From one perspective, I wasn't looking forward to this book. I'm reading it because it was the Best Novel Hugo winner in 1991, which is a good reason. However, it's also part of a broader series, the 'Vorkosigan Saga' and it isn't the beginning of it either. That began with 'Shards of Honor' in 1986 and continued not just with a succession of novels but short stories and novellas. This one was an expansion of a novella called 'The Weatherman' and it grew the series to seven books. The eighth and next, 'Barrayar' also won the Hugo so I'll tackle that next month. But I hate starting series at books seven and eight.

Fortunately, while it's quickly clear that there's already history with many characters, not just the lead, Miles Vorkosigan, it's not hard to grasp what's happening and why. It probably doesn't hurt that the series wasn't written according to internal chronology. Four other books precede this in the Barrayan timeline but one of them is the next one, as 'Barrayar' seems to be set twenty years before 'The Vor Game', so presumably when Miles Vorkosigan was six. I enjoyed this enough that I may well tackle the rest of the series, but I'm not going to do it quickly, because my Hugo winners project will trawl in three of them anyway and I don't want to mess with that.

Lois McMaster Bujold has won four Hugos for Best Novel and three of those were for 'Vorkosigan Saga' books. This was the first in 1991 and 'Barrayar' was the second a year later. 'Mirror Dance' is the third, which won in 1995, so I'll get to that soon enough. The fourth was for a fantasy novel not part of this series, 'Paladin of Souls', though its series, 'World of the Five Gods', won a Best Series Hugo in 2018. According to internal chronology, it's the eighteenth and last in that series, but it's apparently readable in any order. Bujold is both prolific and apparently happy to cater to people diving into her long running series at different points.

Miles Vorkosigan starts out as an ensign here, fresh from the academy on Barrayar. He's of major stock, his father Aral Vorkosigan not just being an admiral but a military legend and the current Prime Minister. That's a lot to live up to, but Miles is frankly up for any challenge, even though he also counts as a mutant cripple, due to a poison gas grenade being hurled at his pregnant mother; the antidote caused damage to the foetus. So, after a great deal of surgery, he's stretched out to 4'9" in height with braces on both legs. He's twenty-six at this point and his first assignment as an ensign is not what he had hoped.

One of those earlier stories clearly involves Vorkosigan, pretending to be someone called Admiral Naismith, leading a group of space mercs, the Dendarii Mercenaries, and he wants to be given an assignment into space, officially this time. However, he's given orders to take over from Lt. Ahn, who's the weather officer at the Barrayan infantry's fort on Kyril Island. That's situated near the pole so hardly a comfortable place. No wonder Ahn is frequently drunk, even if he's put in twenty years of service. He's been on Kyril Island for fifteen of them.

This doesn't seem like a recipe for vibrant action, but Bujold conjures some up anyway. However, it mostly seems to be a mental challenge, Vorkosigan figuring out why he's there. Surely there's a good reason for it. Meanwhile, he figures out other things too: why a man died in a culvert, how to get out of a sunken shelter, how to stop a mad general from freezing sixteen men to death. Sure, it's not your typical military sci-fi action, but it's all engaging stuff with much intrigue. It plays like a chess game of a military sci-fi novel.

Then, presumably at the end of what was previously 'The Weatherman' novella, we shift to more typical subject matter, at least after some linking material that helps newbies to the series such as me to get a better grounding of what went before. It's here that we learn about the Dendarii Mercenaries and meet some of the most important people in the Barrayan empire. After what he did at Kyril Island, Vorkosigan's fate is in the hands of Simon Illyan, Chief of Imperial Security. We meet his parents and we spend quality time with the Emperor, Miles's childhood playmate, Gregor. He talks family history when he visits.

It's page 112 of my paperback copy when the real story kicks in. This doesn't count as a fixup novel because most of it is new, only 'The Weatherman' section being previously published. However, it does unfold in sections: that one, then Vorkosigan's confinement as Illyan figures out what to do with him, then his first ImpSec mission with him tasked with going undercover on the Hegen Hub as an illicit arms dealer called Victor Rotha, a black market travelling salesman whose trade is in weapons of mass destruction.

It's already clear that Bujold is very capable writer of military sci-fi but she surprised me with an old school approach that makes this feel at least a decade older than it is. She clearly read Heinlein as a child and there's a lot more of him here than, say Orson Scott Card. She seems like a link between the golden age and later characters like Honor Harrington. I'm interested to see how that continues to feel as I read more of the series. Once Rotha, i.e. Vorkosigan, is framed for murder, Bujold gets to show what she's like with action and intrigue when every second counts and she's even better. No wonder she won four Hugos for Best Novel.

There are two other key details that I haven't got to yet. One is that Vorkosigan has been sent to the Hegen Hub because something's going on such a grand scale within Barrayar's neighbourhood in space that it's hard to figure out exactly what it is. His job is to keep his eyes open and figure it out, while being conveniently a long way away from causing more trouble on Barrayar. The second is that, while in custody, he's shocked to bump into Emperor Gregor, who's somehow managed to become contract slave labour without being recognised. Naturally, he sees rescuing his old friend as top priority and everything escalates quickly from there.

I liked this a lot, even though it's my introduction to the series partway through. What seems odd is that this particular book won the Hugo rather than one of the earlier titles, because it's clear it tells multiple stories that were patched together. That's not a bad thing, and characters from the Kyrin Island section reappear much later on elsewhere; but it inherently affects the flow. Thus it would seem like it would play best to existing fans eager for new material in a favourite universe, rather than the general Hugo-voting Worldcon audience. Why was this the first Vorkosigan novel to win rather than 'Falling Free', which won the Nebula in 1988 but lost the Hugo to C. J. Cherryh's 'Cyteen'?

Other than the flow, which truly isn't a problem beyond the book feeling like a collection of linked novellas, everything is strong. Miles Vorkosigan is a glorious character, a bundle of contradictions who is almost guaranteed to handle any situation in a way that makes us want to read all about it. His physical condition makes him an unusual soldier but his brain makes him a great leader, even at a relatively tender age. No wonder there's a sprawling 'Vorkosigan Saga'.

However, I liked a lot of the supporting characters too, especially other members of the Dendarii Mercenaries, like Elena and Ky Tung. They're clearly not new characters here, but they're all easy to pick up here. Again, no wonder they appear to play a sizeable role within this saga. The empire itself is interesting too, even though we see it through its leaders here rather than its people. I'm sure the bigger picture will manifest in other books. There are only so many pages in a novel after all and most of this one unfolds off Barrayar. Even when it's on Barrayar, it's mostly way off on its pole at Kyril Island. We don't get to see much of the world itself.

Ultimately, though, I think the novel's biggest success is how it tells a huge story, literally one of significance to multiple worlds and the interplay between them, in a very personal way, through a relatively small cast of characters that's primarily centred on particularly fascinating one, Miles Vorkosigan. If there's convenience here, it's that he has a knack of being in the right place at the right time but, bumping into the Emperor aside, mostly that's by deliberate choice. I look forward to seeing what else he gets up to in other books, even if it looks like he's not going to be doing too much in the next one, 'Barrayar'. ~~ Hal C F Astell

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