One point I always liked about that story was the point she made - legal precedent was subservient to the judgement of the person on the spot. Precedent can guide you, but it doesn’t bind you, and you can’t fall back on it to defend a bad decision.
Because damn it, she has the right to petition her Count for redress of a grievance!
One thing with reading the stories a bit out of order is that some of the character development is mixed up. In this story, Miles spends a lot of self-pity on “Why does it have to be me to handle this? Is this some sort of test?”. But by, say, Diplomatic Immunity, he doesn’t even have to ask: It’s him because it’s his job, and it’s his job because he’s the best man for the task, and he knows he’s the best man for it, and he’s going to do his job, end of.
@ParallelLines , it looks like the next one after this would be Barrayar before I get to Memory. And there will also be some other reading of other series in between: I’m alternating between Bujold and reading for school and (currently) also another series that I got into and want to finish (technically I don’t need to do the reading for school, the expectation is one book out of a list of 12, but like I’m going to let myself get away with just one of them…).
One of the recurring points in the series is that the miracle tool has limits, requires extensive training to do right, and is such a serious step to take an experienced investigator will hesitate to use it in some cases.
Nothing wrong with taking your time and savoring a good book/series or three.
One of my regrets when reading the series for the first time years ago was that most of my friends read either harder scifi or fantasy mostly. I was the only one who read military scifi or more blended material.
So I didn’t have people to TALK about my thoughts on the subject.
So looking forward to sharing those thoughts as you move through the books.
I’ve started re-reading them, too, largely because of this thread. But at the moment I’m stalled because I’m reading Hugo nominees.
(Reading Hugo nominees is good for me. It forces me out of my comfort zone, and introduced me to new authors. I found one i liked enough to buy more books last year, and there’s a new one this year I’m going to pursue, too.)
I’d like to re-read as well, but sadly my list of purchased but not read books is, like my Steam games library, a bit overfull.
When I read, I want to sit and read through as much as possible, often omitting sleep and other responsibilities. Which is bad when I’m adulting.
And with Miles, much like Pringles in theory, I can’t stop with just ONE you know.
Yeah, that other series I mentioned, I indirectly got into because of the Vorkosigan books. When I got to “The Borders of Infinity”, the easiest collection to find it in was an anthology of space opera from a bunch of other authors, and one of the other stories, the story itself had issues (it was fantasy trying and failing to be science fiction) but I could tell that the writing was great, so I looked for actual fantasy stories by the same author (Nnedi Okorafor, the Akata books).
Which also actually ties into the reading for school, because I’m on the committee that picks the list of summer reading books, and it’ll be a great fit for next year’s theme.
If anyone wants to talk about the Hugo nominees, i started a thread