Interstellar Refugees

Monday 20th June is World Refugee Day, and the week beginning Sunday 19th June is UK Refugee Week.  This post will try to reflect that.

Ever since I was a teenager and old enough to have read the books, I have found it frustrating that the film versions of The Sound Of Music and A Town Like Alice only tell the story of the first halves of Maria Von Trapp’s autobiography The Story of the Trapp Family Singers and Neville Shute’s novel.  In other words, they cut off when the ‘couple fall in love in time of war’ plot finishes and the ‘culture-shock observer’ plot begins, as the protagonist or protagonists learn to deal with life in a new country.

I think this is a shame.  I want to watch Jean Paget settling into life in Australia and starting small businesses to help the dead-end small town where she lives grow into a thriving town like Alice Springs (which is, after all, the point of the title).  Immigrants, the story reminds us, are positive contributors to a community, not scroungers.

I definitely want to watch the Von Trapp family as refugees in America, trying to make a living in the American showbiz scene without compromising their principles, and wondering whether they will ever actually be granted leave to remain.  There is a scene in the book where they make friends with an Italian refugee family who have been repeatedly transported back and forth across the Atlantic because no country in either North America or Europe will shelter them.  These Italians try to make light of their situation – at least they’re getting a perpetual cruise holiday for free – but being shuttled across the globe in the middle of World War Two is certainly no joke.  And neither, of course, is the danger faced today by refugees trying to cross seas, often in tiny, unseaworthy dinghies, in the hope of finding a safe country, only to be forcibly repelled.

I’ve done a bit of research, and it turns out that there is a German film, Die Trapp-Familie in Amerika, which covers the plot of the second half of The Story of the Trapp Family Singers.  The director, Wolfgang Liebeneiner, had already told the first half in his previous film, Die Trapp-Familie.

I think it makes sense to split the story up like this – as long as you tell it.  Sometimes there is just too much plot to take in at once.

So it is probably just as well – and a gift to film-makers, if anyone ever gets round to filming them – that Lois McMaster Bujold splits this narrative into two successive novels, Shards of Honor and its sequel Barrayar.  Admittedly, they frequently get published together as an omnibus volume, Cordelia’s Honor, but please don’t feel that you have to read the lot in one go.

Shards of Honor is the ‘couple fall in love in time of war’ part of the story.  Cordelia Naismith and Aral Vorkosigan, starship captains from planets with very different cultures, meet when they have both been left for dead by their respective crews on a newly-discovered planet and have to work together to survive.  As they get to know each other better, they soon start to fall in love with each other – but Barrayar is planning an invasion of one of Beta Colony’s allies, and when they meet again, it is because Cordelia has been taken prisoner in battle.

Not surprisingly, when Cordelia gets home after the war, the authorities on Beta Colony can’t believe that she is genuinely in love with a man referred to across the galaxy as ‘the Butcher of Komarr’, and take it for granted that she must be suffering from Stockholm Syndrome.  After all, it is known that some prisoners of war were tortured by their Barrayaran captors, and that at least some of these had had their memories erased – so if Cordelia doesn’t remember having been tortured, that must mean that her memory has been erased, mustn’t it?  And this might mean that she has been brainwashed into becoming a spy for the Barrayarans and that her apparent ‘love letter’ to Aral Vorkosigan was actually a coded report, so they’ll just have to take her into a secure hospital until she remembers, won’t they?  With no prospect of convincing the mental health services of her sanity, Cordelia manages to escape and flees to Barrayar – which probably convinces the Betans that they were right all along.

So, from the first novel that she wrote (and almost the first in the Vorkosigan Saga’s internal chronology, apart from the prequel Falling Free), Bujold establishes escape and refugees as a key theme in this series, as much as the themes of parenthood and fertility, and of women’s rights and minority rights.  For example:

Falling Free: origin story of the Quaddies, a race of genetically engineered humans designed to work in zero-gravity.  Because Quaddies are not legally regarded as people or even animals, but are officially listed as ‘post-foetal tissue cultures’, they are not only used as slave labour, but are faced with genocide as soon as improved technology renders their existence obsolete, unless they can escape.

Shards of Honor – see above.

Barrayar: this starts as the culture-shock observer story sequel to Shards of Honor, as Cordelia tries to make sense of Barrayaran attitudes to politics, sexuality and gender roles being wildly different from anything she has grown up with.  It is also, like another of Bujold’s novels, The Curse of Chalion, a story that starts slowly because the characters are still recovering physically or mentally from their previous adventures.  After all, when the first book had ended with the heroine moving to a different planet, the hero having decided for personal reasons to retire from military service and then been unexpectedly offered a massive new responsibility, one supporting character being discharged from the military on grounds of mental illness, and another being transferred from active service to a desk job after suffering life-changing injuries, they’re going to need time to adjust to their new situations – and give the reader time to get to know them better – before the author throws a civil war into the mix.

But yep, there’s a civil war.  So instead of battles in space where no-one (except the clean-up crew retrieving floating corpses expelled from blown-apart spaceships) actually has to see the bodies, we’ve got a grimly believable war, in which no-one – child, pregnant woman, civilian – is safe.  One section (continuing the refugee theme) follows Cordelia and her bodyguard Sergeant Bothari in escorting the five-year-old Emperor Gregor to a remote village in the mountains which should hopefully be far enough from anyone who is trying to kill him.  At this point, Cordelia is recovering from having just given birth, Bothari is struggling to hang onto something like sanity when the war means he doesn’t have access to his antipsychotic medication, and all three of them are worried sick about their loved ones who are in danger back home: Cordelia’s son Miles and Bothari’s daughter Elena are both babies and in danger of being taken hostage, and Gregor’s mother is already a hostage.

The Warrior’s Apprentice, which takes place a generation later, tells the story of Miles and his friend Elena escaping the prejudices and frustrations of Barrayaran society by becoming space mercenaries.  But it is also about refugees in a more literal sense.  The adventure is triggered when Miles befriends two misfits: a Betan space-pilot who is suicidally depressed at the thought of losing his pilot’s career if his ship is scrapped, and a Barrayaran deserter who faces execution if he ever returns to Barrayar.

One of the three main characters in Ethan of Athos is Terrence, a young man who had been genetically engineered to be the perfect spy for the genetic-engineering-obsessed Cetagandan Empire, and had realised that he had no sympathy with the Cetagandan government and decided to defect to the distant planet of Athos.  Like the Quaddies, Terrence is treated by the world that produced him as non-human, with one of the Cetagandan soldiers who has been sent to hunt him down and kill him describing him as ‘a virus of a man, who would make the whole universe over in his twisted image.’  You can’t exactly blame him for leaving, can you?

Labyrinth picks up on the theme of What Measure Is A Non-Human? with another type of genetically engineered character – this time one who is actually part non-human.  Miles has been sent to the gangster-run planet Jackson’s Whole to extricate a Jacksonian geneticist, Hugh Canaba, who wants to defect to Barrayar.  But he and his crew find themselves needing to rescue – and be rescued by – two other would-be escapees: a Quaddie trapped in contract slavery, and an alleged ‘monster’, another genetically engineered life-form created as a military experiment, whose creator wants it destroyed.  The ‘monster’ turns out to be an intelligent, sensitive and desperately lonely teenage girl – admittedly a teenage girl who is eight feet tall with fangs and claws, and has part-horse and part-wolf genetics, but is that any reason why she shouldn’t have a life?  But on the other hand, Miles can’t take her with him to the notoriously mutant-hating Barrayar, where anyone who even looks as if they might be a mutant (like Miles himself, who is disabled as a result of prenatal poisoning) risks being killed in infancy by their own family.

I’ve already wittered on about Mirror Dance, which picks up the story of Miles’s clone-brother Mark.  But I’m going to do so again here, because it is so full of migration stories.  The first section revolves around Mark’s attempt to rescue a group of clone children from Jackson’s Whole, to save them from being slaughtered to provide whole-body transplants for their progenitors.  Winning their trust turns out to be much harder than he expected – and finding a safe home for them is yet another problem to solve. 

Secondly, there is Mark’s own experience of coming home to a planet he has never been to, to be handed over into the custody of parents he has never met – he hadn’t even thought of himself as having parents, and certainly doesn’t expect Aral and Cordelia to accept him as a son, especially when he had inadvertently caused Miles’s death.  He didn’t want to be there – but finding his place as part of a family is the beginning of his journey to finding a sense of his own identity.

Thirdly, there is the family of Jacksonian cloned doctors whom we meet later on in the story.  They are powerful enough to be virtually a House – one of the ruling criminal gangs on Jackson’s Whole – in their own right, yet they are the property of another House.  They have heard of Miles’s rescue of Dr Canaba a few years earlier, and they want him to get them off-planet, too.

One of the many plots in A Civil Campaign involves Mark’s new friend Enrique Borgos, a naïve, probably autistic geneticist whom Mark had bailed out of jail on another planet.  He was in prison because he has no business sense and hadn’t realised that he had accidentally sold more than 100% of shares of the business he was trying to start – he honestly didn’t intend to commit fraud.  And Mark, given that he comes from the lawless planet Jackson’s Whole, doesn’t realise that Bail Equals Freedom does not apply on planets that have a functioning legal system, and that the Escobaran authorities are going to come looking for Enrique.

Captain Vorpatril’s Alliance: well, I’ll quote the TV Tropes page for Citizenship Marriage for this one:

Ivan Vorpatril marries a Mafia Princess from a clan destroyed in a Mob War to keep her from being arrested by local immigration authorities, which might have betrayed her location to the rival clan. Bonus points are given for the ceremony ⁽spoken wedding oaths in front of two witnesses are legally binding on Barrayar) taking place as the authorities are breaking down the barricaded door to Ivan's apartment.

Details not listed on that page – Ivan’s new wife Tej is from Jackson’s Whole (so we get a whole new culture-shock observer view of Barrayar), but also has Cetagandan ancestry, and Cetaganda is Barrayar’s traditional enemy.  Oh, and Ivan’s household now includes not just Tej, but her sister Rish, a genetically engineered blue-skinned pointy-eared dancer.  Remember what I said about Barrayaran prejudice against mutants?

Why am I wittering about all this?  Why am I not writing a serious blog post about the Ukraine War, or about real-life memoirs of refugees?  Well, narrative books in general, whether novels or memoirs, manage to be universal by being specific.  By taking us to the story of one character and making us feel for them, the narrative forces us to remember that each of the tens of thousands of people claiming asylum in Britain is an individual person, and that most of them, too, are people we would probably feel for, and even love, if we knew them well enough.

But fiction – and well-written speculative fiction in particular – takes this a step further, because it bypasses our opinions about the politics of any given conflict in our world.  It seizes us by the imagination, entertains us, and gives us the chance to get to know the characters better than they would allow us to if they were real live people writing memoirs.  Then it drops us back in this universe and says, ‘Well, now what are you going to do?’