Lois McMaster Bujold

The Vorkosigan Saga — (1986-2010) Omnibus and audio versions are available. Publisher: Our hero is a quiet, upstanding citizen of Athos, an obstetrician in a world in which reproduction is carried out entirely via uterine replicator, without the aid of living women. Problem: the 200-year-old cultures are not providing eggs the way they used to, and attempts to order replacements by mail have failed catastrophically. But when Ethan is sent to find out what happened and acquire more eggs, he finds himself in a morass of Cetagandan covert ops and Jackson Whole politics — and the only person who's around to rescue him is the inimitable — and, disturbingly, female — Elli Quinn, Dendarii rent-a-spy.

Publishing Chronology (There are other suggesting reading orders):

The Vorkosigan Saga (Baen Omnibus #1: Shards of Honor, Barrayar, The Warrior’s Apprentice)

Do you like fancy military uniforms? Shiny spaceships that blow things up? Brooding aristocrats with hulking stone castles and dark secrets? Snappy comebacks and one-liners? Voluptuous women warriors? Swords and secret passages? Surprising twists on standard military tactics of engagement?

If you answered “Yes” to three or more, check out the Vorkosigan Saga. Lois McMaster Bujold started this series in the mid-80s. The Vorkosigan books start out as space opera, even having maps of the various planets and star systems with those so-convenient wormholes linking everyone together, and convincingly add a stratified, highly mannered aristocratic society on one of the principal planets. Later books have become more sociopolitical while still set against a dynamic interplanetary background.

The main character of the series is Miles Vorkosigan. Miles is a smart, physically damaged character with a lot to prove. He is an aristocrat, a crown prince and a highly skilled covert operative. He is a risk-taker and when he makes mistakes, they are profound. Sometimes he is a fool, but usually, when it matters, he is brilliant.

Shards of Honor and Barrayar introduce us to Miles’s parents, Cordelia Naismith and Aral Vorkosigan. In the midst of an interplanetary war, Cordelia, a native of the Beta colony, raised in a tolerant, sexually open, egalitarian, high-tech and seriously bureaucratic society, clashes with and ultimately falls for a warrior-prince from a rigid, military, patriarchal one. Shards of Honor tells the story of their meeting. Cordelia disregards the shock of her home planet and its nanny-state government, marries Aral and moves to Barrayar. In Barrayar, we observe the mutual culture shock that follows. Women have some power on Barrayar, but they do not have equality. The Vor is an elite of families charged with running the planet, and Aral’s family is classic Vor. Aral has as much committed the unthinkable with this marriage as Cordelia has. His father in particular is disapproving of what he sees as a misalliance.

Cordelia soon learns that there are many cliques, coalitions and conspiracies, and that Aral has enemies, some of whom would like nothing better than to drive a wedge between Aral and his new wife. At a formal reception, a new acquaintance, catching Cordelia apart from her husband, tries to inject some venom:

He paused, watching Aral, watching her watch Aral. One corner of his mouth quirked up, then the quirk vanished in a thoughtful pursing of his lips. “He’s bisexual, you know.” He took a delicate sip of wine.

“Was bisexual,” she corrected absently, looking fondly across the room. “Now he’s monogamous.”

Barrayar quickly leads us into a political coup and an assassination attempt on Cordelia and Aral, with a disastrous impact on the newly pregnant Cordelia. The damage to her unborn child does not stop her from fighting at Aral’s side, and her woman-warrior skills even win over her father-in-law at the end. Aral becomes the Regent for Prince Gregor, a physically perfect six-year-old destined to be emperor.

The Vor (and all the people of Barrayar) worship racial purity and physical strength, and are terrified of mutation, for reasons that are clearly and credibly delineated in the back-story. Cordelia’s baby is born with brittle bones that shatter at the slightest impact. In a society that values physical perfection, this is a serious drawback. Miles represents both a genetic failure — even though his weaknesses are not genetic — and his society’s worst fear. While the brittle bones can be dealt with medically, Miles Vorkosigan is the opposite of what a Vor lord is supposed to be, and he and his father both know it.

In The Warrior’s Apprentice, Miles, at 17, has just failed the physical exam for the Imperial Military Academy. Despondent, he goes on a family trip to Beta. In short order he rescues an on-the-skids jump-ship pilot, co-opts a mercenary fleet, styles himself “Admiral Naismith” and saves the underdogs in a nasty civil war, pausing long enough to suffer pangs of unrequited love and jealousy over his childhood playmate Eleni and pick up a Barrayaran military deserter who is a genius with engines.

It appears that Miles is a flippin’ genius at strategy and tactics (years of dodging the neighborhood bullies at home?) but his real gift is that of inspiring loyalty and getting people to work at their maximum capacity, or beyond it.

One of the best things about the early Miles Vorkosigan books is the idea that the bluffing, one-upping, dueling, raygun-toting, make-it-up-as-I-go hero is four feet tall and has bones that will crack if he sits down too hard. He talks as fast as a guy on his seventh energy drink, and like William Ryker on Star Trek, he never met a female alien he didn’t like. There is real darkness in these books, though. In the first two, rape is deployed as a weapon of terror, with some reverberations into later books. At times, the humorous, straightforward prose seems disrespectful of the serious nature of the plot, but no one will doubt Miles’s determination to make things right, even when he’s making mistakes.

These early stories play with the theme of the outsider, with Cordelia in the first two as a literal outsider, and Miles having the more painful role of the person within the culture who doesn’t quite fit in. The early Vorkosigan stories, those with “Admiral Naismith,” can be read as Miles trying to find a place for himself in the universe.

The three early books should be read close together so that you understand the story of Miles, and why he drives himself so hard. The action is brisk, the characters are good, and there is quite a bit of funny dialogue. I quibble a bit at some of Bujold’s anachronistic word choices, but really, things are usually happening so quickly, and are so interesting, that I don’t get thrown out of the story.

A final warning; a Vorkosigan book is like a potato chip. If you start with these three, you’ll want to read more! —Marion Deeds

The Vorkosigan Saga (Baen Omnibus #2: The Vor Game, Brothers in Arms, Mirror Dance)

Miles Vorkosigan is nearly a dwarf, with bones as brittle as fine porcelain, and he is a Vor, one of the elite, the son of the Imperial Regent. The Vor, and everyone on Barrayar for that matter, are terrified of mutation because of their history, and Miles looks like a mutation even though he isn’t one. During the middle books of this series, Miles finds a way to serve his planet while succeeding in space, where for the most part people judge achievement more than physical appearance.

Miles cannot escape his Barrayaran heritage, however. In The Vor Game, he must rescue his cousin and planetary emperor Gregor from a kidnap attempt. In Brothers in Arms, Miles travels to Earth and meets a long-lost relative who may be his most dangerous adversary. Mirror Dance finds Miles, for part of the book, back on Barrayar.

The Vor Game mixes space opera with political drama, and gives us a charming, dangerous character in Commander Calvino. Miles plays a double game in order to rescue Gregor, but is he tempted, just for a moment, to let the plan play out? Gregor, who is smooth, calm and deliberate — the complete opposite of Miles — is no pushover, as he reminds us:

... both of my parents died violently in political intrigues before I was six years old. A fact you might have researched. Did you think you were dealing with an amateur?

Until now Miles has had two identities, his “real” Barrayaran identity and the cover role of Admiral Naismith, mercenary commander, secretly in the employ of Barrayaran Intelligence. Brothers in Arms adds a new facet to the Vorkosigan character when Miles meets his clone.

Miles goes to London, on old Earth, a city that has built locks at the mouth of the Thames to keep the rising waters from flooding the city. While there, Miles has a strange hallucination in which he sees himself in a Vor military uniform. Shortly, he discovers that this was no hallucination. Someone got DNA from Miles when he was a baby and cloned him, setting in motion a long-range plan to assassinate Miles’s father and plant a mole in the heart of the Barrayaran government. Because a true clone of Miles’s DNA would not show the damage caused in utero by poison gas, the clone should be about six feet tall and robust, but he is not. He is the same height as Miles, with a disproportionately large head, and his bones show every break, check and flaw as Miles. This gives the reader some idea of the clone’s early days. He does not greet Miles with whoops of brotherly joy. Miles, though, does manage to win him over, which is good — since the clone, who names himself Mark, is also a highly-trained assassin.

The final scenes take place in the locks, an exciting hide-and-seek action sequence. At the end of the book, Mark reluctantly agrees to meet his DNA-host family on Barrayar.

One of the different things about these books is the mix of high tech with the rigid social society on Barrayar. Bujold offers a critique of the concept of the male-dominated, paramilitary society while simultaneously writing fine military sci-fi — the Vor are fine with energy weapons, but things like uterine replicators, which make pregnancy safer for the woman and the fetus, are viewed as newfangled and probably evil. Clones, however, are commonplace, most of them the product of a planet called Jackson’s Whole, which is the Rodeo Drive of cloning with a Costco at the end of the block.

In Mirror Dance, the story follows Mark as he pursues a black-market cloning operation. In Bujold’s universe, cloning is used for the purposes we would expect; genetic engineering to create super-soldiers, sex slaves, and the most logical purpose, spare parts. Mark’s early years and his identification as a clone have engendered in him a seething hatred for those he calls “clone consumers.” When he is not on Jackson’s Whole, Mark struggles to deal with his resentment of the Vorkosigans, and his desire for a family, for love. The mirror dance, which is danced at a formal ball Mark attends, is a fine metaphor for his struggles in the book.

I have a couple of quibbles with the Vor books. One is the perfection of some of the characters. Gregor should win a gold medal for too-good-to-be-true, but Cordelia and Aral are bafflingly permissive as parents. Aral is a revolutionary, a patriot and a Vor through and through. In spite of his love for Cordelia and his love for Miles, is there never the teeniest bit of shame about his less than perfect son? He lets Miles, his fragile son and sole heir, gallivant around the universe with only the occasional manly sigh of concern when he finds out, after the fact, how bad things were. Cordelia, a Betan, is open-minded and accepting, having no trouble taking in her clone-son Mark, and in fact shares intimate information about his biological father’s sexual hardwiring. This behavior is either admirably egalitarian or downright creepy. I also roll my eyes at the anachronistic language. Commander Calvino growls that she will grind someone “into hamburger.” Hamburger, really? This is in marked contrast to the studied, mannered, carefully paced language the characters drop into when they are about to deliver a bon mot.

I did say they were quibbles, however. In the long run, the Vorkosigan books keep me up reading way too late at night, and that is the mark of good storytelling. —Marion Deeds

The Vorkosigan Saga (Baen Omnibus #3: Memory, Komarr, A Civil Campaign)

In Memory, Komarr and A Civil Campaign, Lois McMaster Bujold turns the Vor Saga from space opera to planetary politics.

Miles Vorkosigan has always been a risk-taker. Usually the person he puts at risk is himself, but in Memory, Miles’s choice injures a crew member. Miles compounds the problem by procrastinating and then outright lying in his report. Even hundreds of years in the future, the cover-up is often worse than the original act, and the consequences for Miles are serious. He must give up the mercenary fleet and the alter ego “Admiral Naismith.”

Miles, though, is too valuable an instrument to leave on the shelf, and Emperor Gregor soon makes him an Imperial Auditor. At first this sounds punishingly tedious to Miles, but Gregor points out that an Auditor is an Imperial inquiry agent, and the unique traits that make Miles so, well, Miles-like are exactly what Gregor needs.

Komarr is a futuristic detective novel. Komarr, a neighboring planet in the Barryaran system, is being terra-formed, and there has been an incident with the equipment that might have been sabotage. The name Vorkosigan is met with hatred on Komarr, where Lord Aral Vorkosigan brutally put down a rebellion decades earlier. Political skullduggery, criminal conspiracy and a love story all unfold. In Komarr, Miles finally meets a woman he may be able to be happy with. After his exotic liaisons and hook-ups with galactic tough-girls, Ekaterin is something of a surprise; a conventional Vor woman. She has a son with a genetic condition, and Miles soon bonds with the boy. Ekaterin is well-drawn and believable, a good match for the Vorkosigan scion and the secretly lonely hero.

A Civil Campaign is a book with many subplots. Back on Barrayar, Miles continues his courtship of Ekaterin, who is trying to make her own way under very difficult circumstances. Miles’s clone-brother Mark is pursuing a business venture with madcap results. Emperor Gregor is involved in a royal wedding — his own, to a Komarran, a match that will finally join Barrayar and Komarr in peace. And a young Vor lady brings information to Gregor that will change the political landscape of the whole planet.

Mark’s butterbug marketing scheme was the least successful storyline here as far as I was concerned. The Vor books are filled with dry wit and slapstick humor, but this Three-Stooges-style farce, especially the predictable dinner party scene, didn’t work for me. I also thought that Gregor, who comes to the aid of a nine-year-old-boy at the eleventh hour, was too good to be quite true. Yes, he had told the boy to call him if he were in danger. Yes, Gregor must be a man of this word, and yes, I do understand that we must see Gregor as a protector of children in order to recognize how different he is from his sadistic, insane father. Still, Gregor has a planet to run and a wedding to plan. I would have expected a snappish comment or an acerbic remark directed at Miles, at the very least.

Still, there is so much here to like. Miles and Ekaterin are poignant as two vulnerable people trying to be together in the face of huge odds, and the subplot involving gender politics hits all the right notes.

Early in the Vor Saga, Bujold gave herself a huge canvas and filled it with an extended ensemble of characters. From Cordelia and Aral, Miles and Mark, to their very Vor cousin, to family retainers, to Gregor and the royal court, she has left herself plenty to work with, and deploys these interesting people with skill, humor and panache. At the end of A Civil Campaign, Miles is no longer a space pirate/undercover operative. He has found a woman to share his life, and a way to be Vor and still be fulfilled. And has he truly settled down? Only time will tell. —Marion Deeds

Cryoburn

Cryoburn is the long-awaited new novel in Lois McMaster Bujold’s excellent VORKOSIGAN SAGA, following 2002’s Diplomatic Immunity. If you’re not familiar with this series yet and are in the mood for some intelligent, character-driven and consistently entertaining SF, drop everything now and go find the first few books. Almost all of them are conveniently available in affordable omnibus editions from Baen. You can start with the Cordelia’s Honor omnibus if you want to read the series according to internal chronological order, or Young Miles if you want to start where Miles Vorkosigan, the series’ unforgettable hero, really gets into gear.

In Cryoburn, Miles is on Kidou-daini (a brand new planet in the series, as far as I know) to investigate a possible scam involving cryogenically frozen people. As the novel starts off, he has just narrowly escaped becoming a hostage during an attack at a cryonics conference and is wandering around in a drugged haze, because he happens to be allergic to the drug used by his would-be kidnappers. By the time the (very amusing) hallucinations wear off, he finds himself in an underground cryonics clinic, taken under the wing of a young boy who has recently run away from home. Eventually, Miles finds his way back to the local Barrayaran consulate, and begins to unravel a mystery that leads much, much farther than anyone originally suspected...

Cryoburn shows Miles in his Imperial Auditor role, investigating a mystery in the name of Emperor Gregor, but as he isn’t actually on Barrayar, his powers are more limited than they would be on his home planet. Still, in typical Miles fashion he quickly pulls the local consular staff along in his wake as he investigates and solves the mystery through legal, quasi-legal and, well, uniquely Milesian methods. As always, there’s lots of action, a good amount of humor, and Bujold’s consistently excellent dialogues. It’s hard to be bored, reading a Miles Vorkosigan novel.

By now, a narrative infused with Miles’ manic energy will be more or less expected by long-time readers, but as a special treat, Cryoburn alternates viewpoints from Miles to Jin, the boy he meets at the cryonics clinic, and (best of all) Miles’ Armsman, Roic. Roic is a sturdy, calm fellow who sounds as if he is used to his master’s antics by now. It really can’t be a coincidence that his name rhymes with ‘stoic’. Seeing Miles through Roic’s eyes is the best part of this novel.

In a nutshell, Cryoburn is a good installment in a great series. I doubt that many long-time fans of the VORKOSIGAN SAGA would consider this one of the best entries in the series, but expecting that would put the bar almost impossibly high. The plot also doesn’t really advance the overall story arc of the series much, and instead reads as if it could be one of five or ten other missions Miles completed in the same year. However, the end of the novel, which is unconnected to the mission, suddenly and painfully yanks you back into the main continuity of the series, and will have you clamoring for the next book. Since it’s been almost 10 years since the last Miles book, hopefully this will motivate some new readers to get into the VORKOSIGAN SAGA, which is easily one of the best SF series of the last few decades. —Stefan Raets