bloodygranuaile

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.

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.

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.

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 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 don’t like having series split up on my shelves and yet for some reason I read Walter Macken’s Seek the Fair Land back in 2015 and have had the two sequels sitting around separated from their fellow for nine years now. Anyway I decided that was enough of that nonsense and it was time to continue the trilogy; while I didn’t get around to it during Sad Irish Literature Month or my first foray to Maine this year, this weekend it was time! I was determined to at least start on the very depressing-looking The Silent People, and next year I will read The Scorching Wind, for reals.

The Silent People follows the life of a Connemara man named Dualta Duane, starting when he is in his late teens in the 1820s. Duane’s parents died in a famine and he has been raised by his uncle, the schoolmaster, so he can read and write and speaks English pretty well. Trouble begins when the landlord’s son hits him with a whip for not getting out of the way fast enough at a market fair, and Dualta, in the manner of strong young men who have just been physically assaulted for no reason at all, knocks the rich asshole off his horse. This obviously is the morally correct and badass thing to do, but tactically was not so smart. Both Dualta and his uncle have to flee the village, going in separate directions. The novel then follows Dualta’s adventures and misadventures as he makes his way from the Connemara hills to the valleys of Clare, where he meets up with various people who all have various opinions and theories of change about how Ireland will win its freedom–when to fight and when to endure, what sacrifices are worth it and what isn’t, what type of fighting is noble and honorable and what is cowardly and base. The conversations don’t sound at all like the “dialogue lifted from Twitter” type of conversation about politics written by modern writers who are all on Twitter, probably because Macken was writing in the 1960s; I cannot say if the conversations however are particularly authentic to the 1820s or if they are too 1960s to be good historical fiction. All I can say is that they are just as frustrating and stupid as listening to real ordinary people talk about their theories of change in politics, especially the type of ordinary people who don’t know terms like “theory of change” and are only just starting to examine their own assumptions enough to articulate them. Daniel O’Connell (here “O Connell”) makes a set of cameos as the man who basically introduced the theory of nonviolent mass pressure to Ireland singlehandedly; we see his theory, like so many others, work up until the point where it doesn’t.

Dualta crosses paths occasionally with a young lady named Una, whose mother was a McMahon who converted to Protestantism upon marriage, and whose father is a wealthy Protestant landlord. Dualta meets her when he gets hired into the man’s household as a “Trojan horse” from his previous job, which was ostensibly helping a local shopkeeper run her shop but actually using his rare bilingual literacy (the literacy was rare; the bilingualism wasn’t) to write threatening letters on behalf of the local agroterrorist organization. Una converts to Catholicism and is kicked out of the house; later, Dualta runs into her again when she sets up as a day school teacher in a random valley in Clare. Dualta manages to snag a ten-year lease on a bit of property no one else wants in the same valley, and, being both newcomers and the best-educated people in the valley, they eventually join forces, first wrangling the weans at the school and then getting married. They adopt some other misfits over the course of their time in the valley as various political happenings come and go, such as the election of Daniel O Connell to Parliament–a massive event that involves thousands of people all walking to Ennis, because apparently in the 1820s a county would only have one polling station–until the famine hits in 1845 and their painstakingly scraped-together life falls apart.

The book is sad but also dryly funny at times, which is a common enough combination in Irish literature. The writing style has something very midcentury about it that I can’t quite put my finger on, where it includes a lot of small details but they are all in very plain, unflowery language. There is a wealth of information about rural life in 19th-century Ireland woven into the story, a way of life that’s not only lost to time but also which none of us who grew up with running water would put up with for a single second. These people were poor as dirt, did backbreaking labor, owned nothing, and had no security. They rented land, but not houses; they had to build their own houses on the land they rented, and when they were evicted the houses were torn down or set on fire. This meant that what passed for a house for tenant farmers then wouldn’t pass muster as a garage now.

Overall this was, I wouldn’t say a fun time exactly, but a very immersive one.

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.

In another short book for a short month (although this February is at least a little longer than most Februaries), I checked out the newest Wayward Children novella, Mislaid in Parts Half-Known. This one follows pretty directly upon the last one: our main character is again Antsy, who has found her way to the school and has sort-of fallen in with our group of series mains, rooming briefly with Cora and getting saved from Seraphina’s machinations by Kade, Sumi, Cora, Christopher, and some of the Whitethorn escapees.

This honestly seemed a little bit of a bridge book, referring heavily to stuff that happened elsewhere in the series and serving mostly to tidy up some loose ends around Antsy and, to a lesser extent, Sumi and Kora. The main plot is the direct follow-up to how Antsy left things at the shop, which perhaps not surprisingly didn’t go exactly to plan. There is some fun jaunting around to Prism and then to a world full of dinosaurs (I did honestly think the dinosaurs would take up more of the book, given that they are on the front cover, but the sojourn into dinosaur world was pretty brief), but most of it take place either at school or in the Shop Where the Lost Things Go. Series-wise, the biggest turn seems to be the increasing clues that Eleanor may be losing her touch and responsibility needing to be increasingly turned over to Kade–who, we find out, may have been kicked out of his world by the fairies whose rules he broke by being a guy, but who is wanted back in that world very much by the goblin side of things, who have named him the Goblin Prince. It would be great fun for the series to head in the direction of that showdown, but if it does, who will take care of the school? And that’s the thing that makes me want to read more of these–less the enjoyment of this particular installment and more just the positioning of the characters at the end, where some plotlines have resolved and others seem to be opening up. That said, these books are so short that it doesn’t feel like a big ripoff to have one installment where it feels like not much happened and stuff just moved around the way it would if this were a series of 800-page doorstoppers; sometimes you gotta move some characters around. Anyway, we’ll see what happens next.

Sometime when I wasn’t looking, another Craft book came out. This one is called Dead Country and it promises to be the beginning of the Craft Wars series. It’s a lot shorter than Ruin of Angels, clocking in at just under 250 pages. Therefore, I was able to devour the entire thing in less than one weekend.

After the big, planes-spanning drama of Ruin of Angels, this one seemed–at least at first–much more limited in scope. We’re back with our series-starting protagonist Tara Abernathy, now going home to the desert farming community of Edgemont to attend her father’s funeral. Tara had never particularly fit in well in this rinky-dink village on the edge of the Badlands, even before they chased her out of town with pitchforks for witchcraft, and it doesn’t get any less uncomfortable when she shows back up in her fancy suit with her body covered in glyphs.

Tara’s plan to get in, attend the funeral, and get out is foiled by an attack from the Raiders, whose black magic curse is somehow different than it used to be–threaded through with some sort of white fibrous substance that seems to lend it extra vitality and malevolence. Tara ends up staying to help save Edgemont and take down the Raiders; to do so she has to communicate with the other people in the town in order to build wards that define and protect the town as understood by its inhabitants. There’s all kinds of heartwarming character growth and also some sick-ass wizard battles. And behind it all is the threat of bigger, even more fucked-up things than the old God Wards–big spidery things among the stars, and the possibility of the creation of a god born of Craft. It’s definitely a setup to the bigger arc that I assume the Craft Wars series will follow, and it’s definitely an engaging one! I will for sure be reading Wicked Problems when it releases in April.

Last weekend was Readercon! I spent a good chunk of it sitting on the Marriott patio plugging away at the last installment of my Gentlemen Bastards reread, The Republic of Thieves.

This book came out ten years ago, which means it’s been a whole ten years since I read it, which means for like 90% of it I felt like I was reading it for the first time. I remembered it had two storylines, one “present-time” one about an election in Karthain and one flashback one about the teen Bastards joining a theater company. I completely misremembered the ending, except that it was Very Bad for our lead boyos.

Some things have changed in the past ten years that definitely affected my perception of the election-running plot. One is that I got involved in political organizing, rather than just being a very news-houndy hobbyist and telling myself that meant I was Informed, so I had a lot more understanding of what they were doing and sympathy for how much it sucks, even though I don’t do electoral organizing. Another is that I had just recently watched the San Lorenzo episode of Leverage, which was a fun compare-and-contrast (and also made me feel like Locke and Jean were barely rigging this election at all! They were just… running it dirtily!) (this is a bad standard, isn’t it).

Anyway, I don’t have a lot of deep analysis here, not even about the politics of Karthain (I have one joke about Joe Manchin I will refrain from actually making, though). Mostly this book just continues to be a load of fun. It’s got murder and scams and fuckery and a pair of star-crossed lovers who can’t have a normal conversation to save their lives. It has Jean, basically the only character who doesn’t exist to be maximally infuriating to everybody at all times. This is part of the fun.

I have absolutely no idea how Scott Lynch is going to get our boys out of all the trouble they’re in. That’s part of the fun, too.