bloodygranuaile

So, Winterfair Gifts was actually not my July installment of Lois McMaster Bujold’s Vorkosigan Saga–that’s going to be Falling Free, which I haven’t gotten to yet–but I had basically forgotten to put Winterfair Gifts in the lineup as I had been unclear if it constituted a book or not. It’s a novella, hardly more than a short story, and doesn’t seem to have a standalone print publication, but I got the ebook and read it that way. It took me about an hour and a half to read the whole thing, which was a nice way to cap off a night where I’d finally finished a lengthy nonfiction book that it’d taken me upwards of 10 days to read.

Winterfair Gifts is a charming little story from the point of view of Armsman Roic, last seen at the end of A Civil Campaign wearing briefs, boots, his gun holster on the wrong way, a lot of bug butter, and nothing else. Roic is Miles’ most junior armsman, and until this point has mostly been a rather one-dimensional comic relief himbo sort of character, so it was fun to get a little bit of his background and see how things look from his point of view. Roic comes from a fairly provincial Barrayaran background and is somewhat in awe of all the galactic experiences and high-ranking shenanigans of his new employers, but he is doing his best to learn and expand his mind and lives in fear that Miles, Armsman Pym, and the other bigshots whose company he must now keep think he’s an idiot.

Roic’s horizons are abruptly expanded when two of Miles’ colleagues from his old life show up to Barrayar as wedding guests–the jumpship pilot Arde Mayhew, and the bioengineered werewolf-esque Sergeant Taura. Once his initial shock wears off, Roic finds himself very attracted to Taura, but unsure how to navigate picking up an eight-foot-tall galactic mercenary while constantly on duty.

Plot stuff happens when Ekaterin, who is already under some degree of emotional stress about the wedding, falls ill, and Sergeant Taura develops an unorthodox theory about one of the wedding gifts, which she attempts to investigate on her own. This doesn’t get very far, and instead, Taura and Armsman Roic find themselves trying to keep their cool while bringing in all sorts of very important ImpSec people that they’re not used to talking to. Fortunately, because this is a cute short short, the threat is eventually neutralized and the mystery solved, Ekaterin gets better and the wedding goes off beautifully, and Armsman Roic both proves himself Not An Idiot to his superiors and gets to snog Taura.

This story was overall pretty cute and fluffy (minus Ekaterin almost dying) in a way that wouldn’t at all have worked for me as an independent story with characters I didn’t know, but as a Vorkosigan Saga book it was a delightful little romp full of all our Fan Favorites and worked perfectly as an escapist palate cleaner from the day I’d been having. I’m looking forward to tackling Falling Free later this week.

While I am certainly enjoying all my early American history nonfiction reading, I am finding that the highlight of my reading month is increasingly whichever installment of Lois McMaster Bujold’s Vorkosigan Saga I have on deck. I decided to schedule these out so I didn’t burn out on the series but I’m increasingly finding that as soon as I finish one I really want to run right back to the library and pick up the next.

This month’s book was Komarr, in which our hero Lord Miles Vorkosigan, now an Imperial Auditor, accompanies another Imperial Auditor (formerly an engineering professor) to the titular planet to investigate a mysterious accident that had destroyed part of the planet’s terraforming infrastructure. Much of the book is from the POV of the other auditor’s niece, a Vor lady of about thirty, whose husband is the administrator of the department that includes the terraforming project. Ekaterin is a great character and I immediately found myself hoping that she got out of her shitty marriage with her shitty husband, which was in fact taken care of in a plot-appropriately terrible way that made it all nice and complicated but also very satisfying. Excellent look into the dynamics of an emotionally abusive marriage and what it can do specifically to very intelligent people that are, in fact, more intelligent than their partners, which the shitty partners are insecure about. (Obviously, this book might be upsetting reading for anyone who’s been in a controlling relationship with someone who used the same sorts of tactics, but a lot of the interesting psychological stuff that goes on in the Vorkosigan Saga comes with the same caveat, and I like that the book deals with stuff that regular people go through as well as dealing with insane space empire political and technological intrigues.)

This is one of the few books I’ve read in quite a while where the romance brewing at the end actually does have me all wound up and invested in it. I am chewing the drywall to see where this goes. So far the secondhand embarrassment is exquisite and the various mental tangles that Miles and Ekaterin are getting up to in rationalizing their feelings to themselves are excellently illustrative of both of their characters and situations. It also illustrates the difference between “being vulnerable and letting somebody take care of you” versus “being sloppy and making somebody else clean up your mess” in a way that has no business being woven into a story about mysteriously exploding terraforming equipment on Space Holland (trade oligarchy built on artificially reclaimed land. You tell me Komarr isn’t Space Holland).

Anyway this series really has it all and does it all; it is going off in directions I would not have foreseen from the first couple books but which nonetheless all make perfect sense for the series that it is. When is my June 1 hold coming in?

My Vorkosigan Saga installment for March was Mirror Dance, which, in addition to being a regular novel and not a bunch of short stories, is over 500 pages long. This scotched my assumption that I could knock it out in 24 hours but I did get through it pretty quickly–three or four days, I think–because not only are these books pretty fast-paced generally, but this one was maybe one of the most gripping adventures yet.

Our hero, Miles, is… well, he’s actually dead for at least a third of the book. Which means the hero of this specific book is actually largely his clone-brother, now dubbed Mark. Mark was an antagonist in an earlier book, as he was a project of a Komarran terrorist cell. In this one, freed of the control of… well, anyone, for the first time in his life, Mark finds himself alone in the galaxy, with only his traumas for company. He does have one driving motivation, though, and it’s not the hatred of Barrayar that was so carefully cultivated in him for so long (although he’s pretty contemptuous of it)--it’s hatred of the clone-brain-transplant trade on the organized crime planet of Jackson’s Whole. To this end, Mark cooks up a plot to impersonate Miles in his persona as Admiral Miles Naismith, “borrow” the Dendarii Mercenaries, and go spring a bunch of teenage clones from House Bharaputra.

Things go very poorly on this raid, and Mark, with whatever allies he can muster, must spend the next 450 pages trying to fix the mess he created. This takes 450 pages because the mess includes things like “Miles is dead now.” There is also a lot of complicated Jacksonian politics, and some Barrayaran politics, and some personal politics within the Dendarii Mercenaries, and and and. At one point Mark even ends up having politics within himself, as his various traumas and identities get put through the wringer in some very disturbing ways.

This installment of the Saga features a lot of things that are designed to inflict maximum psychological damage on the characters, and thus might be triggering for readers as well–including sexual violence, eating disorders, child abuse, torture, and a lot of gruesome medical stuff–and while some of it betrays the book’s origins as having been written several decades ago (I wince a little every time we use “it” for Bel Thorne instead of the obvious “they”), Bujold is clearly a lot more interested in actual psychology and the effect of all these insane experiences upon people than your average midlist 20th century mil sci fi author. Mark is a very different character from Miles, and his slow and painful (VERY painful) journey toward coming out of Miles’ shadow and figuring out himself in his own right is fascinating.

We also get to see a good deal of Cordelia, who by now is at least in her sixties and still an incredibly fun character.

Overall, this one seemed a little more serious than some of the other installments in the series, and I think it did that pretty well. I am excited to see where the series goes next.

According to the reading guide I’m following, the next book up in my Vorkosigan Saga reading marathon was Brothers in Arms, which clearly chronologically takes place after Borders of Infinity, so I guess we’ll see what’s up with that next month.

In this one, Miles and his fleet of supposedly-independent mercenaries have to stop off at Earth to put themselves back together after a successful but very costly mission that has pissed off, unsurprisingly, the Cetagandans, who are now trying to assassinate Miles as Admiral Naismith. Miles also has to check in with the Barrayaran embassy–where, surprisingly to Miles but perhaps unsurprisingly for the reader–his himbo cousin Ivan is putting in some time as second military attache to get himself cultured. Miles Vorkosigan is promptly designated third military attache and ordered to start doing diplomatic duties by the ImpSec captain at the embassy, a somewhat dour Komarran fellow named Duv Galeni.

Miles has two very big problems starting off: one, he needs a big infusion of cash from ImpSec, pronto, and it keeps not coming; and two, his two identities are now hanging out on the same planet, which is not great given how physically distinctive he is. This is how the main shenanigans crop up: after, in desperation, telling a too-observant report that Admiral Naismith is a clone of Lord Vorkosigan–created by the Cetagandans, as far as they know–an ACTUAL CLONE of Miles shows up, as part of a Komarran rebel plot run by, of all people, Duv Galeni’s father. This is bad for Galeni in that he gets kidnapped although good for him in that his father is hesitant to execute him. It is also likely to be very, very bad for his career.

Miles has a lot of feelings about the clone, and the clone has also, clearly, has a lot of feelings about Miles, mostly very different ones. According to Betan law the clone would be Miles’ younger brother and as their mother is Betan, that makes it applicable, as far as Miles is concerned, and if the clone is Cordelia’s son and Miles’ brother then he’s also Aral Vorkosigan’s son, which means his name is Mark Pierre Vorkosigan and he is entitled by Barrayaran law to various things as the second son of Aral Vorkosigan. Mark–who has been going by Miles because his entire existence has been geared toward replacing Miles in a byzantine plot to destabilize the Barrayaran imperium–does not initially seem to like being dubbed Mark but he didn’t like being Miles either. Mark’s, uh, entire life seems to have done a number on him psychologically, which is very understandable.

The introduction of additional family members who are also enemies, for both Miles and our new character Galeni, adds a fun layer to the usual Vorkosigan Saga string of increasingly frantic shenanigans and plots within plots and faction fighting and general Situations with a capital S.

This was honestly perfect sick reading–I read it in a 24-hour span in which I was sick and, completely unrelatedly, had to go to the emergency room–as it both kept my problems in perspective and was also just a fun space romp that I didn’t have to think too deeply about. Nice easy reading; my biggest challenge was not bleeding on Beth’s nice hardback. (I succeeded and the hardback is unscathed.) Excited to see what Borders of Infinity has in store for me.

The next installment in my Vorkosigan Saga reading project was Lois McMaster Bujold’s now-somewhat-unfortunately-titled The Vor Game, in which our precocious but physically fragile hero, Miles, having just graduated from the Service Academy, is now Ensign Vorkosigan. As his first assignment, Miles is given what, for Miles, is an impossible task: He’s got to stay somewhere boring for six whole months and keep his nose clean. To this end he winds up in the Arctic doing weather technician stuff, which he picks up pretty quickly, and things are comparatively uneventful for the first three months, minus one or two near-death experiences and the subtle hints of something being deeply and nefariously wrong with the commander.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, things at the Arctic base explode spectacularly after about three months, the commander is discharged for brutality (which is impressive in Barrayar, a notoriously pro-brutality society), and Miles is reassigned by his chagrined superiors to a suitably out-of-the-public-eye assignment with ImpSec, the military intelligence service. Here he is sent on a secret mission that is not to rescue the Emperor, it is about his band of mercenaries from the last book and the tense political situation among a bunch of planets that hold strategically important wormhole gates. All this goes absolutely tits up when the Emperor goes missing–something Miles is not informed about, and thus discovers only when he unexpectedly runs into his old childhood playmate and friend, Emperor Gregor Vorbarra.

From thence (actually starting significantly before this) the plot follows a satisfying structure of 1) Miles is in a Situation 2) Miles comes up with a brilliant plan to get out of the Situation 3) The brilliant plan doesn’t quite pan out and Miles is now merely stuck in a different and usually worse Situation. This goes on for about three-quarters of the book, when Miles amasses enough information to start turning the tables on at least some of his many, many adversaries and starts digging himself out of at least some of the situations. His main adversary for a number of the conflicts Miles finds himself embroiled in is the head of another mercenary company called Randall’s Rangers. This commander is a femme fatale type with a seemingly endless capacity for double- and triple-crossing people and a strategic mind that’s not necessarily always three steps ahead so much as always three steps in every direction, so that no matter what happens, she wins. She is also very short, but she’s pretty, making her an excellent and not particularly subtle foil for Miles. She has decided to “rescue” Gregor and set herself up as Empress of Barrayer. Miles does not like this idea, and even Elena, who hates Barrayar and left it on purpose, doesn’t seem to think Barrayar deserves such a fate as having Commander Cavilo for Empress.

Miles does eventually solve the mystery of why the Hegen Hub seems about to explode into warfare with nobody having any idea why, although he does not quite manage to prevent it from exploding into warfare. He does manage to figure out who should be on what side and get the information to the right places so that they actually do that, and then they win, which is nice. Gregor largely rescues himself. Miles is moved into a position where being an enfant terrible is less of a liability.

Honestly this is mostly just really fun military sci-fi. The characters occasionally pull out some Deep Thoughts that can sort of constitute Themes if you want, but mostly they are all little shits, and there is lots of intrigue and people getting beaten up and other things that it’s fun to see happen to little shits.

Next book just arrived at the library. I’m excited to see what situations our main little shit gets himself into this time.

I have committed myself to reading one book each month of Lois McMaster Bujold’s Vorkosigan Saga, so that I can be prepared for Readercon 2026 when we celebrate the 40th anniversary of the first publication in the series. Ordinary you’d think enthusiasm for this would be left to people who are already fans of the series, but I love a reading challenge and I do not love being left out of whatever the hot topic of discussion is at Readercon, so I’ve got a lot of books to read, only most of which are in my library’s network! I read Shards of Honor several years ago, which I remember was fun although I don’t really remember what happened in it other than that there was lots of escaping from hostage situations. The next installment–chronologically, though not in publication order–is Barrayar, which follows the adventures of Cordelia Vorkosigan, nee Naismith, as she arrives on the militaristic, feudal planet of Barrayar with her husband and her natural pregnancy, and is immediately besieged by the plot happening.

On Barrayar, the old emperor is dying and the new emperor is a four-year-old boy. Cordelia’s husband, Aral Vorkosigan, is chosen by the old dying emperor as Regent until Emperor Gregor reaches his majority at age twenty. This puts Cordelia, Aral, and the unborn heir to the Vorkosigan countship in the middle of a very volatile political situation, which Cordelia frankly has very little respect for, since she thinks the traditional Barrayan attitudes toward class and militarism are both thoroughly idiotic. Cordelia has to learn about Barrayar quickly whether she likes what she finds or not, though, both because she lives here now, and because plot keep happening to her that will require her to assume a variety of disguises, build alliances with people she didn’t already know, cut deals, execute plans on the fly, and other adventure shenanigans where cultural incompetence could prove very, very costly. A couple assassination attempts on Aral and Cordelia, an emergency surgery to transfer Cordelia’s unborn baby into an artificial uterus so that it can be subjected to emergency medical experiments, and a political coup by one of the douchey super-conservative counts sends Cordelia into a sequence of planetary wildernesses that she’s not used to–hills, caves, the poor neighborhoods of cities. Much of these shenanigans involve very young children–at one point Cordelia is responsible for hiding the young Emperor; at another point she has to rescue an also-pregnant friend and help her have her baby in the least convenient time and place Bujold could think of; late in the book she has to heist her own baby out of the city before the artificial uterus fails from lack of maintenance.

Despite the bad dreams it gave me about babies with fucked-up bones, this was overall a pretty fun set of “competence porn” action-adventure shenanigans. Cordelia is smart and resourceful and gathers up a ragtag band o’ misfits whose various competencies are either ignored or rejected due to Barrayar’s very narrow ideas of appropriate behavior, and together they survive various horrors and eventually show everybody who exactly it is they’re messing with, that sort of thing. Fun and satisfying, and I hope the rest of the series remains as enjoyable even though I understand we are ditching Cordelia as our main character and will be going most of the rest of the series with the medical experimentation baby as the protagonist. So we’ll see how that goes.

Spent more of the long weekend sitting around rereading Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Mercy, which is the further adventures of Breq Mianaai, formerly the troop carrier Justice of Toren. Most of this one is still spent in and around Athoek Station, although for civil war reasons quite a lot of it is also spent hiding out in gate-space, between Athoek System and the Ghost System. Gate-space is more fun than you’d think since it allows us little breathers to hang out with all the insane people Breq has collected on her journey, including Presger Translator Zeiat, who likes to drink fish sauce and is so glad she’s not Translator Dlique; an ancillary from the long-lost, pre-Radch spaceship Sphene, who is rude and snarky to everybody except sometimes Zeiat; Mercy of Kalr, who is learning things from Breq that are emotionally difficult for Breq to deal with; and cross-class lovers Lieutenants Ekalu and Lieutenant Seivarden, who are on a long and painfully slow journey toward Seivarden being ever so slightly less of a self-absorbed asshole. There’s also a single instance of the shittier Anaander Mianaai, who manages to royally piss off Athoek Station, to satisfyingly funny results. The ending definitely feels like a setup to further books, and also makes extremely explicit that the Point (with a capital P) that Leckie is making here is that “endings” are just the beginnings of other things and politics is never over, but it does appear that Breq did succeed in her mission of absolutely fucking up Anaander Mianaai’s whole deal, so that was nice. Overall, still a great, fun entry in the “Disaster Queers in Space” subgenre of space opera. I’m very glad I reread it.

On a recent trip to Vermont I indulged myself in the purchase of Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Justice, and my girlfriend indulged me with buying the two sequels to read herself and then to promptly hand over into my possession so they could stay together and I wouldn’t blow up my books-purchasing count.

Ancillary Justice is a big fun space opera from the point of view of an AI, which is a type of science fiction that I have a big weakness for (see also: my beloved Murderbot). “Breq” used to be a big ship but is now only one human body. This reduction in stature has not stopped her from being on a mission of revenge against the many-bodied ruler of the Radch empire, Anaander Mianaai. This mission of revenge brings her to an ice planet full of (justifiably) cranky provincials where she on purpose finds a scientist with a useful antiquities collection and accidentally finds a former lieutenant of hers named Seivarden, who is herself an antiquity, as she once got stuck in a suspension pod for a thousand years and then woke up to find everyone she’s ever known dead. Seivarden didn’t handle this well and wandered off out of the Radch to do drugs for a bit before Breq scoops her up and saves her life, basically against her will. Breq pretends to be a foreign tourist until she maneuvers herself into a position to get an audience with Anaander Mianaai, or at least some of Anaander Mianaai. Breq ends up being suborned into a bunch of inter-Anaander Mianaai politics even though if she had her druthers she’d just shoot all the Anaander Mianaais on both sides of her internal conflict.

At the time this book was published it was subjected to a lot of discourse and now, with the discourse in the back mirror, I was wondering if it would hold up. I think it does. Without a bunch of discourse about people bugging out about pronoun use in the Radch… well, you get used to it after a few pages and then it’s a fun space opera about a bunch of traumatized military goons doing revenge and intrigue and hinting at the threat posed by bigger, weirder, more powerful forces than the Radch, although of course we don’t meet the Presger yet because that is what sequels are for. There is explosive space combat and fussy imperial shit about manners and tea. It’s a great time.

Every now and again the politics book club decides to read some fiction, and this time we decided to read a Russian sci-fi classic I had never heard of, We by Yevgeny Zamyatin.

We was written in 1921 and as far as I can tell is the first entry in the sci-fi subgenre of far-future dystopias, predating such classics as Brave New World and 1984. Frankly, knowing that Orwell read and apparently loved We seems to retroactively dim the luster of 1984 a little bit, as they are in many ways very similar, so I must revise my estimation of Orwell’s imaginative faculties downward a little bit.

We is the personal diary of the mathematician D-503, a chief engineer of a glass spaceship called the Integral, who begins keeping his diary with the intent of putting it on the spaceship to explain the wonders of life under the One State to the aliens that the One State intends to use the Integral to conquer. It’s unclear to me if the aliens actually exist or if the One State just figures they probably exist, but that’s not really the point. The point is that D-503 is a model One State cipher, until he isn’t.

By “a model One State cipher” I mean that D-503 is an absolutely insufferable STEMlord with not only not an ounce of poetry in his soul, but also almost no capacity to think thoughts in any way other than mathematically, which he is convinced–and, sadly, so is the rest of his civilization–that this constitutes having reached some sort of “higher” capacity for thought rather than just having a very, very narrow field of aptitude. The One State has sealed itself off entirely from the natural world by means of a big green glass wall whose electric-fence-like extension goes so far into the air that even birds can’t fly over the city. Even the food is synthetic. While we’re a hundred years out from the specific events and discourses in revolutionary Russia that Zamyatin was apparently parodying here, it’s interesting to me, as an American a hundred years later, that if you let your Communism go down the path of elevating Taylorism and rationality and technological progress over everything else you seem to end up with something that looks suspiciously like the hideous Apple Store, Soylent-drinking future that today’s worst Silicon Valley technobros are working to bring into being.

Things begin to go tits-up for D-503 shortly after he begins keeping his diary. In traditional Western literature fashion the disrupting influence here is that he falls in love with a hot lady. Part of me is rolling my eyes at this so hard they are falling out of my head–I’m not sure there’s ever been a time in my life where I didn’t carry a certain amount of disdain for literature’s most shopworn trick of elevating heterosexual-romantic love to the highest moral and societal good by relentlessly finding ways to portray it as some sort of oppressed scrappy underdog–but that is not really the point. The point is that D-503, having developed this immediate and morbid fascination with the mysterious rebel I-330, finds all his comfortably conformist thinking utterly upended, and proceeds to torch basically his entire life and all his prior quiet State-approved relationships, blundering his way into the outer edges of a rebellion that he doesn’t know anything about and can’t quite decide if he supports or not (he’s far too confused). The plot, however, is not really the point; the point is the portrait of a man losing his entire sense of self through the harrowing process of discovering he has a self, when he had previously been a content little cog in the machine; the point is the little rebellions and dramas of the people around him that he’s never been able to really concern himself with (including his ex-girlfriend, O, who seems to have had a quietly rebellious streak all along that D kind of blows off as weak-mindedness in a classically misogynistic way); the point is the increasingly absurd bad rhetoric and cheap tricks and self-serving logic of the One State and its “unanimously elected” Benefactor (anyone who votes against the Benefactor is clearly nuts and their votes shouldn’t be counted, you see). The high point of the worldbuilding, to me, was the discussion of the state department for poetry, which gives us the funniest, most painfully bad doggerel I have read in a hot minute, as well as teasing me with the possibilities of “the immortal tragedy He Who Was Late for Work.”

The language is really fun, which I’m assuming means the original language was also really fun, because I do not have the grounding in Russian to do anything other than assume that Natasha Randall was chosen as translator here because she’s good at her job. But it does a good job of both being very descriptive and making D-503 sound like he’s absolutely, grade A insane at all times, always being impaled on people’s javelin-like eyelashes and being afraid of the square root of -1 and letting his sentences trail off into ellipses. Truly a unique reading experience. I’m sure the book club will have a lot to say about modernism and technofuturism and stuff but for right now I just wish I had enough brainpower to write the tragic poem He Who Was Late for Work.

I had forgotten how much I liked Network Effect!

Some of it might just be because I really dig the novella length for Murderbot’s wacky escapades, and having one random novel in there sort of sticks out weirdly from a series that is otherwise, so far, all novellas. I almost didn’t want to like it as much as I liked the novellas and I was a little surprised that I had given it five stars on the first read, especially given that I had only given all the novellas four stars. This was in the pre-vaccine part of the pandemic and I guess I wasn’t forming memories super well, lol.

Anyway, I started rereading it before bed and the next thing I knew I’d read the first hundred pages and it was super late. Then I did the same thing the next night. Then I blew off going for a walk on the nicest afternoon of the week to finish it (whoops). This one is riveting. There are so many factions! So much drama! An incredibly angry ART! Creepy mind control space aliens shit! Also more SecUnits, including a second killware version of Murderbot, who, among other shenanigans, increases Murderbot’s ability to waste time arguing with itself by a lot. I had totally forgotten the plot somehow but it was a really fun and action-packed space adventure with lots of twists and things not being as they initially seem and all that good stuff, and I was on tenterhooks the whole time.