Vorkosigan Saga - Tumblr Posts
This has been on my TBR list for a while. I need to find the charts/One True Reading Order list so I can figure out where to even start. (I'm open to suggestions)
I knew maybe half of the things on this list. The one thing I know that is not listed is that Miles uses EPIC RULES LAWYER-ing and BLUFF for good (??? maybe good? to save the universe? for fun and profit?)
Also, pretty much everything I know about this series I picked up from following Batya.
What I Know About The Vorkosigan Saga From Watching My Sister Read It
i am about embark upon A Reading of the vorkosigan saga after having been convinced to do so by my sister’s obsession with it. before i do, however, my sister @umamidjezhda told me to do one of those ‘what you know about’ posts because, and i quote, “the like six other people in this fandom deserve more content”.
idk if this is the content you fine people deserve, but it’s the content you’re getting from me.
A Complete List Of Things I Know About The Vorkosigan Saga From Having Been Somewhat In The Vicinity Of My Sister As She Read Them:
SPACE
Lois McMaster Bujold so it’s gonna be Great and make me realize just how much of my life has been wasted reading things written by men and deciding i don’t like certain tropes or stories or genres because i’ve only read them as written by men and it turns out that when written by a woman they are Good Actually.
like half a million books and some of them haven’t been in print since like 1992 and others are only available in collections but like different collections in different countries, etc. etc.
must plot out reading order using charts and one of those deeply obnoxious ‘THIS is the one true reading order for purists and REAL fans’ articles put together by some deeply obnoxious 20-something dude in between sci-fi forum wankfests.
amazingly hideous/hideously amazing 80s cover art
like half a million characters. many, but not all, of them Vorkosigans.
Miles. Cordelia…….yeah you know what I thought I had osmosised more names, but I haven’t. No wait. Mark.
well one of the books is apparently called ethan’s something, so i guess i can extrapolate from that fact that there is also an Ethan.
at any rate, half a million characters and yet only one (1) that i know any vague thing about: miles.
Not Hot in theory but Extremely Hot in practice
i get the feeling there are roughly six places in every book he appears in where he really probably should have died and yet somehow miraculously survives
okay there is also a Bel, but i don’t think they’re a Vorkosigan
i know about bel only because there is apparently a tragic dearth of bel/miles fic. which, really sister, i’m not wholly convinced they’re not all just chilling on an lj somewhere, or like an archived geocities page, or tbh one of those ancient web forums. what was it called? usenet? frankly i think you should check with that academic library that’s serving as an archive for print fandom material before giving up hope. there’s probably at least one zine.
Barrayar. this could mean literally anything i truly do not know. but it is a word. a Vorkosigan word. and it is a thing i know, so onto the list it goes.
a planet of gay men. tragically the planet of the gay men was conceived of in the 80s, which, as we all know, was before the invention of trans men, and so they are struggling with the whole procreation thing.
thankfully the marketing material is here to remind you that there is in this book An Woman and that she is Beauty Itself, so i’m sure that all works out fine and just as the 80s straight dudes who picked it up expected.
something something mirrors metaphysics identity crisis
PEW PEW SPACE BATTLES*
* a direct quote from one of my sister’s texts to me
50k fake married au (canon compliant)
tbh it sounds like at least one person is in some kind of space military
something something non-toxic masculinity passed down from father to son
a garden???!
Late Addition: Ivan [B???????]. miles’s cousin. my sister wants to name a husky after him. I don’t know what this means.
I apologize for my brief recommendation of the further novels, as it was without context and born out of my excitement for the books. Frankly, I wrote it with the assumption that whatever my feelings upon the matter you already had your own, and would do whatever you wished no matter what I said. Having said that, I will now write the reason I so quickly recommended the books without giving you context.
Reading Bujold, for me, is a baseline to expand one’s empathy for others. All books do this, to an extent, but Bujold does it with particular finesse, and with, I admit, a dry irony I very much enjoy. She writes humans who push the boundaries of how we define humanity and asks us to expand our definition of humanity to include them.
Within her books she discusses a wide variety of topics, frequently pertaining to ethics. She is at her best while writing ethical intellectuals. A shortlist of the topics Bujold breaches are, family, identity and self-discovery, redemption, ableism, patriarchy, the mechanics of privilege (from different points of view), tradition and innovation and how they relate, medical ethics, bioengineering, and more (not to mention a generous portion of science fiction ethical dilemmas). Within the world of her books she focuses more upon characters than she does upon science, giving a plausible future scenario in which she can discuss more topics more freely than she might be able to within the modern era.
Shards of Honor was Bujold’s first published novel, and therefore lacks some of the polish and skill of the later novels. She is an author whose writing gets better, not worse, as she progresses. This is even more impressive when you realize that Shards of Honor is no where near a ballpark that could be considered bad.
I do not have a reference for how much you know about the series, so I will now expound a little upon its format.
The protagonist of Shards of Honor, Cordelia, appears as the main third-person narrow point of view for one more book before a time jump and a change in perspective to her son, Miles. Miles is his own protagonist for the majority of the series, though in later books the cast expands. Miles is a complex character that I do not wish to spoil should you decide to keep reading, but he very atypical for a protagonist of his sort, and it leads to a lot of interesting things about the series at large.
In addition, it is important to note that not all of Bujold’s novels are romances. Barrayar, the next book, can be semi-classified as a romance given as Aral and Cordelia are both still present, but I find it more justly fit into a political thriller. All the novels in the series can be called space operas. Furthermore, depending on the book, she writes within the genres of horror, speculative fiction, comedy, mystery, and drama. While this has a potential to be jarring with a less skilled writer, with Bujold, the result is instead a cohesive, interesting universe with realistic societies.
The books do include trigger warnings on rape and torture, though the worst instances are in the scene you mentioned in Shards of Honor, and instances in Mirror Dance much further in the series. The most common just complaint I have heard of her books is a lack of understanding of gender and sexual orientation early within the novels. She does not handle the subject horrendously, as you have likely gathered from the nature of Beta colony, but there are some instances that reveal a lack of understanding into bisexuality and what in means to be transgender. However, this lack of understanding, too, improves as she continues to write.
The series itself is extremely important to me, which doesn’t necessarily mean it will be an extremely important to everyone. However, I would highly recommend you continuing to give it a chance. I did not receive the impression you particularly disliked it, but rather you enjoyed it well enough, but not enough to derail your reading for the next month as you finished the series. I strongly urge that you do. Personally, I find it some of the most poignant books ever written on human nature and on human hope, and have long felt the relatively insular community that knows of its existence should expand. It is a series I honestly believe would improve the world if everyone read and understood its messages. It is a story of finding joy in the darkest times, of changing the world, and of the power of human inspiration.
Read further. Just do it.
@unexpected-firestorms replied to your text post
Read further. Just do it
I’m not absolutely opposed to the idea, but I’m gonna need way more of a convincing pitch than that.