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I decided for December I'm going to just do a bunch of comfort rereading, and my brain has been clamoring for "what if you just reread all of Bujold's Vorkosigan series again (again)". I could reread just A Civil Campaign like most people do, but maybe it's time to reread them all.

Shards of Honor is the "first" book in this series, and genre-wise feels like a space opera romance. (Arguably Falling Free comes first chronologically if you're being pedantic.) If you haven't read these books, most of the series stars Miles Vorkosigan, and this book is the setup of how his parents Aral and Cordelia met and its sequel deals with the circumstances around Miles' birth.

This book does need some content warnings especially for rape, sexual assault, alcoholism, and ableism. This book was first published in 1986, and I think the book cover listed on unseen.city is doing it NO favors in that department either. It's definitely got a good bit of gender stereotyping going on too, but I can honestly blame a lot of that onto the Barryarans rather than the text itself.

I like the amount of worldbuilding this book gets into. There's backroom politics from a planet the reader hasn't seen involving characters the reader barely has met, and it manages to stay coherent. The setup of the book involves Aral taking Cordelia prisoner on a new planet she is surveying, and we learn a lot through both of their eyes about the wildly different cultures that they each come from. Even though the book spends a lot of time side-eyeing the militaristic aristocratic Barrayarans (for good reasons), the scene where Cordelia comes back to liberal Beta Colony and has to escape non-consensual "therapy" will always stick with me; it feels like a parallel to abusers misusing therapeutic language--the same power and control dressed up more presentably.

It must be quite a shock to suddenly find out you're pregnant, seventeen times over--at your age, too, she thought. She squelched the black humor--he was so clearly out of his depth--and took pity on his real confusion. "Take care of them, I suppose. I have no idea what that will entail, but--you did sign for them."

He sighed. "Quite, Pledged my word, in a sense." He set the problem up in familiar terms, and found his balance therein. "My word as Vorkosigan, in fact. Right. Good. Objective defined, plan of attack proposed--we're in business."

Minorly, one small character detail I noticed this time around is how much Aral and Miles orient to problems by reframing them in more comfortable contexts: Aral here, through his word and honor, and Miles later through logistics and persistence. This moment from Aral feels like a future parallel of Miles resolving the uncertainty about how to court Ekaterine by (disastrously) considering it as if he were planning a military endeavor.

I think there's some parallel to the way they both cope with failure as well, with Aral getting insensibly drunk in this book after the events of Escobar, and Miles many books later coping with the events of Memory.

This is the third book in Sue Burke's Semiosis trilogy, that follows the events on Earth after some of the rainbow bamboo and other fauna from the planet Pax are brought back.

The previous books worked well for me because they told a story over time from different perspectives. Each segment could stand as its own connected story, and characters didn't have to be fully fleshed out because we were only getting a small slice of them. This book is more compressed in time and so we get a rotation of multiple views from the same characters, bringing back viewpoints from the beginning as a touchpoint at the end. However, there were a number of narrative perspectives that felt like they weren't doing enough narrative or worldbuilding lifting (especially the first couple), and seeing the characters again only made me see how weakly developed they were.

Overall, I enjoyed the evolution of the ideas of this series but the execution could have been better.

The cover blurb makes it sound like a cautionary tale about our highly-tech-dependent world (even in the 1990s!), but it's not the technology that's the problem. It's the homogenization of culture, and the insistence that there be one perspective, and only one perspective, that really matters.

Think of how we travel and find the same chain stores, chain restaurants, the ISO standard Irish Pub with its bric-a-brac decor, and how our TV and movies are full of endless reboots, spinoffs and sequels.

We see it first in Sutty's memories of Earth, controlled largely by a theocracy until contact with alien civilizations kicks their support out from under them. And then in the world she's trying to understand, one that's undergone a complete transformation in the time it took her to travel there at relativistic speed. She knows there were flourishing cultures here before she left Earth. She studied the few fragments that made it offworld during first contact. But she finds a world that has discarded its past and modeled itself on the one she left.

It's largely a story of discovery: Sutty, frustrated and depressed, trying to figure out what the heck "The Telling" actually is and what it means, and the government agent shadowing her also discovering what it is he's trying to suppress and why. A lot of it takes place in small villages, but there's also a long trip through mountains that feels like counterpoint to the glacier expedition in The Left Hand of Darkness.

Well worth the read!

(Slightly condensed from my website.)