Welcome to Six Damn Fine Degrees. These instalments will be inspired by the idea of six degrees of separation in the loosest sense. The only rule: it connects – in some way – to the previous instalment. So come join us on our weekly foray into interconnectedness!
Speaking of sci-fi novels: You guys, I did it! I binge read all the novels of Lois McMaster Bujold’s space opera, the Vorkosigan Saga, in about three weeks. All 17 of them.
Lois McMaster Bujold is one of the few authors whose fantasy books I’ve bought without even checking the blurb at the back (another one is T. Kingfisher). I’m a big fan of her Chalion books and in particular the Penric & Desdemona series. In it, a young man gets possessed by – or gains possession of – a demon composed of 12 distinct personalities, all of them female and most of them snarky. It’s fun, sometimes tragic, thoughtful and adventurous. I love the characters and the complex worldbuilding. I love the humour that comes effortlessly from well-drawn characters bouncing off each other.
The Vorkosigan books on the other hand have always mystified me. In fact, I bounced right off the first few pages a couple of years ago. Surely life was too short for self-impressed military sci-fi. How was this even the same author?
The Vorkosigan Saga follows the fate of Miles Vorkosigan, best described as a hyperactive space pirate who’s way too smart for his own good. It starts1 with Miles’ mother Cordelia Naismith and father Aral Vorkosigan, the so called “Butcher of Komarr”, who meet in a military fracas on a distant planet. They are technically enemies but they end up bumping into each other again and again, saving each others’ butts. Until Miles’ mother defects to Barrayar, the extremely macho military home planet of Miles’ father, to marry him. Book two shows them settling in and Miles getting assassinated with poison gas before he’s even out of the womb. It leaves him with brittle bones, a hunched back and a lot to overcompensate for.
Book three is where the story really gets into the flow: It shows 17 year old Miles “accidentally” fast talking his way into founding a mercenary fleet and becoming his alter ego, dread pirate Miles Naismith. It’s hard to explain. I think Miles is more like a natural phenomenon in that you have to experience him yourself. This is where the story starts shining as all the shenanigans fall into place. (Or space. Splace.) And then it just never lets up. Every book is full of hair-raising adventures that need to be solved with brains and courage.
Everything that is good about Lois McMaster Bujold’s writing kicks into gear. The world building. The whimsical ideas. The well-rounded characters. One of my favourite things is that many of the main characters have strong personalities and they certainly don’t always get along. The idea that just because we like two people they should end up liking each other is just not realistic. And yet that is often what happens in fiction. But here, you can see the friction between them, you understand where it’s coming from. People, especially family, can drive each other round the bend even as they bail each other out of trouble.
17 novels give ample room for fascinating side characters, like Miles’s evil clone (yes, really, and no one is more surprised about this than Miles) Mark.
Or my favourite character, Miles’ cousin and sidekick Ivan Vorpatril, a man who seems to have stepped straight out of a Jeeves & Wooster story. Until you realise his fecklessness is precisely calculated to allow him to live a life of comfortable non-ambition. Ivan Vorpatril does not want to be brave, or famous, or particularly smart like his cousin. He just wants to be left alone to enjoy his mediocrity. And yet fans have demanded – and received – a novel that is all about Ivan. Aha! Does Ivan finally get the ending his lazy butt deserves? Read and find out!
One of the unexpectedly great things about binge reading these books in order is that you see the author gradually growing into her own power. Bujold wrote the first novel, Shards of Honor, in 1986 at age 37, the last one in 2016. 30 years of Barrayar.
The first two are, frankly, a bit awful. Compared to her later books, they are clunky. The strong plotting bones are there, but the drama is dramatic, there is all this high emotion, stiltedness, some really lurid rape and overall… well, space opera. It’s like she had to get all these Important Ideas about what she wanted to say out of her system before settling into something more subtle and organic.
As Bujold ages, so do her protagonists. That’s the second pretty wonderful thing. Miles Vorkosigan ages and changes. His priorities shift, his self-awareness grows. He gets too damn old for youthful suicide missions and funnels his considerable acumen into political games. He defines himself anew. When she wrote the last novel, featuring an aging Cordelia, Bujold pulls deeply from her own age acquired wisdom to give us a meditation on parents, children and the need to live a life of your own. Rarely does an author stick with her characters so long that you can see all these changes happening as you read.
When the first Penric & Desdemona book came out in 2015, Lois McMaster Bujold already had a lifetime of novels under her belt. The effortless mastery is, I think, what happens when an author uses her skills to write something new for the pure, light hearted joy of it.
- I won’t count Falling Free here, as that is set 200 years earlier. ↩︎
A Damn Fine Cup of Culture 