I’m disappointed. I actually, for the first time in years, couldn’t wait for paperback and shelled out for a hardcover.
Miles shows no personal growth in this book; the planet he is on came out of nowhere; his mission didn’t require an Auditor. The deus ex machina came, oddly and awkwardly, at the beginning of the book.
Sloppy and lazy romanticism between the consul and Jin’s mother. The employee at the consulate should have either turned into being a problem or should never have existed; no one is going to offer to call the cops for a twelve year old, and then later mention (to his boss!) that he expected the job to be a source of baksheesh.
Making sure I’m below preview . . .
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One thing that particularly made no sense to me is why the cryology companies would be the guardian of their client’s estates. Even the most primitive civilizations could see the conflict of interest in that. Allowing that, for the sake of argument, we get to the cryology companies getting to vote their client’s vote! That is just ridiculous. Sorry, Lois, but it is.
Miles is up to four kids, and Gregor has at least two, yet there is a book missing on the effects on Barrayan politics and on Miles, Gregor, and–yes–Ivan of those births.
Major spoiler:
The book should have ended exactly at, “Count Vorkosigan, sir?” or that should have happened at the beginning and it should have been an entirely different book. The “drabbles” were cheap and unfulfilling.
On the bright side, there is a CD in the hardcover that appears to have every Miles novel and story on it in a variety of formats. That’s absolutely worth the $25 all by itself.
I agree. Throughout this book Miles didn’t seem to be himself.
The scenes with Jin also seemed off. Which is unusual. Bujold herself is a mother and has experience with real children. She’s written realistic child characters in past books. And Miles has dealt with children in other books and is supposed to be a father by this point. But he seemed clueless on how to deal with children here.
The CD is missing ‘Memory’ - Lois tells us that it is because the person that normally edits the CDs included in the books was away and the CD got completed without them. Although it does also have ‘The Vorkosigan Companion’ which wasn’t originally going to be included. I haven’t checked mine out yet but I understand you just look in the root directory and it is there.
I have an entirely different view of the book, but everybody is different =)
AS to the rest -
Hm, Not all books are written identically, and as to why Lois decided to open with Miles drugged out of his mind and wandering around the cryo facility instead of starting with a meeting with Gregor telling Miles to go investigate the planet was her choice. We do find out later that that is exactly what happened. The real deus ex machina is actually Roic managing to break out of the resort room and manage to discover a boat with an emergency communicator that actually powers up.
His mission did require an auditor - the job of an auditor is “whatever you say, Gregor” and there was a discrepancy that needed sorting out. As Miles called it a slow creepy way to steal a planet. Since the people were getting cryostored before they actually died, the cryo companys retain the vote of the corpsicle. The plot hinges on Komarr’s political structure of not just one person one vote, but some rich people had more than one vote, so when they got frozen the cryocorp retained their voting proxy. They were planning on grabbing the ownership of the planet by convincing a majority of the population to cryo store themselves before death on the hopes that their age or disease will be cureable in the future [the premise is that people properly cryo stored are revivable, it happened to Miles when a needle grenade took him out in a previous book by basically gutting him]
Would you prefer that the plot of Dr Lieber to take Jin’s mother Lisa Sato off to another planet [leaving both her kids there with her sister] and romantically sweeping her off her feet and marrying her to have worked? Vorlynkyn was only being speculated about by the kids … and why should the embassy’s clerk become a major problem?
To be perfectly honest, I prefer certain authors because they don’t follow the same formula for writing as every other author in existence.
And the purpose of drabbles [prose in 100 words] is sort of like a prose version of a haiku or sonnet, a highly formalized format where you need to follow a specific format to accomplish your point. Some people like them, some don’t.
Ah, it is not included. Memory seems to be the only one not included in one of the omnibus volumes. Coincidence, or not?
No, the deus ex machina is the (attempted or actual) kidnappings, that are further completely dropped from the plot, at least until Bujold felt that she needed to create danger.
I found it hard to believe that the issue required more than a competent forensic accountant, and I find it hard to believe that Gregor is stupid enough to not realize that. It helps if you remember that, cryogenic votes or not, Gregor is the Emperor of Komarr.
Yes, I noted my difficulty in believing that premise. I’m uncertain as to why your response assumes that I did not read the book.
I’m uncertain as to why your response assumes that I have read neither this book nor any other Vorkosigan book.
I dislike the plot and the story. It does not remotely approach the caliber of her other books about the Barrayan universe. It is formulaic and simplistic, and it dodges the changes in the Imperium since the last novel.
I do like them, under different circumstances, as in stand-alone. In this circumstance, they were a cheap and dishonest way to end the novel.
I was disappointed too. It just wasn’t interesting. No pain, no urgency, no hard choices.
Lois said that she didn’t want to dwell on her own feelings about her parents’ deaths, so she just touched on it briefly. But she has also said that she’s working on an Ivan book, which gives me hope.