The Vorkosigan Saga by Lois McMaster Bujold, Part 4: Barrayar

Barrayar by Lois McMaster Bujold

My fourth Vorkosigan novel (third in chronological sequence, eighth in publication order) picks up right from the end of the previous one, Shards of Honor. Indeed, Bujold's very interesting afterword discusses how originally Shards was going to be longer but she realized she was introducing new complications instead of wrapping up existing ones, so she went backward and found a spot where it could stop, orphaning several thousand words that she'd written. It was another five years or so before she went back to that orphaned material and realized it could form the beginning of a second novel about Cordelia, one about—as the title is very clear about—her new life on the planet Barrayar.

I had actually read Shards and Barrayar before; over a decade ago my friend Christiana loaned me an omnibus edition of the two. Rereading the review I wrote at the time, it's almost hilariously lukewarm:

It has some adventure narrative tropes I find uncomfortable (the "other" being simultaneously more dangerous and more interesting than the home society), some slightly strange gender politics (the woman must give up her society utterly for the man she loves, who never seriously considers it), and some stuff that's just plain weird (everyone reveres one character who is a rapist), but overall I enjoyed it. It gets off to a rough start, to be honest-- there's a lot of journeying through a dangerous landscape, which I find tedious, and our protagonist Cordelia has a tendency to be rescued by other people a lot.  But at the one-third mark, she finally starts making her own decisions, fleeing her home planet in a fantastic sequence, and then traveling to Barrayar, where she marries Aral Vorkosigan and is forced to navigate her way in a strange society.  At this point, I was completely absorbed, and I loved all the political maneuvering and civil war stuff, and Cordelia herself shone quite well.

Originally published: 1991
Acquired: January 2022
Read: November 2023

On this read, it was pretty obvious to me that the books are interrogating the things I found uncomfortable, and I'm not sure why I didn't know that the first time; these books are all about that contact between cultures and danger of being fascinated by the "other"; the gender politics of Barrayar are continuously scrutinized. And when on Earth was Cordelia ever a victim who needed to be rescued!? What I do think is fair is that I clearly liked Barrayar more than Shards. While Shards is good, I definitely think Bujold got better as a novelist in the interim; Shards is like three linked novellas while Barrayar has a unity of plot and, especially, theme.

The other really interesting tidbit the afterword brought into focus for me was that this was a book about parenting. I just don't think I saw that at age 24, and even if I had, it would not have resonated the way it does as a 38-year-old father of two. Most of Cordelia's emotions and decisions are driven by the fact that she's a parent. This is obviously the case when it comes to Miles, but it's true almost everywhere in the book: the way she thinks about the boy emperor, Gregor, for example, or her ability to figure out what the emperor's mother Kareena is thinking. I definitely liked the book before, but this time through I felt it, there was a real intensity to it. The book is filled with great moments, some of them funny, some of them grim, all of them thoughtful and considered. I won't list them here, but if you've read it, you'll easily bring a number of them to mind.

Science fiction can sometime feel like a young person's game: young people doing epic stuff like fighting empires. But Barrayar is science fiction for the middle aged. Yes, there are evil empires, but it's about the struggle to be a good parent in all its myriad forms, the right you keep up every day, not always because you want to, but because you won't be yourself if you give up.

I know there are more Cordelia-focused novels in the saga's "main" sequence, but it's a shame there aren't more of these books about her younger days on Barrayar, because in some ways she's an even more interesting protagonist than Miles.

Every five months I read a book in the Vorkosigan saga. Next up in sequence: Cetaganda