Reviews and Comments

This book is the logical extension of the exploration of "uterine replicator" technology. We see Betans and Barrayarans using them to have safer and more egalitarian pregnancies. We see Cetagandans using them in the previous book to design humans differently. And, here in this book, the planet Athos is using them to perpetuate their remote society made up only of men.

(And yeah, yeah, this story was written in 1986, and so we'll just handwave over what the fate of poor trans folks or non-gay men might be on this planet. On this planet, women are sort of treated as mythological demons that have hypnotized galactic men with their wiles. This book is written in a way to make Ethan come off as comically naive, but the religious indoctrination here is horrifying if you think about it to any degree.)

Ethan is the earnest straight man (:drum:) in this comedy routine who is sent off to figure out what happened to their shipment of ovarian tissue for the uterine replicators on Athos. He's never left his planet until now. He's never seen a woman before. He also tries to recruit people to Athos and earnestly doesn't understand why nobody else wants to move to his religious men-only remote planet. Understandably, this book has a good bit of explicit homophobia (but also some fatphobia). That said, it's largely background radiation to the story, rather than something any of the protagonists are doing themselves directly.

All things told, this book holds up as a lot of fun on a reread. Ethan is out of his depth even before he gets captured by some Cetagandans who then attempt to murder Ethan when he doesn't know anything. He gets rescued by Elli Quinn (of the Dendarii Mercenaries, also an absolute delight) who is trying to kill the Cetagandans and chasing what they're after. We also get some interesting worldbuilding for Kline Station, in terms of station life, biocontrol, and newt ecology. Overall, I would pitch this as a spy/heist story that weaves in sociological observations and stars an earnest-but-naive protagonist.

One of the qualities that I love about the Vorkosigan series is that because it is so long, it allows Bujold to play with different genres between books. If The Vor Game is military SF, then Cetaganda is a mystery novel. Pedantically, this book is not really a mystery proper in the way that a reader could piece together the whodunit independently; however I think this is an example of "detective Miles" mode, and one that we'll see again in Memory and Komarr especially.

This book features Miles and Ivan on a diplomatic visit to Cetaganda for the funeral of the Cetagandan empress. Miles has to juggle investigating a plot that's trying to frame the Barrayarans (but why? and by whom?), hiding things from his superiors (by implying he's a higher level spy), trying to interface with the Cetaganda police about a murder investigation (while not giving things away to them or to his superiors), and stopping a plot that would cause chaos to Cetaganda (while also trying to work towards Barrayaran interests).

One thing I think this novel does well is to portray the Cetagandans in a sympathetic and interesting light, and to dig into the interesting social structure they have going on. In previous novels, the Cetagandans have been the historical invaders of Barrayar and also aggressive expansionists into the Hegen Hub, and the reader doesn't know much about them other than their military bent. This book could be a bit more subtle about weaving all this background info in without as much of an info dump, but in a broader sense it adds a lot of nuance and fills in a lot of detail.

Ok, ok. I know I'm leaning on the horn here (pun not intended), but holy moly this book is still stuck in horny Miles brain mode. He is still not over Elena (who doesn't even appear in this novel) and he loses it over the haut women who ensconce themselves behind opaque bubble forcefields. There is one brief, minor moment where Miles realizes these feelings are clouding his judgement; Ivan comes up with a plan Miles hasn't considered because it wouldn't let him play the hero in front of haut Rian. This is as far as it goes, though.

(It's funny how much this quality sticks out for me on this reread. Am I just older and ace-er? Is this how books airquotes of the time all were and I haven't noticed because I haven't been reading books that are thirty five years old? Is this a deliberate writing decision for a twenty year old protagonist? Did I just forget that's how these books were?)

This novel won a Hugo, and I liked it more than Warrior's Apprentice, but it still jumps around quite a bit. It certainly leans a bit more "military sf" where we learn a bit more about space tactics and wormhole politics. The book feels like it has a couple of distinct sections: first, Miles on his first assignment in Camp Permafrost (until he joins a mutiny and washes out of the Imperial Military, again). Then, Miles kicking his feet "in disgrace" until he joins Imperial Security and is sent back out to potentially active the Admiral Naismith identity again. Finally, a bit where he is separated from his ImpSec minders and simultaneously tries to re-form the Dendarii Mercenaries, stop an invasion, and rescue the Barrayaran emperor all at the same time.

On this reread, I felt like that the Camp Permafrost section, even if it was interesting, didn't quite tie into the rest of the novel strongly enough for its length. My opinion while reading is that it would be better as a standalone story. I felt pretty justified learning that it was a separately published novella that then got edited into this book.

Camp Permafrost certainly firmly establishes that Miles has a problem with subordination (although we already knew that). The commanding officer Metzov comes back later (and is ironically undone by his parochial attitudes). And there's a joke later about drain expertise (although I'll ask how can you have a surprise corpse in a novel that goes nowhere). The only plot function this section has is that Metzov can know Gregor and Miles and reveal their identities to Cavilo. None of this feels like enough for its length, and it would have made the rest of the book stronger to have it edited out.

This book definitely continues with Miles lusting forever after every woman on page. He's still in love with Elena, and lusts after Cavilo. Buddy, Elena is (still) married to your oath-sworn armsman, get it together. Maybe I'm biased because I roll my eyes through these bits, but it feels like missed opportunity for character growth, either in seeing him change here or paying for these feelings by having to deal with their consequences more explicitly.

One thing I do really like in this novel is being able to see Gregor out in the field. We get to see how Miles feels bound by his Vor responsibilities but Gregor feels trapped. Having Gregor in play (and their identities partially revealed) adds a different flavor; it's not just foiling a plan, but it's doing it in a way that also involves rescuing Gregor. We also get to see Gregor's competence at his job; he's not just a figurehead emperor, he's a master of politics and manipulation.

I think most importantly, we also get to see the implicit trust between Miles and Gregor, culminating in the climax of the book where Gregor walks directly up to a plasma cannon while Miles pretends like he's going to kill him. This book's theme, if I tried to put a finger on it, is Miles' insubordination in service to what he believes is right. (See also: the moment where he has locked several superior officers in the brig simultaneously.) So, it feels useful to establish the level of trust and devotion between Miles and his emperor directly on page. Sure, Miles continues to deliver results, but why else would anybody put up with this ensign.

This is a novella about Miles on Barrayar after the events of A Warrior's Apprentice and while he's waiting for his first assignment (surely, ship duty :drum:). Miles gets tasked by his father to help a woman from out in the country investigate the murder of her child that nobody else will listen to.

This is not so much a mystery story so much as it is an opportunity to stick Miles in a rural area with poor Barrayarans to navigate a thorny social and political situation as Lord Miles Vorkosigan. You get to see him deal with folks outside of the military or aristocracy and show more directly some of the cultural biases going on on Barrayar. (I'm still not 100% sure how I feel about how this story treats the impoverished hill folks. Miles certainly carries less bias than the officers he brings with him, but there's still a feeling that he feels ashamed and responsible for them, even if he is more respectful than others.)

This is probably unintentional, but this story also works exceptionally well coming off of the courtroom scene at the end of the previous book, which dredges back up events from Barrayar where Aral Vorkosigan had Carl Vorhalas executed for dueling, due to a strict reading of the letter of the law. It's interesting to see Miles come up with a much neater solution to his own problem than his father did with his.

I like the foreshadowing of the opening scene of Miles yelling at his grandfather Piotr's grave, but even more it's interesting to see his compassionate revisionist view of Piotr during the mystery reveal climax. From the perspective of Cordelia, Piotr is a conservative stick in the mud who had to be barred from Miles' uterine replicator for security reasons, but Miles looks back and is able to see how much change Piotr did deal with over his lifetime (even if he couldn't cope with everything). These musings about Piotr make for great bookends to a story about dealing with cultural change.

With Cordelia and Aral's story mostly backgrounded, we now get to the Miles Vorkosigan stretch of novels. Miles washes out of military school due to his physical disabilities and easily broken bones; he ends up on a trip to Beta Colony as a vacation with his bodyguard Bothari, and Bothari's daughter and Miles' childhood friend Elena.

This was the first book in this series I ever read, and I almost bounced off of it the first time through. My partner also stopped reading two thirds of the way through and then came back and finished much much later. This book has big "it gets better in season 3 I promise" energy.

For me, it's a weaker book than the two Cordelia books prior in a number of ways, and honestly there's really only so much I can take of teenager Miles. It's partially his self-loathing--internalizing the way that Barrayar treats anybody who looks like a "mutant" or is at all disabled, and also coping with his own military failures in the eyes of his family. But it's also his constant teenage lusting after his friend Elena or even later with Elli Quinn. My memory is that Miles interacting with any women are a low point in other books too all the way up to Ekaterin, unfortunately. It's not "breasted boobily" levels of lecherousness, but there's a desperation for attention in all of his actions.

Positives, instead. The joy of this book is how instantly the chain of chaos starts when Miles is involved. An example: he makes it to Beta Colony and in the brief period of time that he is out of Bothari's vision after customs he immediately adopts a pilot (plus ship) as his armsman, and then must come up with a scheme to pay off said ship by sneaking weapons through a blockade. Cut to being in space and Miles hatches a scheme to pretend to be leader of the (fictional) Dendarii Mercenaries in order to recruit mercenaries that they had just captured (once they shape up, of course). This creates a wild chain of lies and fabrications as Miles tries to keep it all together, keep his actual identity secret, and keep himself and his people safe.

This book feels meant to be funny and ridiculous. Why does nobody suspect the 17 year old with no combat experience leading mercenaries into battle? I think it's almost believable that these folks are so down on their luck that the version of reality that Miles presents (and creates) is compelling enough that nobody asks too many questions (even if they give some side-eyes). And maybe they handwave past the age with a rumor of mythical Beta Colony rejuvination treatments that make him look really young.

The delight of Miles is his manic energy and the way that he energizes the people around him to be bigger and better than who they were; it's also the balancing flip side of his secret identity trying to keep Barrayaran politics in mind and trying to live with some aristocratic Barrayan honor.

I think this book is still a good introduction to Miles, and I'm glad that he quickly grows up a little bit after this one. The main gripe for me is that this book is just not as neatly plotted or tight thematically and it feels a bit off the rails (even if it sticks the landing with a delightful courtroom ending). I really don't know that I would recommend this book, but it also sets the initial trajectory for the series so strongly that it would be impossible to skip.

Most of the books in this series are quite standalone, but Barrayar feels more like the second half of Shards of Honor. This book follows Cordelia's attempt to survive and protect her new child in a hostile environment as Aral struggles with his new job as regent.

This book and its prequel are some of the strongest books in the series for me. I love Cordelia as an outsider character who hates what she sees in Barrayar but ties herself to it for the people she loves all the same. It's also nice to have "older" characters (which then feels a bit of a shock when the next book has seventeen year old hyperactive Miles). This is also a book that very much centers itself on children and families, and all of the side plots (Drou & Kou, the Vorpatrils, friendship with Kareen, Bothari & Elena) tie neatly into this as well.

One thing I noticed in this reread is how much thematic foreshadowing Kou's nerve disruptor injury has for Miles, obviously in terms of the disability-averse Barrayarans but also psychologically. Miles is carrying a boatload of self-loathing when we first meet him in the next book, and it helps to have been warmed up to the cultural and familial context around those feelings a little bit here.

My favorite moment in this book is the fight between Aral and his father Piotr; their dispute over the fate of baby Miles comes to a head and in a rage Piotr kicks both Aral and Cordelia out of all the Vorkosigan house. A sudden interruption as the emperor Gregor is threatened and Piotr and Aral instantly drop everything and align themselves with full trust to protect their liege together. This is also the moment where the novel shifts from social (politics) directly into action (politics) mode.

He paused, watching Aral, watching her watch Aral. One corner of his mouth crooked up, then the quirk vanished in a thoughtful pursing of his lips. "He's bisexual, you know." He took a delicate sip of his wine.

"Was bisexual," she corrected absently, looking fondly across the room. "Now he's monogamous."

Look, it's the 1980's and I'll give you credit for trying here, but wow does this line always catch me off guard and feel like such a backwards attitude about bisexuals.

I'm sure this line has been picked to death elsewhere, but I'm going to fall back on my previous rant about explicit identity labels in fiction; I think that it's a rare case that using them makes any media better, and like here they certainly don't age well. This exchange could have led with the attempted barb "he's also attracted to men" or "do you know he slept with Ges Vorrutyer", neither of which could have been negated and both of which could have had more interesting answers.

I decided for December I'm going to just do a bunch of comfort rereading, and my brain has been clamoring for "what if you just reread all of Bujold's Vorkosigan series again (again)". I could reread just A Civil Campaign like most people do, but maybe it's time to reread them all.

Shards of Honor is the "first" book in this series, and genre-wise feels like a space opera romance. (Arguably Falling Free comes first chronologically if you're being pedantic.) If you haven't read these books, most of the series stars Miles Vorkosigan, and this book is the setup of how his parents Aral and Cordelia met and its sequel deals with the circumstances around Miles' birth.

This book does need some content warnings especially for rape, sexual assault, alcoholism, and ableism. This book was first published in 1986, and I think the book cover listed on unseen.city is doing it NO favors in that department either. It's definitely got a good bit of gender stereotyping going on too, but I can honestly blame a lot of that onto the Barryarans rather than the text itself.

I like the amount of worldbuilding this book gets into. There's backroom politics from a planet the reader hasn't seen involving characters the reader barely has met, and it manages to stay coherent. The setup of the book involves Aral taking Cordelia prisoner on a new planet she is surveying, and we learn a lot through both of their eyes about the wildly different cultures that they each come from. Even though the book spends a lot of time side-eyeing the militaristic aristocratic Barrayarans (for good reasons), the scene where Cordelia comes back to liberal Beta Colony and has to escape non-consensual "therapy" will always stick with me; it feels like a parallel to abusers misusing therapeutic language--the same power and control dressed up more presentably.

It must be quite a shock to suddenly find out you're pregnant, seventeen times over--at your age, too, she thought. She squelched the black humor--he was so clearly out of his depth--and took pity on his real confusion. "Take care of them, I suppose. I have no idea what that will entail, but--you did sign for them."

He sighed. "Quite, Pledged my word, in a sense." He set the problem up in familiar terms, and found his balance therein. "My word as Vorkosigan, in fact. Right. Good. Objective defined, plan of attack proposed--we're in business."

Minorly, one small character detail I noticed this time around is how much Aral and Miles orient to problems by reframing them in more comfortable contexts: Aral here, through his word and honor, and Miles later through logistics and persistence. This moment from Aral feels like a future parallel of Miles resolving the uncertainty about how to court Ekaterine by (disastrously) considering it as if he were planning a military endeavor.

I think there's some parallel to the way they both cope with failure as well, with Aral getting insensibly drunk in this book after the events of Escobar, and Miles many books later coping with the events of Memory.

This is the third book in Sue Burke's Semiosis trilogy, that follows the events on Earth after some of the rainbow bamboo and other fauna from the planet Pax are brought back.

The previous books worked well for me because they told a story over time from different perspectives. Each segment could stand as its own connected story, and characters didn't have to be fully fleshed out because we were only getting a small slice of them. This book is more compressed in time and so we get a rotation of multiple views from the same characters, bringing back viewpoints from the beginning as a touchpoint at the end. However, there were a number of narrative perspectives that felt like they weren't doing enough narrative or worldbuilding lifting (especially the first couple), and seeing the characters again only made me see how weakly developed they were.

Overall, I enjoyed the evolution of the ideas of this series but the execution could have been better.

The setup of this story is that the twelve provinces of Concordia have sent their heirs on a voyage by themselves to the Goddess's Mountain, and while en route one of the heirs is mysteriously murdered.

The mystery in this story worked well for me. Each heir has a Blessing, which takes the form of some sort of magical power (fire breathing, invisibility) but it's considered gauche to ask people what form it takes. The reveal and ongoing discovery of what Blessing each heir has becomes part of the mystery. (And on top of that the narrator Ganymedes does not actually have a Blessing and has to disguise this fact from his fellow heirs.) There's some twists and complications, enough crumbs for the reader to guess at what might be happening, and it all gets a good reveal in the end.

The worldbuilding was a bit weak. It's a bit hard to be tossed into a fantasy world with a bunch of different countries, but the countries here all feel a bit shallow--they are all represented by an animal and they each have one feature and one magical hair color that they're known for. This also means that the reader has to be told about the background to all of these different countries (and that they probably couldn't be much more complicated, with twelve of them).

I had fun with this book and I enjoyed the mystery, but my biggest gripe is that the goofy internal narration just didn't land for me. It's not that I need my fantasy to be all serious all the time, but the silly narrator was not my kind of humor.

This novella is a story about memories, transformation, and love; it follows the demon Vitrine, whose best love is the city Azril that she writes about in a book kept in the glass cabinet of her heart. When angels raze the city to the ground, she curses one of them with a piece of herself, and gets to the work of rebuilding the city into what she remembers.

This is an interesting book to pair with Kalpa Imperial from the #SFFBookClub this month. The way Vitrine remembers the ghost of the old city interspersed with what the new city is becoming feels like it could be a chapter from Kalpa Imperial. Subjectively, there's sort of a similar lyrical style between the two as well.

I continue to love Nghi Vo's writing, and the way this book juxtaposes the fantastic with the literal rebuilding of a city brick by brick. However, the emotional crux is the relationship between the angel and the demon and this just wasn't my jam.

This is a fluffy novella about a space dragon trying to lead a crew for a salvage job in a universe that usually has a human rider running the show. The characters were fun, but this book was too much of a marshmallow for me.

The biggest conflict in the story was Lux's internalized worries about running their own crew. (Other conflicts like space horrors, mud, and dangerous wildlife are quickly and immediately solved with little repercussions.) It's not that I need a story to be gritty and stressful, but in order for a story whose emotional resolution is a space crew bonding together, I need more pulling them apart (either emotionally or via external circumstances) to have that pay off. Ultimately, this novella doesn't quite stand on its own for me, and feels like the first third of a book where everything is going well just before it doesn't.

This is the first in a series, and it poses a number of unanswered worldbuilding questions: how dragon and human society got to where it is, what went down with Lux's old partner Sar, and some other mysterious goings-on that are revealed at the end of the book. I enjoyed the worldbuilding about a universe seemingly built for humans that only grudgingly makes room for space dragons even as it depends on them, and I hope future books get into this more.

This is a young, trans fantasy story that begins with teenager Lorel switching places with her friend Lane to go join a coven of witches, trying to keep them from discovering that she's not a girl. It's not billed as YA, but I would give it that label--although there's a good bit of physical violence on the page, this is a coming-of-age story with a large focus on peer relationships inside a larger adult structure.

Unsurprisingly for a Margaret Killjoy book, this is a very trans story. Lorel spends the majority of her mental energy worrying about being found out, and even after her secret is partially revealed, there's still terfy antagonism and fears of acceptance. In a world with magic, I also quite appreciated the trans nuance of "do I want to change my body because other people would accept me more or because I want to change it for myself (and maybe I don't)".

There's a lot of neat smaller worldbuilding details here that I really enjoyed. Magic in this world is grasped through metaphor, and depending on the metaphor used there are different perspectives and tradeoffs. I like that the fantasy political landscape is a bit of chaotic feudalism, full of different groups of knights with different loyalties and values, rather than clear cut countries with rulers.

My real disappointment with this book is that I wish the characters had more depth. The protagonist Lorel doesn't really get much time in her home town before joining the witches, and we only get scraps about who she is or where she came from. The reader hears more about Araneigh's family than they do about Lorel's. It's also hard to know much about Lorel's self that isn't explicitly a response to being trans; she doesn't talk about herself much (because she's hiding her past), she volunteers for cooking (so as not to reinforce gender roles), and she works incredibly hard (and so that people look kindly on her if her secret ever came out). The dynamics between Hex and Lorel are the most interesting character bits, and there's a moment of tension about Araneigh's feelings around Lorel's body, but on the whole most characters feel fairly one note.

This is book one of a trilogy, so there's certainly room for the future. It also didn't end with a lot of hooks for the sequel, so I'm quite curious where it will go.

This book is the October/November #SFFBookClub book. It's a collection of stories about an empire that has fallen and been rebuilt multiple times, each focusing on a very different place and time, and each told with a narrated fable-like style. One stylistic choice that stands out immediately is that the sentence structure is quite long and there are often comically long lists of names or places or ideas or things or professions or or or... I found this to be overall a delight, personally.

This may be due to expectations that I had going into this, but the stories in this novel felt loose and disconnected. This is especially due to coming off collections of short stories like How High We Go in the Dark or even North Continent Ribbon, which interconnect the stories together with shared characters or worldbuilding. Kalpa Imperial had very few touchpoints between stories other than a loose thematic sense, and this created a storytale atmosphere where places and characters and words washed over me, unlistened.

Nothing was rooted in a time. Most stories were barely rooted in a place, and at best were set against "the south". Characters are referenced and never touched on again (or at best mentioned in passing elsewhere once). The storyteller narration references historical context that the in-universe listener would know to situate this story in, but to me the reader it felt like noise rather than worldbuilding, akin to opening the Silmarillion to a random page with no further context.

Theoretically, I can imagine placing any book on some hypothetical scale of narrative detail. (As a joke, let's say this is a scale with one end being the TV series Lost and the other end being a Brandon Sanderson wiki). I don't need all the details in a world spelled out, but there's a tipping point where there's enough detail where I believe that the author could fill in the blanks if needed. Well before that tipping point, it feels like authors are largely making everything up whimsically as they go. I think you can tell a set of disconnected stories where all the details are constructed out of whole cloth, but there needs to be some strong thematic through line to carry it, at least for me. This novel just doesn't quite have that.

To come back and treat this book for what it is rather than what I expected it to be, thematically I would try to pin this book down as about being about telling stories and taking the long view of history--that all places and empires and people change dramatically over time and can become something different. I think secondarily, it feels like it's a set of critiques and observations about empires and humanity; it's full of wry critiques of power, of nobles, and of human nature. I found the book amazingly quotable and quite funny in parts.

This is a hard book to recommend; even as I enjoyed it, its lack of coherence and whimsical storytale nature make it more a book that I enjoyed in passing than one that will stick with me.

This fantasy novel has a fun blend of politics, murder mystery, and rivals-to-lovers romance.

Lorelei Kaskel is picked to lead a small expedition to find the Urspring, source of all magical power, for King Wilhelm to unify his fragile empire. On her team is her infuriating academic rival Sylvia von Wolff. Once on the boat, Lorelei's mentor is murdered, and Lorelei has to work with Sylvia to continue to the expedition and find the murderer.

The dynamics of enemies-to-lovers don't always work for me, but somehow this one was a lot of fun! I felt like there was a lot of nuance around class and power dynamics, around misunderstandings, and around the tension of Lorelei not wanting to abandon her culture any more than she already had. This romance was as bumpy of a ride as you'd expect, but that bumpiness didn't feel artificial--it revealed characterization or heightens the mystery and politics. The ending of the book felt a little anticlimactic, but even so I found it satisfying in the way that it realistically addressed the needs of all the characters.

The Old Goat and the Alien is a cozy, fluffy scifi novel that is largely inwardly focused on character growth and interpersonal conflict. It's also hella queer. This book is exactly the soft hug I expected it to be.

The main plot hook is that grumpy, goat-shape Avari inadvertantly becomes the host for the newly arrived "alien" (human) Jenna who shows up through a portal with no resources and no friends. This book has a confetti grab-bag of genders and trans and queer and disability flavors. I love love the gift economy. I also super appreciate the detail of having a major side character be a plural system that is chimera-shaped.

A story with this many identities also creates so much space for nuance; there's different kinds of disability accommodations, there's two very different ways of being autistic, there's many different ways of being trans.

(also Tak! shoutout in the thanks section??)