Kay Hudson

I’ve been a fan of Lois McMaster Bujold’s Vorkosigan series since the early 1990s, and I have the old paperbacks of the first few novels to prove it. Somehow I let Captain Vorpatril’s Alliance linger on my TBR shelf for quite a long time, perhaps because it wasn’t about Miles Vorkosigan, the protagonist of most of Bujold’s Vorkosigan books. Miles’ cousin Ivan, a supporting character in the saga, takes center stage here, and he is a delight. So is the book. Space opera, romance, intrigue, a marriage of convenience, buried treasure, and two sets of crazy relatives! What more could one ask for?

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Bujold provides a series chronology in the back of each volume, which is how I discovered the one Vorkosigan story I didn’t have and hadn’t read, the novella Winterfair Gifts, originally published in a romance anthology, Irresistible Forces, and also available as an e-novella. Told from the point of view of Roic, one of the Vorkosigans’ junior Armsmen, it tells how he and Sergeant Maura, a genetically engineered member of Miles’ old mercenary crew, foil a plot aimed at Miles and his fiancee, Ekaterin, and lets us attend the Vorkosigans’ Winterfair wedding. It’s a sidebar to the series, and a gift to fans.

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Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen is the sixteenth book in the Vorkosigan saga and picks up the story of Cordelia Naismith Vorkosigan three years after the death of her husband, Count Aral Vorkosigan. Back on Barrayar, their son Miles has shouldered his responsibilities as Count (and as the father of a boisterous young family), but Cordelia remains Vicereine of Sergyar, where she has some surprising plans for her own future. There are no space battles or assassination plots this time; this is a novel about love, and family, and decisions that change lives. Bujold writes about a totally human future (despite a certain amount of genetic manipulation and reproductive technology), and even a few centuries down the road, humans haven’t changed much. Secrets only hinted at in earlier books are revealed, and events from the past are remembered. Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen is probably not the place to jump into the series, but it makes me want to go back to the beginning and read it all again.