bloodygranuaile | Entries tagged with series

August’s entry into the project of reading the entire Vorkosigan Saga was Ethan of Athos, which I read partly on the plane and partly in the hotel at a conference center approximately the size of Kline Station.

Ethan of Athos is about a doctor named Ethan Urquhart who comes from the planet Athos, which is basically what would happen if MGTOW guys were ever really serious about GTOW and also had access to terraforming and uterine replicators.

After a couple of generations, Athosian misogyny has morphed from like “normal” misogyny to a sort of superstitious belief in aliens with mind control powers, and the men of Athos have all turned real gay. Never having seen any women in real life, they imagine all sorts of weird things about them, but they do not consider them objects of attraction nor as sources of unpaid domestic or reproductive labor. The reproductive doctors on Athos, such as Ethan, know that the ovarian cultures they use for growing babies in the replicators came from women at some point, but they are expected not to think about it too hard.

Athos’ little all-male domestic utopia has a problem, however, which is that after 200 years, several of its ovarian cultures are failing. They order a bunch more from House Bharaputra on Jackson’s Whole, but the box that shows up is full of garbage–dead cancerous whole ovaries from hysterectomies, that sort of thing. Athos’ ruling committee of cranky old men then send Ethan, who is both knowledgeable about what they need and generally considered to be a scientific and level-headed character, to go out into the big bad scary outside universe and try to source some new genetic material.

Ethan’s journey to Kline Station is, for a sheltered–practically cloistered–guy from a completely fringe society with deeply bigoted religious and cultural beliefs, deeply harrowing. First, he keeps encountering women. (He at first finds this deeply unsettling but eventually gets used to it as the women in question turn out to be more or less normal people.) Second, nobody is receptive to his earnest pitches to join the all-male utopia of Athos, because, in a turn of events very surprising to him but probably surprising to nobody else, all the Kline Station misogynists are also homophobes, with no interest in going to the Planet of Fags where there are no women to subjugate. And third, Ethan almost immediately finds himself mixed up in some arcane plot involving a brutal Cetagandan counterintelligence agent, the Dendarii Mercenaries’ Ellie Quinn, a genetically engineered telepath named Terrence, House Bharaputra again, and several different departments of Kline Station bureaucracy. The plot seems to revolve around the shipment of ovarian cultures that Athos was supposed to get, as compared to the one they actually got, and it takes a lot of trickery and shenanigans before anyone even begins to figure out what might have actually happened. These shenanigans almost get Ethan killed several times for reasons that have nothing to do with him being a rank misogynist and are an effective way of building sympathy for a character with an essentially decent moral core that has been warped by an absolutely garbage fucking belief system (you can tell the moral core is decent because the garbage belief system doesn’t survive contact with the outside world). Ethan manages to not die and, despite having learned that many things about the way he was raised are false and stupid, does end up going home where he is not shot at nearly as often.

This was an interesting inversion of the “planet of women” sci-fi trope and provided an interesting deconstruction of oppositional sexism and the role of unpaid “women’s work” in “normal” patriarchal societies. It was also a very fun space opera mystery, with amusing fish-out-of-water dynamics and lots of cloak-and-dagger (or cloak-and-stunner) stuff getting tangled up with other cloak-and-dagger stuff. It was also fun to spend time with Elli Quinn absent the overpowering presence of Miles, although occasionally his presence can still be felt in absentia because he is this series’ most special crazy intel boy. Overall I enjoyed it very much, although after this and Falling Free I am excited to hopefully get back to the crew of main characters next month.

It’s almost the end of July and I just got around to reading this month’s Vorkosigan Saga book, which somewhat unusually does not involve any Vorkosigans. Falling Free takes place 200 years before the events of Shards of Honor, which I think was still during the Time of Isolation on Barrayar. It was, however, a generative time for hot new Galactic technology in the rest of the known universe, including the recent development of the still hideously expensive uterine replicator, which enabled the development of the secretive human genetic engineering experiment that was the creation of quaddies.

Our protagonist and pleasingly-somewhat-unlikely hero in this one is Leo Graf, an engineer, and specifically a welding instructor with a specialization in safety inspections. He is sort of like an earlier version of the auditor who is a systems failure analyst whose name escapes me at the moment. He is brought in to train some of the oldest quaddies—who are now barely twenty—and while he is deeply uneasy at the entire labor arrangement going on here (i.e. “it’s not slavery because they’re totally a different species”), especially given that the asshole boss is one of his former asshole students, at first he keeps his opinions to himself and resolves to just teach the quaddies about welding safety as best he can. This becomes increasingly impossible as the corporate fuckery intensifies, with asshole boss unwittingly instigating all sorts of interpersonal drama (over the objections of the well-intentioned but useless psychological specialist, whose only move appears to be begging other people to be reasonable), looming financial problems for the company, and the prospect of artificial gravity tech that could make the quaddies obsolete before they were even launched. Graf, a longtime company man, has to make a decision about how much good he can do from inside the system and when it’s time to go rogue and get the quaddies out from under their corporate masters’ thumbs—and by the time Graf and the quaddies swing into action, so does everyone else.

This was overall a very satisfying story about a bunch of nice, obedient, well-trained specialist workers rising up against their corporate overlords and putting their douchebag boss in his place. Some of it was a little unrealistic—like when the psychologist finally does something other than talk—but it’s a nice fantasy certainly to have a character like that eventually do the right thing. The degree to which Van Atta’s absolute interpersonal assholery and lack of managerial skills, emotional regulation, or other remotely redeeming qualities ends up turning the other corporate functionaries against him, to the point where they all end up sandbagging him and therefore their mission just so he can look like an even bigger failure and they’ll never have to deal with him again, is also satisfying narratively if apparently unrealistic—in the real world, even men as wildly unlikeable as Ted Cruz and JD Vance can obtain lackeys and allies on the promise of enacting cruelty upon lesser beings. One could say that was Van Atta’s mistake—he was instead surrounded by paternalistic types who couldn’t deal with the mask-off version of the slavery they were enabling—but it also appears to be squarely a pleasing but unrealistic fantasy that they’d ever find their limits and bother to even use the bureaucracy against him. At any rate, it’s fucking delightful to read.

Though Graf is our main viewpoint character, we also spend some time in the heads of some of the quaddies themselves—mainly Claire and Tony, who are one of the first sets of quaddie parents, and Silver, a bold and strategically minded young quaddie woman who isn’t afraid to do what she has to do to get what she wants, even if it would scandalize the behavioral psychologist. This is sometimes humorous, as when the twenty-year-old quaddies have to deal with gravity for the first time and they do not like it, but it also goes a long way toward establishing that the quaddies are basically regular people, just ones that have been raised in very irregular circumstances. Overall I think this is a strong addition to the Vorkosigan Saga universe even if it doesn’t have any of our faves in it.

So, Winterfair Gifts was actually not my July installment of Lois McMaster Bujold’s Vorkosigan Saga–that’s going to be Falling Free, which I haven’t gotten to yet–but I had basically forgotten to put Winterfair Gifts in the lineup as I had been unclear if it constituted a book or not. It’s a novella, hardly more than a short story, and doesn’t seem to have a standalone print publication, but I got the ebook and read it that way. It took me about an hour and a half to read the whole thing, which was a nice way to cap off a night where I’d finally finished a lengthy nonfiction book that it’d taken me upwards of 10 days to read.

Winterfair Gifts is a charming little story from the point of view of Armsman Roic, last seen at the end of A Civil Campaign wearing briefs, boots, his gun holster on the wrong way, a lot of bug butter, and nothing else. Roic is Miles’ most junior armsman, and until this point has mostly been a rather one-dimensional comic relief himbo sort of character, so it was fun to get a little bit of his background and see how things look from his point of view. Roic comes from a fairly provincial Barrayaran background and is somewhat in awe of all the galactic experiences and high-ranking shenanigans of his new employers, but he is doing his best to learn and expand his mind and lives in fear that Miles, Armsman Pym, and the other bigshots whose company he must now keep think he’s an idiot.

Roic’s horizons are abruptly expanded when two of Miles’ colleagues from his old life show up to Barrayar as wedding guests–the jumpship pilot Arde Mayhew, and the bioengineered werewolf-esque Sergeant Taura. Once his initial shock wears off, Roic finds himself very attracted to Taura, but unsure how to navigate picking up an eight-foot-tall galactic mercenary while constantly on duty.

Plot stuff happens when Ekaterin, who is already under some degree of emotional stress about the wedding, falls ill, and Sergeant Taura develops an unorthodox theory about one of the wedding gifts, which she attempts to investigate on her own. This doesn’t get very far, and instead, Taura and Armsman Roic find themselves trying to keep their cool while bringing in all sorts of very important ImpSec people that they’re not used to talking to. Fortunately, because this is a cute short short, the threat is eventually neutralized and the mystery solved, Ekaterin gets better and the wedding goes off beautifully, and Armsman Roic both proves himself Not An Idiot to his superiors and gets to snog Taura.

This story was overall pretty cute and fluffy (minus Ekaterin almost dying) in a way that wouldn’t at all have worked for me as an independent story with characters I didn’t know, but as a Vorkosigan Saga book it was a delightful little romp full of all our Fan Favorites and worked perfectly as an escapist palate cleaner from the day I’d been having. I’m looking forward to tackling Falling Free later this week.

Though Sad Irish Literature Month for me is traditionally March, I make an exception for Walter Macken’s Irish Trilogy. I read the first two at my dad’s cabin in Maine and I was going to read the third one there, too. The copies I have are ancient 1970’s editions from when my dad was living in London before I was born and as such I consider them to be Family Heirlooms and I will read them properly.

The first book in this trilogy, Seek the Fair Land, takes place during the Cromwellian ravages and I read it several years ago. Last year I determined to make some progress and read the second book, The Silent People, which is about the years leading up to and during the Great Famine. This one, The Scorching Wind, takes place in the 1910s and ‘20s, during the war for independence and the civil war that immediately followed.

Before I get into the book properly I must point out the things that this book has in common with Ken Loach’s movie The Wind that Shakes the Barley. Loach is an Englishman but The Wind that Shakes the Barley, featuring a not-yet-Oscar-winning young Corkman named Cillian Murphy, is nevertheless one of the most tear-jerkingly powerful movies about Irish history I’ve seen, with bonus socialism and extra bonus Cork accents so thick you could cut them with a butter knife and put them on toast. So. In addition to the general time period, both works feature a protagonist who is initially reluctant to join in revolutionary activity, because he is a medical student who is therefore a) very busy studying to be a doctor and b) more about putting people back together than blowing them apart. In the movie our half-doctor revolutionary is named Damian and in the book he is named Dominic. (One major difference: Damian, being played by Cillian Murphy, is very handsome, and Dominic is frequently implied to be not so handsome–certainly not as handsome as young Cillian Murphy, anyway.) Both protagonists have brothers who, at the beginning, are more militant than they are, joining the IRA first, while our black-haired heroes are still reluctant. By the end, though, it is our younger brothers who have become more militant and take the anti-Treaty side in the war, while the older brothers become Free State officials, pitting brother against brother in a way that makes an extremely heart-wrenching and dramatic ending to a drama about war. Also both stories take place largely in the Western part of Ireland, far from the drama in Dublin–Loach’s movie was filmed largely on location in Cork, and Macken’s story takes place in and around his native Galway.

From thence the similarities end, but it’s enough that I tried to look up if Loach had ever mentioned the book in an interview or anything. I can find some webpages that claim the film was influenced by the book but I can’t find any primary sources where they are getting that claim from on a quick search. Ah well.

Anyway. The prose style is trademark Macken, with a lot of very simple descriptive sentences interspersed by the characters’ unpretentious thoughts and bits of Hiberno-English that someone unfamiliar with the area could spend years looking up. Many of the characters speak in Irish but the book doesn’t generally include it; it translates it to English When an Irish word is used because there’s no real English translation or it’s just one word, Macken doesn’t italicize; it just blends in seamlessly the way Irish words are normally incorporated into Hiberno-English. As far as I’m concerned, a real strength is the way the characters talk about politics, especially as people who have a lot of history but not necessarily a lot of theory–it sounds believable to the way real people at the time would talk about politics, and not like the author is performing educational dialogues for the benefit of the audience. The fights Dominic and Dualta have at the end might not be blindingly original but they sound like real fights people on the opposite side of an issue have.

Another interesting approach here is that Macken doesn’t spend a lot of time on the high-level news–other than everybody getting the news of the Easter Rising in Dublin, the book focuses on the individual experiences of the characters involved, with little in the way of dates, cameos by famous people (except one brief one from John Redmond), or the characters conveniently turning up at high-profile historical events. They ping back and forth between various IRA operations and trying to go back to regular life for various stretches of time. The characters only ever seem to know the bits of things they’re involved in, and sometimes not even that–Dominic ends up on multiple jobs where his acquaintances basically just scoop him up and tell him to do something and he’s not really sure what it is that’s in the bag, or where they are going, or some other type of information that you’d think would be fairly critical to being involved in a guerrilla military operation. But no, everything’s done on such a tight NTK information ecosystem that I sometimes worried it’d actually be a security hole, making people do things they hadn’t agreed to with only your judgment of their character that they’d go along with it.

Dominic’s journey from a reluctant revolutionary who would rather be left alone to study to a hardened veteran of the flying columns involves a lot of pretty nasty stuff. Macken really excels at foregrounding the humanity of everyone involved–including unprincipled mercenaries like the Tans Mac and Skin–without falling into the common modern trap of being like “Sure, the oppression is bad, but isn’t fighting back against it worse if you find yourself losing even one inch of moral high ground by doing anything even a little bit shitty to anybody.” Dominic doesn’t like everything he has to do as an IRA man, like burning a really big lovely house down in reprisal for another house burning, but his doubt and disgust that this is really necessary–his reluctance to accept it as necessary even as he acknowledges that it worked–doesn’t lead to him quitting or renouncing the IRA or deciding both sides are just as bad or anything. It’s just used to show how having to do all these terrible things sucks, and no cause or tactical justification makes it not suck. The exploration of what having to do awful things, as well as having awful things done to you, changes you, is, I think, the essence of what makes the novel so powerful.

One of the other great features is its incredible use of ambiguity, which I will not elaborate on because it would give away the ending.

Overall, I’m very glad I finally read these and I’m not sure what took me so long.

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.

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.

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.

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.

There is a new Craft Wars book out! I was a bad girlfriend and pinched my ladylove’s copy of Max Gladstone’s Wicked Problems before she had a chance to read it, and then I didn’t finish it quite as fast as I’d intended to. But I did finish it so now I can give it back and begin being a bad girlfriend in a different way (impatiently bugging her to read it already).

Taking place shortly after the events of Dead Country, the problems we had at the end of that novel have burst their quiet little Edgemont-adjacent bounds and are now everyone’s problem, all over the world. Thus Wicked Problems is no longer just about Tara Abernathy’s family issues, no matter how much Tara Abernathy tends toward denial about her ability to single-handedly fix everything without bothering anybody else. Instead we get a big, complex, multi-faction epic where all our friends from previous books show up again whether they like it or not (usually not), including people I forgot about because I read the first five books of the Craft Sequence like ten years ago at this point. The journey takes us all over the world and involves dead gods, a prison break, creepy razor wire monsters, a trip to definitely-not-Paris to almost get murdered at the opera, the phrase “prophet-and-loss statement,” a somewhat self-indulgent appearance of the Tiffany Paradox (this was the one bit that took me out of the story a little too much, because I too have read the viral Tumblr post about the Tiffany Paradox, Max), and a lot of gay feelings that neither Kai nor Tara actually have time for (since they keep almost getting murdered at the opera by squids and razor wire monsters and, at one point, a vampire, which I had forgotten existed in this universe).

In the necromancy-flavored late capitalist hellscape that is the world after the God Wars, how to save the world from being eaten by the skazzerai from beyond the stars is not just a complicated question, but several complicated questions–questions like, is the world really worth “saving” given how incredibly fucked up it is? Can the brutally rational secularist power-hungry assholes of the Craft set aside their differences with the fanatically religious power-hungry assholes of various faiths for long enough to do anything useful? Is Dawn, Tara’s former student now semi-integrated with a god-esque creature made of sentient Craft, going to stop the skazzerai, or is her plan very bad and does she have to be stopped before we can stop the skazzerai? What are the skazzerai actually (since they aren’t literally giant space spiders), and where do they come from, and as the King in Red points out, how would you know you were facing one?

The immediate problem facing most of our several protagonists here is a little shard of what appears to be iron and it is so, so hungry. It seems to be a relic from last time the skazzerai tried to eat the world (they got run off but in the process the world broke and a functionally new one had to be reborn). Due to a series of mishaps the shard breaks out of its little holding container and winds up in a new holding container, which is the dying nature goddess Ajaia in the form of a rose, who is then contained in Dawn’s hand, which is then contained in a heavily warded glove. This multilayered battlefield of power in her hand, combined with her earlier merging with the new god-thing of Craft (now dubbed Sybil and manifesting as a serpent to maintain some separateness from Dawn), gives Dawn some truly terrifying power at her disposal, if she can figure out how to use it without getting eaten.

This was funny, scary, action-packed, and generally pretty good at holding my attention during the parts of this past week or so when I simply could not pay any attention to anything, so well done. Can’t wait to see how all these overpowered dickheads get themselves into and out of their next set of world-ending scrapes.

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.

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.