Reviews and Comments

I read this book five years ago, and thought I'd refresh myself before the #SFFBookClub read of the sequel this month. I'd forgotten just how much I enjoyed this story and world. The writing has a brusque, hardboiled tone from the cynical point of view of a survivor, and it really works for this particular kind of book.

This is a multiverse travelling story, where there is technology that can send people between similar worlds, but only safely to ones where their "other selves" are not alive. Cara is somebody who has fought to survive her whole life and thus has few other selves alive, so she gets a job as a "traverser" to be sent to other worlds to collect information. Because it deals with worldwalking between closely related worlds rather than wildly different ones (like Charles Stross' Merchant Princes series), it gets the opportunity to explore the same characters in different timelines where their lives had taken different paths.

The post-apocalyptic wasteland locale of this novel is split into the wealthy folks of Wiley City living behind a wall (literally and metaphorically the airquotes nice white people of this story), the religious Ruralites, and the survivors of Ashtown between them. Cara is constantly code switching and crossing borders, both locally and multiversally--she is pretending to be a Ruralite, is secretly from Ashtown, while she precariously lives in Wiley City (hoping to get citizenship). Thematically, I love how the book ends with doubling down on Cara's role as an intermediary between worlds.

This is a strange little queer transhuman[*] science fiction novella about cheesemaking, embodiment, and trauma. It follows Wayland Millions, part of a group that has continually copied themselves into more and more selves. It's also got cheese forgery and a cheese heist?

This story feels pretty plural (or at least plural-adjacent) to my eyes: there are a number of situations where multiple people share the same body, but it's in a future where selves can copy themselves and instantiate themselves in different bodies as well.

Overall, I'd say this book largely has a lighthearted plot, but also takes itself seriously in a balance that really worked for me.

[*] in the trans trans human sense, as it should be, not that I'd expect anything different from Ann LeBlanc

This is now my favorite Adrian Tchaikovsky book. The writing is grippy, the narrator is wry, and I love the way the plotlines of revolution against authoritarianism and academic exploration of alien biology intertwine with each other.

Some extremely minor asides that I appreciated:

The narrator is quite funny and I appreciate the way he sometimes deceives the reader; there are several scenes where you get the surface level view of the scene and then find out shortly afterwards that he's also doing something furtive simultaneously.

I love that the authoritarianism is all about black and white binaries, and the book casually infers that one of the characters fell into political disfavor because they are some flavor of non-binary (without using that word, thank goodness).

This is also somehow the second academic adjacent alien book that I've read recently, with James SA Corey's The Mercy of Gods being the other. The power dynamic contexts are different enough that they end up taking different collaborator vs revolutionary approaches.

I gave myself a comfort reread of this book to remember again how much I enjoy it. It's still great.

Winter's Orbit is a queer romance / science fiction book. Personally, I think folks who like one genre but don't read the other would enjoy this book, but in practice it seems like the combination seems to make folks bounce from the idea. I wonder if perhaps this is why nobody else seemed intrigued to read this for hashtag SFFBookClub. Also, the romance is largely PG rated, if that's important to you one way or the other.

The plot hook is that reticent and duty-bound Count Jainan has recently lost his husband; in order to politically preserve an interplanetary treaty, he is quickly remarried to easygoing and irresponsible Prince Kiem. When Kiem's friendly overtures are rebuffed, Kiem tries to give Jainan space to mourn and not push him or through his silences; meanwhile, traumatized Jainan (who believes himself at fault for everything) feels pushed away but also that he deserves to be.

One trope that can frustrate me in a lot of romances is where two characters don't communicate and I feel like I need to yell "why won't y'all just talk to each other". Here, it feels less that these two don't talk, so much as they continually try, but end up talking past each other and making bad assumptions about why it's going poorly. This dynamic manages to work for me because the writing makes it believable why both of them think what they're thinking and why they don't push each other for better understandings. (But, I could also see this not working for some readers!)

The afterword mentions that this is a book that came from fanfic, and between how grippy it is to read and its use of some popular tropes, I think it shows (in a positive way). It opens with arranged marriage and there is definitely a scene with only one tent. (I don't know which fandom this is meant to have come from.)

But I also think saying this book comes from a fanfic undersells it. What I love is how solidly it intertwines the developing relationship between Kiem and Jainan with the developing space politics. For plot reasons, these two need to uncover the truth around the details of the death of Jainan's former husband, but this also results in uncovering Jainan's traumas and fears. Being vague for spoiler reasons, but the climax of the book has Jainan wrestle with being gaslit about his past, having to trust Tiem, working through his insecurities, and holding true to the strong parts of himself; and all this directly in the context of solving the space politics plot. It's this moment in particular where this book really melds these two genres together perfectly.

Bones & Runes was the #SFFBookClub January 2025 selection. It's a modern mythological quest of three friends trying to recover something stolen and grow as people and friends along the way. Overall it was a bit of a disappointment.

@eldang's thorough feelings after stopping reading sums up the majority of my thoughts. I'll try to get at a couple of other thoughts past that.

This book is attempting some interesting things by trying to mix together African, Irish, Hindu, and Greek mythology all at once. I can understand a story that is trying to stir together a variety of myths and methods of accessing the divine, but overall there's too many ingredients and everything is weaker for it.

Subjectively, I was disappointed by the writing. For a book that is so thoroughly rooted in South Africa and Durban in particular, I did not come away with much of a sense of place in most of the scenes. Part of this is that the characters are driven around by Ganesh from place to place in a way that makes it feel like the cast is teleporting between scenes.

But this isn't some seven stages of hell, Dante. These are African gods. The hero doesn't always survive. Forget heaven and hell. We've got no time for the devil here. Here, in this land, on this rock, we've got so many aspects of evil that one being doesn't suffice to hold its might; it's true strength. Maybe in your western worlds where everything is black and white, where you can afford one being to hurl your hatred at; one place that is good and one that is bad. This is Africa, baby. Here the good can be both bad and good at the same time.

I quoted this because this whole statement is repeated twice in the book almost word for word, but it feels all talk and no show. There is precious little ambiguity in this fantasy quest. There are a number of dangerous and neutral characters who deal in bargains or seem chaotically neutral, but the main players all seem fairly clear cut and shallow.

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.)

This is a cute novella about Taura coming back to Barrayar to see Miles and Ekaterin's wedding (and also having a fling with Roic).

It's a little bit of a weak story to me. There's a murder plot that is caught, but we've never heard of the perpetrators before and is mostly there as a plot device to make Taura and Roic heroes of the day.

I think the best part of this story is that we get to see Roic's perspective. Getting to see from the perspective of one of Miles' armsmen, particularly the newest one who deeply respects Miles but isn't privy to all of this escapades, is really fun. It also sets up Roic to be more of a character for when he shows up in the next book.

Surely, the real point of having a dozen previous books in a long running series establishing characters and world building is so that you can then truly and properly roast them in the worst dinner party disaster ever imagined.

This book is a comedy of manners about various courtships in the shade of the Emperor getting married. I love that a science fiction action politics series can have a book like this in the middle of it, and it doesn't feel out of place.

I do wonder a little how well this book would stand up on its own, though. There's so much history with Drou and Kou, Cordelia, Mark, Alys Vorpatril, Simon that it's hard to know if this would be quite as satisfying to a reader who doesn't have the level of background of reading all the previous books. I think the primary crux of the story, of Miles waging a surprise war of secretly courting Ekaterin as if it were a military endeavor (and, crucially, without telling her), is romantic comedy that could land for anybody.

There are just SO many delightful moments in this book: * "Mother, Father, let me introduce--she's getting away!" * the pile of terrible suitors for Ekaterin * Cordelia sitting Kareen's parents on the couch to be the baba between them and Mark and Kareen * Ivan being seconded to his mother for the imperial wedding * the Lord Dono reveal to Ivan (but just Dono in general) * Gregor giving Nikki his comconsole number, and Nikki calling * the final courtroom (re)proposal scene in the end

A brief plural aside about Mark and his headmates; I do observe that this book definitely posits Mark as the one who "should" be in charge, with everybody else as explicitly "subordinate" and are described as "semi-autonomous subpersonalities". To me this feels somewhat different than how the previous books have treated it.

(A further brief aside about the cover linked here, but Miles is not taller than Ekaterin. Maybe boxes are really popular?)

Genre-wise, Komarr feels like the initial part of a romance book mixed with mystery. I hesitate to say mystery because none of these really are really true mysteries where the reader had enough information, but it's definitely Miles in investigation mode. Miles is learning his auditor role and goes with Auditor Vorthys to help investigate the destruction of planetary mirror array, staying with Vorthys's niece Ekaterin and her family. What seems like a small embezzlement situation turns into something with much larger political ramifications (as always).

I like seeing Miles as an Auditor and having to learn the limits of his near-absolute power. That finally, a dozen books later, he is in a position where he needs to be careful about what he asks for, because it will happen even if it shouldn't.

One thing I do appreciate generally about this book is that we get to see some of the less wealthy Vor social class who are struggling to get by. Most of the series is about incredibly powerful families on Barrayar who know the emperor on a first name basis. Here, Tien and Ekaterin Vorsoisson are struggling to make ends meet (although this is partially Tien's fault) but also are trying to maintain what it means for them to be Vor. I wish the series had more of this dynamic!

That said, specifically I don't find Tien to be particularly interesting other than as a source of trauma for Ekaterin. It partially reminds me of the bad fanfic trope where there's some established "character in the way" who needs to be made to look as bad as possible (here: controlling, sloppy, petty, mean) so that you can bring the two characters you want together.

I do think the Ekaterin and Miles flirting/romance here mostly works for me. I think it's really well written about what each find appealing about the other; Miles is looking for a competent Vor lady who can love Barrayar, and Ekaterin is looking for somebody who will let her grow and isn't afraid of her son Nikki's genetic disease. This is petty, but I think the only moment where this is ruined for me is the end of the book where Miles offers Ekaterin some jewelry (of a model of Barrayar) and says that he hasn't ever succeeded in giving any girlfriend Barrayar before. I think it's just the one-sided misuse of the word "girlfriend" here that makes Miles seem like he's twelve; even saying "woman" instead would have felt a lot better.

Maybe this book rings very true to me as somebody who is airquotes old, but this is really a book about a middle age crisis; about how to handle losing everything, picking up the pieces of yourself, and then going on to the rest of your life all the same.

Miles has largely been unstoppable in previous books, and even death only slowed him down a little bit. But this is the book where he seriously fucks up by making a mistake, doubles down by lying about it, triples down by not come clean about it, and gets kicked out of his ImpSec job. And, his job is also his only connection to the Dendarii mercenaries and his Admiral Naismith identity. He could, of course, go run off to them, but it'd be a treasonous one way trip. So instead he stays home depressed, trying to put his life as Lord Miles Vorkosigan back together (and figure out what that even is, having put it on the shelf for so long).

There's some really good foreshadowing of all of this from the previous books. Miles strips Bel of its commission for lying about not knowing about Mark. Cordelia wonders several times what would happen if Miles loses his "little admiral". But the big one for me is when Miles tells Mark, "You are what you do. Choose again, and change." This moment comes a couple of books earlier, but that theme resonates strongly here through the whole book.

I really also appreciated the explicit revisit to Mountains of Mourning and Harra Csurik. This was really the only previous time in the novel that we see Miles really being authentically happy in his role as Lord Miles Vorkosigan, and so it's a great place to revisit in a novel about Miles becoming himself again.

Some smaller bits about book that I enjoyed: * lol at thirty being middle age * Simon Illyan also having to navigate figuring out who he is when he is not his job * the metaphor about the Dendarii being children that Miles is no longer responsible for along with this whole middle age crisis theme * Miles merging both of his selves vs Mark resolving into multiple selves * the Quinn scene at the end where she wants Miles to stay and Miles wants her to go and both would lose themselves if they did