My partner first introduced me to Curse of Chalion, and later to the Vorkosigan books (starting with Shards of Honor) after he'd made sure I'd read enough of Georgette Heyer to get the references. I'm also intrigued by the plot parallels between Curse of Chalion and Shards of Honor: amongst others, the way that, in the beginning, the hero is asked about the rumours of prisoners being raped, and replies that this doesn't happen on the better-run ships (with the implication that it does on the worse-run ships), and later on, the plot turns on someone risking his life to kill a corrupt officer to save that officer from raping a prisoner - with the result that he is harshly punished and narrowly escapes being put to death, but later on is honoured for his courage.
Yes, I agree with you about the way Bujold's characters grow and develop over the years: seeing Miles' development from a teenager desperate to pass the Imperial Service Academy exams, to a middle-aged retired Covert Ops agent, Imperial Auditor and Count, with children of his own, is a lot more interesting than James Bond, who remains a promiscuous thirty-something bachelor from 1952 to 1964 (Fleming had to retcon his date of birth from 1918 to 1924 so that he wouldn't appear too hopelessly crumbly to teenage readers). I don't think Bond would mind moving on, but the only two times he's actually dared fall in love with someone (Vesper in Casino Royale, and Tracy in On Her Majesty's Secret Service), she gets killed off before the relationship can go anywhere, and the one time we know of that he becomes a parent (with Kissy Susuki in You Only Live Twice), he has set off on a blundering, amnesiac attempt to find out who he is before Kissy has a chance to tell him she's pregnant. Now, if Bujold or Pratchett was writing the story, we'd learn about James Bond's experiences as a retired British secret agent married to a Corsican bandit's daughter, starting on some new career and trying to get the hang of being a parent. (On the other hand, Bond does get injured in most of Fleming's novels - when he is first introduced, his main distinguishing feature is a long scar down his right cheek, as distinctive as Aral's L-shaped scar, and by the later books I imagine he must be mainly held together by scar tissue - so I can imagine him and Miles convalescing side-by-side in some metafictional hospital, and commiserating on what their authors put them through.)
Mirror Dance is my favourite of the Vorkosigan books, and I wish there were more books about Mark. But I think reading in chronological order from Shards of Honor onwards is probably the best way to appreciate them, even though it isn't the order they were written in. Apart from anything else, having come to love Cordelia, Aral, and Bothari in Shards of Honor, I was glad to have more time to spend with them (and a chance to get to know Koudelka better, since we only meet him briefly in Shards of Honor), before Bothari gets killed, and Aral and Cordelia demoted to supporting characters, in The Warrior's Apprentice. A friend of mine, whom I lent The Warrior's Apprentice to, read the first chapter and disliked Miles too much to continue with it. I don't know whether I'd have felt the same way if I'd read this one first, but I think I'd probably have found the military space-opera setting of The Warrior's Apprentice and The Vor Game off-putting if I hadn't already had enough emotional investment in the series to want to see how Aral and Cordelia's son turned out.
Online friends are one of the benefits of writing/reading fanfiction that no-one tells you about. I became friends with evilkat23 because we were both Drachenreiter fans (and we seem to have cross-fertilised each other's fanfiction). One of the downsides that nobody warned me about is that on some websites, people with no interest in reading or writing fanfiction set up accounts with no stories written and no stories favourited/bookmarked, just so that they can email me to ask me for a date. I'd guess that a lot of them are blackmailers, but just in case some of them really are lonely people looking for a partner, I generally write back to them advising them to join a dating website instead, and pointing out that that was how I met the person I'm now happily married to.
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TempleCloud on Chapter 5 Thu 25 Jun 2020 01:18PM UTC
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