The Vorkosigan Saga, by Lois McMaster Bujold

I don't like the phrasing there, although I'm having difficulty stating exactly how. Lois has stated on the Baen Bar "Miles to Go" forum that she writes what she's inspired to write and that she feels she has finished Miles's story, and doesn't want to do a Generation Xerox story with his children going through the same things, so if she returns to the Vorkosiverse, it will pretty much be because some aspect of the universe has caught her fancy and she has an idea of how she wants to write it (although that doesn't always bear fruit... anyone else remember her reading that excerpt using the Butterbugs to clean up radioactive zones that never really came to be?).

Just started the series awhile back and am now up to Ethan of Athos.

Actually, a while back was about two years ago with Shards of Honor and Barrayar. Weirdly, it had the effect of me being completely uninterested in continuing the series because I loved it. Strange? Not so much in that I was absolutely fascinated by Cordelia and hated the idea of leaving her behind as a protagonist.

I should have trusted Lois Bujold more!

But even sci-fi writers can be be fooled by prejudice against NEW things.

edited 9th Nov '17 1:16:55 PM by CharlesPhipps

Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen partly returns to Cordelia's point of view. Though it is shared with another character.

Although it's somewhat controversial for taking faithful "he was bisexual. Now he's monogamous" Aral and giving him a secret affair that leads into a threesome.

Yeah, I heard about that. I don't mind a poly Aral and Cordelia because, hey, Betan but I can't believe Aral would involve another man in their relationship unless he had the latter's permission first.

Don't worry—the affair wasn't secret from Cordelia.

Weirdly, I'm going to say the most frustrating part of the books for me is the fact there's a certain blind spot for the Smallfolk (so to speak) in the books the same way there is in A Song of Ice and Fire. Centaganda seems like it was made to humanize them and make them less repellent but it actually makes me think they need to be wiped from the face of the Earth because they're engineering slave castes without free will. Miles utterly ignores this, though, because he is only seeing the upper class as people. Which is, of course, perfectly fine and in character for him as a Vor.

I also amusingly like comparing Miles to Tyrion, both in terms of flaws and attitude.

Cordelia, of course, remains my favorite character.

The ba are not the common citizens of Centaganda. They're the genetic testbed for the haute caste and almost never leave the Star Creche.

Yeah, but everyone is genetically engineered with the Cents.

The laborer caste is just alluded to but they exist too.

I'm pretty sure that Miles would have Tyrion running away in sheer terror five minutes into any conversation. Or they'd take the galaxy and stick it in their pockets.

Thank you. You now have mr shipping them.

From the looks of the Cetagandan Haut philosophy, I'd say only the Haut and Ghem are always engineered. I think Cetaganda has a large population of "other", people who breed and have children without an abundance of genetic engineering. Their decent on Barrayar was apparently more about getting access to several hundred years worth of free human evolution. It was spoiled by the fact that the Barrayarans fought so hard to prevent mutation. One of their doctors stumbled upon a true telepath in an insane old woman, after all, somewhere on one of their planets. It seemed kind of interesting how they tended to breed down. Bring the cool Haut genes into the Ghem pool, and the Ghem men especially will breed out and carry those genes into the general human population.

OMG. You have me cracking up in glee at imagining Miles and Tyrion Lannister forming an alliance and utterly annihilating anyone who underestimated them. It would be glorious.