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I read this novel by accident. I looked it up after hearing about the dark forest hypothesis and I somehow missed the fact that this is the second book in a trilogy. I read the Three-Body Problem few years ago but didn't particularly like it. I found the same faults repeated in this novel too.

This book reads like a story from the science fiction's golden age: it has an interesting sci-fi concept at it's core, and it logically extrapolates from there. Cixin Liu does a really good job at this; at times it feels like Asimov's Foundation. Unlike the previous book, this one takes the plot into the farther future, and Liu gets to flex his creative muscle. The depiction of future cities and spaceships is well thought out and realistic. As a whole this book felt like reading through a game of chess.

Which leads me to the first of my objections: characters seem robotic. Even when they cite emotion as a factor in their decision-making process, this citation itself appears as a line in a logical proof. The characters just don't read as emotional beings.

The same "logic first" approach is applied to societies at large. As plot progresses through time we see countries taking actions which would fill entire novels seemingly "by decree". This simplifications feels like something Clarke would do, to help him explore an idea without getting lost in minutia of every-day reality. Unfortunately, it is this reality that makes for a more convincing story.

While these things are excusable as valid stylistic choices, and even necessary for Liu to tell the kind of story that he wants, my final qualm does not. It relates to portrayal of female characters.

There are few of them in the novel, the most prominent one being positioned squarely as a love interest of a male protagonist. What's worse, more pages have been devoted to his fantasizing about a "perfect woman" than to her actual character. When she does eventually appear it's because she has been kidnapped and brought as a some sort of a gift for the protagonist. She has been picked for this honor predominately based on her appearance. She is there for a chapter or two, in which time she falls in love with the protagonist, and is then kidnapped yet again and held as a hostage to ensure his cooperation. He proceeds to lament this turn of events until the end of the novel, but reflects on his fantasy more often than on the actual woman.

There is one more notable female character, and she is admittedly inflicted by fewer tropes. Although she too gets manipulated by another male protagonist, begrudges him at first, but then realizes the superiority of his idea and goes along with it. She ends up thinking of him as a fatherly figure.

All this seems fine to the rest of the characters and the narrator, and that is what makes it objectionable. It's one thing for a book to critique this treatment, or to omit it entirely. But the way it is presented here just feels wrong to me.

On paper, this final book in the Vorkosigan saga is doing some really neat things. It creates such a pleasing parallel bookend to the opening book, Shards of Honor. Both are set on Sergyar with Cordelia as a point of view character, Aral features heavily in both (although as a palpable absence here), and both thematically are about choosing new directions for your life. It's a nice way to send a series off into the sunset.

This book also has an incredible plot hook, to my mind. We learn that Aral, Cordelia, and Jole have been discreetly in a relationship together for twenty years off page. Or, probably better put, Cordelia and Jole have both been orbiting around the gravity well of Aral and both been in a relationship with him. This isn't that surprising as the reader was already aware that Aral was bi, and Cordelia is Betan and so likely wouldn't be flapped by such an arrangement. When Aral dies, Cordelia and Jole both have to work through their feelings in unhelpful ways: Cordelia forced to grieve publicly and closeted Jole forced to hide his privately. This book focuses on them reorienting their relationship to each other without Aral in the picture. What a great setup!

What hurts this book a little is that Admiral Jole is a fairly unknown character. We see him on page for about ten seconds in The Vor Game and Captain Vorpatril's Alliance. He carries Aral's coffin in Cryoburn (and we tragically don't even get his point of view). That's it! It's a risky maneuver to try to bring back this minor character and tell the reader that secretly he's been in a relationship with two of the most major characters in the series. We also don't explicitly know how Barrayarans would feel about this sort of relationship or homosexuality or relationship inside a chain of command (although there's an intuition of disapproval earlier in the series). I think the book still works, but more foreshadowing would have made all of this much more powerful. That said, this series has been written across thirty years and not in chronological order, so if this is one place where cross-book foreshadowing falls flat, it's still got a great record over all.

What also hurts the book for me is that I think the interesting bits of setup are all told to us as the reader as having already happened. We don't get to see Cordelia and Jole grieving Aral. We don't get to see Cordelia sending Jole a message about Aral's death directly, showing how much she values his relationship with Aral. We don't get to see them try and fail to continue the relationship they previously had without Aral there. We just get a "three years later" when most of this has already happened and then are told about it. Without the investment in feelings of how things are broken, the resolution where they are mended feels so much weaker.

Instead, this book largely focuses Jole coming out of the closet about his past relationship with Aral and his newly forming relationship with Cordelia. In large part, Jole seems to naturally hide these personal details out of inertia and habit from how he discreetly had a relationship with Aral earlier; and, the consequences of coming out for him seem to be that... drumroll some people might feel a little weird about it. This is an incredibly low stakes hook to hang an entire book on, especially for a character the reader barely knows, especially for the final book in your series.

Look, as a not young queer person who lived in the closet well past its expiration date, a story about coming out and consequences cannot be more in my wheelhouse. This story, sadly, is just not it.

This is the final Miles-centric book for the series. One of the best parts of this book is that we get so much of Armsman Roic's wry point of view of the shenanigans.

To me, this one is weakened by trying to hearken back to the mode of adventure investigation Miles. Diplomatic Immunity works for me because it's sandwiched between two romantic comedies, involves Ekaterin, ties together a number of elements, and crucially ends with a "we really can't keep doing this anymore" moment for Bel and Miles. So, it's a little weird that he does, in fact, keep doing this. This book is set on a new Japan-esque planet that we have not heard of previously and involves mostly new characters; it largely feels like a one-off than a series capstone.

I think there are a lot of good components to this book that don't all gel together. The shadow at the end of the book is that Miles' father Aral Vorkosigan dies, not altogether unexpectedly. And so, this book focuses on a planet where people freeze themselves before death, so that they might be revived later if needed. Unfortunately, I feel like the mystery is more of an conspiracy cover-up investigation of corporations and voting; the (possibly) more interesting cultural feelings around postponing death feel largely unexplored. There's certainly some parallels around children and the absence of their parent, but this wasn't enough to make this book thematically resonate as strongly as it should have.

The ending moment is quite good though, containing fanfic-esque five views of Aral's death, written as drabbles. This is the highlight of the book for me, but is weakened by how thematically disconnected it feels from the rest.

"I, Ivan Xav Vorpatril, ..., do take thee, uh ... what did you say your name was, again?"

If I had to rank books in this series by their comedy, this book would be up there right behind A Civil Campaign. Ivan Vorpatril has always had a long series of girlfriends but has dodged marriage as much as he's dodged extra work. The plot hook here is that in an attempt to save two women who are on the run from bounty hunters, immigration, and the local police, Ivan comes up with the idea to marry one of them in a rush (temporarily, of course!). Comedy ensues.

I love that there's a lot of ambiguity about how everybody else reacts to this "temporary" marriage. You get the feeling that everyone is sort of raising their eyebrow at Ivan, but also taking it seriously and are waiting for Ivan to come around to realize he's actually married and it's not just a temporary deal.

There's a lot of good parallels in this book. I liked getting to see Alys Vorpatril whose husband had been killed get to talk about loss and rememberances with Tej, who also has lost her entire immediate family. I like Shiv and Simon both being father-in-laws betting and dealing with each other (and how seeing Simon in this role makes Ivan realize that maybe Simon wants a different relationship with him). I love that Tej and Ivan can connect over how overbearing their families are, and how both of them just involve them in their plans without asking their permission or what they want. I love that both Tej and Ivan alternately both take and don't take their marriage seriously.

Thematically, I also appreciate that we get to see Ivan's reasons for being deliberately "middling" laid out here. In previous books, there's an increasing assumption that he's smarter than he looks but that he just chooses not to apply himself. However, this book really gets into the crux of the issue; because he's always been hyper aware that he's in the line of imperial succession (although not without a few murders and a civil war that he was born into), he has always applied himself to be conspicuously middling at all times. He also talks about being in the shadow of Miles, whose whole family overdoes everything. And truly, he's also just lazy and would rather not be handed work he doesn't need.

I think there are a few minor things that mar this book for me, and both are largely functions of this book being near the tail end of a long series with many characters, being set on a planet where all those characters reside, and also being one of the last books published. One thing this causes is that there is a lot of info dumping here. It needs to explain Ivan's family tree. It needs to retell the story of Vordarian's pretendership. It needs to explain titles of counts and and their heirs. These are all important to the story, but I think none of these things are delivered gently and are also all things previous readers know very well. This also suffers from some Marvel Cinematic Universe effect, where every character in an increasingly large roster needs to have some screen time. I think on the unnecessary end, there's a luncheon with Miles and Ekaterin and their kids, and their parents. Duv and Delia have to show up to. I think all of these folks could have been off planet (to Ivan's relief) without making the books worse. At least the book sends Miles and Ekaterin off to Sergyar pretty quickly so they can't steal the spotlight.

Miles and Ekaterin are getting back from their honeymoon when they are sent off to quaddiespace to investigate some Barrayarans who have gotten into some trouble. Needless to say this small investigation immediately escalates into attempted murders and politics (always) and threats of all out war. This book manages to tie in a bunch of bits from other books: there's the quaddies from Falling Free, Nicol from Labyrinth, Bel Thorne from a bunch of previous books, but also the Star Creche from Cetaganda. I think there's enough background explanation here (sometimes too much) that you could read this book without having read any of the others.

One thing I do really love about this book is that we get to see how terrible Barrayarans are. We get this perspective a little bit from Cordelia's point of view in Shards of Honor when Betans are horrified by backwards militaristic Barrayarans. And we certainly hear some later on a little, largely about Barrayarans fear of genetic mutation. But here, we really get to see Barrayarans as enthusiastic frat boys with weapons. "Oh, some of our people got arrested unfairly, well maybe we should take our plasma weapons down and try to break them out from the local jail."

As this book takes place in quaddiespace and involves a number of quaddies, I really appreciate the parallels that it makes to Falling Free. Part of it is disaffected Guppie, who also lost his livelihood by becoming biologically obsolete on Jackson's Whole. But, I do also love the last paragraph of the book saying "it felt like free falling into the future" as a deliberate echo of Falling Free's title and similar thematic lines.

Only a few books in this series are not from Miles' point of view. Maybe this was an editing decision, but while Miles is out of the action (but after he'd largely set the solutions to everything in motion) we find out that Ekaterin put those plans into action and ordered people around with authority she didn't know she had. This feels to me like it could have been some great scenes and some on page character growth for Ekaterin, but instead we just get told about it.

I think the foreword pitches this book better than I can.

We all know what happens when technological obsolescence hits the products of engineering; what would happen if (always a key SFnal question) technological obsolescence hit the products of bioengineering.

This is a book set two hundred years before Miles Vorkosigan is born. It sets up the origin story of the "quaddies", a genetically engineered race of four-armed people meant to live in zero gravity environments. It's a fun story of corporate greed, "kids" being smarter than their parents give them credit for, and a hectic escape to freedom. Unlike most of the other books in this series, this one feels the most like a more classic science fiction story.

(For those playing Bujold bingo at home, this also fits the older man younger woman romance trope between Leo and Silver. It's very funny that the book Diplomatic Immunity has a dramatic interpretive dance of their historical romance.)