lightreads | Entries tagged with au: lois mcmaster bujold

Penric and the Bandit

3/5. A Penric novella, this one half outsider POV as Penric falls into the company of a man trying to rob him, but it’s a bit more complicated. I read this entire novella while cooking dinner* (crispy tofu and green beans in peanut dressing with smashed potatoes) and it was pleasant for that purpose. Slight, zero stakes in that way where there are stakes on the page, but absolutely none in a doylist sense. Comforting, is what I mean.

I do wonder where she’s going with this thing where Pen is not aging. Recompense for killing Miles so young….?

*Yes, I read audio at a very high speed

Demon Daughter by Lois McMaster Bujold

4/5. Another novella in this series about the scholar and a demon sharing a body, fantasy theology follows. This one I liked more than many. It’s 100% clear how this is going to resolve from, like, 10% in, but the pleasure is in the getting there. A domestic tale, with further gentle exploration of this untraditional three-party marriage, and the unusual family-building that may result. There’s a dark echo, too, in a marriage which began in sexual slavery, and no longer is that, but is something uncomfortable and compromised, which flows through to the family building – and family sundering.

Content notes: References to offscreen miscarriage, attempted murder of a child, slavery

Knot of Shadows

4/5. A short novella about Pen getting drawn into a strange question of a ghost inhabiting a corpse. I liked this one – it's far less pat and tidy than some of the previous entries, and is the better for it. And there's more theology than just 'a god shows up and fixes it all.' Pen has to do the hard work, too late but hopefully not too little. Mind the notes on this one, though, oof.

Content notes: Dead children, references to suicidal states of mind.

The Assassins of Thasalon

3/5. Latest Penric story, this time a short novel. Pen goes on a diplomatically perilous journey into neighboring country court intrigue in the company of a new sorcerer and a saint who'd rather be fishing. Pleasant, but.

I realize it's hilarious to complain about the deus ex machina that resolves this book. I mean, the entire series is powered thereon, emphasis on the deus. But in this instance, it was just too literal (someone prays, and the whole thing is immediately and tidily resolved. So even though the new characters are charming, and the cameos from practically everyone are appreciated, this book never lifted above gentle enjoyment.

Maybe that's a limitation of the form? This series feels quite low stakes at this point – see above re prayer resolving everything neatly and immediately, to say nothing of the complete lack of personal conflict Pen has in this book. That has its pleasures and its place, but when you're not in the mood for mild comfort reading . . . well, it all goes a little flat. There's a lot you could do about that as a writer. Personally, I'd have been writing various stories up and down Des's timeline, featuring her various companions, and that's just the most obvious course. There are also enumerable ways to generate conflict within Pen and, more interestingly, between Pen and Des. But LMB isn't really here for that, so okay, it is what it is.

Masquerade in Lodi

3/5. Another Penric and Desdemona novella wherein he ends up on a wild goose chase through an island city on festival night in the company of a saint.

I respect how she cheerfully writes these out of order. Big AO3 series-in-progress energy. This one is a pleasant romp, with serious undertones having to do with mothers lost or mothers never had. But, per usual, Pen is not the most interesting person in this book, and this time he doesn't come second, but a comfortable third behind his demon and the eighteen-year-old orphan turned Saint of the Bastard. If she doesn't recur at some point, it's a terrible waste.

The Physicians of Vilnoc

3/5. Another novella about Pen and his demon. This one legitimately is a novella – there's not enough here for a novel – so at least there's that. Though I should point out that this book is about being a doctor overrun with cases of a mysterious and deadly infection sweeping through a population. In short, Pen does a lot that feels and reads like running in pointless circles over and over again until he collapses, and we understand why he did not become a physician after his previous study of medicine. That is, having the ability is really not the same thing as having the calling.

But, after eight books, it has finally occurred to me that my problem with this series is that it's about Pen and not about his demon. I'd frankly rather be reading these stories from her perspective, layered more directly with her dozen prior companions. Pen has grown up nice, don't get me wrong, but these stories are far more conventional from his point of view. Also, I think she mis-stepped on a few key points early on, for example by inserting that it is unusual for Pen to have named his demon. Which always struck me as laughable, since humans are humans. We name our vacuum cleaners, of course we name the sentient presence in our heads for decades, come the fuck on. I suspect she was setting up some stuff about how Pen's approach – not trained by the temple – is salutary, and there is a bit of that, but she (thankfully) never really ran with it. But anyway, my point is, I think this series was set up to be a little bit about how special Pen is, and if I'm not convinced of that after eight novellas and am increasingly convinced with each one that Des is far more interesting, well, something isn't going right.

The Orphans of Raspay

2/5. Another Penric novella. This time he and his resident chaos demon are taken captive by slavers. Pen then attaches himself to two young girls similarly on the auction block, and the three of them go through various travails and reversals to escape.

Yeeeeah. So the narrative problem here is that Pen is under no substantial threat, unless he gets extremely and repeatedly unlucky, not given what he can do. For him, slavers are inconvenient, not life-shattering. LMB tries to fix this with the introduction of the kids, who are threatened with separation and, implicitly, much much worse. But it doesn't work, because she also leans hard into her penchant for hijinx and funny reversals, and the result is like reading about someone taking a vacation with a "enjoy a slavery experience!" company. I only exaggerate slightly. This is definitely the tourist-friendly end of slavery. The Disney-would-have-an-attraction end of slavery.

I was not in the mood for that, and it got less and less okay the more I thought about it.

Knife Children

2/5. Novella in her sharing knife universe. A lakewalker dude (guy who fights monsters with knives containing the souls of dead people) connects with the daughter he's never known because she was accidentally conceived in a tryst across a cultural divide.

Hoo boy. I've never been interested in this universe – its central culture clash has always seemed simplistic and boring to me. This iteration is pleasant enough on the surface, with some messy family dynamics in all directions. But. But.

At the heart of this book is a rape that goes largely unacknowledged on both watsonian and doylist levels. Within the text people are disapproving, but in a boys-will-be-boys way that is really more about cultural purity than anything. And structurally – we're supposed to think it was okay to use magic to compel this girl to sleep with him because he could tell she wanted him. Wow. Where to start. First: just because she wanted to doesn't mean she actually was going to. These are different things. Second: if somehow her wanting to makes this okay, then why did he do it? Like, if it's totally cool because she was going to fuck him anyway, why did he need to coerce her? Third – eh, never mind. I don't even.

Why is this universe of stories prone to such problematic content? Why why why.

Proto Zoa

2/5. Collection of very early shorts. I never read this back when I was in Bujold fandom because it was nowhere to be found in accessible format. It's a weird collection because it's recognizably her but also . . . not very good? There are some highlights – the evocation of the miseries of stay-at-home mothering with a useless spouse in "Barter" are hilarisad. But the keystone novella, "Dreamweaver's Dilemma" is a competent but shallow treatment of an idea I've seen done many times much better (also creepingly sexist around the edges). But the one that really threw me was "Garage Sale," a manifestly unkind story about neighbors who hate each other and both behave horribly.

The Flowers of Vashnoi

2/5. Ekaterin is involved in an experimental project to try and cleanse the radioactive site where the Cetagandans dropped a dirty bomb decades ago. This unearths an ugly secret.

Hm. This is a good idea done without much of the richness I was expecting. This is a story that, by its shape, literally goes to the radioactive heart of this culture's ableism. Most of the story is set on the bomb site which started this supposed deep-rooted phobia of mutation. And yet it somehow manages to not … really … be about that? And I'm not sure how? Partly it's that Ekaterin drives this story, rather than Miles, though Miles is the one who personally owns the site and whose personal baggage re disability it encapsulates. That's fine – and it makes sense – but Ekaterin has basically nothing to say about disability or this culture's view of it that I found interesting or illuminating.

Also, here's my real problem. ( spoilers )

So yeah. I don't think this story is being honest about what ableism is and how it functions and how you combat it. And it feels that way – dishonest – rather than merely ignorant.

Content notes: Infanticide; child abandonment; attempted murder; ableism everywhere.

The Prisoner of Limnos

3/5. Another Penric novella, this one (maybe?) concluding a trilogy about Pen's entanglement with a disgraced general and, more importantly, his widowed sister. Rather simple from a plot perspective, but the point of this one is to set up various examples of non-traditional marriages – the poly v (or possibly triad, it's unclear) is the simplest of them. It's all in aid of allowing some reflection on the prospect of marrying Pen, and thus also marrying the demon/twelve shadow personalities in his head. It's not very deep reflection, mind. This series continues to be froth more than substance, but in this case, and at this time, that's a plus.

Penric's Fox

3/5. Another novella about Penric and his demon. A pleasant standalone murder mystery this time. Penric is still quite young here; he's learning about what he can do, and what he can't, and he's coming to be rightfully wary of his powers. All of which preoccupies him such that I don't think he notices that this story turns on women quietly making the world work. Or possibly the story doesn't notice? Unclear. Regardless, there's a casual bit of byplay where two women of differing magic schools talk carefully in each other's general direction for a bit then adroitly rearrange the men around them to suit them both,, and Pen sees this happen but doesn't see it happen, you know? Funny, in light of the pack of women in Pen's head. Anyway. He's still young, like I said.

Mira’s Last Dance

3/5. Another Penric novella. Better, even though this is still the middle chunk of a novel and not a standalone story. But it’s a mostly charming tale in which Pen cross-dresses and allows one of his demon’s shadow personalities to come forth to have kinky sex for money, which is not what I was expecting. It’s all rather wholesome? And weirdly unchallenging? Like, I’ve been waiting and waiting for this series to engage with Pen’s gender identity, since there are a dozen women in his head with him and who sometimes are able to become him. And this story really doesn’t, except for some glancing and shallow tussles with pronouns. And it doesn’t really engage with the queerness of the scenario either. I mean, it doesn’t have to, but I’d rather it did.

Mostly, though, this book rotates around two failed marriage proposals. One delivered to Pen as a lady by the man he seduced. And one delivered by Pen to his traveling companion. Both proposals miss their mark, but they don’t inform each other the way they clearly ought to. Pen refuses because it’s patently ridiculous and he has shit to do and he doesn’t want that guy oh and also that guy thinks he’s a lady. And Nikys refuses because she says she wants a stable life. And yet the life she is given is stifled and clearly not what she wants. IDK, these two proposals – and the whole novella – are trying to be about the space given to women and the space given to men. The huge amount of leash given to Pen, in particular. And the two proposals are supposed to be stitching that up, but they … don’t. Maybe the third part of this just-write-a-novel-jFC will do it.

Penric’s Mission

2/5. Continuing adventures of Penric and his accidental demon. It would have been a 3/5 for pleasantly diverting Bujoldian adventure, but then. My dudes. You can not write the first third of a novel, half-assedly resolve about 20% of the conflict and none of the important interpersonal questions, and then just end it with everyone literally marching off into uncertainty and call it a novella. And it’s not one of those artistic non-endings, either. It’s a screamingly obvious “whoops this grew a novel but I donwanna write it but I do want to sell some books sooooo….”

Penric and the Shaman by Lois McMaster Bujold

3/5. Sequel novella about Penric, the accidental host to a demon. An inquirer from the Father's Order sweeps Pen (and company) into his investigation of a shamanic ritual gone wrong.

More interesting than the prior novella, largely because Penric is more interesting with several years of demonic and scholarly experience to his name. At first blush this was some pretty typical LMB ground about a young person in the wreck left after he did something young and stupid. But there's a bit more to it, to the question of being late when you are needed, to the difficulties of trusting in providence when it sounds like just noise. So there's more here, and it's a pleasant read.

I do think that she is . . . growing overly attached to some of her pet techniques. She has a particular fondness for propagating paired adjective/adverbs to repeat and alter through a chain of sentences, usually with a touch of ironic humor. But it's so distinctive and specific – it's the sort of wordplay that makes you very particularly conscious of reading a story, not just of experiencing it – and it only works when it's, you know . . . well done. It isn't always, these days. I found myself flipping back through a few passages in this novella and shaking my head at the misfires. We all need to update our favorite writerly tics sometimes, it's okay!

I bring this up not to be picky about technique, but also because of the bigger sense that a lot of her writing is of a sameness these days: pleasant and predictable, never surprising.

Penric's Demon

3/5. A Five Gods novella. Through (random?) circumstance, a rural lord's younger son on the way to his wedding unintentionally comes into the possession of a demon. Subject and object purposefully left unclear in that last bit.

This is a pleasing, if inconsequential little tale. Maybe I've just read too much LMB, but I understood pretty much everything about this story by a third of the way through and nodded along comfortably to the end. Our protagonist is rather unformed – as a person, I mean, not a character – which is a bit of a departure for this universe. The whole thing works a bit better if one imagines onself, the reader, rather like the demon in Pen's head: significantly smarter than him, and seeing a great deal more through his eyes than he does. But even those things were not terribly complex or interesting.

Still, comfortable and rather sweet. Good for completists, I guess.

Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen by Lois McMaster Bujold

4/5. ARC. I don't have an overarching summation, so here, have some bullet point thoughts:

• This is A Civil Campaign level plotless social drama. By which I mean the social drama is the plot. This book has a climactic picnic scene, okay. Not nearly as funny as ACC, though.

• Portions of this book are set inside a futuristic fertility clinic, and it made me smile, because yeah. Fertility clinics are fuckin' weird, and conceiving by science is fuckin' weird, and this book had a finger nicely on that.

• Lois McMaster Bujold learned the word 'monosexual,' you guys! *wipes tear*. She still, unfortunately, has not quite grasped that one's sexuality in re the genders one is attracted to is an entirely separate facet from one's sexuality in re how many partners one wishes to have. Which is weird, considering just how many people have taken her to task over the year's for Cordelia's infamous summation of Aral: "He used to be bisexual, now he's monogamous." (Hint: bisexual doesn't actually mean simultaneously banging people of two different genders. A bisexual person doesn't become straight by marrying someone of another gender, or queer by marrying smoene of the same gender. No really, my extended family, I still get to be bisexual, fuck right off). Aaaaanyway, despite having apparently regreted the prior Cordelia observation, LMB still doesn't seem to quite get it. And more fundamentally . . . for anyone who doesn't know, I guess this is a spoiler? Though I'd assume everyone knows by now – this book is about what happens when there is a long-term V relationship with occasional jaunts into triangle, and then the point of the V dies, and how the two left come back to each other, eventually. And this book is . . . very concerned with people's queerness, and like, negative a million percent concerned with polyamory. I exaggerate there are a few throwaway comments on that aspect, but by and large, this book just doesn't . . . notice? It's like, the queerness of the queerness all but swallows the queerness of the poly, which are two very different things, thankyouverymuch. And that disappointed me.

• I said it before on twitter when the spoilers first broke, and I'll say it again: Miles spending decades of adolescent and adult life oblivious to his parents's queerness and polyamory is A++++++. Because yep. He would

• Things I quite liked: this is a book about single parenting by choice, and non-traditional families, and gamete donation, and yeah, that was really good for me.

• Less good. Everyone must have babies. Everyone. Everyone. Babies are not optional. If you are in this verse and you think you do not want babies, well, that's just because you didn't think about it right, and as soon as a real possibility is presented to you, babies you will want and babies you will have. Babies babies babies.

• Another thing I liked: Cordelia is living a long, varied life. She is in her seventies here, embarking on the fourth or fifth major life change. There is a lovely and subversive sense of her as a woman in her prime, in the middle of it all. And also a lovely evocation of how an ideal long-lived future might be, where you could have multiple successive phases of family-building and work, and family-building again, on the scale of decades, without being rushed by biology. Being rushed by loss and grief, though, of course.

• I miss Gregor. I have always, always wanted the Gregor book that Vor Game was actually not.

• This book feels like an end, in a way none of the prior books that were maybe sorta an end did. I don't know why, it just does. I'd be okay with that, actually.

Captain Vorpatril's Alliance by Lois McMaster Bujold

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Or as I have been calling it for over a year, How Do You Solve a Problem Like Ivan Vorpatril?.

Which was a little bit snide of me. Apologies to anyone who was there in June when I co-modded a panel and have already heard me going on about Bujold’s tendency to solve people’s lives like equations. Who is your perfect mate, what is your perfect challenge? What is the thing that balances you? How can we write the equals sign, reduce you to a simpler function, and be done with it? Which is both true and unfair to say – most fiction is in this business to some extent or other, and I’ve actually loved the way she does it. I was just a little worried she’d solve Ivan the way she eventually solves pretty much everybody: by pairing him off, marching him onto the arc two-by-two, and tossing some babies at him.

And yep, she pretty much did that. And I’ll shut up (for now), because I loved it.

I didn’t love it centrally as a romance, though I did enjoy that aspect, and the lady in question is great. Marriage of, um, convenience is not quite the right word -- marriage of expediency is not really my kink, but this was charming. (Also, I can’t help noticing Tej is a smirking, tongue-in-cheek, “oh yeah?” response to all those people who wanted to see Ivan paired up with a Haut lady. Heh.) But I really loved the shape of it, how it’s all about being the one person who doesn’t quite fit into an extraordinary family, not because you don’t measure up but just because you’ll have to shout down some of the biggest personalities in a three light-year radius to be noticed, and who wants to do that? It’s about just wanting to live your life, and how that can appear small and unworthy when you’re surrounded by families like Ivan’s and Tej’s, but how really it’s not at all, it’s great, it’s perfect.

And mostly I loved the indulgence of this book. It basically took a big pile of what I love about this universe (Miles and Alys and Gregor and Simon (Simon Simon Simon!) and heaped it up, and flung itself on top. And then delivered a moment of such wry, perfect Bujoldian hilarity that made me snigger so unexpectedly I almost fell over on the train. You'll know it when you see it, trust me.

This is how you solve a problem like Ivan Vorpatril. And it is really, really sad to me that this universe is running out of problems, because no matter what I say, I love watching her solve them.

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CryoBurn by Lois McMaster Bujold

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Ah. I got an ARC of this two weeks ago, and it’s a mark of just how fucked in the head I was by the bar exam that I couldn’t even crack it open until now. But I did at last, and ah, it was good.

This is a romp. In fact I’d go so far as to say in some places it’s a caper. Basically, it’s a hundred thousand words of Miles repeatedly happening to people. These people generally start out unsuspecting, but by the end are learning to brace for impact, even if they’re curled up in the fetal position and whimpering on the inside.

Except be careful for the corners and edges on this caper, because some of them will cut you. Like most of this series, this book contemplates a bit of speculative technology – cryo freezing and reviving, here – and asks a lot of penetrating questions about the sociopolitical fallout. Without, thank God, being didactic or prescriptive or blankly alarmist or utopian. This is a book about the institutions of death when death is temporary. Except – and I’m paraphrasing Miles here, because he sums this up nicely for us at one point – institutions and corporations and political machines are just big groups of people mostly moving in the same direction. They might feel like they’ll live forever, but they’re just us, too, and we certainly don’t.

Except when we kind of do, and how voting power would be allocated to frozen people, not to mention the economics of it (I slapped a hand over my face and laugh-groaned a lot over the commodified cryo corpse contract swaps, because ahaha, yes, that is so fucking trufax). Then again, I clearly still am fucked in the head by the bar exam, because I also thought in a frantic gabble at one point, “does this planet have an inherited Rule Against Perpetuities? Because if the voting interests don’t vest within 21 years of the end of a life in being – and technically they’re not lives in being – then the conveyances are void oh my God what is wrong with me?”

To everyone who actually understood that: I am so, so sorry.

Ahem. The point. This book is not a disappointment. It is fun and hilarious and chewy. It is also a lot more conscious of Miles’s privilege than previous volumes, in ways I appreciated. Really, one of the best things that happened to this series was the introduction of roving point-of-view, because there are so very many things that Miles does not know about himself; his quite literal entitlement is often one of them.

And then it ends with a quintet of drabbles. Really good drabbles, the kind that feel like really good haiku, where saying the perfect thing in the perfect, tiny package makes writing like origami or something else beautiful and precise and intense. Ouch.

The title isn't any better after reading, though.

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Horizon by Lois McMaster Bujold

My rating: 2 of 5 stars
In which this four-book romance fantasy wanders – by which I mean plot? What plot? – to a close – by which I mean babies for all!

Yikes. A friend called this the "never-ending beige adventure," which made me laugh. More than the book did.

I'm feeling kind of cranky about this book. It's intellectually boring, with a thematic conversation (communication, clashing and changing paradigms, etc.) little deeper than your average morality play. I could forgive intellectual boredom for emotional interest – God knows I've done that before. But my emotional needle didn't so much as quiver throughout. I will say that the book is at least prettily, if . . . rustically written. And I don't usually get cranky over boring, because boring for me is a great romance for someone else (though, I've never met anyone who was actually really moved by this particular series . . . Bueller?).

No, the real problem is the explicit and implicit helping of babymaking propaganda. Did you guys know that the purpose of marriage is babies? Didya didya didya? The sheer amount of moral imperative this series piles on reproduction – though, okay, not always heteronormatively – is staggering because half of it is delivered with this 'duh' of universal unarguable truth, which, um, no, and the other half feels entirely unconscious and kind of uncomfortable as a glimpse of author id to me. The older I get, the more toxic that becomes. Yeurgh.

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