Barrayar (Vorkosigan Saga #2), by Lois McMaster Bujold

Not bingo, just random thoughts!

So many good quotes:

-On page 7 I flagged an argument between Aral and his security expert, Illyan. Illyan wants Aral to move into the Imperial Residence. Aral is like, "no, I would prefer to stay at my own residence." Illyan: "I can't really endorse that idea, sir. Strictly from a security standpoint. It's in the old part of town. The streets are warrens. There are at least three sets of old tunnels under the area, from old sewage and transport systems..."

Me, writing notes: "Foreshadowing tunnels"?? Okay, well, it turns out in the end people do use secret tunnels to sneak in somewhere...but let's just say it's not Vorkosigan House. ;)

-"What if we made people apply for licenses before they could be parents" is one of those crazy "third options" from the NationStates Issues game, but on Beta Colony it's the rules! Maybe that's where Max Barry got his ideas.

-The staff are practicing duelling and Cordelia is like "A proper Barrayaran contest should have at least three sides anyway, it's traditional." On its own this is "snarky foreigner." If you've read "Shards of Honor" it cuts very caustically and almost feels like leaking classified info...

-Similarly to Cordelia/Aral last book, the Kou/Drou ship is not wasting time, instead of just secret glances the main characters are making observations and trying to cut to the chase.

-that awkward feeling when an assassination attempt almost succeeds and the secret service is like "well we're incompetent and need to investigate how we almost blew it" :/

-the absurd traditions and loopholes about "we just changed our fiscal year"

-this part is so good I have to quote the whole thing. (Context: sexual mores and taboos.)

She tried writing out a list of the rules she had thought she had deduced, but found them so illogical and conflicting, especially in the area of what certain people were supposed to pretend not to know in front of certain other people, she gave up the effort. She did show the list to Aral, who read it in bed one night and nearly doubled over laughing.
"Is that what we really look like to you? I like your Rule Seven. Must keep it in mind...I wish I'd known it in my youth. I could have skipped all those godawful Service training vids."
"If you snicker any harder, you're going to get a nosebleed," she said tartly. "These are your rules, not mine. You people play by them. I just try to figure them out."
"My sweet scientist. Hm. You certainly call things by their correct names. We've never tried...would you like to violate Rule Eleven with me, dear Captain?"
"Let me see, which one--oh, yes! Certainly. Now? And while we're at it, let's knock off Thirteen. My hormones are up. I remember my brother's co-parent told me about this effect, but I didn't really believe her at the time. She says you make up for it later, post-partum."
"Thirteen? I'd never have guessed..."
"That's because, being Barrayaran, you spend so much time following Rule Two."
Anthropology was forgotten, for a time. But she found she could crack him up, later, with a properly timed mutter of "Rule Nine, sir."

-"Counts Vorkosigan have come to horrible ends throughout your history. You've been blown up, shot, starved, drowned, burned alive, beheaded, diseased, and demented. The only thing you've never done is die in bed."

-"He is my past. You are my future." Go Aral!!

-There are a lot of fantasy stories, and jargon, about people riding horses but Cordelia's POV is a great take on "city person who doesn't know anything about horses has to ride a horse and deal with all the stupid jargon."

-"wood represented poverty, not wealth, here. They must have passed ten million trees yesterday." Nice worldbuilding (but see below for more on the culture clash stuff.)

-The epilogue of "Shards of Honor" cut to two new characters and mostly dealt with people (and corpses) we hadn't seen before. But the themes expressed by Cordelia's motherhood ties that together in this one. Every military casualty was once some mother's baby.

-"nobody ever asked the Barrayaran-in-the-street much of anything, at least until major rioting raised the volume to a level no one dared ignore."

-"Live, and so confound our enemies." This is someone's dreamwidth/Tumblr blog subtitle, I know I've seen it around before but have no idea where.

Okay, so this was really good. A couple broader criticisms, though:

-In "Shards of Honor" we got to see Beta Colony, and specifically, Cordelia's bad experiences with the psychiatry system. Those chapters were slower and less interesting to me than the warfare stuff. But in retrospect, it did get the point across that Beta is not perfect, and that some of the mundane threats are more reflective of the experiences someone like me might have than getting blown up with plasma arcs.

Here, the entire plotline is set on Barrayar. We get some mentions of Betan practices that are different than modern Earth (they take sexual liberty very far, maybe too far; the contraceptive mandates are at odds with many ideas about bodily autonomy; there's a lot of environmental management that has to be run by machines since the climate is not as Earthlike as Barrayar). But, like, Cordelia is shocked that Barrayar has poverty and rampant ableism and some kids never get a decent education. It definitely comes across as "Beta has solved all the galaxy's important problems, and they can do no wrong."

Moreover, it sometimes feels like Cordelia can do no wrong. I'm not sure what options I would have preferred; Padma would have died anyway if Cordelia and the gang hadn't been there at the right time, and Kareem's odds weren't great in any situation (although her plot was very realistic, and everything Cordelia says about her type of bravery/heroism being underrated was 100% right). But "letting Aral stick to his guns about not putting personal need above the greater good, and then going behind his back to save Your Person...?" Again, I'm not sure what other plotline could have worked and not been super depressing, but it reinforced the "Beta is perfect" stuff.

This also made me want to know more about how Aral became Aral--the person who could stand up to Piotr about Miles, and forge ahead with the "we will never put any individuals above the greater good, not even mine." Like, obviously, meeting Cordelia busted him out of his shell when it came to ableism, but even before that, there was the "I gave my word as Vorkosigan that the prisoners would be unharmed, it was the stupid political spies who ruined everything." What happened?

-I'm not a huge fan of the Bothari plotline. In the previous book, it was like, "Bothari can't stand Aral and is always trying to take him out in duels. But if Aral is going on a suicide mission, Bothari is like, 'I have the right to be first in line.'" And that's very iddy. But I need a little more about why, beyond just "Bothari is crazy." Here, he seems to be complicit in his own dehumanization, and that's... :/ It's a case where having everything through the same POV (Cordelia, hearing from Aral, about his best guess at Bothari's brain) is kind of limiting and I would have appreciated a different POV to compare notes.

-Some of the foreshadowing made me think things with Piotr would go a different way than they did. Which means there may be a short fic in the future.

-I am not using this for bingo, but. I got a physical copy via interlibrary loan. Half the cover art was obscured by the interlibrary loan sticker. Which is probably? a good thing? because what in the galaxy is this. I think this would count for the bingo square "judge a book by its cover" but in an ironic way.