Komarr by Lois McMaster Bujold

Hello, Stranger.

Let's talk about Lois McMaster Bujold's Komarr.

The Short of It

Plot: Miles settles into his new life as a full time Imperial Auditor, but his father's shadow towers over him.

Page Count: 332

Award: Part of the Vorkosigan Saga

Worth a read: Yes
Primary Driver: (Plot, World, or Character)
Bechdel Test: Pass
Technobabble: Minimal/Moderate
Review: Miles is back in business. An excellent entry into the series. Komarr, a planet famously butchered by Miles's father, is an excellent backdrop for well-executed suspense and romance plots. Miles has a mentor here, and it's nice to see him actually need to learn something, no just be good at it. Pacing stays brisk, aided by alternating narrators by chapters. This also helps reestablish characterization: we're so accustomed to Miles as he is that is helps to see him from an outside perspective.

The Medium of It

Spoiler Free!

Miles is a real Auditor now! Not just a half-baked pseudo-Auditor. Nice!

It's refreshing to see Miles working to figure things out, to reestablish his place. He tends to be exceptional at everything that he attempts, so it is a relatively painless learning process. Nonetheless, it counts as learning! It's different than what he was doing before!

Komarr is a perfect location for Miles to reevaluate who he is and how he interacts with the world. In Memory he proceeded under the illusion that perhaps, when all was said and done, he could return to his life in the military. Here he finally needs to come to terms with the fact of being an auditor, and that this is his future. This gives Miles's internal monologue a very different timbre: from "let's push through this" to "is this really it?" 

The planet itself offers a delightful and new locale to explore. In some ways it feels more like a classic SF setting: domed cities in a Mars-like environment. It feels familiar enough that we don't need to go through every detail of how it works while still bringing a few twists to the standard formula for a bubble planet. 

This is one of the strongest books in the whole saga. Character work continues to be superb, but here this extends to villains as well. In other volumes, even when the antagonists have some points that seem fair, they're still monsters. It's hard to disagree with the opposition here and easy to see why they view themselves as the heroes of their own stories.

Vorkosigan mysteries tend to be enjoyable but extremely heavily telegraphed. There were multiple points here that were genuinely surprising, and I found myself more invested in the actual plot and mystery than in almost any other book in the series. Plot moves quickly and stays focused. 

All in all, one of the best. But if you're this far into the series, it almost doesn't matter what the review is - you're going to keep going.

The Long of It

Spoilers Ahead!

There is one major point here that does not work that well, and that's the budding romance subplot. This is the one aspect of Miles's character development that seems to get reset constantly. He is at every turn a bumbling, awkward, floundering romantic. He's even worse a bit later in the series.

Making Miles awkward with women worked in earlier books. He was deeply insecure and had little to no experience. At this point in the series, however, he has had multiple significant relationships that stretched over a number of books. In universe his relationships lasted years. I think. It's a bit hard to tell the whole timeline on these.

Which is all to say that Miles reverting to the very same awkward flirtation that we've seen in the first couple of Vorkosigan books feels out of character. Miles always succeeds, but does so by learning from his experiences along the way. Except romantically. He's not about that life.

On the flipside, making Etienne Voroisson an unintentional villain was a superb twist. He's married to the woman Miles is pursuing, so we don't like him. But we, as readers, know that we're being unfair. Sure, he's obnoxious, and yes, he doesn't like Miles. This is easy to understand: Miles is trying to sleep with his wife. Which does not give Miles the moral high ground. I was so busy disliking him for being a bad husband and father that it did not even register that he could be a conspirator as well. More accurately he was taking bribes to look the other way... but I had already casually labeled him as "B-Plot Romantic Rival" and moved on. 

Tien is a bit overdone as an awful spouse. We need to be firmly backing Miles while he chases someone who is married - so Tien needs to be terrible enough that we ignore the marriage. The perspective chapters from Ekaterin get us even further into the loveless marriage, showing us, as semi-omnipotent readers, that it truly is a terrible pairing. It's heavy handed but it works. We stay on team Miles and we don't blame Ekaterin for not wanting to stay with Tien.

Do you think you could teach Miles to flirt a bit better, Stranger?

And don't forget to read a book!