Elliott Good asked Lois McMaster Bujold:

Vorkosigan Idea - Miles does real legislation in Vorkosigan District as I always felt that this was never addressed given as there district always seems to fall behind as Aral and Miles were always off world or at the Capital worrying about Barrayar. Thoughts?

Lois McMaster Bujold
It's not legislation the VK district needs, it's economic and technological development (the two go hand in hand), education and medical care (ditto), and terraforming. None of which are as easy to implement as waving a pen. People are working hard on all these, but there's so much to do, and it goes "as slowly as a baby grows". If you look from week to week, you see nothing, year to year, some, decade to decade, lots.

Aral, I keep needing to point out, did not have a free hand in the district till Piotr died when Miles was 17, although Cordelia was able to get in some groundwork on the education and medical sides after the reconciliation when Miles was about 6, as "women's work". With a full school generation built and coming on to do the work, when they did get full control they were able to implement quite a lot -- Aral through appointed deputies, as he was always tied up in the capital, Cordelia directly.

By the time we come to the Sergyar Years, Miles, Ekaterin, and Mark as a team are able to do even more, with the human capital painstakingly built up over the prior decade and a half. One cannot run (or build, for that matter) either a hospital or a fusion power plant without highly and expensively trained people. Returning retirees from the military, who had their tech training beyond the district, would be very important starter-leavening for these projects in all eras.

Another point that escapes many readers is that there must always have been quite a bit of what we would dub local democracy going in all over Barrayar, or the place simply would not function. Village moots (of non-uniform sorts, depending on local history) choose the village Speakers, not the district count, ditto town and township councils, city mayors, and so on. A count is the titular head of the district justice system, but even a little math must reveal that he has a whole web of people under him, of which the books only give tiny glimpses, that decide and filter out almost everything but final appeals. The system runs more heavily to build-ups of precedent, bottom-up, than official codes, top-down, though it has both, again varying by district. Granted, the cumulative effect can get almost as weird as British law.

My further thoughts on all this drift from worldbuilding to the more meta level of novel writing (and selling), so this is probably enough for now.

Ta, L.

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