The Warrior's Apprentice by Lois McMaster Bujold
My friend Christiana has been after me to read the Vorkosigan books for some time and, indeed, she did get me to read the Baen collection of the two Cordelia novels over a decade ago. But I never got around to reading anymore; you lot know how many books are on my reading list! Recently, my sister's voice has joined her. I was finally spurred to action by the fire that destroyed Uncle Hugo's Bookstore in Minneapolis during the Black Lives Matter protests. Posts on File 770 drew my attention to the fact that the store, as it was being rebuilt, was selling signed copies of special editions of the Vorkosigan novels that had been released by the New England Science Fiction Association.
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Originally published: 1986 Acquired: January 2022 Read: March 2022 |
These editions were nice hardcovers, with better art than what graces the Baen editions. You can see them on the NESFA site here, and on the Uncle Hugo's site here. I think they look nice, and they have definitive texts and extra critical apparatus, and I suspected they would look nice on a shelf together. The whole series hasn't been done, but they would match the fact that the one Vorkosigan book I do own (the sixteenth! someone got it for me as a present) is in hardcover, too. So I put them on my wish list, and my sister got me signed NESFA editions of the two Cordelia books for Christmas. Me being me, however, I had come up with my own reading order for the Vorkosigan novels that was neither chronological nor publication (more on that in a future post), and I had decided to start with The Warrior's Apprentice (second in publication order, fourth in chronology). Thus, I picked that up from Uncle Hugo's myself, and off we went!
At first I struggled with it. It's a bit jumpy at first. As I texted my friend when I was partway through, "Like he's failing out of school, now there's a party, now he's on Beta Colony, it wasn't clear to me what the book was actually about. But now that he is on his smuggling run with his weird crew it is super fun."
And indeed, groups of weird people who must work together to run a spaceship is basically my favorite genre of science fiction, and this is a particularly well-executed example of it. I like how Miles bluffs his way into a situation, and then is forced to escalate his bluffs again and again, and soon he supposedly runs a massive mercenary organization... and then he does run a massive mercenary organization! I loved his "inspection" of the mercenary ship he captures. Forward momentum! Miles himself is the kind of character I love, of course: logical, honorable, cunning, clueless. Basically Hornblower in space, how could I not like him?
I had some niggles, aside from the opening—a romance subplot didn't convince me too much, the stuff about a certain character felt a bit too icky but not handled sufficiently well—but on the whole this was a highly enjoyable book, one that gave me exactly what I want. I am writing this in August, when I have not yet got to my next Vorkosigan book, but I hope to do so soon!
Next up in sequence: The Vor Game
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