Vorkosigan Saga / Tropes A to I

Vorkosigan Saga | Tropes A to I | Tropes J to Z

Tropes A

• Absent Aliens: No sapient aliens anyway. Several of the planets, most notably Sergyar, have very active ecosystems. There are plenty of odd sapients, but they all are variants of humans created via genetic engineering. The most prominent of these are the quaddies, built to work in zero-gravity environments, who have an extra set of arms in the place of legs. Hermaphrodites were gengineered as the next step in human evolution, but they ended up being a Betan minority group instead.
• Accidental Murder: In Komarr, the conspirators handcuff Miles and Tien to the railings of the isolated terraforming station, planning to drop word of their location once the conspirators have had time to make their escape. Unfortunately, Tien had failed to keep his breath mask properly charged, and he doesn't have enough oxygen to make it until rescue arrives.
• Accident, Not Murder: In The Vor Game, Miles discovers the corpse of a cadet in an outflow pipe. It looks suspicious, until Miles checks the parcel he's clutching: a box of cookies. Turns out it was Yet Another Stupid Death.
• Achievements in Ignorance: In The Warrior's Apprentice, Elena presses and wins a desperate battle that the more experienced Tung would have withdrawn from, because she assumes things are just normally that bad.
• Addictive Foreign Soap Opera: While holed up in her apartment on Komarr, Rish gets hooked on several of the local holo-dramas. She even manages to find a few other addicts on a military ship ferrying her and Tej back to Barrayar and has viewing parties with them.
• Adrenaline Makeover: Ekaterin has a brief one at the end of Komarr. No one should look that hot while defeating Komarran terrorists barefoot, dammit!
• Aerith and Bob: Tej's father supposedly found a book titled 10,000 Authentic Old Earth Baby Names with translations and geographic origin. He got a little carried away and doesn't seem to have had any sort of unifying theme in mind. By the time Tej came around, his wife had managed to reel him in a bit, and Tej was only burdened with three names before Ghem Estif-Arqua was tacked on. Her siblings were not so lucky.
• Agent Provocateur
  • Aral goads Prince Serg into leading the Escobar invasion in person, ensuring the success of Ezar's Gambit Pileup.
  • Byerly actively encourages Richars's stupidity.
  • Miles, realizing that his new job as Imperial Auditor is inherently reactive in nature — Auditors are not called in to deal with a situation unless it has already gotten pretty bad and more normal means of resolution are inadequate or impractical — contemplates trying to sell Gregor on the notion of an Auditor Provocateur to better match his own more proactive temperament.
• Air-Vent Passageway:
  • Pointedly averted in Imperial Security HQ: not only is the ductwork generally not amenable to crawling through, there are security cameras giving a view of every last inch of it. (ImpSec also averts Insecurity Camera and related tropes.)
  • In "Labyrinth", Miles infiltrates the Ryoval biological facility through an air duct. It only works because he's so small, and even for him it's a tight squeeze.
• Albinos Are Freaks: Par for the course for Barrayaran culture and its hatred of "mutants"; The Flowers of Vashnoi features a boy who was abandoned in the eponymous radioactive exclusion zone due to his albinism.
• All Are Equal in Death: The theme of her short story "Aftermaths", showing the crew of a space ship that is out reclaiming the dead bodies after a space battle.
  • Cordelia (and other Betans, it is implied) refers to death as "the great democracy."
• The Alleged Boss: At the beginning of Brothers In Arms, Miles Vorkosigan faux-modestly claims to be this, saying that he just plays the part of the Admiral while Commodore Tung does the real work. This isn't complete rubbish — originally Miles relied on Tung's experience a lot — but it's not the whole truth, and Elli immediately calls him out on it.
• Alliterative Family: Miles comments on the alliteration of Duv and Delia (D&D) when they become a couple.
• Alliterative Title: The first two stories, which seem to be setting up Idiosyncratic Episode Naming, but no: "Dreamweaver's Dilemma", Falling Free.
• All Therapists Are Muggles: In Shards of Honor Cordelia literally couldn't tell the Escobaran or Betan therapists the truth about what happened to her while in Barrayaran captivity, since that could set off a civil war on Barrayar.
• Almighty Janitor:
  • Miles's cover job is as an Imperial Courier, justifying frequent and extended absences. Memory also reveals that the Imperial Security Headquarters building's janitors are all 10-year veterans, although that is more or less par for the course for ImpSec HQ employees.
  • On Barrayar, it's rumored that the title of "Count" is short for accountant, although even the people who repeat this rumor are unsure if it is actually true, or just something made up after the title came to exist.
  • Ivan, in Captain Vorpatril's Alliance. He's the military aide to Admiral Desplains, and Tej has him pegged as "a middling Vor officer of middling responsibilities and middling rank. Just middling along." Then Captain Morozov informs her that that's a "charming understatement." Then Ivan starts to introduce her to his family. It's true to say that, by the standards of his relatives, Ivan is middling along in a fairly average fashion.
    However, since his relatives include his wealthy mother who is the Emperor's trusted social advisor (whom Tej estimates would be a Minor House in her own right if she were Jacksonian), two of the greatest military leaders Barrayar has ever known, the youngest Lord Auditor ever appointed (who was also a very important Military leader, in a slightly skewed way), a key behind-the-scenes political player in a triplanetary Empire, the former spymaster for said Empire, and The Emperor of said Empire, it's also true to say that "middling along" by their standards would be wholly exceptional by anyone else's.
    • Part of this is because Ivan is on paper a middling-rank Vor, as he is from a cadet branch of his District's count. However, Ivan is effectively Crown Prince Ivan for the majority of the series, as the closest relative to Gregor in the line of succession who is acceptable to Barrayaran sensibilities. It's just not something publicly discussed due to Mad Emperor Yuri's purges.
• Almighty Mom: Cordelia and Alys.
• Alternative Calendar: Alternative fiscal calendar, anyway. Due to ancient tradition, the date when all revenues gathered by the district counts have to be delivered to the imperial government is the Emperor's birthday (for political reasons, the counts refused to pay taxes to the Emperor, but were willing to give him a "birthday present" consisting of however much they would have been expected to pay in taxes every year. Said present is a small bag of gold coins, which is purely symbolic, and returned to the Count to give the next year; the actual tax revenue is electronically wired earlier that morning.) Whenever an Emperor dies, the tax day changes to the new Emperor's birthday, altering the tax collection and distribution schedule for the entire empire. This also means that on a year in which an Emperor dies, it is entirely possible that the Emperor's Birthday (with accompanying tax obligations) can happen anywhere from zero to two times that year, depending on the order in which the old Emperor's birthday, the old Emperor's date of death, and the new Emperor's birthday occur. Cordelia asks if this can disrupt the economy if the new birthday is just a few days away; Piotr responds simply that "they manage".
• Amazing Technicolor Population: The Jewels. The first one we meet is bright blue with bright golden striped accents and called Lapis Lazuli.
• Amazon Chaser:
  • Aral and Cordelia.
  • Miles tends to be attracted to tall, aggressive women. (When he makes love with Taura in "Labyrinth," he describes his sexual proclivity for a woman twice his height as "mountain climbing.") Lampshaded by Mark, who called Miles' girlfriends and love interests "terrifying Amazons" and "the harrowing harem".
  • Mark averts this himself, preferring "round blondes". Kareen (his love interest) is the shortest of her sisters (known as "Commodore Koudelka's all-blonde commando team"), though even then he's at eye-level with Kareen's bust; she is estimated to be around 5 foot 9 or 10 inches.
  • Roic and the aforementioned Taura.
• Amnesiac Resonance: One thing used to test an amnesiac Miles for returning memories is having him reassemble several weapons (their parts all mixed together, and dummy parts thrown in). He does it, while subconsciously making sure never to point any of them at either himself or his examiner.
• Ancestor Veneration: Cordelia notes to herself that "Barrayaran ceremonies for the dead approached ancestor-worship". When Miles makes an offering at the grave of his grandfather, Count Piotr, this includes burning very personal offerings (a special hand-calligraphed copy of his officer's commission in the Imperial Service, a scholastic transcript from the Imperial Academy, and hair) by the side of Piotr's grave. When Ma Mattulich is convicted of infanticide, the sentence Miles hands down includes the stipulation that no one "shall make a burning for her when she goes into the ground at last", which the older and more traditional Barrayarans view as a literal sentence of the death of her soul.
• Ancestral Name: The Vor tradition is that first and second sons are named after their paternal and maternal grandfathers. Miles was going to be named "Piotr Miles" after his paternal and maternal grandfathers' first names and it was Serious Business when his grandfather Count Piotr Vorkosigan refused to allow Miles the name. Mark, as a second son (despite being a clone) got his name from his maternal and paternal grandfathers' second names.
  Miles: That makes you Mark Pierre. Sorry about the Pierre. Grandfather always hated it. You are Lord Mark Pierre Vorkosigan, in your own right, on Barrayar.
• Ancestral Weapon: The Vorkosigan Seal dagger willed from Count Piotr to Miles. Like many famous weapons in the series (e.g. Koudelka's swordstick) it mostly gets used for mundane purposes, but Bothari makes rather disconcerting use of it during the Tau Verde campaign. Miles also uses it in the Tau Verde campaign to make the ImpSec agent in the enemy fleet follow his orders, then uses it to good effect in an emergency simulation at the academy, and it was a significant element in Miles' apology letter to Ekaterin. Ekaterin lampshades that It Belongs in a Museum:
  When genuine seal daggers from the Time of Isolation appeared on the market, they were bid up into the ten of thousands of marks. Miles probably used his as a letter opener, or to clean under his fingernails.
• And Now for Someone Completely Different: The final chapter of Shards of Honor is suddenly from the perspective of a tech who is working with a medtech. It's tied in with one of Aral's close friends being found by the medtech, who posthumously marries him to her dead daughter.
• …And That Little Girl Was Me: In Shards of Honor, Aral and Cordelia exchange their rather depressing romantic histories under the guise of sharing stories about "someone I knew once". Neither is fooled for a moment, but both respect the other's deep need for the emotional distance.
• Anguished Declaration of Love: The second time around (the letter, not the dinner party) Miles gets it right. Though technically, it's the fourth time around for Miles; his first was to Elena Bothari, the second to Elli Quinn (in Memory).
• Animated Armor: High-end powered combat armor and heavy-duty engineering EVA suits often have remote operator capability.
• Anti-Villain: In the book Komarr, the terrorists are mild-mannered academics who misguidedly think they are taking a non-violent path to political independence. They do not care that millions will die from the loss of access to Galactic technology — or rather they have convinced themselves that the consequences will not be that bad since Barrayar has the scientific knowledge and industrialisation to recreate the technology now. Miles himself describes them as less "Mad Scientists" than "Extremely Pissed Engineers."
  • Possibly just Obliviously Evil. Also a case of Lethally Stupid. Regardless of the consequences for Barrayar itself had their plan worked, as Miles points out, the vast majority of Barrayaran space-based military forces were on Komarr's side of the wormhole at the time. If they closed it, the Komarrans would be stuck facing the wrath of very angry Barrayaran military commanders with a fleet of warships at their disposal. While their original plan was to close the wormhole during the Emperor's wedding when the vast majority of the fleet would be on the Barrayaran side of the wormhole, continuing the plan once they had been rumbled was sunk costs mixed with the fear that they'd never get a second shot.
• Arms Dealer:
  • Miles' first official ImpSec cover identity was as a freelance arms dealer.
  • House Fell's primary income stream is from the interstellar arms trade.
  • Betans, rather curiously because of their rather exaggeratedly enlightened culture, are some of the most enthusiastic arms exporters in the nexus. Their technological wizardry makes their products high-demand items.
    • Betan weapons helped drive the expanding Cetagandan Empire off of Barrayar, and were the key to stopping the expanding Barrayaran Empire from gobbling up Escobar.^note However, Emperor Ezar knew Escobar had the advanced weaponry, and he and Aral pushed Prince Serg into what they knew would be a Escobaran turkey shoot. Aral had formulated a plan to make sure the Barrayaran navy would be more or less intact — his closest friend was still killed thanks to the lack of Subspace Ansible, hearing the results long after the battle was over. There's a pattern here...
• Arranged Marriage:
  • Type two, permitting the young people to veto their elders' plans, seems to have been the rule on Barrayar formerly, but is now considered old fashioned.
  • Still exists among children of Jackson's Whole's House Barons, but on Jackson's Whole, this is because children are their parents' property in a non-patriarchal way. To quote Baron Cordonah, "They tell me that in some Barrayaran weddings the father is expected to give away the bride. That struck me as valuing her much too low." He's mollified by Ivan explaining that among the High Vor, behind the scenes the negotiations for arranged marriages are complex and finely detailed.
• Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking: Illyan's list of the motivations of men: "Money, power, sex... and elephants." (The full explanation of this list is in Memory, if you're looking for it.)
• Ascended Fanboy: Ky Tung, Captain of the Dendarii Free Mercenary Fleet, turns out to be a complete Aral Vorkosigan Fanboy.
• Asskicking Leads to Leadership: Deconstructed. Barryar has to learn to get by without asskicking. Although Emperor Gregor, whose course of study at the military academy mostly consisted of him going through "standard" training exercises with a fleet's worth of backup hovering nearby in case anything went wrong, does strong-arm himself into a (largely ornamental, admittedly) co-commanding position at one point in the series. Aral wants to believe that the ruler of three worlds was, in fact, perfectly safe during the entire operation, and that the political and diplomatic results justified the (surely non-existent) risks... but is too honest to really think that. He is, however, immensely proud of the fact that Gregor had the stones to insist on doing it in the first place, and justifiably proud of himself for saying "Yes, Sire," instead of abusing his authority.
• A Taste of the Lash: In the good old days Barryaran military discipline was enforced with lead-lined rubber hoses.
• Attack Reflector: Shards of Honor describes a combat where shots are being returned shot by shot, putting significant strain on shields. Vorkosigan orders a full retreat upon hearing this, because he knows it's a plasma mirror field that reflects the attack back.
• At the Opera Tonight:
  • Before retiring, the only times Simon had been to the opera were when he was running security for when Gregor was attending. After retiring, he started going so he could enjoy the show.
  • In Diplomatic Immunity, Miles and Ekaterin go to the Minchenko Ballet. They enjoy the show, but the main purpose was to be seen.
  Ekaterin: But there's no point in being seen enjoying their art if we just look like any other anonymous downsiders. Tonight, I think we should both look as Barrayaran as possible.
• The Atoner: Count Vorloupulous, he of the 2000 chefs, was sentenced to die of public starvation, but then the Cetagandans invaded. Vorloupulous died in battle a hero defending Barrayar. Miles considers this a happy ending.
• Attempted Rape:
  • In "Shards of Honor" Admiral Vorrutyer orders Bothari to rape Cordelia as part of his systematic torture sessions with female combatants. Cordelia, in her usual epic fashion, talks Bothari out of it and instead causes him to turn on his master and kill him. Aral shows up to rescue her after it's all over.
  • Mark to a 10 year old in a woman's body in "Mirror Dance". Elena is horrified, but mollified when Cordelia tells her of Mark's own sexual abuse. To be fair, Mark doesn't go through with it after a long internal struggle.
• Automated Automobiles:
  • Komarr has had an automated traffic control system installed for decades — and the debate on how to revise the system to deal with the fact that the system is seriously stressed by the amount of intra-dome traffic that goes through on a typical day has been going on for years.
  • After the third vehicular near-miss of the week, Pym asks Miles when Vorbarr Sultana would be getting its municipal traffic control system installed. Miles responds that priority was being given to the automated air traffic control in light of increased lightflyer fatalities.

Tropes B

• Babies Ever After:
  • Miles and Ekaterin have six children altogether. She wisely squashed his suggestion of having them all at once — though in Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen she begins to wonder if she'd have been better off.
  • In Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen there are nine. All of which have Aral as the father courtesy of frozen sperm. Six are with Cordelia as the mother, three are with Aral's secret male partner Admiral Oliver Jole as the second father. This allows for both Cordelia and Oliver to gain closure after Aral's death. Miles snarks that he went from being an only child to the eldest sibling of 11.
• Baby Factory:
  • Cordelia's first impression of Barrayar, since unlike Beta Colony, parents can have as many children as they want without a permit.
  • The introduction of uterine replicators has one aristocrat issuing over 100 daughters. Gregor's ruling makes such schemes very unprofitable.
    "Dowries! Dowries! A hundred and eighteen dowries..."
  • Ivan feels Miles is starting one of his own when his and Ekaterin's third and fourth children are born in Captain Vorpatril's Alliance.
• Badass Bookworm: Duv Galeni. Doctorate in Modern History and Political Science, seems to like being a desk jockey, able to render two armed Cetagandans — one a Covert Action Team leader — unconscious with his bare hands and a week of unexpressed frustration.
• Badass Bureaucrat: Barrayar cultivates these, probably on purpose.
  Tej: And you said you were just a desk pilot.
  Ivan: But it's a Barrayaran desk.
• Badass Family: Grandfather Piotr, Mother/Father Cordelia and Aral, Miles and Ekaterin, Mark, Aunt Alys, even Cousin Ivan eventually.
• Bail Equals Freedom: Justified, averted, and lampshaded in A Civil Campaign. On Escobar, a bond is a guarantee of court appearance, but on Jackson's Whole bail means getting off into the clutches of the one who pays the bail.
  "Whatever. The Escobaran Cortes does not, as you seem to think, engage itself in the slave trade. However it's done on this benighted planet, on Escobar a bond is a guarantee of court appearance, not some kind of human meat market transaction."
  "It is where I come from," Mark muttered.
• Band of Brothels:
  • Betan Licensed Practical Sexuality Therapists need an Associate Degree or better in psychotherapy and must pass government examination boards. (The hermaphrodites make the most money; they are very popular with the tourists and virgins looking for a non-hostile and comforting first time.)
  • Several of Byerly's sub-agents are or have been prostitutes. He notes that it's easier to recruit prostitutes to be spies than the other way around.
  • Sergyar has SWORD ^note Sex Workers Respect and Dignity Association, a prostitution union started by Vicereine Cordelia after the local pimps around Kareenburg started getting out of hand. One of Cordelia's aides jokes that SHEATH would be a better name, but nobody could think of words to go with the acronym.
• Barbarian Tribe:
  • How haut Cetagandans view all non-Cetagandans, as "barbarian outlanders" — the ghem they consider "half-breeds".
  • Barrayarans have this reputation to the rest of the Galaxy, not entirely undeservedly. They are trying to get themselves a better reputation, and seem in general to be succeeding as the series progresses.
  • In Diplomatic Immunity Miles deliberately plays this up to aid his negotiations with the quaddies, in a somewhat forlorn hope it will lessen the eventual concessions he knows he'll have to make. They don't quite buy into it, but he does manage to keep them guessing just how much is true and how much is bluff.
  • In Captain Vorpatril's Alliance they are characterized as having conquered Komarr to prevent anyone else like the Cetagandans trying to come in and "civilize" them.
  • Ivan makes a remark about preserving some bits of old Barrayar "...now we're all turning galactic, y'know?"
    This brought a smile to Tej's lips. "Is that what you Barrayarans think you're doing?"
• Barefoot Captives: The prisoners in the Dagoola #3 prison dome are issued trousers and a tunic, but no shoes. The gang that attacks Miles on his arrival are thus all barefoot, but their lack of combat boots doesn't help Miles very much.
• Barefoot Poverty:
  • The Dendarii Mountain village of Silvy Vale is fighting hard to get out of poverty, but when Miles visits in Memory most of the children in the two-room schoolhouse are barefoot. So is the teacher, Harra Csurik.
  • The irradiated Vashnoi District also has some holdouts who are similarly destitute.
• Bastard Angst:
  • A downplayed version in A Civil Campaign is when Count Rene Vorbretten is threatened with a succession suit because an ancestor was a bastard, thus clicking complicated tangles in local laws. An added public relations difficulty was that the father was a soldier in an invading army.
  • Played very straight with Bothari. Miles notes that every slur bounces off Bothari's back, save "bastard". (Bothari's mother was a prostitute and his father was unknown.)
• Bavarian Fire Drill: Miles does this constantly.
• Batman Gambit: Miles' somewhat uncanny ability to read people makes these a large part of his arsenal.
• Battle Butler: Bothari (and later Pym, and then Roic) for Miles. Counts' Armsmen in general tend to live this trope; the informal title of one assigned to this position is "batman," which means a soldier assigned to act as manservant to a superior officer.
• Battle Couple: Several, but Aral & Cordelia are the most prominent example.
• Battle Trophy: Vorkosigan House has a bag of Cetagandan scalps in the attic presented by Piotr's faithful and ferocious followers. Still kept in the attic because, as Miles notes, "Can't throw them away, they're presents." The only possible use he sees for them is to "regretfully" return them to the Cetagandans as a subtle diplomatic insult, but they haven't needed to deliver such an insult.
• The "Be Careful!" Speech: Many people tell Miles to be careful; occasionally, he even listens to them. In Mirror Dance, Kareen Koudelka tells Mark to "be careful" (even though he hadn't mentioned that he was in fact about to go into harm's way). This deeply touches him: No girl had ever told him to be careful, as though she meant it.
• Because You Were Nice to Me:
  • Taura fights like a demon to help save Miles at the climax of Labyrinth, after he was the first person in her young life to treat her like a human being instead of a test subject.
  • The widow Radovas has the tie-breaking vote of the rebellious scientists in Komarr. Because Miles made sure she wouldn't be destitute because of her husband's death, she votes to surrender peacefully.
  Madame Radovas: You know, I will never forget the look on your face when that fool Vorsoisson told you there was no place on his forms for an Imperial order. I almost laughed out loud, despite it all.
• Becoming the Mask:
  • Sergeant Bothari has, according to Aral, no sense of self. He becomes whatever anyone thinks he is. Bothari is Cordelia's self-proclaimed "dog" because Cordelia is the only person who sees him as a hero — and therefore, he is a hero around her. "He clings to you because you create him a greater man than he ever dreamed of being."
  • Miles Naismith Vorkosigan finds himself becoming Admiral Naismith (his fictional identity) more and more, and Lord Vorkosigan, his actual identity, less and less. This is helped by the fact that the reason he created and maintained his fictional identity was to have an outlet for the drives and urges his true identity is not permitted to indulge in. However, Memory happens and Miles finds his alter ego destroyed — and he realizes that after everything else has been stripped away, he is still a Dendarii hillman in his bones. Miles successfully adjusts by finally allowing his true identity to fulfill the impulses his alter ego had been satisfying, though his mother claims she thought he would flee Barrayar and "choose the little admiral."
  • Mark was brainwashed and trained from birth to impersonate Miles, and after breaking free of his captors he struggles for years to find his own personality and avoid Becoming the Mask.
• Behind Every Great Man: If not a Central Theme, one of the running themes of the series. Aside from Cordelia, the women of Barrayar conspire to change society without the men even noticing it till too late; one of the biggest weapons has been playing on the fears with the Uterine Replicator which can gene clean. Two women, Cordelia and Alys, made themselves two of the biggest power players on Barrayar simply by Cordelia then Alys having the most intimate access to Gregor as a child and later as an adult. In Captain Vorpatril's Alliance, Ivan notes that his mother, Udine and former haut lady Moira had been having secret meetings before Gregor offered a Deal with Udine's husband Shiv that led to a Win-Win Ending for all parties.
• Beleaguered Assistant:
  • Ivan often finds himself cast in this role to Miles.
    Gregor: As you know, an Imperial Auditor may request anything he pleases. The first thing he requested was an assistant. Congratulations.
    Ivan: He wanted a donkey to carry his luggage, and the first ass he thought of was me.^note Ivan is instantly mollified by the fact it's not because he's Miles' favorite Chew Toy, but he's the only person either could trust entirely with getting to the bottom of Simon's malady — and Ivan is fond of Simon, too.
  • After Gregor gets engaged, Ivan gets seconded to act as his mother's assistant in the wedding planning.
    Ivan: It's like working in an office with an entire boatload of mothers-in-law-to-be with pre-wedding nerves, every one of them a flaming control freak. I don't know where Mama found that many Vor dragons. You usually only meet them one at a time, surrounded by an entire family to terrorize. Having them all in a bunch teamed up together is just wrong. My chain of command is built upside down; there are twenty-three commanders, and only one enlisted. Me. I want to go back to Ops, where my officers don't preface every insane demand with a menacing trill of, Ivan, dear, won't you be a sweetheart and... What I wouldn't give to hear a nice, deep, straightforward masculine bellow of Vorpatril!... From someone other than Countess Vorinnis, that is.
  • Miles's Armsman Roic (see the Butter Bug Battle in A Civil Campaign) and his chauffeur/butler/pilot/etc. Martin Kosti (Memory)
• Beleaguered Bureaucrat:
  • Duv Galeni was the ImpSec rep stationed on (relatively) quiet Earth when the Dendarii Free Mercenary Fleet arrives in orbit, shattering his plans to perform his duties quietly as one of the first Komarrans in Barrayaran Imperial service.
  • Averted with Vorob'yev on Eta Ceta IV, stationed in the heart of the Cetagandan Empire. Part of the reason is that Miles is able to remain sub rosa for most of the story, but even when Lord Miles Vorkosigan causes some minor trouble, Vorob'yev is mostly unfazed.
    • Played straight by local ImpSec chief Vorreedi, who is convinced that Miles was on a secret mission from Illyan by the end of the book, something Miles refuses to confirm nor deny.^note Nope, just another Xanatos Speed Chess Indy Ploy played by Miles. Although he does attempt to justify it to himself that if Illyan were fully appraised of all the details, he wouldn't hesitate to assign Miles to sort it out. Miles then subverts this by snarking to himself, "Yeah, try using that at the court martial."
  • Consul Vorlynkin in Cryoburn. Understandable, given the situation — the rather quiet consulate of far-off Kibou-Daini suddenly gets Miles freaking Vorkosigan dumped in their laps. Have fun, guys!
    • This instance is extra amusing because Vorlynkin occasionally comments on it. The clear frustration and exasperation as he realizes he has not gotten a right and proper auditor, but a sawed-off madman ready to bend, if not break, every rule covertly to pursue his self-assigned need to correct some other country's political issues; while Vorlynkin has to legally justify it all, is so satisfying.
  • Ivan once notes that he has met many who have coveted the Imperial throne but not one who coveted the Imperial desk.
• Beta Couple:
  • A Civil Campaign featured the intertwining romances of no fewer than five couples in addition to the primary story: Mark and Kareen^note Particularly apt, considering where they've been attending school and their plans to return, Duv and Delia, Gregor and Laisa, Olivia and Dono, and Martya and Enrique. After all, this is a comedy of biology and manners.
  • Cetaganda featured Ambassador Vorob'yev and Mia Maz, which doubles as a Citizenship Marriage, though that's irrelevant because they each expressed an attraction for each other despite their professional relationship.
  • By and Rish in Captain Vorpatril's Alliance.
• Better than Sex: Bothari considers killing people to be better than sex. After having executed Vordarian and torching the Imperial Palace, Cordelia's euphoria makes her ponder, "Is this how Bothari feels when killing?"
  • Arde Mayhew says this about being a jump pilot — which is so central to his life that, when he is in danger of losing his job, he is suicidally depressed.
• Beware the Nice Ones:
  • Leo Graf was just a mild-mannered engineering geek who had his morality twisted by his employers. He ends up helping the quaddies turn a space station into a spaceship.
  • Ekaterin was a self-described Extreme Doormat of a housewife. Then she single-handedly thwarts a band of Komarran terrorists by hijacking a crane and smashing their multi-ton secret weapon into the floor. Repeatedly. It makes such a mess even Miles admits he would be hard pressed to do better.
  • Kareen Koudelka, at least according to Miles. While watching Kareen and Mark do their good cop/bad cop routine during a business negotiation, Miles thinks that it would be a serious mistake to assume that all of the "bad cop" ideas came from Mark (and vice-versa).
• Beware the Superman: The Cetagandan Empire does not exactly make the best neighbours...
• Big Damn Heroes: Byerly Vorrutyer, of all people, in Captain Vorpatril's Alliance.
• Big Eater:
  • Taura is the "gets hungry often because of her fast metabolism" variety.
  • Rish as well, though not as pronounced as Taura and mentioned only in passing.
  • Mark also tends to eat a lot, mainly so that he cannot be mistaken for his brother Miles (who he now outweighs by a significant margin).
• Big Fancy House: All Counts' residences (with the notable exception of Impoverished Patrician Count Vorfolse) probably qualify. Due to the Schizo Tech nature of the planet, architectural styles differ from Quasi-fortress structures (Vorrutyer House) to ultra-modern (Vorbretten House).
  • Vorkosigan House in Vorbarr Sultana may be considered representative of the species: 4 residential floors for extended family and retainers, 2 underground service levels, extensive library, ballroom, dining room with space for nearly 100 guests if they don't mind a little crowding. It does have some modern amenities such as a lift tube (thanks to a pregnant Cordelia insisting on one), but they're discreet and don't interfere with the architectural style at all. The tangle field is almost invisible, to the dismay of poor Zap the cat.
  • Vorkosigan House in the district capital of Hassadar also fits, even though much of the building is occupied by administrative offices.
• The Big Guy: Armsman Roic is big by Barrayaran standards, and that is big.
• Bilingual Bonus:
  • The noble prefix "Vor" means "thief" in Russian, which is one of the four major languages of Barrayar. Bujold was initially unaware of it, but was notified by a Russian fan, and has since incorporated it into a couple of pretty clever linguistic jokes in-series.
  • There are a few French words sprinkled here and there. For example, the Vorkosigan-run town near the lake shore is called Vorkosigan Surleau ("on the water"), the ruling caste of the Cetagandans are called haut ("high") and their servants are called ba (bas = "low"). Magnifique! Bujold even sneaks in a Stealth Pun with a joke about Vorkosigan Sousleau.
  • The name Lord Dono rings a bell for Japanese-speakers, since -dono is an honorific of great respect that is used to mean "lord."
• Bio Data: Simon Illyan had a chip that recorded everything he saw and heard, using a protein-based data storage, installed into his brain. Many who got such chips installed developed schizophrenia.
• Bizarrchitecture: ImpSec HQ. Stunningly ugly. Oversized steps guaranteed to give anyone climbing them leg cramps.^note There is a discreet side entrance for personnel only. The large steps are considered useful as a deterrent to civilians. No windows. Illyan once said that he'd cheerfully sell the place for a Betan dollar if he could find a Betan with a dollar and no taste — and if he could just get the funding to build a replacement headquarters. He kept a holo of the beautiful building that the Escobaran Intelligence Service was based in the way normal people would keep a pinup.
• The Blank: Elli Quinn becomes this in The Warrior's Apprentice when she takes a plasma burn to the face. Fortunately, plastic surgery does wonders in the future.
• "Blind Idiot" Translation: In Diplomatic Immunity:
  Fourteen languages were handled by nineteen different brands of auto-translators, several of which, Miles decided, must have been purchased at close-out prices from makers going deservedly belly-up. [...] The fourth iteration of ["Ask Sealer Greenlaw"] was finally met with a heartrending wail, in chorus, from the back of the room of, "But Greenlaw said to ask you!", except for the translation device that came up a beat later with, "Lawn rule sea-hunter inquiring altitude unit!"^note I.e. '[green] [law] [sealer] [asking] [miles]!'
• Blind Jump: The first jump through a newly discovered wormhole is always blind — you have no idea where your ship is going to come out, and it could be close enough to a star to instantly vaporize your ship, or something similarly hazardous. Doing this used to be Cordelia Naismith's job.
• Bling of War: The red-and-blue parade uniform of Barrayar, with two swords, boot-tassels, high collar and commonly described as gaudy. The normal service uniform is a more practical green.
• Blood-Stained Letter:
  • In A Civil Campaign, Ekaterin notices that the seal of Miles' letter of apology to her was marked with the most old-fashioned and traditional smear of red-brown. The color of blood. Then she realizes that it is his blood—an even older-fashioned tradition that the use of red-brown pigment was meant to resemble.
  • In Cryoburn, Miles seals his letter of instruction to the Barrayaran Consulate with a thumbprint in his own blood, knowing that the Consulate will test it and so confirm that the letter really is from him.
• Bluffing the Murderer: The climax of Memory. No one died, however. Well, Admiral Miles Naismith, in a way.
• Body Backup Drive: Some very rich and very evil people clone themselves, then when the clones are in their twenties have their brain transplanted into the clone's body. Mark has made it his life's work to eliminate this practice, by inventing a life-extension technology that does not depend on committing murder.
• Body Double:
  • While Miles and Gregor were off in the Hegen Hub during The Vor Game, ImpSec had to scramble a bit to find a suitable person to play Emperor and vacation at Vorkosigan Surleau (The volunteer officer was informed of an assassination plot and jumped at the chance.) After the War of the Hegen Hub, a story about a secret diplomatic mission was crafted to explain Gregor's absence.
  • Mark was created as an evil one for Miles, and actually does this a few times in his first two appearances. Then he makes a point of gaining a lot of weight so that they cannot be mistaken for each other ever again.
• Body Horror:
  • Star Creche bioweaponry
    Guppy: What kind of hell-disease melts bones?
  • The non-lethal but disgusting Sergyaran worm-plague, which infests your skin with crawling subdermal parasites and leaves puckered, swirling scars.
  • The Barrayaran reaction to any sort of mutation, regardless of how horrible it may or may not be.
  • Children born in the irraditated remains of Vorkosigan District die with serious deformities, as their bones in one woman's house shows, as shown in The Flowers of Vashnoi.
• Book Ends: Shards of Honor begins with Cordelia exploring the newly-discovered planet that will one day be Sergyar, and finding love. Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen is about Cordelia, the widowed Vicereine of Sergyar, re-finding love and exploring Sergyar.
  • The Warrior's Apprentice opens with Miles failing the Academy entrance exam, followed soon by Piotr's funeral. It ends with Bothari's funeral, followed by a scene of Miles training at the Academy.
  • Early on in The Warrior's Apprentice (the start of Chapter 3) a servant conveys to Miles the information that his grandfather has died by addressing him as 'Lord Vorkosigan'. At the end of Cryoburn, an Armsman conveys to Miles the information that his father has died by addressing him as 'Count Vorkosigan'.
• Bothering by the Book:
  • In Falling Free: Bannerji lets the Quaddies get away because they have been classified as "post-fetal experimental tissue cultures," so killing them would be hazardous waste disposal and Van Atta has not filled out the proper paperwork.
  • In The Warrior's Apprentice, Elena assaults a Betan while Miles is elsewhere. From her perspective she is perfectly justified ^note it's strongly implied he makes a sexual pass, by Barrayaran standards an insult to her and her family's honor; from his he is entitled to justice, dammit! The complaining Betan is diverted to the Barrayaran Embassy, where he will spend several hours filling in forms that have to be shipped back to Barrayar (on paper, to ensure they take as long as possible in the loop) where they will inevitably be returned to the origin for minor errors in execution, several times. From the Betan perspective, things are getting done; from the Barrayaran, the whole thing can be kept in limbo indefinitely until the complainant's head cools.
  • In Barrayar, Cordelia buys Koudelka a swordstick as a present. However, under Barrayaran law, only Vor are permitted to carry weapons; the only exception is if a Vor orders someone to carry a particular weapon in order to carry out their duties. Since the swordstick was bought with his money it technically belongs to Aral Vorkosigan, so he orders Koudelka to arm himself with the swordstick.
  • A Civil Campaign: The two Escobar cops sent to arrest Enrique, Mark's scientist (and bail-jumper), mention how much trouble they had to go to to get to him. It took them a month, and twenty-five different pieces of paperwork. They would have gone after Mark, too, since he paid Enrique's bail, but he has Diplomatic Immunity and the second the two cops mentioned who they were after "every Barrayaran clerk, secretary, embassy officer and bureaucrat" they met essentially shut down. It took the guard at the gate forty minutes to get through their pieces of red tape. Individually. And they had to go through a great amount of effort to not alert Enrique... and it was all for naught since Miles points out they need another document that they can only get from him. He may have been bluffing; when another character asks if what he said was true his response is "look it up".
• Brainwashing for the Greater Good: The Mental Health Board of Beta Colony is permitted to subject any citizen judged to be a danger to the public safety to "psychological treatment". Technically, that is illegal under the planet's constitution, but it is considered ethical so long as permission is eventually obtained from the patient... even after the "treatment." ^note There have been real life incidents where a doctor has decided that declining a treatment is proof that the patient is not competent to properly care for themselves, and therefore must have treatment, which this parallels
• Breaking the Glass Ceiling: Duv Galeni is the first Komarran member of ImpSec, the security and intelligence service of the Barrayaran Empire, which conquered his home planet. He gets trouble from both sides - some Komarrans naturally view him as a traitor and a quisling (not least his own militant father), while many Barrayarans don't trust him and are waiting for him to slip up. However, he believes that integration and cooperation between Komarr and Barrayar is the only good way forward for either of them, and that putting up with the problems will make things easier for those who follow after him.
• Breather Episode:
  • A Civil Campaign and Captain Vorpatril's Alliance are both comedies of manners that have no real antagonist (Richars does some antagonist duty in the former, but really Miles is his own worst enemy in that one.) Both books focus on exploring Vor society, the former from an insider's perspective, the latter from a Jacksonian citizen's.
  • Gentlemen Jole and the Red Queen seems to be the proper epilogue to Aral's death in Cryoburn (itself just an epilogue), and a Book End to Cordelia's story from Shards of Honor. There is No Antagonist except for Jole's choice of moving ahead with his career or retiring to be with Cordelia. The closest thing to a real antagonist is a sleazy manufacturing company that is trying to strong-arm Cordelia (which is a bad idea considering how many connections she has — and she doesn't even bother Gregor for help.)
• Briar Patching: In The Vor Game, Miles gets aboard the Ariel by claiming that the mercenaries are after him for selling them some defective weapons, and loudly begging his captors not to hand him over.
• Bribe Backfire:
  • Memory: Once Miles realizes that General Haroche is trying to bribe him, he quickly puts together all the pieces of Illyan's chip sabotage and solves the case in less than 27 hours (The Barrayaran day is 26.7 hours long).
  • Deconstructed in A Civil Campaign, when Miles notes that bribing of Council votes is standard practice. (But also played straight: Richars Vorrutyer's attempt to buy or blackmail Miles' vote drives Miles to form an alliance with Richars' opponent.)
  • Miles uses trolling for bribes in his arsenal of investigative techniques in Cryoburn, both gaining valuable information from his targets and testing the loyalty of his staff. He succeeds in both areas; his targets reveal their plan when they try to bribe him, and his staff proves their loyalty when they try to report him to the Emperor for accepting a bribe.
• Brick Joke:
  • At the beginning of Mirror Dance, the stunningly hot Elli fends off a suitor trying to maraud on her time with Miles by telling the would-be swain that Miles can do push-ups with his tongue. Miles laughs it off. Fast forward to Miles being held captive, with his hands cuffed behind his back, by a couple of jittery House Ryoval goons; he manages to talk them both into investigating a soundproof cell, slams the door on them, and when they turn on the plasma fire to burn their way out he uses the only appendage he has available (hint: not his toes) to cycle through the control panel options then drop the oxygen in the cell until the goons pass out. Not exactly pushups, but it might explain in part why Miles is so popular with the ladies...
    • This one goes back to Brothers in Arms. There's a scene where Elli makes a comment about "beard burn" while "scratching a thigh absently".
    • Ivan apparently shares the same skill, since in Cetaganda, he sexually satisfies two women without having use of his normal appendage for the job (having been dosed with an anti-aphrodisiac as part of a series of pranks from an obnoxious noble).
  • Ivan has been known to complain a few times that, "The reward for a job well done is another job," which is why he prefers to be Brilliant, but Lazy. In the middle of Captain Vorpatril's Alliance, he complains to Byerly that for all the help he provided in A Civil Campaign, nobody so much as offered him thanks. "And what do I get?" Ivan demands. Byerly responds, "Another job." This instantly mollifies Ivan, though Tej, having only just recently met him, is completely baffled as to why.
    • In the same book, when Tej calls Ivan, who is bound to a chair, an "idiot", it only makes him grin. Again, Tej is perplexed at this reaction.
• Brilliant, but Lazy:
  • Ivan Vorpatril. He is no less talented than his cousin, but to exercise any effort that he could escape is against his nature. In addition to disliking work on its own merits, his position in the ranks of Imperial succession^note Ivan is third in line for the throne, and well aware that Miles and Gregor are a little bit safer as long as he looks like the worst choice of the three. also makes him a target for assassination plots, revolutionaries and general muck-rakers. He has to work extremely hard to not be taken seriously. For all that, he is probably Admiral Desplains' (his immediate superior) favorite aide because when he does do a job, he does it well. He has also developed a highly honed ability to recognize political snakes when they show up in the Admiral's in box. In fact, when he's Reassigned to Antarctica, he streamlines the Yllan embassy so that he doesn't have to work as hard in a tropical location. In other words, he uses his brilliance to allow more lazing around. Aral once snarked that Ivan did it at age five, making the "brilliant" part doubtful to him.
  • As shown in Cetaganda, nearly all young Ghem Lord aristocracy fall under this category, due to misapplication of their inherent intellect, because all positions of importance are already occupied by previous generations of (long-lived) ghems. Miles finds this disturbing.
• Broken Pedestal: Lots and lots. Elena in The Warrior's Apprentice, Gregor in The Vor Game and Nikki in A Civil Campaign have to face alarming revelations about their fathers — either after or immediately before their fathers' deaths, so that they have no way of repairing the relationship. (Though Elena does eventually forgive her father enough to burn a grave-offering for him, more than a decade later.)
  • Downplayed for Miles — compared with the above, his discovery that his parents' marriage, while happy and loving, hadn't been exactly standard, doesn't qualify as more than Amazingly Embarrassing Parents.
  • Completely inverted for Mark, who discovers in Mirror Dance that his biological father, while not perfect, was far from being the Depraved Bisexual Darth Vader that Mark had been brought up to believe.
• Bunny-Ears Lawyer: Miles. He may be nuts, but he is very good at covert ops.
• The Bus Came Back: Minor character example: Aral's brilliant aide Lieutenant Jole is described in brief but memorable detail in The Vor Game, as if to set him up as a recurring supporting character. After that book he vanishes and is never heard from again... until twenty years later, when he gets passing mentions in Cryoburn and Captain Vorpatril's Alliance... And then he's the protagonist in Gentleman Jole.
• Busman's Holiday (with a side order of Weirdness Magnet): Even when he does not intend to, Miles tends to run into situations of intrigue and mayhem wherever he goes. He goes on a trip to Beta and ends up accidentally taking over a mercenary space fleet. He is assigned to a do-nothing post at an arctic outpost in the middle of nowhere and ends up putting his life and career on the line to take down a psychotic disciplinarian. He travels to Cetaganda on a diplomatic mission and ends up saving the Cetagandan empire from treason (and saving Barrayar from being caught up in another war while he is at it). He has the Dendarii Mercenaries take some time off on Earth while the fleet is being repaired and discovers a Kill and Replace plot to assassinate his father. Miles's entire early life is one long series of Busman's Holidays. And then on his honeymoon a small detour to smooth ruffled feathers in a diplomatic incident turns into a wild dash to stop all-out war between two empires.
• The Butcher: Aral gets called "The Butcher of Komarr" after one of his subordinates orders the slaughter that he specifically did not want to have happen. Since Aral is a political pragmatist, he admits later in life that he used the weight of that undeserved reputation to lean on those who would be awed by it. He states that since he paid the price for having that reputation, he had the right to use it in that manner.
• …But He Sounds Handsome:
  • After Admiral Naismith becomes well-known enough that people start noticing the similarities between him and Miles Vorkosigan, Miles "admits" that Admiral Naismith is a rogue clone, which gives him an opportunity to talk at some length about how cunning and charismatic Admiral Naismith is.
  "Aye, there's the genius and the wonder of the man," cried Miles, then decided he'd better tone it down a bit.
  • "Naismith" agrees — yes, he surely is much handsomer and more intelligent than poor, dull Lieutenant Vorkosigan. This seems to reflect Miles' honest opinion about the lives he leads in his respective identities.
• But Not Too Bi: Admiral Jole in Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen, who was in a long-term polyamorous relationship with Aral and Cordelia. But three years after the events of Cryoburn, he begins a romance exclusively with Cordelia, who is finally emerging from her grief over Aral's death.
• Buxom Beauty Standard:
  • Tej gets a lot of this. She's described as quite busty, and despite her striking looks from her half-Cetagandan (half-haut, half-ghem) ancestry, her chest size is mentioned frequently as her most attractive feature, almost to the point of being a Running Gag. Her second feature is her "generous" figure.
  • Miles notes to himself that he could burrow into Big Beautiful Woman Laisa Toscane's bosom for the winter.
• By "No", I Mean "Yes": From Cetaganda:
  Vorreedi: Are you a special agent, or not?
  Miles: Well, if not... I succeeded like one, didn't I?

Tropes C

• Caged Bird Metaphor: After her husband dies and (apparently) leaves her a crushing debt, Ekaterin imagines herself as a bird released from ten years in a cage and told she can fly free — as soon as these lead weights are tied to her feet.
  • Earlier on, disappointed that Elena doesn't want to marry him, Miles reminds himself that hunting hawks must fly free.
• Cain and Abel:
  • Yuri and Xav. Both ways: Yuri tried, but Xav succeeded.
  • The monstrous Baron Ryoval and his moderately less evil brother, Baron Fell.
  • Mark and Miles, at least to start with.
    Miles: While I thought I was an only child, he was growing up with the worst case of sibling rivalry you could imagine.
• The Caligula:
  • Mad Emperor Yuri.
  • Prince Serg (if Ezar had given him the chance).
• Caligula's Horse: Lord Midnight Vortala. "If a horse's ass can be Count, why not the whole horse?"
  • The funny thing about Lord Midnight is that he's actually really important to the plot of several of the books, since the case established a legal precedent for a Count naming someone not biologically related to him as his heir.
• Call-Back:
  • Constantly, due to the "future history" nature of the saga. In one particularly subtle example, the Barrayaran warship Kanzian in Captain Vorpatril's Alliance is named after an admiral who appears briefly in Barrayar.
  • A subtle one: in Falling Free, Leo Graf is welcomed to the quaddie space station with a description of it as "the armpit of the universe." In Diplomatic Immunity Miles contemplates heading off to a quaddie space station (the same station as it turns out, now called Graf Station) and speculates that that will probably be "the armpit of Sector V."
  • An even subtler one: Freight Pilot Arde Mayhew does not make his first appearance in The Warrior's Apprentice; he is the pilot who Cordelia tricks into giving her a ride to Escobar during her flight from Beta Colony. Made particularly interesting when, in "Winterfair Gifts", he has a chance to meet Cordelia again, although no mention is made of the incident.
  • In Captain Vorpatril's Alliance, By assures Ivan that Tej is really a woman. Ivan snarks that with By, he couldn't be 100% sure (referring to Lord Dono, formerly Lady Donna, and Ivan was never informed that the Donna he was meeting at the spaceport was no longer female).
    • In the same book, Simon notes that Shiv could "sell elephants to circus masters," recalling his "sex, money and elephants" story from Memory.
• Call-Forward:
  • Cetaganda has one to chronologically-published-earlier story Borders of Infinity.
  "The Marilacans aren't paying sufficient attention to their own wormhole nexus maps," Vorob'yev went on. "They imagine they are at a natural border. But if Marilac were directly held by Cetaganda, the next jump would bring them to Zoave Twilight, with all its cross-routes, and a whole new region for Cetagandan expansion. Marilac is in exactly the same relationship to the Zoave Twilight crossings as Vervain is to the Hegen Hub, and we all know what happened there." Vorob'yev's lips twisted in irony. "But Marilac has no interested neighbor to mount a rescue as your father did for Vervain, Lord Vorkosigan. And provocative incidents can be manufactured so easily."
  • Cetaganda also has General Millisor contacting Rian about what to do with L-X-10-Terran-C. Unfortunately for Rian, Miles is present, the latter making a mental note about it, which would lead to the events of Ethan of Athos.
• Call a Rabbit a "Smeerp": Jacksonian children play an electronic game called Great House that is recognizably similar to Diplomacy crossed with Monopoly by description. It makes sense, as that is a very Jacksonian kind of game.
• Camp Cook: In Shards of Honor, Yeoman Nilesa is this for a large number of Barrayaran soldiers (young men who clearly miss "home cooking" and have evidently not been shy about letting the yeoman know their opinions of his culinary offerings). He is correspondingly surly and hostile. When Cordelia (who has just spent a considerable period hiking through a wilderness with nothing to eat but packets of instant oatmeal and artificial blue cheese salad dressing) samples his food ("a stew-like substance, and real bread with genuine vegetable oil spread") she sincerely declares it to be delicious, causing a rather startling change in poor Nilesa's attitude.
• Cannot Talk to Women: Ethan, in "Ethan of Athos," being from a single-sex society, has this condition early on in the book. Notably, he finds a seedy bar of only men less threatening than a single female receptionist at a Diplomatic Embassy. To be fair, he grows out of this character quirk as Character Development. However, at the end he's helped conspire to make the entire stock of eggs on the planet come from a telepath, potentially making the single-sex society whose hat is He-Man Woman Hater into the only men who will ever truly be able to understand women.
• Can't Catch Up: Mark's creators needed him to impersonate Miles, but Miles was already older and being given the best education money could buy. In addition Mark was having to learn by rote things (like the layout of Vorkosigan House) that Miles just knew.
• Can't Hold His Liquor:
  • Due to his small stature and unusual metabolism, a couple of drinks tends to put Miles to sleep.
  • Or so he thinks. Lord Vorpatril (Ivan's father) tells newlywed Cordelia that his cousin Aral was famous for being a lightweight. After a couple drinks he would be under the table "declaring revolution in iambic pentameter."
  • Averted with Jole, whom Cordelia informs that everyone notices that he can drink anyone under the table. He's somewhat surprised to learn he picked up this reputation because he subtly avoids alcohol at parties: when he was serving as the Prime Minister's aide, his training included never drinking alcohol in any place where he might be open to a diplomatic or political ambush, and the reputation stems almost entirely from him using colored water or other innocuous beverages as social camouflage; it's a habit that he maintains out of habit even in innocuous settings such as a diplomatic party. This reputation ends up with him being given a full Gargle Blaster on his 50th birthday, which gets him rather buzzed.
• The Captain:
  • Commander/Captain Cordelia Naismith: Aral's "Dear Captain", Action Girl and Guile Hero. Then she resigns her commission and finds herself in Mama Bear territory...
  • Captain Simon Illyan (he refused to take an official rank greater than his predecessor, who saw no reason to claim higher rank because everyone knew how powerful he was without it), is one of a very few people that can even partially keep Miles in check. By reputation, his predecessor, Captain Negri, was even more badass. Fortunately for future ImpSec chiefs, Allegre was already a general when appointed, so future chiefs wouldn't have to be stuck at Captain.^note Illyan still received a vice-admiral's pay at the time of his forced retirement.
  • Captain Elena Bothari-Jesek, of the Dendarii Mercenaries.
  • Captain Bel Thorne, of same.
  • Miles wrangles a promotion to Captain as part of his appointment as Imperial Auditor. Aral remarks that it's the most roundabout way of acquiring a set of Captain's collar tabs that they've ever heard of...
• The Casanova: Ivan, at least during his peak years as a junior officer. He later shades into Looking for Love in All the Wrong Places when he realizes there may not be any single women of his class left if he doesn't snag one soon. Though, given his reasons for being Brilliant, but Lazy, it might have helped his situation just as well to have a morganatically lower-class and foreign wife.
• Cassandra Truth:
  • Cordelia ultimately has to flee her homeworld after her government refuses to believe that no, she is not a brainwashed sleeper agent, she just honestly fell in love with a middle-aged alleged war criminal from an enemy nation.
  • From Captain Vorpatril's Alliance:
  Desplains, a spare and quietly competent officer in his late fifties, took in Ivan’s neat but squinty appearance with an ironic eye. "Heavy drinking last night, Vorpatril?"
  "No, sir, not a drop. I was kidnapped by two beautiful women and held prisoner in their flat all night. They didn't let me get a wink of sleep."
  Desplains snorted amusement and shook his head. “Save your sex fantasies for your friends, Ivan. Time to saddle up.”
• Catchphrase:
  • Gregor (and Cordelia, from whom he inherited it): "Let's see what happens."
  • Ivan: "It's not my fault."
  • Miles: "Forward momentum"
  • Cordelia: "Barrayarans!" (A favorite curse)
  • Lord Auditor Vorthys: "No artificial shortages!" (of cookies)
• Cat Scare: "Labyrinth" has the extended version of the trope: Miles, locked in a dark basement with a dangerous genetically-engineered lifeform, sees something moving in the shadows — but it's only a rat. Just as he's relaxing, the dangerous genetically-engineered lifeform pounces on the rat out of a different shadow.
• Cats Are Mean: Or at least in Zap's case, very bad-tempered (due to being caught in an "entangling field" (read as: captured and shocked interminably till the field is turned off.) In fact, she borders on bipolar: she sometimes purrs and growls at the same time.
• The Cavalry: How Gregor and Aral arrive with the Hegen Alliance Navy, led by the brand new Barrayaran fleet flagship, Prince Serg, to prevent a Cetagandan invasion.
  "What in hell's that? It's too big to be that fast! It's too fast to be that big!"
• Central Theme:
  • For most of the series, What Measure Is a Non-Human? is the strongest theme, with "legacy" in some form or another appearing in all the disparate stories. The rest of the text is spent de- and reconstructing romance, morality and sexuality tropes...but in a funny way.
  • When Aral thinks he might be dying in Mirror Dance, he urgently tells Mark, "All true wealth is biological." This notion shows up everywhere in the series—whether it be family love, a politically-motivated quest for posterity, the constant ambivalence over the value of altered or unfamiliar lifeforms, the prison camp, Miles' death and resuscitation, the Cetagandan desire to refine human genetics, the Betan focus on quality-of-life, the Jacksonian clones, the villains' near-universal obsession with torture and dismemberment, and on and on and on... Human bodies, and whether or not they matter, and why or why not, are the explicit focus of nearly everything that happens in the series.
  • Another central theme is a Coming of Age Story of a society evolving from chaos into civilization.
• The Chains of Commanding: Poor Gregor.
• Changeling Fantasy: Cruelly subverted in The Warriors' Apprentice in Elena Bothari's quest to find her mother's identity.
  • Invoked and defied in Brothers in Arms
  Miles: Orphans are supposed to dream of golden parents, riding to their rescue — for you, it could have been true.
  Mark: Hardly. I always knew the score.
• Changing of the Guard: from Cordelia to Miles. The trope then makes a swerve with Barrayar, which is a prequel about Cordelia's exploits, written and published well into the Miles times. According to the Word of God, Barrayar was already planned, but she only got back around to it when the series became a big hit.
• Character Tics: Miles tends to jerk his chin up defensively under stress; more so when younger and more self-conscious about his height. Miles also inherited the habit of putting his fingers together when being stern and incisive from his father, Aral. Mark shares all of Miles' tics, having been conditioned from a young age to impersonate him, but later begins to add his own variations to them (as part of his Character Development, showing he has accepted his new role as a member of the family — also his brotherly rivalry with Miles). In A Civil Campaign, a little time is spent illustrating that Lord Dono is training himself to use more masculine character tics, and echoes one of Aral's^note specifically, sitting backwards on a chair, with arms folded over the chairback; his armsman had commented that Aral projected masculinity without effort, while Miles basically was imitating his father and it showed.
• Chef of Iron: Count Vorloupulous and his 2,000 cooks...sort of. Barrayaran law said that Counts cannot have private armies, so Vorloupulous hired 2,000 "cooks," equipped them appropriately (chef's knives instead of short swords), and set them loose on his enemies. When he was caught, his appeal to Ain't No Rule failed. He was sentenced to Death by Irony:
  Miles: The Emperor ... arrested him for treason, for which the sentence was — still is — public exposure and death by starvation. So the man with 2,000 cooks was condemned to waste away in the Great Square of Vorbarr Sultana. And to think they always said Dorca Vorbarra had no sense of humor.
• Chekhov's Gun:
  • Cordelia's shopping trip to the Capital would not have gone nearly so well if she had not bought that swordstick for Kou earlier.
  • At one point in Cetaganda, Miles mentions that he might have gone into law enforcement if he had not entered the military. That's exactly what he does when he becomes an Imperial Auditor in Memory.
  • Early in Diplomatic Immunity, Miles muses on his fear that someday, while he is on assignment a hundred wormhole jumps from home, some grim-faced courier will catch up to him and begin by addressing him as Count Vorkosigan, sir? Just that happens at the end of the next book, Cryoburn.
  • Groats, in Captain Vorpatril's Alliance. And the unexploded bomb.
• Chekhov's Volcano: Completely subverted in Gentleman Jole. Despite Kareenburg being built on the side of a volcano that is known to be a geological time bomb, and despite Cordelia's insistence that the planetary capital move to somewhere safer, it does not go off during the book. (The capital gets moved anyway — and Kayburg suffers some strong temblors during the epilogue, hinting that the mountain is getting ready to blow sometime in the near future.)
• Chest of Medals:
  • Aral has a jar full of various medals stuffed in his desk drawer.
  • Miles has a lot, including one that would be the equivalent of a Cold War-era American soldier having a Hero of the Soviet Union medal (or a Soviet one having a Medal of Honor, given the flavor of the setting). The irony is that both his cover stories preclude him from wearing most of them or admitting he has them. His Cetagandan Order of Merit medal is one of the few exceptions, having been very publicly awarded to Lt. Vorkosigan by the Cetagandan Emperor. Miles only wishes he could have it classified. Miles finds a good use for them all in Memory.
  After all, what's the point of wearing a medal that you can't tell a story about?
• Childhood Friend Romance: Miles's one-sided attraction to Elena Bothari.
• Chronic Backstabbing Disorder: Cavilo, and how.
  Miles: You should have stuck to your original plan. Or your second plan. Or your third. You should, in fact, have stuck to something.
• Chubby Chaser: Those around Emperor Gregor theorize he is attracted to maternal figures due to the early loss of his mother.
  Lady Alys: "All that time I wasted herding tall, slender beauties past him, when I should have been rounding up short, plump beauties. I could cry." She ate a decisive bite of cream cake, instead.
• Cincinnatus: Aral Vorkosigan. Emperor Ezar knows that Aral is both disgusted and frightened by Barrayaran politics, but is also supremely well versed in it so he is able to cope with it — and is honorable enough to give Gregor the throne when he turns 20.
• Citizenship Marriage:
  • Ivan and Tej, who both gain from the arrangement: Tej was keen to avoid being abducted from Immigration's custody, while Ivan needed a way to avoid a charge of kidnapping. Played with a bit: it takes place as the authorities are breaking down the barricaded door to get at both principals, the government accepts it immediately, they tell everyone it is meant to be temporary...and then they cannot get out of it.
  • In Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen, a panicked Cetagandan consul aide who does not want to return to his family and deal with I Told You So mockery tries to propose to Jole's aide in an attempt to get Barrayaran citizenship. She rejects it immediately, one because they'd only known each other for a few months, and two, having a Cetagandan husband would be bad for her military career.
• City of Spies: The Hegen Hub.
• Claustrophobia: Ivan. The germ of it started when he and Miles got buried alive in a tunnel (briefly) as children, but after spending several hours locked in a pumping chamber in the Thames Tidal Barrier — the barrier is meant to prevent the raised sea levels from flooding London — Ivan considers taking up claustrophobia as a hobby. Later in the series, he grimly insists that he does not have claustrophobia; he has an entirely justified fear of being locked in small enclosed spaces, thank you very much.
• Clean, Pretty Childbirth: Justified with the use of the Uterine Replicator, which makes childbirth about as clean and straightforward as it's possible to be, although — as mentioned in Diplomatic Immunity — it does raise the rather embarrassing danger of a mother being late to her own child's birth.
• Cleaning Up Romantic Loose Ends: The more recent novels in the series have been about this. Gregor married Laisa and Miles became engaged to Ekaterin in A Civil Campaign. The latter pair was married as of Diplomatic Immunity. Ivan married a Jacksonian baron's daughter in Captain Vorpatril's Alliance. Aral died offscreen in Cryoburn. Widowed Cordelia has entered into a romantic relationship with Oliver Jole, with whom she had been having a threeway relationship including Aral while he was still alive, as depicted in Gentlemen Jole and the Red Queen.
• Cloning Body Parts: Fairly common tech. Miles gets a whole new set of internal organs after his chest is blown out by a needle grenade, and Aral has to take some time off, waiting for them to grow him a new heart, after his heart attack. In emergencies, the parts that get installed are often undersized and need to grow in situ, but with advance warning, full sized parts can be grown.
• Clueless Chick-Magnet: Miles Vorkosigan is a lot more attractive to women (and one hermaphrodite), for all his bodily deformities, than he even begins to realize — though his cousin Ivan surely does.
• Combat Pragmatist: Numerous examples, and the Vor class, collectively.
  "Let me tell you about the Barrayaran Vor," cut in Miles. "[During the Cetagandan Occupation, t]he loonies who sought a glorious death in battle found it very early on. This rapidly cleared the chain of command of the accumulated fools. The survivors were those who learned to fight dirty, and live, and fight another day, and win, and win, and win, and for whom nothing, not comfort, or security, not family or friends or their immortal souls, was more important than winning. Dead men are losers by definition. Survival and victory. They weren't supermen, or immune to pain. They sweated in confusion and darkness. And with not one-half the physical resources Marilac possesses even now, they won. When you're Vor," Miles ran down a little, "there is no mustering out." ("The Borders of Infinity")
• Come to Gawk: The official punishment for Vors who commit treason, until they starve to death.
• Comically Missing the Point: In Captain Vorpatril's Alliance:
  "Could you people stop trying to come up with novel ways to kill me for just one hour? ... Just stop doing anything. Sit down and wait sensibly. Earth, water, air, fire—you're running out of elements, here!
  Amiri looked very impressed by this ringing baritone rant. Grandmama ... looked less impressed, if perhaps sympathetic. Rising from Pearl's side and helping her up, she observed, "In some Old Earth mythologies there was imagined to be a fifth element—metal, as I recall."
  Ivan Xav said through his teeth, "That was a rhetorical remark, not a bloody suggestion."
• Comically Small Bribe:
  • In "The Mountains of Mourning", a woman tries to bribe an ImpSec guard to let her in to see the Count with all the money she has on her — a mark and twenty pence. Miles orders the guard to let her through for free after learning she is trying to present a petition she has the legal right to make.
  • The inverted version occurs in "Labyrinth". A refugee from Jackson's Whole hands Miles and Bel Thorne her entire life's savings in cash, hoping it will be enough to engage them as mercenaries to get her off the planet. Bel tells her the price is wrong, then peels one single dollar off the stack and tells her this is more like it as it returns the rest. ("Makes it an official contract, you see.")
• The Commies Made Me Do It: In The Vor Game, at least one of Cavilo's men is only following her because of his wife and family being held prisoner.
• Compelling Voice: Cordelia uses this towards the end of A Civil Campaign.
  It was [Cordelia's] old Ship Captain's voice, Kareen realized; and her parents had both lived under military authority for decades.
  Her parents sank as though folded.
• Competence Porn: Frequently commented on by characters. Competent themselves, all the Vorkosigans are great at recruiting teams of hypercompetent colleagues. Standouts include Elena, Tung and Quinn (military), Illyan (intelligence), Bothari, Drou, Pym, and Roic (bodyguards), and Lieutenant Bone and Tsipis (accountants!). Not to mention Cordelia, Alys, Ekaterin, and the whole Koudelka clan, none of whom are employees but definitely on Team Vorkosigan. Miles even muses "I adore competent women," and wonders if the diplomat he's thinking of has a sister.
• Conditioned to Accept Horror: In Mirror Dance, the young clone of Baronne Lotus Bharaputra (herself a clone-daughter of Lilly Durona) knows and agrees with the notion of being killed to give "my lady" a full body transplant.
• Continuity Drift: Any series of this scope is bound to have some. Since many of the books were written anachronistically, this can occasionally make reading them in chronological order a bit disconcerting.
  • Perhaps the most significant example is the portrayal of Cetaganda. In Ethan of Athos it's described as a male-dominated totalitarian world governed by a military junta. A character who grew up there implies that the interrogation/torture of suspected political dissidents is routine; the telepathy complex is specifically being developed for that purpose. By contrast, in Cetaganda (written years later), we learn that it's actually an eight-planet empire governed by a hereditary emperor at the head of a complex two-tiered aristocracy, whose main hat is self-improvement through (female-controlled) genetic engineering; it doesn't really appear to be any more militaristic or totalitarian than Barrayar itself, and the LX10-Terran-C project was a purely scientific experiment privately sponsored by the Dowager Empress. Given that the two books are set chronologically back-to-back, the effect can be slightly jarring. Perhaps we should just assume that Terrence Cee has a somewhat biased and limited view of his home culture having grown up in a lab under the supervision of a jackbooted paranoid.
    • Not actually contradictory. Cetaganda's haut are an insular, not particularly militaristic ruling class of the eight planet empire. The ghem are male-dominated and militaristic. As explained in Diplomatic Immunity, they can coexist mainly because the haut women are the galaxy's best genetic engineers with an arsenal of terrifying bioweapons. Remember, as Barrayar is a bit of a stand-in for Imperial Russia and Beta is a stand-in for California, Cetaganda is a stand-in for Imperial Japan. Beautiful inside the Emperor's Court, terrifying if the military targets you, and with no real concept of freedom.
    • It is also observed in various places, notably in Diplomatic Immunity, that outsiders understand very little of how Cetagandan society really works, at least in part because the haut are isolationist even towards the lower castes of their own culture, and the Cetagandans in general do not mingle well with outworlders; for example, the Quaddies scoff at the haut, saying they don't engage in any meaningful work , which is a howlingly inaccurate assessment, especially coming from a bioengineered species. The ghem are the most visible face of Cetaganda to the Nexus at large, and being the primary militarist caste they define the image of their society. This is contrasted to the Barrayarans, where the Vor encompass both the regular government and the military. Diplomats and other visitors may well have a shot at meeting Barrayaran Emperor Gregor Vorbarra. But most haven't got a chance in hell of chatting up, or even seeing, the haut Emperor Fletchir Giaja. So it is a case of a complex system being seen from many different points of view. Even Terrence Cee was only familiar with the ghem-managed project that created him, and had no direct experience with the Star Creche or the haut, despite the old empress sponsoring the project.
  • Earlier books imply that Miles's disfigurement was caused by the soltoxin his mother was exposed to during pregnancy. When the actual incident is finally described, in Barrayar, it turns out to be the soltoxin antidote that causes all the damage.
    • Given that his parents don't share much about their lives before his birth, including Aral's bisexuality and murder of his first wife's suitors in a duel, it makes sense that they might keep this detail quiet.
  • Several paragraphs at the beginning of The Warrior's Apprentice briefly outline what has happened since Shards of Honor — those events were planned, but the novel hadn't been written. When Bujold got to write Barrayar several years later, she did some things differently. The most cited by fans are the circumstances of Padma Vorpatril's death and Cordelia's role during the mutiny. Fortunately, other novels published before Barrayar do not mention those events, and later ones stick with the Barrayar version.
  • This could be the reason not to write interquel novels after Barrayar and Cetaganda.
  • In the beginning, natural childbirth was a normal, if minority, option among galactics. Even on Beta Colony, one in four babies were natural; Cordelia's brother was one, and she herself got pregnant with Miles without bothering to wait a few months for a Uterine Replicator to become available. Ten books and a dozen years later, it's a mark of Tien Vorssoison's jerkitude that he doesn't want his wife to use one.
  • Gold went from Worthless Yellow Rocks in Shards of Honor to a major part of a treasure cache in Captain Vorpatril's Alliance.^note Though even there, it's noted that since the gold is in the form of coins, the collector's market will factor into its worth. Part of it was the author realizing that gold is rare universally; one can now attribute the Betan idea that "gold was a useful conductor and not that important" to Cultural Posturing more than anything else.
• Continuity Nod:
  • Halfway through Cetaganda, there is a brief moment in which Ghem-Colonel Millisor calls in with a status report for the hunt he is on in Ethan of Athos. In "Labyrinth," Dr. Canaba obliquely mentions the Terran-C gene complex as one of the gene complexes concealed in Taura's muscle. Miles makes a mental note and tells himself to get Elli Quinn in on it, leading to the events of Ethan of Athos.
  • Miles makes a reference to his mother's infamous "shopping" trip^note Read: assassinated a pretender to the throne and brought his head back in a shopping bag (which was the only bag available at the time) during Komarr.
    Shopping? That's an offer seldom made to the son of my mother.
    • He makes another reference to it in Diplomatic Immunity as a "family joke". The Quaddies are not amused. In Gentlemen Jole and the Red Queen, Cordelia exasperatedly tells Jole she only brought home one body part once.
  • In Captain Vorpatril's Alliance, Tej mentions a quaddie musician who used to live on her home planet, who was a central character in "Labyrinth".
  • Tej and Rish, discussing why Barrayar is a power to be reckoned with, note that one ImpSec agent took down House Ryoval.
  • Later books mention Barrayaran spaceships named after characters from earlier books who have presumably died in the meantime.
  • At the end of Mirror Dance, Mark is discussing investments with the industrialist Lord Vorsmythe. A passing mention in A Civil Campaign reveals that Vorsmythe Ltd. has teamed up with Toscane Industries on several infrastructure projects.
• Cool Chair:
  • Averted for the Barrayaran Emperor during the Emperor's Birthday ceremonies. When receiving the traditional birthday "gifts" (bags of gold coins symbolizing annual tax payments) from the various Counts, the Emperor sits on a standard military issue folding camp stool. The chairs in his private offices are considerably more luxurious and comfortable.
  • In Cetaganda, we see that the Cetagandan emperor gets a much, much fancier version than Gregor does. Miles watches Emperor the haut Fletchir Giaja seating himself, and reflects that Gregor would probably make a crack about the chair supporting "the Imperial Ass". He nearly goes cross-eyed trying not to blurt that out.
• Cool Horse: Fat Ninny; the name stuck from some youthful misbehavior. He's also a bit funny looking, but Miles loves him anyway, because he's imperturbable and brilliantly trained.
  Miles (to Ninny): If anyone asks, I'll tell them your name is Chieftain.
  • In Mirror Dance, Aral says the horse's name is "Ninny".
    Mark: [thinking] You mean Fat Ninny. You edited it, ha!
• Cool Starship: Oddly averted. The ships (Prince Serg, Triumph, etc...) are implied to be very cool (the mere mention of Barrayar's new flagship, the Prince Serg, has Miles practically salivating), but they are barely described in the narration. It is the people who ride in them that count, after all, though the ordinance described for the Prince Serg is astounding, almost singlehandedly defeating a Cetagandan incursion on its own (by virtue that its weaponry has twice the range of fire than most ships.)
  • The Prince Serg reappears in Gentleman Jole, as an outdated and stripped hulk on the way to the breakers. The cool is no longer there.
• The Coroner Doth Protest Too Much: Cetagandans do not take too well to failure.
  "It was suicide, wasn't it?"
  "In an involuntary sort of way," said Vorob'yev. "These Cetagandan political suicides can get awfully messy, when the principal won't cooperate."
  "Thirty-two stab wounds in the back, worst case of suicide they ever saw?" murmured Ivan, clearly fascinated by the gossip.
  "Exactly, my lord."
• Corrupt Corporate Executive:
  • Bruce Van Atta, the only character in Falling Free actually willing to kill a thousand genetically engineered children.
  • Cryoburn reveals Kibou-Daini has a sizable infestation of these, as the different cryogenics corporations have amassed considerable power from using the proxy votes of their clients.
• "Could Have Avoided This!" Plot: Cavilo, thanks to her Chronic Backstabbing Disorder. Miles and Gregor imply that had she just taken Gregor back to Barrayar, she would have been rewarded richly.
• Covered in Scars: Koudelka's injuries from the nerve disruptor bolt leave him needing to have a large portion of his nervous system replaced with artificial nerves. Much of Koudelka's body is covered with a "tracery of thin red scars", each scar "representing a dead nerve excised and replaced with artificial silver threads". Miles himself has had a ton of surgeries, from broken bones and bone replacements in his childhood, to various other injuries (up to a needle grenade to the chest). All of that has left his body covered with scars, from the neat surgical scars where bones were replaced with synthetics to a huge ragged scar on his chest, the result of a massive combat injury. Miles' body is described in Komarr:
  There were scars on scars on scars, mostly very fine and surgically straight, in criss-crossing layers running back through time, growing fainter and paler: on his arms, on his hands and fingers, on his neck and running up under his hair, circling his ribcage and paralleling his spine, and, most pinkly and recently, an unusually ragged and tangled mess centered on his chest.
• Creepy Souvenir: The Vorkosigans have a hoard of Cetagandan scalps collected by Piotr's followers. They can't be thrown away (it would be a gratuituous insult to the district population after all) and so they are kept in the attic. Miles muses that they are useless unless Gregor needed to send a diplomatic Stealth Insult by returning them to the Cetagandan ambassador with their apologies.
• The Creon: Aral Vorkosigan. He does (reluctantly) take the top spot, as Regent of the Barrayaran Imperium, for sixteen years. He then hands off power to the young Emperor, right on schedule. (He does also accept a job as that Emperor's "right-hand man", faithfully serving him for many years more as Prime Minister.)
  The dying Emperor Ezar, when offering Aral Vorkosigan the job of Regent: And you are the one man—the only man on that list^note of men whom Emperor Ezar claims have "a better right by blood and law to the Imperium of Barrayar than mine"; according to Ezar, Aral Vorkosigan is at the very head of that list who I am absolutely certain, by the scattered remains of Yuri Vorbarra, truly does not wish to be Emperor.
  Aral's son, Miles, musing to himself about his dad: Admiral Aral Vorkosigan, space master strategist, conqueror of Komarr, hero of Escobar, for sixteen years Imperial Regent and supreme power on Barrayar in all but name. And then he'd capped it, confounded history and all self-sure witnesses and heaped up honor and glory beyond all that had gone before by voluntarily stepping down and transferring command smoothly to Emperor Gregor upon his majority. Not that the Prime Ministership hadn't made a dandy retirement from the Regency, and he was showing no signs yet of stepping down from that.
• Crouching Moron, Hidden Badass: IVAN. He can be perfectly competent if he chooses to be (probably best demonstrated at the climax of A Civil Campaign) and is fiercely loyal, but finds it... safer (both for himself and his family and friends), as a potential heir to the throne, if everyone thinks he's an idiot who poses no threat and who no one would ever want to come to power.
• Crusading Widower: Piotr Vorkosigan becomes this after Mad Emperor Yuri sends a death squad to kill his wife, eldest son and young daughter, failing to kill his second son. Piotr then proceeds to kick off a two-year civil war to depose Yuri, succeeding by placing his old friend and protege on the campstool, and helping lead the Dismemberment of Yuri.
• Cryo Sickness: Cryogenic suspension is common in the setting, particularly as emergency treatment for people who have suffered injuries that are severe to the point of death, such as soldiers in combat. It requires considerable prep work be done beforehand (including replacing the patient's blood with special "cryo-fluid" to prevent cellular damage from ice crystals). The side effects of cryogenic suspension (especially if it's done in a great tearing hurry, such as in the middle of a battlefield, and therefore not quite perfectly) range from mild temporary memory loss, to serious brain damage, to being rendered a "vegetable". Or the patient simply not being revivable, and becoming a corpse permanently. As its name suggests, Cryoburn deals very extensively with such cryonics in a non-military setting, including the possible complications of defective procedures or equipment.
• Culture Clash: When Miles visits Quaddie space as Lord Auditor, he has to explain that "Emperor's Voice" does not really mean that Barrayarans think that the Emperor is talking out of Miles's mouth, but that it is simply the Barrayaran term for "plenipotentiary". Apparently the Barrayaran reputation for primitiveness spread even to Quaddie territory.
• Curb-Stomp Battle:
  • When the Prince Serg battleship is unleashed in Battle of Hegen's Hub, its long-ranged gravitic lances make immediate mincemeat of Cetagandan ships.
  • On a personal level, Mark is worried about Cordelia being able to convince Kou and Drou to let him date their daughter. Miles is amused at his fear, and informs Mark that it won't be a problem.
    Miles: Butter, meet laser beam. Laser beam, butter. Oops.
• Cure Your Gays: Hilarious subversion in Ethan of Athos. Gay Ethan wants to ask Elli Quinn for a very personal favor after several shared adventures. She says she has heard it all, and tells him to go on. He wants her to donate an ovary to his planet, and that he wants to use it for his future sons. She is considerably nonplussed, a rarity for her.
• Custom Uniform: Miles wore very expensively tailored custom uniforms, designed to conceal some of his physical deformities, while looking as much like standard issue uniforms as possible.
• Cute Kitten:
  • Subverted with the Cetagandan Kitten Tree.
  • Played straight with Zap's offspring in Memory and A Civil Campaign.
• Cyborg Helmsman: Implants are required by jump pilots. Anyone with the proper training can handle in-system sublight flight, but a jump pilot's neural implants can streamline control of a suitably equipped ship's systems during wormhole transit.
• The Cycle of Empires: The Time of Isolation was a phase 4. Dorca's and Ezar's reigns were a phase 1. Gregor's is a phase 2. The Aral regency is a bridge between 1 and 2.

Tropes D

• Dances and Balls: Form a significant portion of the High Vor social scene and seem to be regular events at the Imperial Palace, what with State Dinners, Emperor's Birthday, Winterfair, etc.
• Dancing Bear: The series directly invokes the trope more than once. Considering Barrayar is Space Russia, it's appropriate. In Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen, Cordelia discusses Aral's artistic talent with her grandson.invoked
  Alex: Why didn't he show them to anybody? Or give them away? There's so many. Didn't anybody want them?
  Cordelia: He showed them to a few people. Me, Oliver, Simon sometimes. I'm sure quite a few people would have wanted them, but not... not for the drawings themselves. They'd have wanted them because the Lord Regent or the Admiral or the Count had made them, or worse, to sell for money. (pause) He said it would be like that bicycle-riding bear someone was parading around the district, once. It wasn’t that the bear was good at bicycling, it was just the novelty of a bear riding at all.invoked
• A Day in the Limelight: "Winterfair Gifts" focuses on Armsman Roic and Sergeant Taura.
• Dead Guy Junior:
  • The High Vor custom of naming the firstborn son using the first names of paternal and maternal grandfathers, plus the second son getting the middle names, tends to produce a fair number of these.
  • Among the non-Vor, memorial names also show up (e.g. Kareen Koudelka)
  • In Cryoburn, we see Taura Vorkosigan.
• Deadpan Snarker: Almost everybody.
  • Mark is a wizard at it since he is Miles with no social restraints. In A Civil Campaign, he takes a precise shot that leaves Miles flabbergasted.
    "Mm, I wouldn't dream of interfering." Mark made for the door. "Though I'm not at all sure I'd choose to structure my most intimate relationship as a war. Is she the enemy, then?"
    His timing was perfect; Miles' feet had just come down and he was still sputtering just as Mark passed the door. Mark stuck his head back through the frame to add, "I hope her aim is just as good as Countess Vormuir's."
    Last word: I win. Grinning, he exited.
  • Simon Illyan is also one of the best.
    Mark: He was... acerb.
    Miles: I'll bet. He does acerb almost better than anyone I know...
    • But Cordelia can top him
      Miles: ... except for my mother when she's lost her temper, which thank God is not very often.
      Mark: You should have seen her annihilate him, then. Clash of the titans. I think you'd have enjoyed it. I did.
  • Byerly Vorrutyer can give any of them a run for the money.
    Alexei: Good, that leaves one more Barrayaran woman for the rest of us.
    Byerly: Well, that leaves one more for one of us; unless you are suggesting something delightfully outré.
  • In Cryoburn, Consul Vorlynkin has his moments:
    Miles: My case budget allows for a lot of discretion, you know.
    Vorlynkin: Then I really wish you'd buy some.
  • In Captain Vorpatril's Alliance, after Illyan fails to keep Gregor apprised of events:
    Simon: It is not often that Gregor permits himself the self-indulgence of sarcasm. I could see that it was very relieving to him.
• Death Flight: In Brothers in Arms one of the Komarran conspirators informs Miles they plan to kill him by stunning him, flying him out over the ocean in a lightflyer, and dropping him in the water. While they plan to weight him down (so the body won't be discovered), if the weights do work loose and the body is discovered after all, an autopsy will show he simply drowned.
• Death Glare: Miles.
  All the latent amusement which had parried Ivan's sallies till now was abruptly wiped from his cousin's face. His back straightened as much as it could, and he leaned forward, his hands gripping his chair arms. His voice dropped to an arctic pitch. "I will thank you, Lord Vorpatril, to take care not to repeat that slander. Ever."
  Ivan's stomach lurched in surprise. He had seen Miles come the Lord Auditor a couple of times now, but never before at him. The freezing gray eyes suddenly had all the expression of a pair of gun barrels. Ivan opened his mouth, then closed it, more carefully. What the hell was going on here? And how did someone so short manage to project that much menace? Years of practice, Ivan supposed. And conditioning.
• Death Is Cheap: Partially averted. In-universe, cryo-revival can be performed to save prematurely deceased people, but several factors are involved. Their blood has to be replaced with cryonic fluid, the injuries have to leave their head intact, they have to be frozen immediately, and if absolutely everything is done properly (and the prep for most combat casualties is done on the battlefield, usually while still under enemy fire, and by medics who may not be completely up to speed on the current best practice), there is a significant chance they can lose some or all of their memory and mental faculty. In one case, some poor guy ended up with periodic seizures that cost him his career.
• Death of a Thousand Cuts: A literal example in the execution of Mad Emperor Yuri. After he was overthrown, everybody he'd wronged got their cut at him. There weren't enough body parts to go around.
• Decadent Court:
  • It's a bit more martial than most examples, but High Vor is frought with intrigue, such as Richars Vorrutyer trying to win the district countship against Lord Dono, who forges an alliance with Rene Vorbretten to help him keep his countship. Both rely on Miles, who in turn relies on Grand Dame Lady Alys who's seen her share of court intrigue.
  • Aral Vorkosigan's knowledge of the high court intrigue — and absolute fear of it — also makes him the perfect Regent.
• Decapitation Presentation: Cordelia rolls Vordarian's head out of a shopping bag after her "shopping trip" in Barrayar.
• Declaration of Protection: Drou about Princess Kareen (though she actually says it to Cordelia).
  Drou: I've watched them, here, gradually reclassifying her as expendable. Every day for three years, I put my life on the line because I believed that her life was important. You watch someone that closely for that long, you don't have too many illusions about her. Now they seem to think I should just switch off my loyalty, like some guard-machine. There's something wrong with that. I want to — to at least try for Kareen.
• Defenestrate and Berate: Inverted when, after Ekaterin coolly informs Tien that she is leaving him, his responding tantrum climaxes with him threatening to toss either her bonsaied skellytum or himself off the balcony of their fifth story flat. When she doesn't respond, he throws the plant over. Ekaterin's only reaction:
  Ekaterin: You ass, Tien. You didn't even look to see if there was anyone below.
  • Played for laughs twice (first with a bucket of ice water, then with the empty bucket) when Pym recounts Count Vormuir's attempt to enforce his conjugal rights in the face of his wife's Lysistrata Gambit:
    Mark: Did she hit him?
    Pym: Yes, both times. I understand her aim is superior.
• Defusing the Tyke-Bomb: Miles' and Cordelia's treatment of Mark.
• Delivery Guy: Subverted at Ivan's birth, as Bothari has some knowledge of midwifery. Good thing too, since Drou and Cordelia have no idea of what to do, and all Kou is good for is supplying a jacket.
• Depraved Bisexual: Prince Serg and Ges Vorrutyer, whose poisonous friendship exacerbated and magnified their own independent psychoses.
• Designer Babies: A common feature of the setting; Cetaganda takes this further than anyone else: their society, economy and political structure is built around making designer babies. Most of the galaxy uses uterine replicators, but Barrayar is just beginning to adopt them, along with genetic screening. While Miles got his mix of genes the old-fashioned way, his kids are screened and canned in a uterine replicator. It is often mentioned that some form of fetal sex-selection treatment is available; its introduction to Barrayaran culture, where the Vor are all very keen on male heirs, has led to a rather pressing demographic problem by the time of the series; there simply are not enough eligible women on Barrayar. It is even worse in the High Vor social scene, where eligibility is much more narrowly defined.
  • The Koudelkas saw this coming and had four girls. All of them make advantageous alignments. Kareen joins the Vorkosigan clan, Delia marries Duv (a highly placed ImpSec man), Martya is with a genius scientist (a wealthy genius to boot, thanks to being one of Mark's projects), and Olivia becomes a countess. Miles notes that each of them picked a different sphere of power (Kareen — business, Delia — government, Martya — science, Olivia — high society.)
  • The men of Athos also take uterine replicators to their logical extreme, with a Planet of Hats of men only. (Though, it can only go so far, as duplicated ovaries can only last so far before a fresh batch is needed.)
• Desperately Looking for a Purpose in Life: Played straight with Miles, but subverted with Mark after he states that his only purpose in life was to kill Miles and Aral, and now that Ser Galen was dead, he had no purpose anymore. Cordelia simply reassures him that almost no one has is born with a ready-made purpose in the first place, so he's in good company.
• Determinator:
  • Miles. Other characters refer to him with nicknames such as "Miles the monomaniacal," and Ivan lampshades it when he mentions that he has never seen a barrier that Miles could not climb, or find a way around, or dig his way under, or just blow up with sapper charges.
  Ivan: Demonstrably, even sniper fire couldn't stop the hyperactive little git.
  • Lampshaded by Illyan, in A Civil Campaign:
    Illyan: Do you know all those old folk tales where the count tries to get rid of his only daughter's unsuitable suitor by giving him three impossible tasks?
    Ekaterin: Yes...
    Illyan: Don't ever try that with Miles. Just...don't.
• Detective Mole: In Memory. Simon Illyan is poisoned by Lucas Haroche, one of his direct subordinates and effectively his second-in-command. He doesn't lead the investigation personally, but does decide who is on it, its scope, and who can contact Illyan.
• Determined Homesteaders: Peasants from the Dendarii Mountains, a provincial Vorkosigan holding that still hasn't been fully terraformed.
• Didn't Think This Through:
  • Quinn, Elena and Taura leave Mark in Baron Ryoval's clutches to hunt down a missing Miles, since they thought Ryoval would quickly realise that the former wasn't the latter. Miles furiously asks, "Did you ever figure that Ryoval wouldn't care?" and tells them to go look at the room Mark was kept in and tortured for five days.
  • All the patriarchal Vor back in Aral and Cordelia's day who used galactic technology to choose the gender of their children, overwhelmingly favouring sons with the odd daughter thrown in. You can do the maths; they certainly didn't. As Miles muses,
    "Hadn't any of those parents possessed a) foresight and b) the ability to do simple arithmetic? Hadn't any of them wanted to be grandparents?"
• Digging Yourself Deeper: Poor Armsman Roic has a knack for sticking his foot in his mouth (or not knowing what to say) around Taura.
• Disintegration Chamber: Mentioned at least a couple of times, specifically in Brothers in Arms: "the disintegration chamber usually reserved for convicted spies" and
  "Wasn't there a mercenary fleet that did that once? They'd show up in orbit somewhere, and get paid to not make war. Worked, didn't it? You're just not a creative enough mercenary commander, Miles."
  "Yeah, LaVarr's fleet. It worked real good till the Tau Cetan Navy caught up with 'em, and then LaVarr was sent to the disintegration chamber."
• Disposing of a Body:
  • In Ethan of Athos Elli Quinn spends a chapter disposing of a body.
  Quinn: Have you ever given thought to the difficulty of getting rid of a body on a space station?
  • The subject comes up in Diplomatic Immunity. The body simply melted away into a formless goo, which they eventually find in a nondescript canister.
• Distaff Counterpart: Tej, to Ivan. Extremely attractive but unambitious scions of very powerful families, who are tremendous disappointments to their highly-motivated mothers, especially in how many failed relationships (Ivan)/rejected marriage negotiations (Tej) they had had.
• Distinction Without a Difference: The Vor Lords do not pay taxes to the Emperor. They just give him a "birthday present" of a cut of their district tax revenues once a year.
• Does He Have a Brother?:
  • Ekaterin asks this of Lord Auditor Vorthys about Miles in Komarr. A bit of a subversion, as she's trolling for family background and not in any romantic sense.
  • Miles later makes a mental note to ask if Ekaterin has a sister. Much more by the book; Miles has just realized that he is starting to fall for her and she's still married at that point.
  • Ivan wonders if Ekaterin has a sister in A Civil Campaign.
  • Miles, from Cetaganda.
    Miles: [thinking] Ooh, I adore competent women. Do you have a sister, milady Maz?
• Do Not Call Me "Paul":
  • Commodore Clement Koudelka and Ludmilla Droushnakovi, aka "Kou and Drou."
    "My brothers used to call me Lud," Drou had confided to Cordelia during the practice yesterday. "Rhymes with mud. Also thud, blood, crud, dud, and cud."
    "You’ll always be Drou to me," Kou had promised.
  • Ekaterin hates her nickname, "Kat." The fact Miles loves her first name and icily corrects Ivan when he calls her that... well, you know.
• Don't You Dare Pity Me!: In Mirror Dance, Mark says as much to Elena, stating, "Don't you dare pity me. I won." He then tells her to pity Ryoval, because he never had a chance at surviving Mark's subterfuge.
• Dowry Dilemma: Mark has the difference between bride-price and dowry explained when he offers to pay Koudelka for continuing to date his daughter.
• Drives Like Crazy: Ivan's none-too-subtle Take That! against his overprotective mother. He's so blatant about it even his normally level-headed Aunt Cordelia wants to slap him sometimes. He also flies like crazy, "assuring" Tej that it's virtually impossible to kill yourself crashing a lightflyer in rather horrifyingly specific detail that implies he's speaking from personal experience.
  • Count Aral during his self-destructive periods. Ivan recalls that Aral taught him to fly by demonstrating maneuvers that made his hardened Imp Sec guards scream in terror.
  • Ivan and Miles used to fly like crazy as a competition between each other, performing increasingly insane stunts until the other either vomited or tapped out. Miles eventually won their competition by flying through a narrow, winding canyon, with his eyes closed.^note He'd spent a couple days beforehand memorizing the route
• Dual Wielding: The Vor traditionally carry two swords, and to duel "with the two swords" is mentioned as being specifically illegal. The two swords aren't described in detail, but one is shorter than the other — when Carl Vorhalas and his friend get into a drunken fight at a party, they get "a pair of dull swords that had been part of a wall decoration" along with "a couple of kitchen knives" in order to settle things the old-fashioned way. (It's noted that Miles finds the longer sword of the pair a particular trial on account of his lack of height.)
• Due to the Dead:
  • Barrayarans believe in making burned offerings to the dead, a trait the Cetagandans seem to share, at least for Empress Lisbet's cremation, in which functionaries brought priceless artifacts to be burned with her.
  • The ending of Shards of Honor.
  • The ending of Cryoburn. Emperor Gregor Vorbarra insists on being a pallbearer at Aral Vorkosigan's funeral. "The man has carried me since I was five years old. It's my turn."
  • Mt. Rosemont is named after Reg Rosemont, a blond officer who was killed on it during Shards of Honor.
• Duel of Seduction: Between Gregor and Cavilo, sort of.
• Dying Alone: Aral, at the end of Cryoburn, dies while napping alone in a garden on Sergyar. His body is found too late to even consider cryofreezing for later revival.

Tropes E

• Easy Sex Change: Lady Donna/Lord Dono's sex change to contest a seat on the Council of Counts is a major sub-plot in A Civil Campaign. Dono notes that Betan surgery is so advanced several Betans have changed sex several times in their lives; however, he also states he has no such plans and is determined to remain a male for the rest of his life.
• Eating the Eye Candy: Armsman Roic and Oliver Jole get the majority of Female Gaze in the books; the former is a tall, muscular hunk, the latter is a blond, blue-eyed looker who ages gracefully, even at age 50. Cordelia once castigates her assistant that she's married when she saves shots of him bare-chested in an action moment; she replies essentially, "Hey, I can look." (Cordelia immediately tells her to send her copies.)
• Elite Agents Above the Law: Imperial Auditors are treated as The Emperor's proxy, granting them unlimited power over anyone who recognizes Barrayar's government.
• Embarrassing First Name: Clement Koudelka and Ludmilla Droushnakovi both hate their first names, which are mentioned only once in the entire series, in the chapter describing their wedding. Their friends call them Kou and Drou.
• The Empire:
  • The Cetagandans to start off with, but even they get Character Development in Cetaganda.
  • The Barrayaran Imperium used to be this, and is currently trying very hard to drop the capital E (if not the precise system of government).
• Enemy Mine:
  • This is how Miles' parents met.
  • Miles and the former leader of what would become the Dendarii Mercs, Oser, have to team up briefly in The Vor Game. It doesn't end well for Oser.
• The Engineer:
  • Leo Graf in Falling Free: At first he wonders what he can do, as just an engineer, to save the quaddies from their plight, but then he realizes that it is an engineering problem, and that he is just the engineer to solve it.
  • Lord Auditor Professor Georg Vorthys, Professor Emeritus of Engineering Failure Analysis at Vorbarr Sultana University and generally regarded as the Empire's authority on the subject.
• Epiphanic Prison: According to Miles, this is what the Cetagandans were trying to create with their Dagoola IV prison camp in "The Borders of Infinity":
  "It's the Cetagandans' plan to break you, and then return you to your world like little inoculated infections, counseling surrender to your people.
  
  "When this is killed," [Miles] touched her forehead, oh so lightly, "then the Cetagandans have nothing more to fear from this," one finger on her bicep, "and you will all go free. To a world whose horizon will encircle you just like this dome, and just as inescapably."
• Escaped from the Lab: Mixed up a bit in Falling Free, where the quaddies and their few sympathizers take over the space station the zero-gravity engineered kids called home, hijacked a cargo craft, and retrofitted the whole mess into a colony ship. In short, they Escaped with the Lab.
• Escape Pod: "Bod pods" feature in a couple of the stories. They are inflatable, single-person, idiot-proof life support modules for use by untrained personnel in an emergency. Miles really dislikes them, because once you're stuffed inside one, you're stuck waiting helplessly for someone else to come rescue you.
• "Eureka!" Moment: After the Bribe Backfire clues him in on who was responsible for Illyan's chip sabotage in Memory, Miles has the considerably more difficult task of proving it, since nearly all of the evidence is under the direct control of the perpetrator. After going on a mental sidetrip about What You Are In A Wing Chair In A Small Upstairs Room, Miles ruminates over how all he has to work with is mirrors and smoke ... which points him at the ImpSec HQ air filtration system.
  • In Diplomatic Immunity,
    “The crime isn't murder,” Miles whispered, his eyes widening. “The crime is kidnapping.”
    The murders had come subsequently, in an increasingly panicked cascade, ...
    “My lord, are you all right—?”
    Ekaterin's voice, in a fierce whisper: “No, don't interrupt him. He's thinking. He just makes those funny leaking noises when he's thinking.”
  • Cordelia (then) Naismith has one in Shards of Honor after she realized that Commodore Aral Vorkosigan could not have used interrogation drugs on her to extract information as he had claimed (she was hiding in the quarters he was confined to, and the only conscious person that knew she was there was no less surprised by what he supposedly gotten out of her than she was)... which meant that he (and only he given how badly the Barrayaran fleet was blindsided) had known of the top secret trump card Beta Colony had deployed in defense of their neighboring system ahead of time... which in turn forced her to conclude that the whole invasion of Escobar was a smokescreen for an internal Barrayaran assassination plot with Vorkosigan as the triggerman.
• Even Evil Has Loved Ones: Oki, one of NewEgypt's goons responsible for two deaths and three kidnappings/cryofreezings, explained his actions and continued employment with NewEgypt by pointing out that he has a family.
• Even Evil Has Standards: In The Vor Game Oser, a rival of Miles, is surprised that to find that General Metzov had been cashiered from the Barrayaran service for brutality.
  Oser: That must have taken some doing.
  • In Brothers in Arms, when reminded that on Jackson's Whole a clone would be the property of the one who commissioned it, Miles remarks "Even on Barrayar, no human being may own another."
  • Keeping "the deal" seems to be almost the only moral standard Jackson's Whole has.
• Everyone Can See It: Everyone can see Ivan and Tej are a match in Captain Vorpatril's Alliance, even Ivan and Tej, but circumstances prevent them from expressing their feelings to each other. It's one of the reasons Falco puts them through the meat grinder during their divorce hearing — to let them hear how silly they sound in trying to break up.
• Evil Counterpart:
  • Equally short but gorgeous vamp Cavilo in The Vor Game is this towards Miles, sharing his talent for clever scheming, but not giving a damn about others — Miles is the Guile Hero to her Manipulative Bastard.
  • In a way, although he is never per se evil, Mark also fits this in respect to Miles. Instead of having birth defects like Miles did, he was born handsome, but cruelly and painfully re-formed so that he could impersonate Miles. While Miles had a relatively benevolent "Well Done, Son" Guy in his grandfather, Mark was raised by the physically and mentally abusive and insane Galen. The end result is someone who is brilliant in an unrestrained way just like Miles, but is much less friendly, and his unrestrained behavior can border on the questionably sane. Not that Miles is exactly a picture of perfect mental health. Lampshaded by Miles:
    Miles: You see, some people have an Evil Twin. I am not so lucky. What I have is an idiot twin.
• Evil-Detecting Dog: The sphinx in Cryoburn
• Evil Is Not Pacifist: The Komarran engineers are pleasant, non-violent intellectuals who are very distressed when they inadvertently cause the death of a colleague and the other deaths they cause in Komarr are similarly accidental. However, in a bit of overlap with A Million Is a Statistic, they are oblivious that their plans would entail bringing death and hardship to millions of people.
• The Evil Prince: Prince Serg in Shards of Honor.
• Everyone Is Related: Justified. It's an aristocracy.
• Excuse Plot: Most fans feel Cryoburn is just an excuse to have the epilogue dealing with Aral's death.
• Explosive Overclocking: This is a way that Barrayarans use to turn stunners and plasma arcs, or more specifically the high-density power cells that serve as their magazines, into jury-rigged bombs. One never knows quite how long the "fuse" is, making this a tricky maneuver at best, not suited to use in active combat as a supply of extra grenades, but great for fishing.
• Extended Disarming: Twice in the series, Played for Laughs.
  • The Warrior's Apprentice: Sergeant Bothari going through Beta Colony customs. The custom's officer is very familiar with Bothari because he can never not try to get some weapon through customs.
  • Brothers In Arms: Quinn, at the Barrayaran Embassy. They treat her bodyguard status as a joke (thinking she is just Miles' mistress with an excuse to always be with him), until she pulls out every firearm known to man, including a few they did not expect. Miles enjoys every moment.

Tropes F

• Face Death with Dignity: Tersa Boni in "Aftermaths" states that her preparing the dead allows her to face her own mortality.
  "Don't be afraid," she said. "The dead cannot hurt you. They give you no pain, except that of seeing your own death in their faces. And one can face that, I find."
• Fakeout Escape:
  • In Brothers in Arms, Miles considers trying to escape via this trope — claiming that he is the clone and that the real Miles somehow got free and tied him up — but quickly realizes that he has several days' worth of stubble and the clone does not, so it is not practical.
  • In Mirror Dance, Miles convinces two of the Durona clones, one of them a prisoner and the other not, to switch places and escape, one under the cover of being the (free to move around) other, and the other under ransom.
• Family Honor: What pledging one's word as Vorkosigan (or Vorwhatever) means. This is done often as a binding oath, and breaking it has serious consequences for the family reputation.
• Family Theme Naming: The Duronas in Mirror Dance. Lilly Durona's clone-daughters all have names like Rowan, Chrys(anthamum), Poppy, and Rose, while the gender-flipped "male-morph" Duronas have names like Raven and Hawk.
  Birds and flowers, they were all birds and flowers in this concrete cage.
• Fantastic Caste System: The Cetagandans. There's the Emperor, the cultured haut lords, the ghem warrior aristocracy, the genderless ba who serve the haut, and the common man. Add a strict, caste-like gender divide that (on the surface) looks like a traditional patriarchy and constant genetic tinkering, and you get the complex system that drives the plot of Cetaganda.
• Fantastic Honorifics: The "Vor" prefix is used to denote the military caste. The word itself is Russian for "thief," which Bujold did not know when originally writing the series, but she has since included many linguistic jokes once she was told by a Russian fan.
• Fantastic Naming Convention: In Barrayar, aristocrats have a "Vor-" syllable in front of their last name so that Vorkosigan means "Sir" Kosigan, etc. The Cetagandan warrior caste does the same only using the syllable, Ghem. Same goes with the Cetagandan aristocracy haut. It must be noted both terms are important since they represent different tiers of genetic modification. As Mia Maz once basically said, "The ghem are something else, and the haut are even more something else." Miles notes when a military officer calls him "Kosigan" that normally, failing to use the "Vor" was grounds for an (illegal) duel, but his own father implemented a policy all cadets are called by their last name, without a "Vor" if there is normally one.
• Fantastic Racism:
  • Barrayaran prejudice against mutants, which tends to include genetically engineered people such as hermaphrodites, quaddies, and Sergeant Taura. This is a problem for Miles, even though his deformities are (as he hastens to assure you) teratogenic, not genetic. In some backwoods communities, infanticide is still committed over "defects" as minor as a harelip, and the traditional engagement ceremony includes the bride's family giving the groom a knife as proof of her genetic purity. Carries over even into their fairy tales, where evil mutants are generally the villain. "Mutant" is, effectively, the Barrayaran word for "bogeyman."
  • Cetagandans look down on other humans as primitive barbarians, barely one step removed from animals.
  • Galactics sometimes look down on Baryarans for getting their milk and meat from real animals instead of replicators and giving birth from real instead of artificial wombs.
  • Averted with Quaddies. While they look down on "downsiders" who are ignorant of their culture and rules, they are a work-oriented society which looks down on all incompetence. Since Leo Graf and Silver had a famed romance and Madame Minchenko was a beloved mother figure, quaddie/human relationships both romantic and platonic have had a long positive history.
• Fantasy Counterpart Culture:
  • Cetaganda for Heian-era Japan (most prominent in Cetaganda). Complete with separate court aristocracy and military aristocracy social classes, a complex means of succession which has nobles trying to gain power through marrying their daughters to the Emperor, court dresses made of an amazing amount of layers (and incredibly long hairstyles for haut women that are never cut to match), incense-scenting contests, recitals of short poems and a power shield version of the Heian court ladies' ox-drawn carriages.
  • Beta Colony for California (per Word of God)
  • Barrayar has cultural elements of Russia (complete with Baba Yaga folktales), and Kibou-daini is heavily reminiscent of Japan (Including Japanese honorifics), but this is because their ancestors were actual Russians and actual Japanese.
  • The Barrayaran Vor resemble the Japanese Samurai, complete with the sole right to own "the two swords".
  • The clash between Progressive Vor and Conservative Vor mimics the ideological conflict between Europhiles and Slavophiles in Real Life Imperial Russia.
• Fashion-Based Relationship Cue: Betans wear earrings that mark their sexual preferences and availability.
• Fate Worse than Death:
  • A non-lethal headshot by a nerve disruptor. A nerve disruptor destroys nerves.
  • Crossing Baron Ryoval, because he's a Torture Technician with access to some disturbing body mod tech. Becoming one of Baron Ryoval's slaves is essentially being reduced to not only completely in his control, but he'll do interesting things to your physical form, as a sex slave or some other servant. There's a reason Miles panics when he finds out Taura is heading in his general direction, because she was the one who destroyed his clone tissue samples, his method of immortality, and Ryoval would probably have some extra nasty fate in store for her.
  • In Cryoburn, Cordelia refuses to put Aral in cryostasis because he died of a brain aneurysm. He would have been revived with serious brain damage, and considering what happened to Dubauer in Cordelia's Honor (shot by a nerve disruptor in the head), she has ample reason not to subject Aral to that. She also believes that reviving him, with his memories intact, would be just as bad a fate for him.
  • Barrayarans seem to view Betan criminal therapy as a fate worse than death.
  • In Captain Vorpatril's Alliance, Ivan states a Citizenship Marriage with him can't possibly be worse than suicide.
    Ivan: I am not a fate worse then death, dammit! Or at least not worse than that death, good God!
  • Wormhole accidents will smear you across the quantum dashboard if you're off by a hair.
• A Father to His Men: Aral's command style strongly emphasizes this. Miles tries to emulate it with the Dendarii, but his need to slip in and out of his Admiral Naismith persona tends to come across as "Slightly crazy, but very cool uncle" instead.
• Female Groin Invincibility: Referenced in A Civil Campaign. Dono, a female to male trans whose surgery includes a pair of functional testicles, is punched in the balls during an ambush. Afterwards, he says "Ivan ... do you remember, when one of you fellows got kicked in the nuts and went over, doing sports or whatever, how I laughed. I'm sorry, I didn't know, I'm sorry." It is unclear whether Dono had been hit in the groin as a female and it didn't hurt as bad or whether she had just never been hit there as a woman.
• Feminist Fantasy: Very understated but there. A good chunk of the books take a non-critical look at a patriarchy that is increasingly shaped by women behind the men, as it slowly acclitimizes itself to the rest of the galaxy. The introduction of the uterine replicator accelerates the process, while more women join the armed services in a military-oriented society. That said, traditional values are still incorporated into the new paradigm where possible, leading to femininity not being exclusive to the Action Girl — and vice versa.
• Feudal Future: Barrayar was isolated from the rest of the galaxy early in its colonization and terraforming when the wormhole leading there collapsed; when a new one was found several centuries later Barrayar had turned to a feudal society just to survive, and has carried it out into the stars.
• Fictional Age of Majority: The Age of Consent on Beta Colony is either 12 or 14. (Cordelia mentions it twice in passing, giving different ages. Possibly both ages are significant).
• Fictional Currency: Combined with Global Currency for the most part, with the Barrayaran Imperial Mark, the Betan Dollar, the Athosian Pound, the Cetagandan Reyul, and the Kibou-daini Nuyen, though the Pesodoro is mentioned as an earlier currency prior to the introduction of Earth's GSA Federal Credits.
• Finger Poke of Doom: Miles demonstrates the power of a single finger to Super-Soldier Taura, by having her use just one finger to manipulate the temperature control on Baron Ryoval's high-security freezers — the heart of his biotech empire. They go from "deep freeze" to "sterilize for cleaning"....
  Miles: And the lesson is, it's not how much force you use. It's where you apply it.
• Fire-Forged Friends
• Fish out of Water:
  • Cordelia, on Barrayar. Or, Barrayar on Cordelia.
  • Ethan Urquhart on Kline Station in Ethan of Athos, though he adapts pretty well, considering.
  • Leo Graf in Falling Free, on what will become the quaddie colony named for him.
• Flashback Nightmare: Many of Miles' nightmares star Lt. Murka, who was decapitated in front of Miles' eyes, and Sgt Beatrice, a female commando who fell out of an atmospheric shuttle after Miles missed grabbing her hand, though eventually he comes to realize she would have pulled him to his death (she was easily twice his size and he didn't have a secure anchor to the shuttle) if he had managed to make his grab good.
• Flooded Future World: The stories are set far enough into the future that sea levels have already risen; London is protected by a system of barrier walls.
• Flying Car: Like many Speculative Fiction settings with mature Anti-Gravity tech, there is a wide variety of flying vehicles:
  • Float bikes (flying motorcycle analog)
  • Lightfliers (2-4 passenger, high performance)
  • Aircars (4-8 passenger. Police/security models have varying armament options)
  • Lift Vans (mass cargo/passenger transport)
  • Anything larger will usually have orbital capability, moving into cargo shuttle or Drop Ship territory.
• Following in Relative's Footsteps: This is a major motivation for Miles. Towards the end of The Warrior's Apprentice Miles tries to justify his (admittedly rather over-the-top) actions by saying "I only wanted to serve Barrayar, as my father before me". In A Civil Campaign, Illyan says of Miles "I've often been afraid he'd break his heart trying to be [like his father and grandfather]". (The degree to which Miles actually manages to follow in these footsteps is complicated—Miles wanted "ship duty", like his father before him, and instead wound up with a career as an ImpSec agent doing covert ops for the Imperium—although he does also wind up as an admiral, like his father before him, albeit an allegedly mercenary admiral.)
• Food Porn: Everytime Ma Kosti's art is described.
• Force Feeding: Scientifically and horrifically employed by Baron Ryoval on Mark for maximum effect. Too bad for Ryoval Mark's Split Personality Gorge enjoys every second of it.
• Forensic Accounting: In Komarr, Miles has definite evidence that a plot exists, but no idea what the plot is about, so he calls in some ImpSec analysts to see if they can reverse-engineer the plan from the purchase orders.
• Foreshadowing:
  • Near the beginning of Brothers in Arms, Galeni refers to Miles as "the great man's son," and Miles has to restrain himself from asking, "And whose son are you?" Galen's father ends up being the main villain of the book.
  • In Mirror Dance Miles bitterly notes to himself that given his accomplishments, he's long overdue for promotion to Captain. Later in the book Mark is told that since the last two heads of ImpSec have been Captains (Negri because he didn't need higher rank to demonstrate how important he was, Illyan because he didn't want to promote himself above Negri), the next one was likely to be stuck at Captain forever for the sake of tradition.^note Fortunately for his successors, the next chief is already a General when he's appointed to replace Illyan, as is his replacement. In Memory, it gets revealed that Illyan was grooming Miles to be his successor up until the incident which forced him to fire Miles.
  • In Cetaganda, Miles remarks he'll wear his newly acquired Cetagandan Order of Merit when he wants to really be obnoxious. Guess what he does when he goes to Gregor to get himself nominated as a temporarily Imperial Auditor in Memory (not to mention intimidate Haroche as well)?
  • Cavilo predicts that in 20 years Miles will end up like her; alone, bitter, selfish, without loved ones. She was only right in that he was still short, just like she was. He does get fired from ImpSec in Memory because he was selfishly trying to cover his mistakes, but shortly ends up with an even more important position. He has plenty of close friends and relations, including a wife and children, is admired by thousands of people if you count the Dendarii, and has public honors from both the Cetagendan and Barryaran Empires, along with at least two other nations he's saved in his Admiral Naismith persona. He does get killed (temporarily), but none of the other stuff was right at the time.
  • In Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen, Mikos ghem Soren's facepaint was "blue and green swirls slashed with gold in an ornate pattern". This foreshadowed his family were plumbers (water and money).
  • In Warrior's Apprentice, Miles quips to himself that if he can't join the military, he might have a future as a detective. Imperial Auditor isn't quite the same thing, but close enough. He similarly jokes about his future as an engineer's assistant. That kind of happens in Komarr, except both of them are Auditors investigating something, and technically equals. The engineer is just the more senior one.
  • At the end of The Vor Game, ImpSec chief Simon Illyan looks at the newly assertive and focused and non-depressed Emperor Gregor and newly minted ImpSec lieutenant Miles, and says Miles' father (the Prime Minister) and himself might actually live to see retirement.
    • In Brothers in Arms, Miles thinks about how Simon refused to change the 'deserter' status of a friend of Miles, and Miles vows to change that once he's in charge.
    • At the start of Memory, Simon very reluctantly fires Miles from ImpSec, and Miles later learns Simon was grooming Miles for the big job...after poison nearly kills Simon, and forces him into retirement.
    • Miles' father was forced to retire by a near-fatal heart attack. Over Miles dying (temporarily) in an attempt to rescue Miles' clone Mark, who was raised as an assassin for Aral. In effect, Mark nearly kills Aral accidentally.
  • In Memory, Miles calls General Haroche and asks him to review the call Simon just made to Miles. Haroche does nothing...until Simon's very public breakdown at a meeting, when Haroche decides to bell the cat. Miles says that the scenario could hardly be worse if it was "deliberately engineered". Guess who did deliberately engineer it? In fact, Galeni mentions Haroche in the very next sentence. ^note Miles and Galeni assume Haroche waited until the meeting because he didn't want to arrest his boss without good cause, because he values his career. They had no idea how much. Later on, Haroche very publicly arrests Galeni to be his Fall Guy. The man loves his theatrics.
• Forgot to Gag Him: Miles manages to Heel–Face Turn many people with his sheer gift of the gab. One Admiral told his men to cut out Miles' tongue if he tries to speak. Later, Miles talks the same General into turning sides.
• Four-Star Badass:
  • General Count Piotr Vorkosigan (Protracted guerilla campaign against the Cetagandan occupation, then victor in the civil war to oust mad emperor Yuri.)
  • Admiral Lord Aral Vorkosigan (Architect and commander of the Komarr conquest, later hero of the fighting retreat from Escobar)
  • Admiral Miles Naismith (At least as far as the greater galaxy is concerned, ignoring Miles' protests about not having "real" flag rank.)
  • Admiral Elli Quinn (Unless something really unexpected happens.)
• Fourth-Date Marriage:
  • Aral and Cordelia have not had even one date when Aral proposes, approximately five days into their acquaintance. Aral states he fell in love with her when she buried her dead compatriot, which was roughly thirty minutes after meeting him. Cordelia states that Aral finally found his perfect match: a soldier who just happened to be female.
  • Ivan and Tej had known each other for less than three days when they got married.
• Framing Device: Borders of Infinity opens with Miles lying in a hospital bed recovering from surgery, with nothing to do except answer his superior officer's questions about his recent missions.
• Free-Love Future: Beta Colony. Also Jackson's Whole, at least inasmuch as you can basically get anything you want as long as you have enough money to pay for it. House Bharaputra offers to clone a client's deceased wife and even program the clone's personality to their liking (i.e. a Type B Stepford Smiler). Barrayarans are an aversion, as their social mores are rather old-fashioned by the standards of most of the Nexus.
• Fridge Horror: In-Universe, as Jole notes all of the adults have "terror, once removed" when they realized the Star Crèche could have wiped all Barrayarans off the face of the planet if they wanted to.
• A Friend in Need: Ivan does this a lot in Alliance.
  • Miles, René, Dono, and even Ivan make a virtuous circle out of it in Campaign
• Frontline General: Due to the nature of the contracts he brings the Dendarii, Miles spends considerably more time in the line of fire than most fleet commanders. This practice comes to bite him hard in Mirror Dance.
• Frozen Dinner of Loneliness: Unexpectedly at home in Memory while all the servants are on Sergyar with his parents, Miles ends up eating a lot of Reddi-Meals until he gets his feet under him enough to hire Ma Kosti as a cook.
• FTL Travel Sickness: Going through one of the "wormholes" which form the setting's Portal Network seems to cause most people to experience at least momentary dizziness. There is also a more serious malady called "jump sickness", which seems to be something like seasickness or airsickness, including varying degrees of personal susceptibility.
  Ekaterin: Oh, no, sir, do you mean to say you are dragging that poor woman through five wormhole jumps from Barrayar to Komarr for me? She gets so jumpsick!
• Fun with Acronyms: SWORD — Kareenburg's Sex WOrkers' Rights and Dignity association
  Blaise: Shouldn't it be called SHEATH?
  Cordelia: Ha. You try to think of a name to go with that acronym.

Tropes G

• The Gadfly: Byerly Vorrutyer is seen by most people as a gadfly who never saw a foul rumor or vicious innuendo he didn't want to spread. There's actually a bit more to him than that, and there's a method to his madness, but most see him as an particularly annoying "town clown".
• Gambit Pileup:
  • Most of The Vor Game. Most of the schemes were Cavilo's. Miles later points out that if she had just stuck with a plan, any plan, instead of inflicting this on herself, she would have won.
  • This drives the plot of A Civil Campaign. To quote from the back cover: "Miles has a cunning plan... Unfortunately his clone-brother Mark and his cousin Ivan also have cunning plans."
• Gargle Blaster: Maple mead.
  It tastes smooth going down, but it destroys cell membranes coming up.
• Gender Bender:
  • Played quite seriously in A Civil Campaign. Lady Donna Vorrutyer's only recourse to keep her cousin Richars from inheriting Vorrutyer District and running it into the ground is to take a trip to Beta Colony and come back as Lord Dono.
  • In the same novel, Dono mentions that it's not unusual for some Betans to have changed their sex more than a few times. He states personally he's never going back.
• Gender Rarity Value:
  • When sex-selection technology came to Barrayar, pretty much all of the Vor families naturally used it to produce as many sons as possible, with the occasional girl thrown in as an afterthought. By the time Miles reaches maturity, the male Vor of his generation outnumber their female counterparts by five to three, leaving many members of even the High Vor scrambling to find a suitable bride frome inside their caste.
  • While the rest of Barrayar was using galactic reproductive technology to favor boys because of their patriarchal, warrior-obssessed society, the Koudelkas intentionally took Cordelia's advice and went the other way because any girls they had would be spoiled for choice in the future. By the time of the Miles-centered storylines, the number of available, socially-acceptable women plummets due to the imbalance and Vor men begin to resort to desperate, sometimes questionable acts in order to secure the affections of whichever Vor women happen to become available.
• General Ripper: Stanis Metzov.
• Genius Sweet Tooth: Lord Auditor Vorthys is very fond of desserts, and goes on regular trips to the local bakery to stock up on pastries. He also keeps a stash of cookies in his study.
• Genre Buster: Between the book's tendency for Genre Roulette mentioned below and the difficulty of deciding how, or if, one should classify the consistent presence of humor within the series, which is enough to be noteworthy but too minor to warrant a classification of Dramedy, it can difficult to classify the series as a whole.
• Genre Shift:
  • Up to around Mirror Dance it is fairly straightforward Space Opera/Military Science Fiction. After Memory and Komarr, the series veers into Mystery Fiction and political intrigue. And then A Civil Campaign and Captain Vorpatril's Alliance are both romantic comedies.
• Gentleman and a Scholar: Lord Auditor Vorthys tends toward this, but his usual wardrobe is a little too frumpy. Professora Vorthys might actually be a better Distaff Counterpart match.
• Gentleman Snarker: Byerly Vorrutyer never insults anyone unintentionally.
• Glory Hound:
  • Miles, in a rare sympathetic way. He grows out of it in Memory.
  • Prince Serg, which is his downfall.
• The Good Chancellor: Miles's father Aral, who serves Gregor as his regent for fifteen years during his childhood, when all of his enemies thought he would make a bid for the throne. He continues in the same role for almost another fifteen years as Prime Minister.
• Good Cop/Bad Cop:
  • In The Vor Game, after being interrogated separately by Cavilo and Metzov, Miles wonders if they had set up a classic "good-guy/bad-guy" interrogation tag team, but got their signals crossed and both of them thought that they were supposed to play the bad guy. Later, Miles and Gregor pull the same routine on Cavilo, with Gregor as good guy and Miles as bad guy.
  • In Cryoburn, Miles notes that Mark and Kareen make a very good good cop/bad cop team, but also hastens to remind himself that not all the bad cop ideas come from Mark, and not all the good cop ideas come from Kareen.
• Gosh Dang It to Heck!: In Komarr, Miles teases Ekaterin for her G-rated vocabulary. Later in the novel, circumstances are so bad she still does not bother to swear, feeling that all other words were just as inadequate. See Precision F-Strike for when she finally does.
• Gossipy Hens: Everyone; the novels indicate that it's not just a female passion. The male Vor counts gossip as much as their wives, and in Gentleman Jole, Cordelia teases Jole that the military personnel "gossip like washerwomen". Jole grins and doesn't refute this.
• Graceful in Their Element: Quaddies in space.
• Graceful Loser: Sigur Vorbretten seems relieved that he didn't win René Vorbretten's Countship in A Civil Campaign, even shaking his hand after his defeat. It's implied he was a pawn of Richars Vorrutyer and Count Vormoncrief.
• Grande Dame:
  • Lady Alys Vorpatril, chief social mover and shaker of Vorbarr Sultana, is a rare sympathetic version.
  • Lady Alys gains an able understudy in the person of Laisa Toscane after she marries Gregor and becomes Empress.
  • Haut ladies all fall under this category as well. But the haut include enduring beauty in their genetic engineering, so if you see one outside her "force-bubble," you will likely notice she is rather sexier than your classic Grande Dame. Miles once used the term "edibly feminine."
  • Ekaterin is clearly a Grande Dame understudy, with her poise, beauty, breeding and recently acquired social position.
  • Cordelia is a Grande Dame modified who can play the vorwoman well enough when put to it, but really has a more detached perspective and thinks the whole thing is rather silly. She is however a fearsome woman with a powerful personality.
• Grandma's Recipe: Ekaterin had a recipe from her great-aunt for a comfort-drink of heated milk with brandy and spices, for when people were sick or just had insomnia. During a fast-penta interrogation, she insisted on giving the complete recipe.
• Great Escape: Miles is given the job of freeing one POW and, in typical Miles fashion, winds up breaking out ten thousand of them. Admittedly one of the reasons he rewrites the mission this way is because his initial target rescuee was broken and on his deathbed, and would not have satisfied the goal of the operation. Years later, the Marilacans make a holovid drama called The Greatest Escape, and try to hire Admiral Naismith as technical consultant.
• Green-Skinned Space Babe: Deconstructed in Falling Free. Silver is blatantly treated as nothing but an exotic piece of tail by both the chief bureaucrat of the project and the pilot of a tramp freighter passing through. It is not depicted as sexy and fun, but rather pathetic and exploitative, as the story drives home the point that Silver and the Quaddies are in fact slaves, if not in name.
• The Greatest Story Never Told: All ImpSec agents have to accept that no matter how heroic they may be, the rest of Barrayar will never learn of it. The best case in point is the Yarrow Incident, in which an extremist Count tried to assassinate Emperor Gregor with a freighter named the Yarrow. Lucas Haroche almost singlehandedly derailed the plot, but no one outside of ImpSec knows of the attempt. This secrecy is a source of frustration for Miles, and he is glad to be rid of it by the time he is an Imperial Auditor, though as an Auditor his major accomplishments will likely be even more secret. Even ImpSec only gets told about them if the Emperor wants them to be told. Despite that, Miles gets the fame and awe that comes with the role of Auditor itself. By Gentlemen Jole and the Red Queen, there are plenty of rumors about Miles' true ImpSec career; he still has to tell people to wait a few more years til the records are declassified.
• Great Offscreen War: Recent Barrayaran history has quite a few that resonate down the years.
  • Mad Yuri's War: Sets up the tension over Imperial succession that only gets relaxed with Gregor's marriage and his mentioned but unnamed offspring.
  • The Cetagandan Invasion/Occupation: Tore the heart out of Vorkosigan's District, established General Count Piotr as a political force to be reckoned with, and was the impetus for...
  • The Komarr Conquest and Revolt: Establishes Aral's reputation (both good and ill) and the galacto-political situation at the start of the primary storyline.
  • The Third Cetagandan War. It happened sometime between Vordarian's Pretendership, and the Komarr Revolt, but that's all we know about it.
• The Great Repair: "Falling Free."
• Grew a Spine:
  • In Shards of Honor, this is combined with Sudden Principled Stand when Sergeant Bothari refuses to rape Cordelia as per Admiral Vorrutyer's orders.
  "She's Commodore Vorkosigan's prisoner. Sir."
  • Ekaterin in Komarr and A Civil Campaign, though it is probably better to say that she found and nurtured the spine, rather than grew it.
• Grey-and-Gray Morality: While there are a few completely evil people to fight, most of the stories tend to fall in this category, with the protagonists displaying A Lighter Shade of Gray. Lampshaded at the end of Brothers in Arms.
  "At least this should be simpler than our late vacation on Earth," [Miles] said hopefully. "A purely military operation, no relatives, no politics, no high finance. Straight-up good guys and bad guys."
  "Great," said Quinn. "Which are we?"
  Miles was still thinking about the answer to that one when the fleet broke orbit.
  • Anything dealing with Jackson's Whole, however, will be Black-and-Gray Morality.
• Groin Attack:
  • Cordelia accidentally kicks the Betan President in the groin once. "I didn't vote for him..."
  • After Lord Dono (formerly Lady Donna) takes a shot to the pills for the first time, he is absolutely astonished at how much it hurts.
    Dono: Ivan... do you remember, whenever one of you fellows got kicked in the nuts and went over, doing sports or whatever, how I laughed? I'm sorry. I never knew. I'm sorry...
    • In addition, it came when Richar's goons were trying to "reverse" the Betan surgery; it makes sense since Dono states that everything about him is XX — his testicles are the only part of him that are actually XY, but also the part that counts (to sire an heir.)
• The Grovel: Miles offered Ekaterin her dream job just to keep her close to him. When she learns the truth, she storms out of Vorkosigan House and he sets out to write the best damn apology letter ever, sealed in his own blood. Nothing like a determinator bent on groveling better than anyone else has ever groveled.
  [Miles] went back inside Vorkosigan House to his study, where he sat himself down to attempt, through a dozen drafts, the best damned abject anybody'd ever seen.
• Guile Hero: Miles most prominently, but really the whole Vorkosigan family qualifies, each with their own signature brand of guile:
  • Miles is the manic king of Xanatos Speed Chess and the Indy Ploy.
  • Mark can use his native intelligence and Jacksonian hat as a businessman to run a Get-Rich-Quick Scheme scheme that actually works, followed by unabashed Screw the Rules, I Have Money!.
  • Cousin Ivan, Butt-Monkey that he may be, can be a distressingly effective example of The Charmer when he needs to.
  • Byerly Vorrutyer, for a given value of hero. Guile Anti-Hero, perhaps?
• Gunship Rescue:
  • A by-the-book example in The Vor Game with the huge brand-new capital ship of the Barrayaran Imperial Navy coming in all guns blazing to save the day.
  • A smaller scale one in "Labyrinth", as a car chase between a van full of Dendarii and two Ryoval security cars is ended by the arrival of a Dendarii drop shuttle.

Tropes H

• Hair Memento: Multiple examples, of different variants:
  • In Cetaganda, a variation of the "parting gift to a friend or lover" form of the trope: The haut Rian Degtiar gives a coil of her own hair to Miles as a gift, to remember her by. She isn't in love with him, and confesses she doesn't even really know what her gift signifies, but Miles certainly made an impression on her (and her on him).
  • In Barrayar an example of the Stalker with a Crush taking a Creepy Souvenir variant of the trope: Bothari admits he managed to keep a piece of Elena Visconti's hair, which he uses to partially counteract his forced amnesia "therapy".
  • In an even more horrific example of the above variant: In Shards of Honor Ges Vorrutyer cuts a lock of Cordelia Naismith's very distinctive red hair, with plans to use it to torment Aral Vorkosigan by taking it out and playing with it “quite casually, at the Staff meeting”.
  • A standard funerary/rememerance practice on Barryar is to ritualistically burn a lock of hair in a brazier. At Aral's funeral, Cordiala cuts her waist length hair at the roots.
• Handicapped Badass: Miles, natch. Also applies somewhat to his clone-brother Mark, and both are amply lampshaded.
• Handsome Lech: Ivan. Possibly even a Casanova. One scene in Cetaganda suggests he is a Miles-level genius when it comes to seductions. On the other hand these affairs are good-natured and rarely end up in a painful break-up, so he is probably more of a Chivalrous Pervert. In Captain Vorpatril's Alliance he attributes his successes to statistics — that even if you strike out 9 out of 10 times, then any pool of 10 or more candidates still had a guaranteed success for a date.
• Hands-On Approach:
  • Referenced in Miles' thoughts in Memory when Gregor takes Laisa riding for the first time in her life. Since she is extremely "luscious" looking, Miles thinks that he would not hold it against Gregor if he used the opportunity to cop a feel while helping her on to the horse.
  • Gregor's handling of Cavilo in The Vor Game when he let her "seduce" him.
    Miles: You realize, Gregor, you did this? Sabotaged the Cetagandan invasion singlehandedly?
    Gregor: Oh, it took both hands.
• Happily Married: Tends to be the norm for the series, rather than an outlier. For examples:
  • Aral's parents prior to his mother's unfortunate untimely death.
  • Cordelia and Aral. For, like, ever.
  • Kou and Drou.
  • Professor and Professora Vorthys for even longer than Aral and Cordelia.
  • Gregor and Laisa.
  • Miles and Ekaterin.
  • Elena Bothari-Jesek and Bazil Jesek
  • Baron Shiv and Baronne Udine. Jacksonian pirate and half-ghem half-haut lady; who'da thunk?
  • Ivan and Tej are going this way.
• Harmless Freezing: Notably averted. Soldiers who need better medical care than can be provided (such as after getting a huge hole blown into their chest) are routinely frozen so they can be transported to a medical facility. The required preparation includes replacing their blood with a special liquid. If anything goes wrong with that, it can lead to tissue damage, which can leave you a vegetable if it affects the brain. Even if everything goes right, more people than not suffer some amnesia. Miles himself ends up with a (first-)career-ending seizure disorder after undergoing the process.
• Haute Cuisine Is Weird: At the funeral of the Cetagandan Dowager Empress, trays of meat are sculpted into flowers, vegetables masquerade as crustaceans, and a plate of simple boiled rice has every grain individually hand-arranged in an elaborate spiral pattern.
• Heads I Win, Tails You Lose: A romantic Win Win version of the trope, as Tej made a bet with Ivan as to whether an old Cetagandan bunker had any treasure left; the winner got to request anything of the loser. Tej reveals that had she won, she'd request she stay with Ivan on Barrayar, when Ivan had already decided he wanted her to stay. (Tej did win the bet.)
• Heir Club for Men: Gregor really needs a male heir. And as of Cryoburn, he has multiple children, though none of them have appeared in the story or been mentioned by name. As of Flowers of Vashnoi, set four to five years after his wedding, he has two sons and a daughter.
• Head-Turning Beauty: Elli Quinn's effect on men after undergoing plastic surgery. Well, not Ethan Urquhart, though he at least has the excuse of coming from the all-male planet of Athos).
• Heartfelt Apology: Miles' letter to Ekaterin in A Civil Campaign. Although Ekaterin notes the letter contains no "plea for forgiveness, absolution, penance, or any begging to call or see her again", it does begin with the words "I am sorry" (as did all of the previous drafts).
• He-Man Woman Hater: Bruce Van Atta. Anyone who he perceives as being less willing than he is to be ruthless and cut-throat, he considers a wimp, and/or a woman, and therefore to be despised. It is also quite obvious that he considers women who have less authority than him to be mere tools of his artifice, or worse.
• Her Heart Will Go On: Ekaterin is a grieving widow...grieved by the damned mess Tien left her with.
• Hermaphrodite: Bel Thorne, who is one of a whole manufactured gender from Beta Colony intended to replace the bimorphic human species. However, humans stubbornly retained the two sexes. Hermaphrodites by the time of the series have a population large enough to sustain on their own, existing as a subcuture within the larger Beta society. They can reproduce with non-hermaphrodites, but this requires the aide of artifical techniques and a deliberate selection of if the child will be male, female, or a hermaphrodite.
• Heroes Gone Fishing: Miles takes Illyan fishing as part of his convalescence in Memory. They end up cheating with a stunner.
• Heroic BSoD: Miles engages in several.
  • Aral is stuck in an alcoholic one while Cordelia's back in Beta Colony. She tells him that his drinking is not as subtle a suicide as he thinks.
• Heroic Sacrifice: To prevent the Escobarans from following the retreating Barrayarans through the wormhole, a pilot self-destructed his ship in the middle of it to temporarily collapse it. He volunteered; Cordelia is gobsmacked at the concept.
• He Who Fights Monsters: Galen is a very evil example of this, so obsessed with a conception of a demonically evil Aral Vorkosigan that he ends up acting exactly like that.
• Hero of Another Story: ghem-Colonel (later General) Benin spends most of Cetaganda and Diplomatic Immunity solving the same mystery Miles investigates, but from the opposite perspective. Both books imply that Benin had to deal with his own serious obstacles with a deft, Miles-like hand, but the reader never gets to see him in action.
• Higher Understanding Through Drugs: In Komarr, a scientist is questioned under "Fast Penta", a kind of truth serum, and discovers it helps her think outside the box in order to figure out a complex scientific mystery. After being cleared of the charges against her she asks if she could try Fast Penta again in order to help her creativity.
• Historical In-Joke: Miles remembers a Countess Vorinnis from the Bloody Centuries whose reaction to her children being kidnapped during a siege was to mock the besiegers by standing on a battlement, flipping up her skirts, and informing them she could get more children where those had come from. This is a reference to William Marshal's father John in a similar circumstance telling William's captors "I still have the hammer and the anvil with which to forge still more and better sons!" Or possibly Caterina Sforza, who reputedly did the same thing during the siege of Forli.
  • In Captain Vorpatril's Alliance, the entrance to the buried vaults recapitulates the opening of Tutankhamun's tomb, with a single observer pushing through to see what's inside, and when asked what they see, responding "Marvellous things"
• Hit Them in the Pocketbook: In A Civil Campaign, Count Vormuir creates a Baby Factory using leftover eggs from his subjects' use of Uterine Replicators and his own sperm to create over 100 daughters that he hopes to use to lure male subjects to his district. Under Barrayaran law this isn't technically illegal, but Emperor Gregor wants to punish him, prevent him from continuing with his scheme and dissuade others from repeating something like this in the future. So, at Ekaterin's suggestion, Gregor rules that Vormuir must provide large dowries for each of the daughters.
• Homosexual Reproduction:
  • Mainly a case of Technology Marches On. This was not considered possible in older novels, hence the need for ovarian cultures in Ethan of Athos. But in more recent novels it has been made very clear that reproductive science (advanced by the Betans, naturally) can produce a viable zygote from two same-sex parents, which is then typically brought to term in a uterine replicator. The Athosians are an isolationist backwater colony that seems to have been founded within a few decades of the Uterine Replicator's invention, with widespread censorship of any off-world media (including, it appears, scientific journals for all but a tiny minority of security-cleared citizens). It's not too implausible for their reproductive science to be lagging behind. They also believe in Lamarck Was Right, and choose ovarian cultures as sources for specific traits (scientific proclivity, martial ability, and so on.)
  • Cordelia offers Oliver Jole, Aral's male partner, the opportunity to use frozen sperm from Aral along with denucleated eggs from her combined with his own sperm to produce offspring that would genetically have both him and Aral as fathers, though legally Aral, supplying the X chromosome, would be the mother.
• Honorary Uncle:
  • "Tante Cordelia" to all the Koudelka daughters.
  • Simon Illyan, to Miles. As of Memory, he is even sleeping with Miles's aunt.
    "I called him 'Uncle Simon' all my life until I went to the Academy, after which I called him 'Sir'."
  • Technically, "Aunt Alys" Vorpatril is Miles' 1st cousin once removed by marriage (Alys' late husband's mother was Count Piotr's sister-in-law).
• Honor-Related Abuse: During the Occupation the children of Cetagandan-Barrayaran trysts were killed by La Résistance and their corpses dumped by the Cetagandan camp.
• Hostile Terraforming: The humans colonizing Barrayar burned away the native ecology and supplanted it with terrestrial soil and plants. In A Civil Campaign, however, they've been making progress towards converting the native life to be Earth-compatible instead of overwriting and destroying it.
• How Dare You Die on Me!:
  • In Barrayar, Lady Alys curses her husband for getting himself shot right when she was about to give birth. She's still mad about it thirty years later in Captain Vorpatril's Alliance - although given her description of the events leading up to his death, it's not hard to see why.
  • In Diplomatic Immunity, Ekaterin informs Miles that he is not allowed to die.
• Human Popsicle:
  • Cryogenics is a mature technology, often used to freeze combat casualties until they can reach the high grade medical facilities needed to repair them. Miles himself spends much of Mirror Dance frozen.
  • The planet Kibou-daini, in the novel Cryoburn, has its entire culture and economy revolving around the cryogenic storage of people.
• Humiliation Conga: Richars is just utterly dismantled at the climax of A Civil Campaign. By his erstwhile supporters, no less.

Tropes I

• If It's You, It's Okay: Terrence Cee just might consider adopting the Athos way of life with Ethan.
• I Gave My Word: Barrayarans in general, and old school Vor in particular, are rather big on this.
  • This is about the only moral code Jacksonians seem to have. Breaking a Deal is worse than murder. Bending The Deal into impressive origami shapes, well, that's just shrewd business practice.
• I Know You Know I Know:
  • Ivan imagines this going on between Simon and Tej's father and gives up trying to work out the permutations after developing a headache.
  • Also how Barrayarans and Cetagandans acknowledge head spies. The Cetagandans know The Spymaster Vorreedi's title at the Barrayaran Embassy on Cetaganda is a fiction — and the Barrayarans know they know, just as the Barrayarans know who the The Spymaster is in the Cetagandan Embassy on Barrayar. Ivan even invokes the trope when discussing the embassies in London:
    Ivan: We go to each other's parties a lot, and practice being snide, and play I-know-you-know-I-know games.
• I Want My Beloved to Be Fashionable:
  • Mild case with Simon after his retirement. Alys convinces him to go from cheap boring conservative suits to expensive well-tailored boring conservative suits.
  • In the short story Winterfair Gifts, Miles commissions his Aunt Alys to improve his ex-girlfriend Taura's appalling fashion sense. This has the double effect of making Taura more presentable for the wedding and keeps Alys busy enough that she isn't able to participate in the wedding planning.
• I Warned You: Miles does this in a subtle way to Richars in A Civil Campaign when the latter clumsily tries to recruit him and ends up pissing the former off. Unfortunately, for Richars, he's not a subtle man.
  Miles: My grandfather... learned his political science from the Cetagandans. Mad Emperor Yuri offered him a postgraduate education after that. My grandfather schooled my father. (thinking) And both of them schooled me. This is the only warning you will receive, Richars.
• Identical Twin ID Tag: Mark, due to both metabolic differences and a desire to distinguish himself from Miles, is much fatter than Miles is. The fact he opts for big and stocky over morbidly obese is a sign of Mark's comfort with himself. The fact his weight bothers Miles is a feature, not a bug. invoked
• Identity Impersonator: Mark at the end of Brothers in Arms.
• If I Wanted You Dead...: At the end of Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen, Miles states that the first Cetagandan invasion was not authorized by the haut at all, and instead was a massive get-rich-quick scheme by the ghem-generals. He stated had the haut wanted take over Barrayar, they would have done it with their deadliest bio-weapons for a Curb-Stomp Battle, and it's only by their discretion that Barrayar is permitted to live. All of the adults have a healthy In-Universe dose of Fridge Horror.
• If You Ever Do Anything to Hurt Her...: By Tej's father to Ivan at the end of Captain Vorpatril's Alliance.
  Ivan: Is asking "Who can I kill for you?" usually how people say "I love you" in Jacksonian?
  Tej: No, just Dada. Though the Baronne is more dangerous -- she might not ask.
  Ivan: Ee. invoked
• Imperiled in Pregnancy:
  • Alys Vorpatril, while pregnant with the baby Ivan Vorpatril, is stranded in besieged city held by a pretender desperately looking for distinguished hostages like Alys.
    • Alys is also implied to be in danger of dying in childbirth — Ivan is a big boy, and the labour has already been going on for several days by the time Padma goes to try to get a doctor to her.
  • Cordelia is attacked with a poisonous gas while pregnant. The aftereffects of the treatment that saved her life drive most of Miles' life, as he was dwarfed and crippled by the effects.
• Immediate Self-Contradiction: When Ethan of Athos is preparing for his trip off-world to get the ovarian cultures his people need to continue to reproduce, the council calls him in and gives him a list of instructions on how to conduct himself. Half of the instructions contradict the other half. Fortunately his boss visits him after the meeting, throws out his notes, and gives him a simpler set: Get the cultures and return. Nothing else matters.
• Important Haircut: Cordelia cuts her waist-length hair "nearly to the roots" to place as a death offering on Aral's memorial pyre. Three years later she's still keeping it short, as a symbol of her grief.
• Impossible Task: In A Civil Campaign, Simon Illyan advises Ekaterin not to try this on Miles.
  Illyan: Do you know all those old folk tales where the count tries to get rid of his only daughter's unsuitable suitor by giving him three impossible tasks?
  Ekaterin: Yes...
  Illyan: Don't ever try that with Miles. Just...don't.
• Impoverished Patrician:
  • Quite a common circumstance on Barrayar, especially after Lord Regent/Prime Minister Vorkosigan's social and economic reforms. Byerly Vorrutyer is "notoriously without visible means of support." Though we discover in A Civil Campaign one source of his income.
  • Also in A Civil Campaign one of the characters wonders whether to visit according to Prole rules (help with the washing up) or impoverished High Vor rules (pretend not to notice that there are no servants).
  • Ghem-lord Yenaro is a Cetagandan example.
    Ivan: Is this what they call genteel poverty?
  • Count Vorfolse is the descendant of a family which for the last several generations backed the losing side of every war, civil war, and rebellion. Consequently, while the effective Head of State of a small country, his official residence is a small apartment with "Vorfolse House" on the door. In context, it is extremely pathetic, and members of another Vor's entourage explain that, if they lived in Vorfolse District, they wouldn't mind being financially exploited if it meant their Count would put on a better showing.
  • Ekaterin is an unusual female example, as a Vor widow left destitute after her husband's death.
• Inappropriately Close Comrades: Miles and Elli Quinn. And before that, Miles and Recruit-Trainee Taura. Miles does try to rationalize away the inappropriateness of his relationship with Taura by agreeing with her argument that, at that point, she hasn't technically finished signing up with the Dendarii and is therefore a guest of the fleet. However, Miles continues occasional dalliances with her after she is unquestionably in his chain of command as Sergeant Taura. Admiral Naismith's relationship with Sergeant Taura also chronologically overlaps with his relationship with Commander (later Captain) Quinn.
• Indestructible Edible:
  • Barrayaran military issue Emergency Rations, according to Aral in Shards of Honor, can go for years without spoiling... and probably have already.
  • During their second encounter in The Vor Game, Cavilo provides Miles with a commercially available field ration bar that "...proved even more repellent than the Barrayaran Imperial version, resembling a rawhide dog chew. Wetted with spit, it softened slightly, enough to tear off gummy shreds if your teeth were in good health."
    Cavilo: You've been fed the same as my troops.
    Miles (displaying a ragged half-gnawed breakfast chew): Can't be. They'd have mutinied by now.
    Cavilo (frowning sympathetically): Oh dear. Those. I thought they'd been condemned. How did they end up here? Someone must be economizing.
• Inertial Dampening: The invention of artificial gravity in Falling Free includes use of the new gravity-control tech for this. The new Betan invention means that a ship "boosting at fifteen gees and insulating the crew from the acceleration" with the new tech will be able to travel between wormhole jumps far more quickly than was previously possible, cutting total travel time between planets in distant star systems to a fraction of what it has been up to that point.
• Indy Ploy:
  • Cordelia is no slouch. Consider her roundabout escape from the General Vorkraft in Shards of Honor, the rescue of Alys Vorpatril and especially the climax of the shopping trip.
  • Miles, perhaps most dramatically in The Warrior's Apprentice, where he ends up creating an entire mercenary company out of little more than dreams, hope, frantic lies, and plagiarism. He would prefer to have time to plan, but reality seldom cooperates. Fortunately, he has a flair for seat-of-the-pants improvisation.
  • Ivan also manages them as well, highlighted by his Citizenship Marriage with Tej to get her and her sister out of a tight spot.
• Infraction Distraction:
  • Discussed when Miles and Co. are attempting to smuggle weapons to the Felicians past a blockade by the Oseran mercenaries. After Miles winds up capturing Captain Auson's own ship, Auson figures that Miles had to be smuggling something, particularly with the way that Miles was acting so cowed and meek in order to avoid suspicion. He wonders if Miles is smuggling the ship itself, then wonders who could possibly want such an old, outmoded transport.
  • In Labyrinth, when caught trying to break into a genetic engineering facility, Ensign Murka quickly creats the story that he and his fellows were a bunch of horny soldiers on leave who thought it was the brothel (the company is known for its bordellos). He was booted out with a warning and fine (i.e. the guards stole all his money), but no alarm was raised over a commando raid and Miles, overhearing the exchange, made a mental note to praise and reward the soldier for his quick thinking (In a following story, the same soldier returns as a now-promoted Lieutenant).
  • Miles tells a story about one of his Vorkosigan ancestors who used the "smuggling bicycles" version of the trope to smuggle horses into a besieged city. Though we do not see the mission itself, Miles was telling the story because they were about to do the same thing with warships.
• In Name Only: In-Universe, General Vorparadijs is the eldest Imperial Auditor, but he's out-of-touch and incapable of the duties, and is never assigned to any mission.
  Vorthys: We think of General Vorparadijs as a sort of Auditor Emeritus. Respected, but we don't make him come to meetings anymore.
  Vorgustafson: (muttering) In fact, we don't even mention them to him.
• Insane Admiral: Ges Vorrutyer is a literal example. There are more than a few crazy generals in the Barrayaran combined services too, such as Stanis Metzov. Admiral Naismith also qualifies, but he's Crazy Awesome rather than Crazy Evil.
• Insignificant Little Blue Planet: Downplayed; due to its position in an isolated cul-de-sac in the wormhole nexus, Earth is a strategic backwater. However, it is still diplomatically and culturally significant:
  But Earth still reigned, if it did not rule, culturally supreme. More war-scarred than Barrayar, as technically advanced as Beta Colony, the end-point of all pilgrimages both religious and secular.
• Insistent Terminology: The Vor are a "warrior caste," not aristocrats, and Miles would like you to keep that in mind.
• Instructional Film: Miles' boredom during his quasi-exile to ImpSec HQ following the Fetaine spill at Camp Permafrost drives him to start watching every training vid in the military library . . . in strict alphabetical order. By the time his exile ended, he had made it to L. One film on the list (Filed under H for Hygiene) was for training recruits from the remote rural areas of Barrayar on how to take a shower.
• Insufferable Genius:
  • Dr. Vaagen in Barrayar. Cordelia loves him for it; his dark humour and high-handed attitude instantly confirms for her that this is a man who will go to any lengths in order to succeed at his task.
  • Dr. Canaba in "Labyrinth", Memory, and Captain Vorpatril's Alliance. Miles reflects that one day, should Canaba's genius run short, he will be astonished to discover how much opprobrium his attitude has brought him... but for the foreseeable future, he will continue to make everyone around him grind their teeth in frustration, and then do exactly what the Doctor ordered.
• Insult Friendly Fire:
  • One of the ways Roic puts his foot in it while talking to Taura in "Winterfair Gifts"; he winds up an account of the Butter-Bug Incident with a comment about exterminating the grotesque genetically-engineered monsters — having temporarily forgotten that his audience identifies herself as a grotesque genetically-engineered monster.
  • In Cetaganda, Ivan makes an off-handed remark about mutations, insulting Miles. He realizes this by blushing, and Miles tells him through clenched teeth, "Try not to start any wars down there" and mentally adds, "Civil and otherwise".
• Interrogation Flashback: Borders of Infinity is a collection of short stories that uses one as a Framing Device — Miles Vorkosigan is interrogated (or questioned, depending on who you ask) by Simon Illyan, and tells the stories "The Mountains of Mourning", "Labyrinth", and "The Borders of Infinity".
• Interrupted Suicide:
  • In Barrayar, Cordelia interrupts Kou when he is about to slit his throat with the sword she had acquired for him. He tries to pretend that he was not serious about it.
  • Part of Miles' backstory is an attempted suicide when he was fifteen that was interrupted by Sergeant Bothari.
  • In Captain Vorpatril's Alliance, Ivan prevents Tej and Rish from leaping to their deaths off his 20th-floor balcony by offering Tej a Citizenship Marriage as another way out. Played with in that the suicides were to prevent capture and fast-penta interrogation, rather than due to depression.
• Intimidating Revenue Service: The Imperial Auditors started out as tax auditors, checking the books of the various counts, who were responsible for collecting all taxes in their districts and sending the Emperor's cut to the capital, to make sure the illiterate warlords handling a significant percentage of the planet's GDP weren't skimming off the top. Over the centuries during the Time of Isolation, their remit was gradually expanded until they were given the responsibility of investigating anything the Emperor wanted investigated that for some reason or another couldn't be handled by standard channels.
• In the Original Klingon:
  • Barrayar has a bit of this. They do not actually think Shakespeare was Barrayaran, but even during the height of their isolation, Barrayar made a point of preserving his plays through oral tradition. When the isolation ended they compared notes to the rest of the galaxy and it turned out that they had done such a good job that they had "preserved" three plays everyone else had "lost."
  • Baba Yaga is frequently mentioned as a characteristically Barrayaran myth.
• Ironic Echo: Aral's first wife committed suicide by plasma arc and burned her face off, after Aral killed her illicit lovers. Miles' first girlfriend, Elli Quinn, lost her face to plasma fire, and it was replaced with enhanced beauty. Men kept hitting on her, but she's loyal to Miles. And instead of a high-class Barrayaran Vor wife, she's a working-class mercenary who grew up on a space station and doesn't like Barrayar or Lord Vorkosigan, just Admiral Naismith.
• Irony:
  • In Gentleman Jole: Mikos ghem Soren left his family to start a diplomatic career because he wanted no part of his family's successful plumbing career, intent on more ghem-ish pursuits. When he was fired by the ambassador, he was allowed asylum on Sergyar — on condition he start a plumbing company to aid in the construction of a needed new capital.
  • In Memory, Simon was grooming Miles to lead ImpSec, so Haroche poisoned Simon to get the job. Except Haroche only had the idea after Miles got himself fired, which Haroche used to frame Miles. To run the investigation, Miles (accidentally) became an Imperial Auditor, which is an even more important and powerful position, and used it to catch Haroche. Also, Haroche himself is a former (military) policeman, and Miles beats him as one of the Top Cops of the Imperium.
• It Belongs in a Museum:
  • When Miles gives his grandmother's old saddle to Ekaterin, she has exactly this reaction. Miles counters that he doesn't need an appraiser to set a value on his Grandmother, and that it is meant to be used, to be part of the work of art that is a life, and not displayed under glass to impress other people.
    The weary straitened housewife in her — Tien’s pinchmark spouse — was horrified. The secret soul of her rang like a bell in resonance to Miles’s words. Yes. That was how it should be. This saddle belonged under a fine lady, not under a glass cover. Gardens were meant to be seen, smelled, walked through, grubbed in. A hundred objective measurements didn’t sum the worth of a garden; only the delight of its users did that. Only the use made it mean something. How had Miles learned that? For this alone I could love you...
  • Duv Galeni, speaking as a trained historian, has this opinion of everything in the Vorkosigan House attic. He can apparently rant for hours about the fact that Miles has yet to document all the historically significant junk up there.
  • Duv gets this again when Ivan tells him exactly what's in the Cetagandan bunker underneath ImpSec headquarters. He promptly gets a research team from the local university to retrieve all the historically significant documents and artifacts in the bunker and sets up teams of analysts to work out which bits need to be classified and which can be used to rewrite the history books on the Cetagandan Occupation. He then sends some people to question Ivan's grandmother-in-law, the widow of a Cetagandan general at the end of the Occupation, for further information about that time period.
  • In Falling Free, Madam Minchenko has a valuable old violin that she used to keep in a climate controlled vault until she realized that musical instruments are meant to be played.
• "It" Is Dehumanizing: Both the genderless Cetagandan ba and at least some of the Betan hermaphrodites actually prefer the term it, although for drastically different reasons. Bel Thorne prefers it because Beta Colony is so amazingly egalitarian that they can use that pronoun without being dehumanizing, while most people Bel encounters are put off-guard. The proper address to a herm, however, is "honorable herm". the neutral equivalent of "lady" or "gentleman". The Cetagandan haut females call the ba slaves and use them as genetic experiment testbeds, which seems like a straighter use of the trope — until we find that the haut use everyone, themselves included, as such, and that the ba are as much siblings as slaves.
  Miles: Ba Lura must have been more to [Emperor Gaija] than a piece of the furniture—it served him for over fifty years.
• It Runs in the Family:
  • Gregor is afraid of this because of how insane, inbred, and generally Royally Screwed Up much of his family was. Finding out how evil his father was almost drove him to suicide, though that was far from the only issue he was having.
  • Ivan is convinced that Vorrutyers have a not-uncommonly murderous tendency toward eccentricity. Going by the Vorrutyers we see, he may have a point.
  • When Elena rejects Miles in The Warrior's Apprentice because of the "genetic risks", he reminds her that he's not a mutant and there's nothing wrong with his genes. But Elena is talking about herself, having just begun to understand how incredibly unstable her father was.
  • A lot of Athosians seem to believe that skill in a given field can be inherited from the ovarian culture a child was made from. For example, a lot of doctors, including focus character Ethan Urquhart, were born from a CJB (donated by one Cynthia Jane Baruch, MD) culture, and he himself believes that the EQ (Elli Quinn) culture he brought back might help improve his homeworld's military.
  • Mikos ghem Soren can't escape being a plumber, no matter how hard he tries.
• It Was a Gift: Mile's bag of Cetagandan scalps. Grotesquely fascinating, but not the sort of thing to display on the coffee table. He notes that he could send it to the Cetagandan embassy with a sincere apology if he wanted to send them a Stealth Insult.

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