Kevin's Weblog

I’ve been wanting to re-read the Miles Vorkosigan books for a while, but kept getting deterred by the fact that they repackaged them all since I originally read them. Finally I took enough time to figure out what the new order is, and grabbed the first one(*) to read while I was travelling a couple weeks ago.

Bujold is one of my favorite authors, and it was fun to revisit this character. These books could easily be mistaken for simple space opera, given how entertaining and quick to read they are, but there’s really much more going on here. Bujold’s talent is in creating complex, coherent universes; and the narrative here is layered on top of a richly developed background of planetary and interplanetary history and politics. Because of this, I might have actually enjoyed reading them a second time even more than the first, as I picked up on some of the details that I missed at first.

(*) Strictly speaking, Cordelia’s Honor is earlier in the chronology of the story, but this book is really the place to start with the series.