CBR16 Book 30: "Cordelia's Honor" by Lois McMaster Bujold

Page count: 641 pages (it is two books in one volume, after all)

Rating: 4.5 stars

CBR16 Bingo: Détente (Cordelia and Aral start out as enemies and end up married)

Official book summary (read this in early May):

In her first trial by fire, Cordelia Naismith captained a throwaway ship of the Betan Expeditionary Force on a mission to destroy an enemy armada. Discovering deception within deception, treachery within treachery, she was forced into a separate peace with her chief opponent, Lord Aral Vorkosigan - he who was called "The Butcher of Komarr" - and would consequently become an outcast on her own planet and the Lady Vorkosigan on his.

Sick of combat and betrayal, she was ready to settle down to a quiet life, interrupted only by the occasional ceremonial appearances required of the Lady Vorkosigan. But when the Emperor died, Aral suddenly became guardian of the infant heir to the imperial throne of Barrayar - and the target of high-tech assassins in a dynastic civil war that was reminiscent of earth's Middle Ages, but fought with up-to-the minute biowar technology. Neither Aral nor Cordelia guessed the part that their cell-damaged unborn son would play in Barrayar's bloody legacy. 

Cordelia's Honor is part of the rather long Vorkosigan saga, which mostly concerns itself with the dashing Miles Vorkosigan and his many adventures. Chronologically speaking, Shards of Honor (the first part of this book) is the very first book in the series, while Barrayar (the second part) is book 7. The reason these two books have been collected into one volume is because they tell the story of how Miles' parents first met, got married and how he was born. I keep hearing great things about these books, and after Sarah, a fellow Cannonballer, wrote an absolutely amazing review last year, I figured that it was really about time to see what all the fuss is about.

Cordelia Naismith is a scientist on what is supposed to be an exploratory mission, but most of her crew ends up murdered and she is left in the wilderness with a badly damaged crew mate and an enemy soldier, popularly nicknamed "the Butcher of Komarr". They spend several days forced to cooperate and navigate dangers on an alien planet, and Cordelia comes to understand that Aral Vorkosigan is a lot more complex and honourable than his reputation would have her believe. By the time they reach civilization and it's time for them to part, it's clear that warmer feelings have developed between them. 

Unfortunately, they are still on opposite sides of a war, and Cordelia's government aren't super enthusiastic about their connection. By the time Cordelia decides to choose love over her own home world, Vorkosigan has been used as a scapegoat for his side of the conflict and is drinking his sorrows away on his country estate. Cordelia's arrival snaps him out of his funk and they get married. 

Their idyllic life together is complicated when the emperor dies, leaving a toddler as the new ruler, and Lord Vorkosigan appointed as his regent. Unfortunately, Aral and a pregnant Cordelia soon find themselves fighting a civil war, against usurping forces who have the dowager princess as a hostage and who want control over the young emperor. Ruthless assassins are dispatched against them, and while they both survive, the poison used could have disastrous consequences for their unborn child (spoiler - the baby is Miles, and he survives thanks to fancy technology from Cordelia's homeworld.

Considering the plots of these two books follow each other pretty closely, I would think that reading the series entirely chronologically would be very strange. Now that I've finally read Cordelia's Honor, which is thankfully more fantasy in space than hard sci-fi (which I rarely enjoy), I can see why so many people rave about the awesomeness of Captain Cordelia Naismith, and Aral Vorkosigan is certainly a good match for her. Barrayar, his home planet, is very patriarchal. Cordelia is a strong-willed, independent woman who has piloted space crafts and fought in a war. She's not prepared to wear pretty dresses and be a passive ornament in her husband's home. Thankfully, while the nobility around him might be a bit old-fashioned, Aral adores his wife and understands how remarkable she is. They have a beautiful partnership which forms the core of especially the second book.

I'm not sure when I'm going to read the books about Miles, their son, but I'm absolutely curious to see how his adventures turn out. 

Judging a book by its cover: These books came out in the 1990s and as such, have covers that feel rather dated now. I'm also not entirely sure why a futuristic sci-fi society dresses as if they were all from early 19th-Century Earth. Also not sure why someone is holding that sword in a way that looks cure to cut palms open and presenting it to Cordelia. Does she want tribute in the form of slashed palms? 

Crossposted on Cannonball Read

CBR14 Book 20: "Shards of Earth" by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Page count: 558 pages

Audio book length: 18 hrs 43 mins

Rating: 4 stars

 

CBR14 Bingo: Cold (the majority of this novel is set in space, which is famously very cold)

 

Official book description:

Idris has neither aged nor slept since they remade his mind in the war. And one of humanity’s heroes now scrapes by on a freelance salvage vessel, to avoid the attention of greater powers.

Eighty years ago, Earth was destroyed by an alien enemy. Many escaped, but millions more died. So mankind created enhanced humans ­such as Idris - who could communicate mind-to-mind with our aggressors. Then these ‘Architects’ simply disappeared and Idris and his kind became obsolete.

Now, Idris and his crew have something strange, abandoned in space. It’s clearly the work of the Architects – but are they really returning? And if so, why? Hunted by gangsters, cults, and governments, Idris and his crew race across the galaxy as they search for answers. For they now possess something of incalculable value, and many would kill to obtain it.

Shards of Earth was the July book club pick of my fantasy/sci-fi book club, and unusual for me, I had actually finished the book BEFORE the meeting. Right? I was as shocked as I'm sure you were. The general consensus of the people at the meeting who had finished the book (most of them) was that it was entertaining, but that the beginning of the book was rather slow and info-dumpy and that the plot narrative didn't necessarily benefit from each new section of the book arresting the plot momentum by going into a flashback, giving the reader background info relevant to this planet/section of space. A couple of people were especially annoyed by this, I think I'd gotten used to it by the third time the book changes location.

As is the case with a lot of sci-fi adventure, we follow a ragtag bunch of space farers, some of the more prominent being Idris, a man who was surgically and genetically modified early in the war against the huge and unfathomable Architects and for reasons I'm sure will be revealed in a later book in the series, has neither slept nor aged since his surgery. Idris and the others who were modified during the war were called Intermediaries, shortened to 'Ints' as the fighting wore on. Their mission was to try to telepathically connect with the giant, destructive moon-sized Architects in the hope to stop them from turning inhabited planets and settlements into abstract works of art, devoid of life. Idris was part of group of Ints who actually managed to mind meld with an Architect eighty years ago, and as a result, the massive alien disappeared, no Architects seen or heard from since. 

The surviving Ints also had an unprecedented ability to navigate ships through space, managing to find paths through the Void that others can't. This makes them extremely prized pilots, and caused the institute who created the first Ints to continue their experiments even after the war, creating in effect an indentured slave class forced to work as pilots until their brains give in. Idris is one of extremely few original Ints left, and bound to no one. To make sure he doesn't get kidnapped or stolen into slavery, he travels with his own lawyer, who can get him out of any scrape. They both reside the salvage vessel The Vulture God with a number of colourful rogues. 

Our other major POV character in the story is Solace of the Partheni. The Partheni are elite female soldiers, all genetically engineered by a scientist shortly before the start of the Architect War. They proved to be extremely useful in fighting the Architects and Solace was there when Idris and others took on an Architect in the final battle of the war. She hasn't aged noticeably either, but only because she's been kept in suspended animation. Now her superiors have need of her and a rather sensitive job they need her to perform, and Solace will need to locate and reunite with Idris.

Solace and the crew of the Vulture God find something very unexpected on what was supposed to be a routine salvage mission. Now they seem to be hunted through space by various groups of space mafia and criminals, as well as government officials and Idris can sense very worrying things in the Void that suggest that the decades of peace may be coming to an end. 

I listened to this book in audio and was surprised to find that the narrator is Sophie Aldred. To most people, that name means very little. But married as I am to the biggest Doctor Who nerd of my acquaintance, to me, Sophie Aldred will always be Ace, the Seventh Doctor's companion (who famously beat up a dalek with a baseball bat in one story). Because she was the main companion on Doctor Who when my husband was a child and first watched the show, he's obviously especially fond of that era, and I've seen pretty much all the stories with her. I've also listened to a lot of audio dramas with her, because we don't play at being Doctor Who fans in our household. Big Finish Audios are an important supplemental source of stories. So it was really strange to me, and probably took me about an hour or so of the novel to get used to Ace telling me the story, except of course, she wasn't Ace at all. Aldred is in fact a very good narrator, who manages to give the various characters, no matter what origin (there are quite a few aliens and cybernetic characters). I suspect listening to book 2 will be less of an adjustment. 

This was my first novel by Adrian Tchaikovsky. It clearly won't be the last. 

 

Judging a book by its cover: There was some discussion during our book club about the cover of the novel. About half of the members think it was a bit too generically sci-fi, especially with the cold shades of blue and a lot of black with some scattered spacecraft. I personally think it's quite cool, especially with the planet in the lower right corner in the process of being opened up and rearranged by the Architects. The second cover is mostly in shades of red, and my bet is going to be that the third novel in the trilogy is dominated by green.

 

Crossposted on Cannonball Read.