sawyl: (A self portrait)
Very pleased to see N.K. Jemisin's The Fifth Season winning best novel and Nnedi Okorafor's Binti taking the novella award. Both categories were strong and I'm pleased to see two of my favourites from last year doing well. It's not terribly surprising to see Naomi Kritzer — the only adequate work on the ballot — taking the short story award or to see the car crash that was the best related work category going to no award...
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A solid vote in favour of sanity in this year's Hugos...
sawyl: (A self portrait)
I'm glad to see both Ancillary Sword and The Goblin Emperor on this year's Hugo novel slate and I'm also pleased to see Emma and Peter Newman picking up another fancast nomination for Tea and Jeopardy. Much of the rest of the list, however, looks a little... uninspiring?

ETA: A handy voting guide with details of how to avoid voting for anything nominated en bloc. It's not ideal but given the very clear attempt to game things at the opening stage — and with the same writer nominated three times, it obviously an attempt to force others out of the running rather than the push through an individual work — I don't think any other response is possible...

ETA2: [livejournal.com profile] kevin_standlee's guide to how the Hugo IRV system works and how and where No Award comes into play.
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The Hugo results are in and I can go to bed happy. A well deserved win for Ann Leckie's Ancillary Justice — I'd been concerned that Wheel of Time was going to somehow slip in on a wave of nostalgia, but no, common sense has prevailed! Equoid feels like the right choice, as does the rather wonderful The Lady Astronaut of Mars, and its good to see no award triumphing over Opera Vita Aeterna in the novelette category...
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I've finalised my decisions about this year's Hugos with a whole day to spare. As mentioned I found some of the choices baffling, but on the whole I thought there was more good than bad. As always, I found the Campbells the hardest thing to decide on. The decision feels more burdensome when you know that the nominees only have a limited number of bites of the cherry and because it's generally a strong slate, it's often hard to pick favourites...
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After deciding that the combination of heat and tiredness made climbing a bad prospect, I was left at a bit of a loose end. But after R talked me into bucking my ideas up, I decided to try and go swimming only to discover that the pool was closing early and I'd just missed the last entry cut-off time. Giving up I returned home and settled down with more of the Hugos works, so here are a few thoughts on some of the anthologies up for consideration for one award or another.

Speculative Fiction 2012 collects a set of online essays and criticism from a variety of different sources. I very much enjoyed the eclectic mix of topics and I was pleased to find myself re-encountering a number of pieces I'd enjoyed when I'd first encountered them — obviously the editors and I share similar tastes! I particularly liked Penny Schenk's piece China Miéville's Railsea and Lavie Tidhar on Embassaytown, while Liz Bourke's caustic review of Michael J Sullivan's Theft of Swords is as delightful a piece of schadenfreude as one might wish to find.

Queers Dig Time Lords: A Celebration of Doctor Who by the LGBTQ Fans Who Love It, with its awesomely long title, does exactly what it says on the cover. The enthusiasm of the essays is infectious, even to someone who has become slightly jaundiced about the show of late, and each one undoubtedly celebrates the Dr Who, but the actual subjects are a bit mixed. Some of the pieces are critical analyses, pointing the gay subtext of a lot of Dr Who and how, in Classic Who, the Doctor's lack of overt sexuality challenged the hetronormativity of your standard TV hero. Many of the other pieces feature often rather sweet coming out stories — either as gay or as geek! — filtered through a love of Dr Who and the fan culture surrounding it.

The Mad Scientist's Guide to World Domination is a fun anthology edited by John Joseph Adams, up for the best short form editor, dedicated to showing things from the other side of the superhero-supervillain divide. The essays are fun, although read shortly after Queers Dig Time Lords and pieces like Kate Eliot's essay The Omniscient Breasts, it's hard not to notice a certain familiar treatment of some of the characters in the stories. But that's a quibble; most of the pieces are fun — and the authors seem to enjoy the opportunity to cut loose — and it gave me the chance to read pieces by a few authors I hadn't read before.

Where the novel, short story etc categories are relatively easy to assess — at the least the forms are similar and the criteria relatively obvious — the related work is such a interesting and varied lot it's hard to make any sort of objective decision...
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I'm making my way through this year's Hugo nominations — I'm a little behind because I wasn't entirely sure whether to go to Loncon or not — and while the stuff lower down the list is pretty solid, the stuff towards the top is very mixed. Sure some of the stuff is good and deserves to be there, but an awful lot of it just makes me wonder WTF was in the kool-aid when the voting was going on...
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This years Hugos feel like the right choices: even if the winners don't precisely match my voting preferences, I don't think there are any irreconcilable differences. It's good to see John Scalzi winning best novel for Redshirts and Pat Cadigan winning the novellette category with The Girl-Thing Who Went Out for Sushi — both have multiple nominations but I think this is the first time that either of them have won...
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Another loose end from this year's Hugos, in the form of Brandon Sanderson's novella The Emperor's Soul. Not having read Sanderson before but knowing his reputation as a purveyor of big fat fantasy, I wasn't entirely sure what to expect but I found myself pleasantly surprised.

The story opens with a powerful political clique attempting to come up with a way to cling on to power following an assassination attempt that has left the Emperor in a coma. After coming up with a way to give themselves a hundred days of breathing space, the arbiters press-gang condemned criminal Wan ShaiLu to forge a new soul for the indisposed Emperor. Determined to survive the experience, Shai spends the next few months working on her artistic masterpiece whilst also carefully fencing with the arbiters' attempts to keep her under control and to subvert her creation in their own interests.

The story features an intriguing magical system based on the idea that objects can be be manipulated into other forms by someone who possesses an understanding of their past and origins. The more probably a change is, the more likely it is to hold for any length of time. Gradually over the course of her work on the Emperor's new soul, Shai converts her room from a humble storage cupboard into the finest suite of rooms in the palace by constantly tweaking the histories of the items in the room and by increasing the probability of other items being left there.

The characters were also engaging and the Socratic dynamic between Shai and Gaotona, the weakest but most subtly complex arbiter, is particularly well done. Gaotona starts off as a committed advocate of the traditional arts, condemning Shai's forgeries as uninventive hack work, but as she demonstrates her abilities and creates a masterpiece of understanding that seems likely to recreate the personality of Gaotona's estranged pupil, he gradually starts to come round to her point of view. The irony being that the careful and honest Gaotona is changed — corrupted, according to the views of his political fellows — by Shai's honesty.

I very much enjoyed this and, if it didn't deliver on a couple of its promises, that probably more down to my Chekhovian expectations than anything else...

2312

Aug. 17th, 2013 12:39 pm
sawyl: (A self portrait)
Into the tail end of my thoughts on the Hugos with Kim Stanley Robinson's tour of the solar system novel 2312. The core of the book is the growing relationship between the Mercurial Swan Er Hong, whose personality is impulsive, unpredictable and immediate, and the Saturnine Fitz Wahram, who is quiet, ordered and contemplative.

The novel opens in the constantly moving city of Terminator with a gathering to mark the death of Alex, the Lion of Mercury. As Swan struggles to come to terms with her grandmother's death, some of the others present — Fitz Wahram and Inspector Jean Genette — repeated ask her whether Alex has left her some sort of bequest. When Swan eventually stumbles across a message from Alex, she finds herself directed to deliver a message to a scientist on Io.

After returning to Mercury, Swan agrees to attend a Beethoven concert with Wahram. On their way back to Terminator following the concert, they witness the destruction of the city's tracks and are forced to take shelter in a tunnel beneath the surface. With no rescue forthcoming they decide to walk through the tunnels to the darkside of the planet and safety, keeping their spirits up by whistling their way through some of the great Romantic symphonies. With their relationship altered by their ordeal, the pair separate: Wahram to pursue Saturn's diplomatic agenda; Swan to help Inspector Genette investigate the attach on Terminator.

The rest of the plot, involving the possible self-awareness of quantum computers, the re-wilding of Earth, and the terraforming of the solar system, plays out against the background of Swan and Wahram's changing attitudes to each other. The characters dwell on some of Robinson's perennial interests: our moral obligations to those, both animal and human, we seek to help and the problems of maintaining their autonomy as we do so; the importance of art and music to individual existence; existentialism and how people might go about creating their own meaning in a post-scarcity society; the importance of the work ethic, and obsessions with pattern and order and iteration.

The setting is, as might be expected, extremely beautifully realised. Travel through the solar system is achieved many by hitching a ride on one of the many peripatetic terraria — hollowed out asteroids furnished with a unique internal landscape, some modelled on classic Earth environments, some catering to skiers or sailors, some, like sexliners or the completely unlit blackliners, intended to provide a unique experience for their passengers. There are other moments of great beauty, such as when the spacers decide to reintroduce animals back to Earth by dropping them back through the atmosphere in a series of aerogel bubbles that burst on impact like something from a dream.

Although the universe of 2312 draws on some of the elements of Robinson's classic Mars trilogy — from the constantly moving city of Terminator and the title of Lion of Mercury, to Swan's embedded quantum computer sharing a name with John Boone's AI — it seems unlikely that the novels share a setting, if only because Earth and Mars seem very different from those of the trilogy.

Despite enjoying the novel and admiring its ambition, I didn't feel that it was entirely successful in its attempts to integrate the conspiracy theory subplot with the story of the central relationship. Ultimately the crime plot relied too heavily on coincidence and resolved itself too neatly and easily to provide a satisfactory conclusion but I'm willing to overlook this in favour of the bits of the novel that are more successful — especially the final uplifting epilogue.
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For a spot of variety, something from the list of Campbell nominees in the form of Max Gladstone's Three Parts Dead. As already this was one of this year's real discoveries: a fun steampunk fantasy that combines magic and technology and complicated credit obligations that take a clear swipe at the problems of the global financial sector.

The story opens in the early hours of the morning with Novice Technician Abelard keeping up the constant litany of prayers to his god, Kos the Everburning, in the city of Alt Coulumb. Initially Abelard isn't worried about the lack of response; the god's responses his prayers have been slow for a while. But when the endlessly burning flame goes out and all sanctum's alarms sound simultaneously, Abelard finally realises that something is seriously wrong. When the church finally realises that their god is dead and that something needs to before his influence disappears, leaving the technology of Alt Coulumb at a standstill, they call in Elayne Kevarian and her assistant Tara Abernathy of the crafting firm of Kelethras, Albrecht, and Ao.

Digging into the mystery the crafters soon realise that the god most likely died because his obligations exceeded his resource and, unless they can prove that his church did not negligently over-commit his strength, Kos' creditors will be able to control the reconstitution of the god's remains. With Abelard's help, they discover that the god should have been sufficient to cover his obligations and that something else must have been sapping his strength. As if all this wasn't enough, they also have to resolve the death of a powerful judge who also happens to have been one of Elayne's principal allies and to confront an manipulative professor from Tara's School days.

Three Parts Dead is extremely sure-footed and its world building is excellent — doubly impressive for a debut novel. Magic and technology are treated in a similarly logical fashion, thus the priests of Kos know all about the laws of thermodynamics and how to get as much energy as possible from a steam turbine even while as the energy in question is supplied by the ever-burning spirit of their god. Likewise in a world where magical soulstuff acts as currency, magic is constrained by complicated binding obligations, its exercise owes as much to law as it does to wizardry, and creatures made of nothing but soulstuff — gods — act as banks, loaning out power and transferring it from place to place.

Excellent. I wouldn't be surprised if Gladstone swipes the Campbell...
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Another of Seanan McGuire's Hugo nominations, this time in her guise as Mira Grant, in the form of her excellent novella San Diego 2014: The Last Stand of the California Browncoats. Set in the Newsflesh universe thirty years after the Rising, it follows Mahir Gowda as he tries to uncover the truth of the Kellis-Amberlee outbreak at the last ever Comic-Con. The story combines some clever fan jokes and a note perfect sense of place but never allows this to undermine sympathy for the central characters.

The story of the Comic-Con outbreak is framed and set in context by Mahir's conversation with Lorelei Tutt, eighteen at the time of the Rising and one of the very few survivors of the convention. Lorelei's reluctant relocations are padded out with Mahir's fictionalised version of events based on the electronic accounts left by the other attendees.

Thus, we get to know Lorelei's parents, Shawn and Lynn, as they mobilise the rest of the California Browncoats to keep as many people safe as possible. We get to know the spear-wielding Kelly and store owner Stuart as they try to find a way out. Kelly, aware that things are unlikely to end well for everyone, tries to keep an emotional distance from everyone while kindly, open Stuart always wants to offer help to and befriend that poor doomed people he meets on the convention floor. We also meet Elle Riley, star of a TV show about time travelling cops, reluctantly en route to a panel when the outbreak hits. Finding herself holed up in a replica of her character's office with a couple of newlyweds, Patty & Matt, Elle finds herself forced to acknowledge some facts about her life that she's been keeping under wraps for the sake of her career.

For all that it sounds like it might be a gimmick, San Diego 2014 really works. The characters are sympathetic, well drawn, easy to identify with — making you ask yourself how you'd behave if you were caught up in the end of the world — and ultimately, despite feeling of doom given by Mahir's framing conversation with Lorelei, you come to hope that they'll somehow get out alive and be given a chance to make good on the things they've learned about themselves & their lives during their brush with flesh-eating monsters.

It's not hard to see why McGuire has quite so many things on the Hugos shortlist this year...
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Next in the novella category, Jay Lake's The Stars Do Not Lie. Set on a somewhat steampunk alternate Earth — it took me an embarrassingly long time to realise this, despite some of the more obvious hits — it tells the tale of a Gallileo-like scientist who has discovered scientific evidence for a particularly radical heresy.

The story opens with Morgan Abotti presenting his radical thesis to the Planetary Society in Highpassage: that despite the Lateran Church, which claims that humanity was created in eight different gardens by the spirits of the Increate a few thousand years ago, humanity actually came from the stars. Needless to say, this does not go down well with the Church and Inquisitor Bilious Quinx dispatches himself to go and track down the truth. Arriving in Highpassage slightly too late, Quinx discovers that Morgan has seized by the secular authorities and whisked off in an airship to a mysterious island. Not meaning to let his prey get away Quinx sets off in pursuit.

There's a lot to like about this story, from the way that it re-imagines Earth's history to the way it subverts and re-tells the story of Genesis using the scientist to argue for rather than against the abrupt arrival of humanity on Earth. There are echoes of Gallileo throughout, especially the idea that scientific evidence will come out if it exists regardless of how hard the priests might try to believe it away.
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And so to the novella category of the Hugos, with Aliette de Bodard's beautifully nuanced On a Red Station, Drifting. Set about a Dai Viet space station on the edge of a decaying empire, it is a close, psychological story about two powerful women who are almost completely incapable of understanding each other even though their true concerns are somewhat similar.

Events are set in motion when Lê Thi Linh arrives on Prosper Station as part of a group of refugees from the Twenty-Third Planet. Linh, a proud and highly educated magistrate, has been forced to abandon her position and her tribune by the gradually rising rebellion. Unable to see sanctuary elsewhere Linh is forced to cast herself on the mercies of her distant relative Lê Thi Quyen, the de facto ruler of Prosper Station. Preoccupied by the gradual failure of Prosper's AI, Quyen has little time for her arrogant relative and contemptuously engages Linh as the family tutor.

The story unfolds primarily through a series of formal and hostile encounters between the two principals. There are moments of high drama, such as when Linh improvises a savage and angry poem in the middle of a banquet for a powerful official or the moment when the family are finally forced to employer her forensic abilities as a former magistrate, but much of the action is quiet and internal.

Quite excellent.
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With the hugos deadline past, I think it's worth saying that I didn't really struggle with most of this year's decisions. I thought the novella & novelette categories were strong, the novels were a bit of a curate's egg, and the short story selection was too limited to say anything about.

My favourite discovery of the year was Max Gladstone's Three Parts Dead from the list of Campbell nominees. A sort of post-Perdido steampunk fantasy, it imagines a world where technology is welded to magic and magic is treated like a tradable commodity. Consequently, gods can go bankrupt — a fatal process for a non-material being! — while human crafters, often brought in to clean up complex magical messes, are equal parts wizard and lawyer. Very highly recommended.
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Last but by no means least, Catherynne Valente's Fade to White, a disturbing post-nuclear vision of a 1960s America where Joseph McCarthy has become president — with Ray Kroc as his VP! — and whose attitudes to sex and fertility recall Atwood's sinister Republic of Gilead.

The story unfolds as a series of alternating scenes focusing on two principal characters: teenagers Sylvie and Martin. Both are preparing for their respective rites of passage — an Announcement for Martin, a Presentation for Sylvie — with very different degrees of enthusiasm. Martin, a dreamer and an artist, can't wait to become the best father he can possibly be; Sylvie, with a secret buried in her past and a secret, chaste relationship with a local boy, is far less enthusiastic about being poked & prodded by a doctor and, if successful, assigned a quarter-share of a husband.

The teenagers' stories are intercut with a series of advertising pitches for the very best that the post-apocalyptic world has to offer: poison-free vegetables; bromide beer; and a type of brylcreem that prevents hair loss. Each of the pitches is undercut by a series of blue pencil interjections from a cynical advertising executive, who attempts to cajole her underlings into coming up with something a bit more manipulative.

The adverts cleverly allow Valente to expand her dystopian vision of the future, undercutting Martin's dreamy ideals and deepening Sylvie's grudging compliance in a way that gives the piece a sinister depth. And if the ending doesn't come as a surprise — and given tone and some of the foreshadowing, I don't think it's supposed to — the way that both Martin and Sylvie accept their predetermined fates is chilling.
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Next on the list it's Pat Cadigan's The Girl-Thing Who Went Out for Sushi. Set in orbit around Jupiter a few hundred years in the future, it imagines a universe where people can opt to change their bodies into something better adapted to space — the sushi of the title — giving rise to a tense relationship with base-line humanity — whom the sushi refer to as two-steppers.

Told from the perspective of a Arkae, an octo sushi, the story is catalyse by a two-stepper, Fry, who decides after breaking her leg in an accident to go out for sushi. The transformation isn't simple — Fry was a brain box & a beauty queen back on earth and her decision to reshape her body triggers all sort of legal and social objections back on Earth — and while Arkae is waiting for her friend to change, she and her gang find themselves being rushed around Bg J in an attempt to get various projects finished before a comet, Okeke-Hightower, is expected to impact the gas giant.

The world Cadigan creates, with its different types of sushi — so-called because they're modelled on various different forms of marine life, from octopi to crabs to puffer fish to nautili — and the tensions that exist both between the sushi and the two-steppers, and within the sushi themselves feels well realised. The story takes in issues of political representation, the power of corporations, and ubiquitous surveillance — a necessity when attempting to survive in a deeply hostile environment — before ending on an intriguing note that casts a new light on Arkae's account of preceding events.
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Onwards to Thomas Olde Heuvelt's The Boy Who Cast No Shadow, another contender for the Hugo novellette category.

The story is the first person account of a sharp-voiced teenager called Look, the boy of the title, who not only casts no shadow but is invisible to cameras of all types and suntans on both sides simultanously. Dismissing the reasons for his lack of shadow early on — "It’s something to do with my genes, they say, but they don’t know what. Molecular structures and the effects of light, blah-blah-blah." — the story concentrates on Look's friendship with Splinter, another teen made entirely of mirrored glass. Horribly fragile and with limited flexibility, Splinter has been so coddled by his parents that he had the freedom to follow up on any of his own dreams. When Look realises this, he decides to help his friend fulfil some of his ambitions.

The story is short and focused, with a strong narrative voice and a quiet message about parents' desires to keep their children safe versus the child's need to live their own life and take risks to follow their dreams. Definitely a contender.
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More from the Hugos shortlist, in the form of Seanan McGuire's two contenders in the best novellette category. Both are set in the same world as McGuire's October Daye stories; both expand the backstory of two of the most important characters in the series, Tybalt and the Luidaeg, in years before their time with Toby; both are available for download from McGuire's web site; and both are straight up excellent.

Set in 1666, Rat-Catcher opens with Rand, the prince to London's Court of Cats, indulging his taste for Shakespeare. His evening is interrupted when his tyrannical King orders him to attend a summit of all London's fae. The King's carefully planned snub, dispatching his prince rather than going himself, backfires when Rand hears another fae prophesying the destruction both of London and of the fae city of Londinium in fire and plague. When the King refuses to hear his emissary's report, Rand has no choice but to challenge for leadership of the court and, after a costly struggle, he leaves his old self behind and becomes Tybalt, King of the Cats.

The outcome of the story is clear from the moment the year is given in the opening section, but the true story is one of growth, of putting aside childish things, and of accepting the costs and burdens of adulthood in exchange for a chance to make the world a better place. Restoration London is well imagined — although, in a moment of stupidity, I managed to confuse the Shakespearian performances of the Duke's Company for those of the King's Men until I remembered that Shakespeare died in 1616! — but the principal focus is on Rand's rejection of his King's arbitrary and violent rule in favour of a more Enlightenment approach intended to save as many of his people as he can from the coming fires.

In Sea-Salt Tears opens with Elizabeth, a young selkie, at a party to mark the passing of a transformative seal skin to one of her contemporaries. Here she meets Annie, a Ronan born without the ability to change herself, and through a series of parties over a number of years during which Elizabeth continues to brood about her failure to be selected to bear a skin, the pair fall into a relationship that ends with Elizabeth moving in with Annie in San Francisco. Years pass and, despite promising to remain with Annie forever, Elizabeth finds herself unable to decline when her mother passes on her seal skin. The gift, a poisoned attempt to split up Elizabeth and Annie and to force Elizabeth to obey her family's expectations, comes complete with a final sting in the tail: the final discovery that Annie is actually the Luidaeg, the sea witch, and the discovery that the selkie's origins are tangled up in the witch's terrible curse.

A small-scale story, In Sea-Salt Tears packs a melancholy emotional punch right from the very start, when an older and sadder Elizabeth opens with a framing narrative that explains that things aren't going to end happily ever after. We're then thrown into the world of the selkies where every member of the younger generation struggle to please their elders, in the desperate hope of receiving the next available seal skin as a reward for their good behaviour. But, as Elizabeth discovers, this cuts both ways: nervous Tempe is given a skin because she tries to walk away from her heritage; her reckless Colin is given a skin to balance Tempe's timidity; and so on with Elizabeth being stepped over on every occasion until the moment when she feels unable to reject the offer that promises to destroy all the happiness she's managed to accumulate so far.

While both stories are excellent, I think I prefer the bitter-sweet In Sea-Salt Tears especially when considered as a standalone piece. Rat-Catcher adds more to the Toby stories, but there's something really wonderful about seeing McGuire in quiet, reflective mode.
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Reading through the last few items on this year's Hugos shortlist, I've arrived at Lois McMaster Bujold's Captain Vorpatril's Alliance, one of her Vorkosigan Saga series of novels.

The story opens on Komarr, where Captain Ivan Vorpatril has been assisting his boss, Admiral Desplains, with a tour of inspection. After allowing himself to be talking into a side mission for Imperial Security, something that involves investigating the background of a mysterious and beautiful young woman, Ivan almost accidentally enters into a temporary marriage with the woman, a orphaned Jacksonian refuge called Tej, in an order to dodge kidnapping and murder charges. After returning to Barrayar, where they go endure a whirlwind series of social events, Ivan and Tej's temporary marriage is thrown into crisis by the arrival of the remains of Tej's clan — all of whom seem determined to do whatever it takes to make enough money to win back their position on Jackson's Whole.

Being brutally honest, I struggled with this book but I think the faults are mostly on my side. Firstly, I've only read one of the previous Vorkosigan novels and that was very long time ago. Consequently I don't have the requisite familiarity with the cast of characters who appear in brief minor roles to buy into them as serious players and lack the tolerance for Ivan's reminiscences about people we never get to meet.

Secondly, I didn't find the plot nearly engaging enough. The screwball comedy plot — man & woman marry in haste, gradually start to fall in love, find themselves confronted with a crisis that forces them to decide whether they want to separate, before finally deciding to stay together — was a little too familiar and the secondary caper plot didn't really have enough energy or tension to make up for it.

But that aside, the writing was perfectly good and the whole thing was technically accomplished — this isn't intended to be as damning as it sounds — but it just wasn't my thing.

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