Sep 07 2025
In Cetaganda Miles Vorkosigan, who is all of 22 years old, is sent to represent his home world of Barrayar at the funeral of the Cetagandan Dowager Empress. Accompanying him is his cousin Ivan Vorpatril, who is not much older. Cetaganda possesses a sprawling empire, by the terms of the Vorkosigan series, “eight developed planets …
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May 07 2025
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. …
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Oct 14 2024
After two Vorkosigan books that are outliers in the larger series — Shards of Honor because it was the first; Ethan of Athos because it’s about an unusual planet — Brothers in Arms returns to what I think of as the main sequence of the saga: books about the life of Miles Vorkosigan. Brothers in …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2024/10/14/brothers-in-arms-by-lois-mcmaster-bujold/
Sep 14 2024
As the fortieth anniversary of its publication approaches, I suppose it’s fair to call Shards of Honor an old-fashioned space opera, although the series it kicked off is open-ended and its most recent work appeared just six years ago. Somehow I missed the Vorkosigan saga when it was becoming a big thing in science fiction …
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Mar 10 2022
For reasons not detailed within the novel, the planet Athos is settled exclusively by men. It’s a backwater, isolated by choice and religious conviction. Converts are few, visitors prohibited, and travel off-planet essentially nil. The rest of spacefaring humanity seems to regard them as quaint but harmless oddballs. The men of Athos have mastered the …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2022/03/10/ethan-of-athos-by-lois-mcmaster-bujold/
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