bloodygranuaile (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
bloodygranuaile) wrote2025-02-15 02:56 pm
bloodygranuaile) wrote2025-02-15 02:56 pm
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In which Miles gets beaten like a pinata until money falls out of Simon Illyan
Next up in my Vorkosigan Saga journey was Borders of Infinity, which is not so much a novel as three short stories/almost-novellas bundled together with a little frame story. The frame story is slight but it works–Miles is immobilized in the hospital after getting his arm bones replaced, and his boss, Simon Illyan, takes advantage of his temporary locational stability to corner him and demand he explain a bunch of cost overruns he’s racked up on behalf of the Dendarii Mercenaries. Thus, Miles must tell Illyan three stories in which things did not go quite according to plan and got very expensive.
The three stories are all very different. The first one, “The Mountains of Mourning,” is a murder mystery set in the backwater mountains of Vorkosigan territory on Barrayar, regarding the infanticide of a child with a birth defect. The mechanics of the murder mystery plot itself are fine; the real draw here is thematic–Miles, his father’s deformed son, is sent as Count Aral Vorkosigan’s Speaker to investigate the murder that the old country mores do not deem as murder. The result is a look into the painful psychology of shifting cultural expectations–even when the expectations are, by any rational measure, shifting for the better.
The second story, “Labyrinth,” is just weird. Miles is back in space as Captain Naismith in this one, doing a job out of the organized crime planet Jackson’s Whole. He gets involved in rescuing not one but two genetically engineered damsels in distress–a quaddie, meaning a person with four arms and no legs, and the last surviving member of a cohort of experimental supersoldiers, a sixteen-year-old girl who is basically a werewolf. This is where the Vorkosigan Saga turns into monsterfucker romance, basically. But it’s also a solid espionage caper.
The third story, the titular “Borders of Infinity,” involves springing 10,000 people from a Cetagandan POW camp that is supposed to be impossible to escape from. This camp is a masterclass in psychological warfare, leaving it to Miles to un-psychological-warfare its residents so they can prepare to escape/be rescued. The cost to this escape plan is high, hence Simon Illyan’s visit, but it is nevertheless a spectacular large-scale operation for the Dendarii Mercenaries, in pleasing contrast to the small-scale but still very chaotic operation of “Labyrinth.”
These stories all take place a few years apart from each other, and it is clear that, fortunately for the reader, Miles is growing up. He is still a horny weirdo with too much plot armor but the series continues to be a lot of fun and, while it certainly has ongoing themes, isn’t repetitive enough to get stale.
The three stories are all very different. The first one, “The Mountains of Mourning,” is a murder mystery set in the backwater mountains of Vorkosigan territory on Barrayar, regarding the infanticide of a child with a birth defect. The mechanics of the murder mystery plot itself are fine; the real draw here is thematic–Miles, his father’s deformed son, is sent as Count Aral Vorkosigan’s Speaker to investigate the murder that the old country mores do not deem as murder. The result is a look into the painful psychology of shifting cultural expectations–even when the expectations are, by any rational measure, shifting for the better.
The second story, “Labyrinth,” is just weird. Miles is back in space as Captain Naismith in this one, doing a job out of the organized crime planet Jackson’s Whole. He gets involved in rescuing not one but two genetically engineered damsels in distress–a quaddie, meaning a person with four arms and no legs, and the last surviving member of a cohort of experimental supersoldiers, a sixteen-year-old girl who is basically a werewolf. This is where the Vorkosigan Saga turns into monsterfucker romance, basically. But it’s also a solid espionage caper.
The third story, the titular “Borders of Infinity,” involves springing 10,000 people from a Cetagandan POW camp that is supposed to be impossible to escape from. This camp is a masterclass in psychological warfare, leaving it to Miles to un-psychological-warfare its residents so they can prepare to escape/be rescued. The cost to this escape plan is high, hence Simon Illyan’s visit, but it is nevertheless a spectacular large-scale operation for the Dendarii Mercenaries, in pleasing contrast to the small-scale but still very chaotic operation of “Labyrinth.”
These stories all take place a few years apart from each other, and it is clear that, fortunately for the reader, Miles is growing up. He is still a horny weirdo with too much plot armor but the series continues to be a lot of fun and, while it certainly has ongoing themes, isn’t repetitive enough to get stale.