Barrayar by Lois McMaster Bujold

Lois McMaster Bujold originally conceived of Shards of Honor and Barrayar as one novel. She was writing her first novel and did not have a firm grasp on how much should fit between the covers of one book. As she writes, “My writing career has been on-the-job training throughout, and this was no exception.” (p. 592 of the combined edition of Shards of Honor and Barrayar, titled Cordelia’s Honor) After Shards of Honor found a publisher, Bujold went on to write and publish six more Vorkosigan novels — The Warrior’s Apprentice, Ethan of Athos, Falling Free, Brothers in Arms, Borders of Infinity and The Vor Game — before returning to the story of Aral Vorkosigan and Cordelia Naismith, and their early years together.

In the first book, they met under inauspicious circumstances but overcame them, along with mutual suspicions and hostility between their homeworlds to marry and live adventurously ever after. Barrayar opens with Cordelia regretting that she agreed to live on her husband’s home planet, the titular Barrayar. It remains a feudal monarchy with violent internal politics, even as it has the technology for interstellar spaceships. Aral is high up in the hierarchy, both commanding armies and vulnerable to assassination. The values that Cordelia brings from her background where she had risen to command a starship in Beta Colony’s Scouting service clash badly with her expected role on Barrayar. She is used to flat hierarchies, equality of men and women, rationality in many things and plurality in almost everything. Barrayar is a vertically-oriented society, with men and women segregated and men privileged. Tradition weighs heavily, especially in the upper nobility that she has married into. Some of the traditions that made some semblance of sense when Barrayar was isolated from other planets and its population struggling to survive look positively barbaric in a less straitened present. Yet those traditions linger and shape the environment that Aral and Cordelia must live in and with.

Aral is involved with Imperial politics at the very highest level, and early on an assassination attempt nearly succeeds in killing him and Cordelia. Quick reactions and preparedness ensure that the two of them receive an antidote to the poison gas from the attack in time to save their lives. Unfortunately, the nature of the antidote is such that it practically guarantees significant birth defects for the child that Cordelia is carrying. Worse, Barrayaran traditions regard such a child as unfit to live, and preferably to be aborted. A clinic in Barrayar’s capital has artificial wombs, a common technology where Cordelia comes from but practically unheard-of and vaguely threatening on Barrayar; the fetus is placed in one, in hopes that treatments the technology makes possible will enable it to live. Readers of other novels in the series will know that the child is Miles Vorkosigan, that he does indeed live with the consequences of the gas attack — very brittle bones, for example — but also that he does live. Part of the art of Barrayar is making the tension real for readers who know the outcome.

The plot against the Vorkosigans is part of a larger attempt to overturn the Imperial order that Aral is trying to bring to fruition as a regent to the new, five-year-old Emperor Gregor. The party of stasis attempts a coup, and the young Emperor comes under Aral’s protection, but his forces are at first scattered and off-balance. They have to keep the Emperor alive in the countryside, and their gestating future child alive in the city. Bujold manages the action with aplomb, keeping the human stakes front and center amidst the technology. Aral and Cordelia are political leaders, but they are also worried parents-to-be, they are suddenly guardians of a five-year-old who is a normal boy, but also key to preventing all-out civil war. Among their closest allies, similar dilemmas abound, and the characters are far from perfect. The intersection of personalities with events keeps Barrayar rushing along to a conclusion that’s both heady — the young Emperor lives — and worrisome — their child is born, but will always have physical problems, in a society that values martial fitness above almost everything else. Barrayar is both a fitting conclusion to the story that began in Shards of Honor, and satisfying background for the rest of the series.