A post about Miles Vorkosigan

[ada_hoffmann]

This post was commissioned by one of my Patreon backers, David Lamb. High-tier Patreon backers can have four pieces a year – flash fiction, poetry, or blog posts like this one – written to any prompt or topic that they like. You can check out this, and my other tiers of rewards, on Patreon.

Miles Vorkosigan is the protagonist of most of the books in Lois McMaster Bujold’s Barrayar series. He is a disabled man, the son of an important Lord (or, later, Count) on a feudal planet, who cons his way into a mercenary fleet and has space adventures. (This is a woefully inadequate summary of the Barrayar series, which also includes feudal and interplanetary politics, mysteries, espionage, entire books that veer away from the military stuff in favor of quirky space romance, and a ton of thoughtful explorations of the societal impacts of biotechnology, among other things.)

It would not be an exaggeration to say that Miles is one of the most beloved disabled characters in all of science fiction. He’s often the first example people give of good disability representation. Too often, he’s the only example.

Miles’s disabilities are many. He has dwarfism, brittle bones, and a host of attendant complications from an incident with poison gas that happened in utero. (In later books, he also develops a form of epilepsy.) Miles is also non-neurotypical – I’m not sure if a coherent mental diagnosis is ever given in the books, but fans seem to agree that he is bipolar and has ADHD.

Bujold gives these disabilities the attention they deserve. Miles is never reduced to just a spokesperson for his disabilities, but they do consistently affect how he moves through the world, whether it’s being seriously injured by things that an able-bodied person would shrug off, submitting to yet another painful and tedious medical procedure, having atypical and alarming reactions to in-universe medicines, or simply dealing with the stigma of being visibly disabled on an intensely ableist planet. (And I do mean intensely – Barrayar was once decimated by a nuclear war, and many of its residents still live in terror of radioactivity-induced mutations, to the point of practicing infanticide for minor birth defects.)

Miles is hyperactive, often hypomanic, fearsomely clever, and has all the resources of a Barrayaran nobleman at his disposal. This makes him a delightful protagonist, the kind of person that you watch just to see how he gets himself into trouble this time – and how he creatively problem-solves to get out of it again, if not always in the manner his superiors would like.

In short, Miles is a tremendously good disabled character. But this is not to say that he is above criticism. One of the criticisms I’ve heard of Miles as disability representation is that, aside from the disability itself, he’s actually extremely privileged. He has all the money he could want for medical care and actual bodyguards, not to mention entire space fleets, to protect him. He is more or less literally royalty, not to mention all the other titles he accrues throughout the series. Ableism is still a thing that hurts Miles, and his health is always going to affect what he can and can’t do. But many of the difficulties and compromises that real-world disabled people make for their own survival never touch him.

This is less really a problem with Miles as a character – disabled people should get to fantasize about being royalty, too! – and more an example of the problem that happens when we try to hold up one character as the pinnacle of representation. People have been writing lately about how, when there’s only one female superhero, or one female whatever, she’s expected to be all things to all women – and, because that task is impossible, fails. Miles can’t be all things to all disabled people, either, and he shouldn’t be where the search for disability representation stops. No matter how cool Miles is, we won’t have real representation in science fiction until many other disabled characters, all intersectionally different and all also extremely cool, can be recognized alongside him.

Comments

[sovay]

This is less really a problem with Miles as a character – disabled people should get to fantasize about being royalty, too! – and more an example of the problem that happens when we try to hold up one character as the pinnacle of representation.

That is nicely articulated.

Fewer zero-sum games would benefit everyone.

[elialshadowpine]

When I read past a certain point in the Vorkosigan series, I may have literally shrieked out loud, startling my partner of the time, and I'm pretty sure I spent a couple minutes babbling incoherently before I managed to put into words, "You HAVE to read these books, if only because they SHOW HOW MY BRAIN WORKS."

Miles is quite literally the first character I have read whose hypomania and hyper-multi-focus is EXACTLY like mine. I'd found characters before that showed my personality in other lights but this was the first time I'd seen someone being shown with active hypomania and hyper-multi-focus. So it was a Really Big Deal.

There are a couple of other books/series that have had similar responses from me regarding disability. There's one that's in progress, by an author I found on Tumblr, of all places. It's a superhero type setting where the bad guys are actually the good guys, and the whole of the primary cast has SOME kind of disability. The series is The Antagonists by Burgandi Rakoska, who I believe is herself disabled. If I'm remembering correctly, she started the series because she couldn't find books with adequate representation.

They aren't perfect, there's definite flaws, but they were a lot of fun, dealt with disability issues, and showed multiple different types of disabilities, which was awesome.

The other series is Mishell Baker's Borderline, starting with the book of that name. I should give the caveat that I have met the author, at the 2014 Writing the Other workshop. She was a fellow student who had recently been contracted. This book is honestly what made me go, "Oh, fuck," and realize that yes, my former psych was quite likely accurate in her assessment of my having borderline personality disorder. The main and viewpoint character of this series has BPD, and the author has been very outspoken about her own experiences as someone who has BPD, too.

It's really well done, although it does need to come with TWs for suicidal ideations and suicide attempts. The majority of the cast is disabled in some way, and primarily (but not solely) deals with mental health issues. It does suffer from the disability-as-superpower trope, but the author handles it in a believable way and it doesn't mean that there aren't major issues as a result of those mental health issues and disabilities. I generally am annoyed by disability-as-superpower but this one didn't bother me too much, probably because it was written by someone who has actual personal lived experience with these issues.

Anyway. I figured I'd peep in and let you know of those, since trying to find books with disabled protagonists that don't suck is... yeah...

- Tris (formerly, Nonny)