bloodygranuaile (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
bloodygranuaile) wrote2025-04-14 04:48 pm
bloodygranuaile) wrote2025-04-14 04:48 pm
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All alone in the moooon-liiiiiiiight
My April installment of the Vorkosigan Saga was Memory, one of the Barrayar-based installments, which I’m coming to enjoy almost more than the off-planet adventures. After nearly a dozen volumes I’ve become emotionally invested in the success of Emperor Gregor’s rein, the security and progress of Barrayar, and the fortunes of House Vorkosigan, which is a neat trick given what a feudal hellscape Barrayar is. Maybe it’s because I live in a back-asswards imperial goon squad with a country attached myself, so I find it hopeful.
Anyway! In this book, something is wrong with Miles. Well, two things are wrong with Miles, on involuntary and one voluntary. This moral, medical, and professional dilemma eats up the first chunk of our book, and the results are quite bad for our hero, who is now out of a job and has nothing to do with himself except kick around an empty Vorkosigan House, a state of affairs deeply unsuited to his entire personality. Miles is uhhh sort of rescued from his doldrums by the arrival of a much bigger problem happening to somebody else. The someone else is ImpSec chief Simon Illyan, Miles’ former boss and old family friend. Miles is certainly not going to allow his total lack of standing or the direct orders of the acting ImpSec chief prevent him from going into problem-solving mode and making a grand nuisance of himself. He scrounges up some temporary authority by wheedling Gregor into making him an acting Imperial Auditor and wades energetically into a high-stakes cat-and-mouse game with… someone; he does not yet know who.
I am middlingly pleased with myself to report that I guessed the culprit pretty early on in the game, and pleased with the book to report that I ended up second-guessing myself out of thinking that because the villain did a good enough job misleading both myself and Miles away from them until the key reveal near the end of the book. It was a pretty good plot, worthy of ImpSec! This book also hit some real milestones in terms of personal and career shifts for a lot of the characters; it’ll be fun to see where things go next now that everyone’s got new jobs and almost everyone except Aral and Cordelia have had their romantic lives shaken up. (There’s an adorable old people romance that the younguns remained quite oblivious to while it was becoming increasingly obvious to me; I found the whole setup very charming.)
I’m super tempted to go and release my hold on Komarr early, but I have other things to read and don’t want to burn myself out. I liked this series well enough to start off with but it has really grown on me as it develops.
Anyway! In this book, something is wrong with Miles. Well, two things are wrong with Miles, on involuntary and one voluntary. This moral, medical, and professional dilemma eats up the first chunk of our book, and the results are quite bad for our hero, who is now out of a job and has nothing to do with himself except kick around an empty Vorkosigan House, a state of affairs deeply unsuited to his entire personality. Miles is uhhh sort of rescued from his doldrums by the arrival of a much bigger problem happening to somebody else. The someone else is ImpSec chief Simon Illyan, Miles’ former boss and old family friend. Miles is certainly not going to allow his total lack of standing or the direct orders of the acting ImpSec chief prevent him from going into problem-solving mode and making a grand nuisance of himself. He scrounges up some temporary authority by wheedling Gregor into making him an acting Imperial Auditor and wades energetically into a high-stakes cat-and-mouse game with… someone; he does not yet know who.
I am middlingly pleased with myself to report that I guessed the culprit pretty early on in the game, and pleased with the book to report that I ended up second-guessing myself out of thinking that because the villain did a good enough job misleading both myself and Miles away from them until the key reveal near the end of the book. It was a pretty good plot, worthy of ImpSec! This book also hit some real milestones in terms of personal and career shifts for a lot of the characters; it’ll be fun to see where things go next now that everyone’s got new jobs and almost everyone except Aral and Cordelia have had their romantic lives shaken up. (There’s an adorable old people romance that the younguns remained quite oblivious to while it was becoming increasingly obvious to me; I found the whole setup very charming.)
I’m super tempted to go and release my hold on Komarr early, but I have other things to read and don’t want to burn myself out. I liked this series well enough to start off with but it has really grown on me as it develops.