bloodygranuaile | Entries tagged with science fiction

June’s entry in the Vorkosigan Saga read was A Civil Campaign, which had been hyped to me as a Regency romance dropped in the middle of this futuristic mil-sci-fi series. I’m not a huge Regency romance reader unless it is by actual Regency-era social comic Jane Austen, but the mixing up of Regency romance with the futuristic mil-sci-fi world of the Vorkosigan Saga and its charmingly nasty throwback empire of Barryar intrigued me, plus I already know and am invested in most of these characters. I really enjoyed Komarr, and I was actually interested in the dynamic between Miles and Ekaterin, so I was quite curious to see how this went now that Ekaterin is back on Barrayar.

In proper romantic comedy style, it goes very poorly, for everybody. Now that the big bad terrorist plot of the previous book has been foiled, everyone is going full-bore insane about Emperor Gregor’s wedding, except possibly Emperor Gregor, who is patiently bearing up under the weight of all the imperial pomp and nonsense associated with the wedding, apparently grounded both by his entire personality and the desire to get to the being married part without incident. Ivan has been press-ganged into service to his mother Lady Alys and a battalion of Vor matron social captains; Ekaterin is fending off unwanted suitors with both hands–at one point, literally–and trying to find work; Miles is trying to court Ekaterin without her noticing and also engage in some politicking in the Council of Counts. Mark has adopted a brilliant but utterly common-sense-free bug scientist and is trying to develop a real company with him and the help of some of the younger Koudelka girls, which is complicated by the Koudelka parents’ reaction to his relationship with Kareen.

This is the base state of problems established in the first few chapters. Things get much more contentious as Ivan’s old girlfriend Lady Donna takes a quick trip to Beta Colony to become Barrayar’s first openly transmasculine Vor, squarely for the purpose of inserting herself into the line of succession for a Countship. One thing I liked about this particularly pseudo-Regency book was all the “battle of the sexes” type bullshit was put quite squarely on Barrayar’s patriarchal culture and not any kind of “men are from mars, women are from venus” type gender essentialist bullshit. The men and the women are both from Barrayar, and if Barrayar stays a man’s world for much longer, it might one of these days find itself shorter on women than it already is.

Anyway, resting upon this foundation of fairly serious commentary about gender roles, the book consists largely of Shenanigans. There is an utterly disastrous dinner party, an extremely silly scene involving the Koudelka girls throwing bug butter at a pair of Escobarian cops, some tragic letter-writing, a Very Dramatic Parliamentary Scene in the Council of Counts, multiple awkward marriage proposals, some very satisfying psychological warfare from Countess Cordelia once she shows up again, and a nice helping of competence porn from all quarters as everyone slowly pulls themselves out of the holes they’ve dug themselves into, stops stepping on every rake on Barrayar, and rediscovers their ability to kick ass and take names. All the men get engaged (except Ivan) and all the women get jobs. There is a little bit of And Then Gregor Fixes Everything which really highlights just how utterly fucked Barrayar would be if basically anyone else were Emperor and how utterly fucked it will become if it doesn’t change before somebody else becomes Emperor. But, given that the Council of Counts says trans rights (in a very roundabout and fucked-up way that really wouldn’t pass muster in a serious society), it appears Barrayar is changing, and there may be hope yet.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

Continuing my Lois McMaster Bujold adventures, I read Cetaganda, the next installment in the Vorkosigan Saga. This one follows Miles and his much handsomer, much dumber cousin Ivan as they go on a diplomatic mission to the Cetagandan Empire, which until very recently has been a recurring enemy of Barrayar.

Miles and Ivan were actually not sent to Cetaganda on any mission other than their public one, which was to represent and deliver a gift from Emperor Gregor at the funeral of the Cetagandan Dowager Empress Lisbet Degtiar. However, a very sensitive intelligence mission attacks them before they’ve even docked properly at the Cetagandan shuttle station (getting them to dock improperly is the opening salvo of the plot, in fact). Miles then spends a tight 300 pages trying to figure out what the fuck is going on and which Cetagandan nob is trying to frame Barrayar for their own treason so they can start another war, which, while Barrayar has won the last couple wars against Cetaganda, they’d still really like to take a good generation-long break from. Miles’ ability to do intel/counter-intel is initially hampered by being in a strange civilization where he doesn’t know anybody and doesn’t know how stuff works, but through sheer enfant-terrible-whiz-kid-ness and plot armor a mile thick, he manages to avoid dying (multiple times) for long enough to talk his way into cultivating some allies, spinning some theories, and gaining access to all sorts of very off-limits-to-barbarian-outworlders spaces in Cetagandan culture.

The Cetagandans are master… well, eugenicists, basically, although (as far as we can see) they are less about murdering undesirables (for genetics reasons, anyway; they’re real big on it as part of regular imperial expansionism) than about tinkering with gene lines to create an incredibly baroque and insular aristocratic power structure, kind of like how all European royalty are cousins with each other, except since it’s being done by Science instead of the old-fashioned way they can avoid any unfortunate Habsburg chins and suchlike. The upper class of genetically on-purpose Cetagandans are called the haut, and they are all very hot, and the women float around in little force-bubbles when in public so no one can see them. The sort of gentry or lower-aristocratic class, from which most of the military brass is drawn, are called the ghem, and the highest honor a ghem-lord can win from the Emperor, even higher than the Order of Merit, is an haut-lady wife. The other big division of labor in Cetagandan society is gender, with the women in charge of the genome project and the men in charge of externally facing Imperial politics. This division does not in any way usurp the class solidarity of the haut, of course.

All this is a bit baffling to Miles, who comes from Barrayar, a place where power is very firmly in the hands of Men Who Can Kill Lots of People. Fortunately, as befits a protagonist, Miles is a quick study, and has the benefit of being constantly underestimated. (He is, in fact, so underestimated that at one point the as-yet-unknown antagonist sees Miles poking around and assumes that Ivan must be the one directing him, and promptly kidnaps Ivan, who is a dumbass who doesn’t know shit about what’s going on.)

In very classic Miles fashion, our hero spends nearly as much time and effort trying to avoid reporting his mission to his superiors–either the Barrayaran ambassador, or the protocol officer, who is actually the embassy’s ImpSec commander–because he doesn’t want them to take the mission away from him and send it up the chain of command, which is what would probably happen given that Miles is a 22-year-old lieutenant with no subordinates.

This gets increasingly difficult as the shenanigans heighten. A low-ranking, broke young ghem-lord takes a sort of half-assed interest in the Barrayaran oddities and plays a series of minor xenophobic pranks on them that are sometimes actual assassination attempts, which he doesn’t seem to be aware of. Ivan develops a reputation among the ghem-women while Miles does detective work and keeps causing minor diplomatic incidents by being in places he shouldn’t be. An Imperial servant is murdered and it is staged to look like a suicide, and Miles tries to gently direct the Cetagandan security officer in charge of the investigation to do actual investigating instead of wrapping it up quickly and quietly, which he is under significant pressure to do. This works because Miles, insufferably protagonist-y as he can be, is certainly not The Guy With the Only Brain Cell–in fact, in this particular book he seems to be surrounded mostly by very smart and competent people, except for Ivan and Lord Yenaro (and even they are competent at some things. Yenaro’s competency, unfortunately, is perfumery, not political intrigue).

Overall verdict is pretty in keeping with the rest of the Saga: a little tropey but a lot of fun.

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.

The next book on my little adventure in reading all of Lois McMaster Bujold’s Vorkosigan Saga books was The Warrior’s Apprentice, the first book about the series’ protagonist proper, Miles Vorkosigan. In this one Miles is in his teens, just old enough to be a protagonist in a book that is not a children’s book, but which might have been YA if it had been published more recently.

Miles is a very specific type of insufferably clever teenage protagonist, although he is saved from being too insufferably The Universe’s Specialist Clever Boy by having bones that are basically made of glass in a highly militaristic culture that usually puts disabled kids out for the wolves. Despite said militaristic culture’s belief that he ought to have been aborted, Miles’ dream is to be an officer in the Emperor’s Service, because this is a space adventures book and you’re not going to get very far being enlightened enough to eschew imperialist militarism. At the beginning of this book, Miles breaks both his legs during the physical tests to get into the Service Academy, and goes to visit his grandmother off-world for a bit to cool off.

Miles, having a serious case of Being A Protagonist, arrives at Beta Colony and after approximately 0.5 seconds gets himself entangled in somebody else’s problems and has to start improvising increasingly dangerous and insane lies to get himself out of it. To this end he winds up setting up a fake mercenary company. At first, it consists of himself, his bodyguard Sergeant Bothari, Bothari’s beautiful and athletic daughter Elena, and the depressed wormhole-jumping pilot that he just adopted as an armsman even though the pilot is not Barrayaran. His indulgent Betan grandmother also “invests” in it.

The fake mercenary company picks up its first contract delivering military supplies disguised as agricultural equipment to an out-of-the-way backwater planet under blockade in a nasty military conflict with the out-of-the-way backwater planet next door. This puts our couldn’t-get-into-the-Service-Academy-without-breaking-his-legs right in the middle of a live siege situation, as the commander of a supposed fleet of ships but actually just one ship, although through some clever ambushing and lying he is quickly able to make it two ships. From here there is a lot more ambushing and lying as Miles gets increasingly deep into the conflict between the two planets–and the much bigger, wealthier, and well-established mercenary company that the other team has hired. Over the course of the conflict a lot of personal history gets dug up, particularly around the mystery of Elena’s mother. As the actual conflict–or at least, the mercenaries’ involvement in it–starts to wind up, Barrayaran politics begin to re-emerge, in the form of Miles’ idiot cousin Ivan, somehow the sole messenger out of a ship full of messengers that was supposed to summon him home. The final batch of plot points take place squarely within the world of Barrayaran court intrigue, even if the physical manifestations of this intrigue had managed to reach out into other parts of space.

Overall this book is like 80% fun (to read about) space warrior shenanigans and 20% Miles discovering that space warrior shenanigans are actually terrible and suck ass to be part of. This is about the correct balance for enjoying reading a military adventure story while being a person who thinks war is basically bad. I’m excited for more horrible Barrayaran politics of death in the next book!

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.

In my “short story collections acquired at Readercon” selection that I have a copy of Elizabeth Bear’s Shoggoths in Bloom. I like the Elizabeth Bear novels that I’ve read, although I also have a couple more novels of hers that are still on the TBR shelf through no fault of their own.

Shoggoths in Bloom has a mix of fantasy and sci-fi, and overall they’re all pretty good–some I liked better than others, obviously, but I don’t think I’d call any of them duds. We got a few stories set in larger worlds from her novels–there’s an Eternal Sky story, and a story from the POV of One-Eyed Jack, the genius of Las Vegas–and of course the titular “Shoggoths in Bloom” dips into the Lovecraftian mythos. There are twenty stories in this collection, which is challenging for me to review. The stories tend toward the serious; when there is humor, which is with reasonable frequency, it tends toward the dry. A few of the protagonists are cops/investigators/otherwise law-enforcement-adjacent of some kind; one is a sort of magical detective that has to work around the regular kind. This seems to be more for the ease of facilitation for mystery-solving plots than any particular ideological affiliation with cops on Bear’s part; even some of her cops are kind of down on cops. The more important thing is that the mysteries are good, solid short story mysteries with satisfying little twists at the end.

Overall, this is a good collection that might provide me with some extra impetus to also read one of the three unread novels by the author that are still on my shelf.

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.

It’s a long weekend and that means I had time to sit around and reread Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Sword, the second book in the Imperial Radch trilogy. In this one, the cast of characters expands dramatically, as our lone wolf AI heroine Breq gets put in charge of a ship, Mercy of Kalr, which is a little awkward given that Breq used to be a ship. On orders from one of the factions of Anaander Mianaai, Fleet Captain Breq goes to Athoek System–which consists mostly of the tea-growing planet Athoek and the associated Athoek Station–to secure it, and Lieutenant Awn’s sister, from the depredations of the civil war that’s broken out. Having been given a big pile of resources–military authority, the house name Mianaai, a ship, officers, a crew, and a bunch of access codes–Breq descends upon Athoek Station and starts aggressively inserting herself into a fixing everyone’s problems, to the great consternation of the people who liked it when those other people had problems. A lot of station politics happen, sometimes violently, and new factions come into play–or, more often, are uncovered as having already been in play. The lieutenants all have personal problems, two of them with each other. It’s all very fun.

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.

Hurrah, new Murderbot! Yes, I did preorder Martha Wells’ System Collapse as an early birthday present for myself and I did finish it within two days.

This one picks up after the events of Network Effect, and we’re still on the alien-contaminated planet, “we” in this case being Murderbot, ART, some Preservation folks, and some of ART’s crew. The task at hand is to try to wrangle the various disputing factions of colonists, who have been cut off from the rest of Corporation Rim “civilization” for four decades, and convince/help them not be sold into slave labor by the Barish-Estranza Corporation, which is trying to claim the planet as salvage. The plot thickens when the colonists reveal the existence of another faction of colonists who headed out to establish a second base near the terraforming engines halfway across the planet a few decades ago. Murderbot and co. must venture into the comms blackout zone where the terraforming engines are to try to make contact with this other group of colonists–and hope Barish-Estranza hasn’t gotten there first.

That’s the plot, more or less. Now, what the book is about, is Murderbot having PTSD, mostly.

In typical Murderbot fashion, it spends like the first third or so of the book redacting any discussion of its worst symptoms, until it really can’t avoid it anymore. This provides some fun structure even though it’s reasonably easy to see where it’s going.

The prose style is rambling and parenthetical even by Murderbot standards, which is saved from feeling like poor editing by instead being an absolutely dead-on portrayal of what obsessive, unhelpful rumination looks like when your emotional problems are interfering with your executive function, or if you’re a security cyborg, your performance reliability. Murderbot keeps its crown of Most Hashtag-Relatable Robot In Sci-Fi by outsourcing most of its self-awareness about its emotions to its therapist (“Dr. Bharadwaj says…”) and grumbling about how it knows it needs the trauma protocol, it just doesn’t want it and will totally do it later, OK? (Hey, Murderbot, remember how much you hated it when Dr. Mensah was doing the same thing a few books back?) This is saved from devolving into pretentious didacticism the same way it usually is–lots of arguing with robots, ridiculous gunfights, trying to understand humans enough to outwit them and then usually shooting them anyway, and goofy fake TV shows. (I still want to know what show Cruel Romance Personage is making fun of. I’m guessing Crazy Ex-Girlfriend?) Anyway, I enjoy these books immensely, they are my favorite comfort read.

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.

Oh no! I’m now out of Murderbot to reread!

I reread all of Fugitive Telemetry in one sitting, because I’m still 10% sick and welched out of doing literally anything else at all that evening. I regret nothing.

This one is a straight-up murder mystery, where someone has been mysteriously murdered on Preservation Station even though that sort of thing never happens. Murderbot reluctantly joins forces with the human-and-augmented-human Preservation Station Security team to collaborate on solving the murder and also, at Dr. Mensah’s explicit directive, to improve its working relationship with them. In attempting to figure out whodunit they end up exposing both a crime ring (the good kind, i.e., the crime is breaking Corporation Rim “contract labor” laws) and some corporate espionage (DEFINITELY the bad kind). Murderbot has to learn how to do crime-solving in a non-surveillance-state, which it finds frustrating but which I loved. Gurathin continually saves Murderbot’s ass and Murderbot is too self-loathing to realize that Gurathin doesn’t actually hate it anymore. Murderbot and Gurathin are just similarly task-oriented and it is clear to ME that Gurathin is taking care of Murderbot, he’s just not touchy-feely about it, which Murderbot OUGHT to be able to RECOGNIZE except that it doesn’t want to. Anyway. I’m definitely normal about Murderbot and the Preservation survey team, I promise.

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.

Exit Strategy is the fourth book in the boxed set of the Murderbot Diaries, bringing this particular story arc to a close. Having retrieved a bunch of incriminating data against GrayCris in Rogue Protocol, Murderbot plans to bring it to Dr. Mensah–except that the newsbursts seem to indicate that something fishy is going on re: Dr. Mensah’s whereabouts. GrayCris seems to think that she sent Murderbot to the “terraforming” facility deliberately, and in retaliation, has outright kidnapped her. This leaves Murderbot with two risky decisions to make: Where to send the data, and where to send itself.

In a fit of heroics, Murderbot sends the data to Dr. Mensah’s marital partners on the non-corporate political entity Preservation, and then charges deep into enemy territory to rescue Dr. Mensah itself. Teaming back up with several of the humans from the planetary survey in All Systems Red, Murderbot has to deal with the twin horrors of multiple murder attempts from GrayCris and its contracted security company Palisade, and of interacting with humans who insist upon liking it and caring about its feelings and generally treating it like a real person, albeit one who is kind of an asshole (especially to Gurathin, who for some reason Murderbot is convinced still dislikes it. Gonna guess it’s because their personalities are too similar). All in all it’s a very satisfying little conclusion to this story arc, in that GrayCris gets its ass handed to it and Murderbot doesn’t die despite a nearly self-sacrificing bout of battle rage at one of GrayCris’ CombatSecUnits. Murderbot gets to use skills it has learned over the course of the earlier books from sources other than watching Sanctuary Moon, including facing down some higher-level challenges to its well-practiced hacking skills, and copying a dangerous trick or three from ART (still sadly absent in this volume) to stave off a killware attack. After bravely almost sacrificing itself to heist Dr. Mensah from the jaws of GrayCris, Murderbot is fucked up enough that it has to stick around long enough to be told that none of the Preservation crew are trying to imprison it or tell it what to do, it’s just allowed to stay on Preservation with them until it figures out what it wants to do. Murderbot hates the feelings it has about this nearly as much as it hates being told what to do, but it doesn’t run away again, which IMO constitutes a satisfying amount of character growth for one story arc. I’m trying to wait a couple of days before rushing headlong into buying Network Effect.

Next up: Rogue Protocol, otherwise known as “the one where Murderbot does corporate espionage on GrayCris even though nobody asked it to.” After digging into its own background during the events of Artificial Condition, Murderbot sees a newsburst indicating that a new company has picked up where GrayCris supposedly left off at a terraforming facility that it had abandoned. Rumors were abounding that GrayCris had actually been mining the planet in question for illegal synthetics and not actually terraforming at all, which meant that the company that had bought it was now well positioned to discover if something was off about this “terraforming” facility. This is where Murderbot comes in, sneaking its way onto the facility to look for evidence of GrayCris’ malfeasance, and portraying itself as a secret extra security person when it is discovered.

In this book, Murderbot’s journey of self-discovery is largely helped along by a friendly little bot called Miki, who is basically the human researchers’ pet robot. Murderbot doesn’t want to be a pet robot but is nonetheless subjected to having many emotions about the degree to which Miki and the humans seem to actually care about each other. Murderbot’s journey of corporate malfeasance discovery and data retrieval is also helped along by Miki, who talks the humans into trusting Murderbot for long enough to let it help, and even tries to fight the combat units that GrayCris left behind to cause trouble. The action sequences are thrilling and cinematic and all that stuff you want out of a space opera about cyborgs doing corporate espionage in space. Since this is my second read I know that Murderbot has now basically made the rounds meeting people enough that further books will involve in going “home” in various ways (i.e. running into them again) so I don’t even have to be too critical of the sad lack of ART in this one, especially since ART clearly lives on in spirit under Murderbot’s skin basically all the time.