that are a result of a decades-long research project to develop spies who are telepathic. Losing the cultures might lead their enemies to develop telepathic spies. They think the valuable samples have been sent to Athos, so they capture and question Ethan.
Tiny electronic bugs and tracers are used by the spies in the story, including Quinn. The Cetagandans use fast-penta and other interrogation drugs. One produces high firing rates of sensory nerves and another, applied to the skin, produces agony but leaves no marks.
Kline Station is in an otherwise empty solar system with six wormholes. The station is a transshipment and trading center with over a hundred thousand permanent residents and sometimes a quarter that many transients.
Safety is paramount. Quinn quips that some places have religions, we have safety drills. The biocontrol cops have immense power to make break-in searches and decontaminations as they see fit.
Oxygen comes from aquatic plant life in tanks, which grows, requiring something to eat the excess growth lest it overrun the tanks. Newts eat the plants and something must be done with the newts. Among other uses are fried newt legs, cream of newt soup, newt creole, newts 'n' chips, bucket of newts, newt nuggets, ad infinitum.
Everything is recycled, from water to the bodies of the stationers who've died (though bodies are broken down to the molecular level and fed to plants). Some organic materials are broken down to a lesser degree and fed to food products growing in vats. All meats (except newts) are vat-grown tissues with no (ugh!) live animals to be killed.
The Vorkosigan Companion Page 12
