Space opera with real grown-ups

I’m scrambling to meet Worlds Without End’s Women of Genre Fiction challenge, so I finally decided to read Lois McMaster Bujold’s Shards of Honor, on the basis that (a) it met the parameters of the challenge (b) I already had it from when I bought the second spec fic Humble Bundle and (c) it was the shortest thing I had on hand that would count for the challenge. And so: Christmas Day, me, sitting on the couch, eating caramelized bacon and waiting for hungover family members to stop napping so we could cook, reading Shards of Honor as fast as I possibly could. That’s just how I roll.

Shards of Honor is, basically, a military sci-fi romance, telling the epic story of how Captain Cordelia Naismith ditched Beta colony and ran away to marry Lord Aral Vorkosigan, one of the most elite warriors of the elite warrior class of the warlike Barrayar civilization. My understanding of the Vorkosigan Saga series, of which this is the first installment, is that the protagonist for most of it is Cordelia and Vorkosigan’s son, making this a sort of How-Mommy-And-Daddy-Met prequel to the rest of it. In this case, how Mommy and Daddy met involves a lot of interplanetary politicking and Cordelia getting taken prisoner in increasingly ridiculous ways.

There is totally a star-crossed lovers joke to be made about Cordelia and Vorkosigan, as even before the war breaks out Beta colony and Barrayar don’t like each other very much at all; each colony/country/thing has a big stick up their butt about how their way of doing things is the only proper civilized not-stupid way and what is wrong with those (choose: brutal, wimpy) other people anyway. When the war breaks out it gets even worse.

Cordelia and Vorkosigan first meet when both of their missions on a weird alien planet go wrong at about the same time. Cordelia’s mission was an exploratory one, leading a team of botanists and stuff to research the fantastically crazy flora and fauna of this planet, which involves things like hydrogen-filled floating vampire jellyfish (+10 points to Bujold for worldbuilding, just for the vampire jellyfish). Her team was attacked by Barrayarans, who are considering starting a war over this particular planet. Vorkosigan’s mission was not precisely to kill all of Cordelia’s scientists, but that’s basically what happened because a rival political faction picked this mission to instigate a mutiny against Vorkosigan.

Vorkosigan takes Cordelia prisoner, along with one of Cordelia’s men who is suffering from nerve disruptor damage and has lost all higher brain functions. Cordelia learns all sorts of fun things about the Barrayaran culture and political situations on their four-day adventure to stay alive and get to the supply depot, where Vorkosigan surprises his men by being not dead and re-takes command. Cordelia is rescued by some of her men in the middle of the mutineers trying to re-mutiny, and things are kind of awkward because Cordelia’s rescuers have teamed up with the mutineers to make this happen, but Cordelia at this point kind of likes Vorkosigan and really is not at all on Team Mutineers. Cordelia awesomely pulls off a weird half-baked plot to both foil the mutineers and escape with her men.

Some months later, war is on, and Cordelia is now officially a combat captain, when she and her men again get captured by Barrayarans. This time she is captured by a deeply unpleasant and twisted dude who plans to torture and rape her, in what is really one of the most uncomfortable scenes I have read in a damn long time. Creepy dude tries to outsource the raping to a former soldier of Vorkosigan’s, however, and the soldier (who is a very interesting but not very intelligent sort) recognizes Cordelia and still has her mentally categorized as Vorkosigan’s prisoner. Vorkosigan has very strong feelings about not hurting prisoners. The soldier kills the creepy dude instead, and this is where the plot really starts to go crazy enough that I don’t think I can summarize it. The political situation in Barrayar is deeply complicated, full of plots within plots and the sorts of things that make an honorable guy like Vorkosigan start drinking heavily when he figures out what’s going on and what part he actually has in all of it.

Cordelia returns from the war a hero, although she is shell-shocked and also really annoyed that nobody will listen to or believe her accounts about what happened and what she did and did not do. (The main sticking point on this one is that creepy rapist guy did not succeed in raping her, and she was not the one who killed him, but everyone is totally sure that he raped her but then she did kill him, because that’s the story they want.) This reaches the final straw when she meets a series of smug psychologists who are all a hundred thousand million bajillion percent sure they know exactly what did and did not happen to her, and that any evidence to the contrary is merely evidence of a really good cover-up, and anything Cordelia says to the contrary is obviously just denial, because there is of course no way that things could have gone any way other than the way a bunch of people who weren’t there decided they did. Cordelia eventually gets so frustrated with this condescending treatment that she runs off to Barrayan to see if Vorkosigan is still interested in her. Cordelia’s escape from Beta Colony is an absolute delight to read; it’s clever, it’s funny, it contains much off-the-cuff manipulating of journalists and spaceship pilots. Cordelia really has an amazing talent for pulling off completely harebrained escape attempts by the seat of her pants.

The romance in this story, despite being sort of the point of the novel, is all very understated, except for the weird Jane Austeny thing where the first move anybody makes is a marriage proposal. But it is a very sensible marriage proposal, as Cordelia and Vorkosigan are both sensible mature adults. It’s quite easy to see why they make a good match, and they work very well together. It’s also cute that they are both a bit older, frequently being the oldest characters around, so they have a sort of bonding over competent world-weariness thing going on that for some reason I really like. They are both generally pretty level-headed people, and Cordelia in particular has a sort of resourcefulness and dry sense of humor that I really like in a protagonist.

Overall, Shards of Honor was a really solid and enjoyable space opera, with a little bit of everything—action and romance and intrigue and humor—and generally likeable characters. While I am bummed to hear that Cordelia won’t be the heroine in the other books—Cordelia is pretty great, I have not gushed on for too long about how great Cordelia is BUT I COULD—I will certainly be putting them on The TBR List, if only in hopes of more floating vampire jellyfish.
 

KILLER FAIRY HORSES OMG

Clearly, I need to start paying closer attention to Kindle deals thingies. A fortuitous instance of other people paying attention for me led to me obtaining a two-dollar copy of Maggie Stiefvater’s The Scorpio Races. Things I knew about this book beforehand: It has ‘Scorpio’ in the title. Things I knew about the author beforehand: she called one of my friends “beardy fellow” at the Boston Book Festival. For two dollars, this is enough to go on.

The Scorpio Races turned out to be a YA fantasy about killer water horses, which is pretty cool. It takes place on a small island, geographically and temporally vague but seeming sort of midcentury British Isles-y, named Thisby. Thisby is a rough, rocky little place that is plagued by carnivorous horses that live in the ocean, and which frequently come up out of the ocean to eat sheep and sometimes people. Many of the islanders try to capture and sort-of-tame these water horses, called capaill uisce, and every November they race them along the beach. These races are called the Scorpio Races, and they are a big tourist draw, which makes up a big chunk of Thisby’s economy.

Our dual protagonists are Sean Kendrick, a teenage boy who has won several previous Scorpio Races on a blood-red water horse named Corr, and Puck Connolly, a teenage girl who decides to ride in the races out of desperation. Puck is the first girl to every try to run in the races, and, predictably, a lot of people aren’t happy about that. She also decides to ride on her regular horse, Dove, rather than try to tame a water horse. This also ruffles a lot of people’s feathers. Sean thinks Puck is out of her mind to attempt such a thing, but he isn’t threatened/offended and he also admires her bravery. Sean teams up with Puck to help her train and there is a bit of an Obligatory Romance because of course there is.

Puck’s main antagonist is Benjamin Malvern, the wealthiest man on the island, who owns a large horse farm and is also the landlord for Puck’s house. Puck lives with her two brothers, and they have been barely getting by since both of Puck’s parents were killed by wild water horses, but they have fallen way behind on payments on the house, and Puck needs the winning purse to pay off the house or they will be evicted. Puck’s secondary antagonists are all the dudes who are really put out about there being a girl in the races, and who keep trying to bully her out of them.

Sean’s main antagonist is Mutt Malvern, Benjamin Malvern’s son. Sean works for Mr. Malvern at the horse farm, training both regular and water horses. Mutt is both terrible with horses and generally an asshole, and he resents that Sean gets all kinds of respect around the horse farm and around the island in general (and from Mr. Malvern in particular) for, y’know, being good at what he does and winning the races and stuff. Mutt also seems to resent the fact that Sean has basically kept him alive through the last several races, a resentment that festers nastily when paired with denial that Sean has done any such thing. Mutt’s desire to get in Sean’s way becomes tunnel-visioned enough that by the halfway point of the book, he is willing to sacrifice pretty much anything to stick it to Sean, up to and including maiming his own father’s prize horses, because of course wrecking your daddy’s livelihood will make him super proud of you. Sean’s secondary antagonist is Mr. Malvern himself, who refuses to sell him Corr at any price. Sean, inspired by Puck’s nutty bravery, threatens to quit the races and the horse farm unless Mr. Malvern makes a deal—Sean will race, and if he wins, he can buy Corr.

Obviously I am not going to tell you who wins the race but suffice it to say that they cannot both win.

This is one of those books where the real main character is the location. The island of Thisby has a very strong, primal identity, and a great hold over many of its inhabitants. People are either irrevocably tied to it or they can’t wait to get the hell out. Everything about the island is governed by its intense relationship to the water and the water horses—the beach, the tides, the storms, the dangers of emerging capaill uisce. In addition to the tradition of the races, the island has a whole body of traditions surrounding the races—from the decadently sweet November cakes baked only in Thisby (EXCEPT THE BOOK COMES WITH A RECIPE SO YOU CAN MAKE THEM YOURSELF AND THEY SOUND SO GOOD) (IT SOUNDS BETTER THAN QUICK AFTER-BATTLE TRIPLE CHOCOLATE CAKE EVEN, BUT I WILL HAVE TO MAKE SOME TO BE SURE), to the nighttime blood sacrifice to the pagan mare goddess when the riders declare their mounts (but at least nobody has to eat a horse heart).

While I am not a Horse Person and I feel like this book would probably be more captivating to people who are Horse People, Maggie Stiefvater does a great job of communicating Sean and Puck’s attachments to their horses on an emotional/visceral level, so I was able to stay engaged and somewhat empathize with the characters’ attachments to their horses. (Same goes with Thisby, actually; being trapped on an insular, isolated, rainy-ass little island with a bunch of horses and sheep and the continual danger of being eaten sounds like literally my own personal hell, but I bought it while I was reading.) I was kept guessing about how the race was going to turn out, and I thought the ending pulled it all together well. I liked that the book was a little bit sweet and a little bit funny and a big bit creepy and weird. While the bits involving the actual racing of crazy fairy horses that eat people were obviously what one would class as action scenes, I liked that a lot of the plot was a bit… quieter, dealing in gossip and money and tourists and domestic life stuff like that. I think Stiefvater actually hit the perfect balance between regular small-town drama and KILLER FAIRY HORSES, for maximum atmospherics and tension.

I am definitely planning on checking out her other stuff, hopefully soon. But first, I must make November cakes!