Shards of Honor

A space opera about military and diplomatic complications, centered on two characters from opposing parties, who happen to be the sanest people in the room. This started out fun, lots of wry humor, and a general old-school feel to it (a yes, women! as captains! of spaceships!). But then the plot tapered off a bit in the second half.

Good starting place for the story, lots of action and forward motion to the plot, characters you can get to know and love, and no sidetracking. All the things I love in a book.

I did like a few things about it, i.e. the brevity and the implied gay sex. But for the most part I feel like my opinion can be summed up by the fact that I spent like 100 pages waiting for the "actual" story to start before realizing that this was it. Just something, idk, missing for me. Gene Wolfe broke me, probably. The romance feels unearned, the odd modern lingo and references are really immersion-breaking (referring to drunkenly flying a hovercraft as "drunk driving"??) Charming at times, but I left feeling 0 interest in this world or these characters.

Really interesting start to the series. I came in thinking this would be focused on space battles, and instead we get a lot of traveling story and political intrigue. Though I also see space battles on the horizon for future books.

I'm certainly interested in seeing where this goes.

Audio read by: Grover Gardner

Still good on a re-read many years later. Good interstellar romance with strong military-political elements.
This is the book that got me started on my journey through Bujold's worlds – and a good trip it has been.

Thinly veiled romance
poor misunderstood bad boy
she sees his true self!

Executive Summary: I liked it, and I plan to continue, but I had been hoping for a bit more.Audiobook: The audio is pretty good, but nothing fantastic. Grover Gardner does a good job in terms of volume and inflection, but there isn't anything in his performance that makes this a must listen. It's a decent option though, if like me you have more time for audio books than reading.Full ReviewApparently I bought this book twice. I had the ebook and totally forgot. Then I bought the audiobook on sale. I figured it was time I read at least one of the copies I own.This is the third book I've read by Ms. Bujold. I really enjoyed the two Chalion books of hers I read, and so I was eager to check out her more popular Sci-Fi series. Needless to say after how much I enjoyed those books, and how popular this was, I had high expectations coming in.I believe the author actually recommends a different order to read the books, but I'm pretty stubborn about reading series in publication order. I'm not sure if this was her first book, or even one of her earliest works, but it definitely isn't as polished as [b:The Curse of Chalion 61886 The Curse of Chalion (World of the Five Gods, #1) Lois McMaster Bujold https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1322571773s/61886.jpg 1129349].I liked both Cordelia Naismith and Aral Vorkosigan, but I found the story slow in places, especially at the beginning. I did find the world building interesting enough that I plan to continue. It probably also helps that I already own [b:The Warrior's Apprentice 61906 The Warrior's Apprentice (Vorkosigan Saga, #2) Lois McMaster Bujold https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1170597854s/61906.jpg 2792]. Hopefully she'll continue to build on some of the things she set up here and maybe include a bit more action than this one had.

Nee, 't is nog niet echt écht begonnen wegens nog geen Miles Vorkosigan, maar het begint te komen: er zit toch al een Vorkosigan in. Het is dan wel de vader van het personage waar de meeste boeken over gaan, maar hey.

Cordelia Naismith woont op de planeet Beta, Aral Vorkosigan woont op een andere planeet, Barrayar. 't Is niet dat er oorlog is tussen de twee, maar ze leven toch op gespannen voet. Naismith landt met haar schip op nog een andere planeet, wordt daar aangevallen. Vorkosigan bevindt zich ook op die planeet, maar blijkt snel dat hij het niet is die haar aangevallen heeft, maar wel een deel van zijn crew die tegen Vorkosigan aan het muiten geslagen was (duistere machinaties met interne politiek en Vorkosigan die van een nobele familie is maar geen vrienden heeft gemaakt).

Twee mensen op leeftijd (zij in de dertig, hij in de veertig), met elk een moeilijk relatieverleden en een sterk karakter: 't is liefde op het eerste gezicht, al duurt het nog een beetje langer voor zij het ook toegeeft.

Maar geen wilde seksscènes, nee meneer: 't is eer en beleefdheid en alles. Ter illustratie, een stuk van als Cordelia Naismith terug is op haar planeet (en Vorkosigan terug op de zijn, zonder dat ze ook maar één kus hebben uitgewisseld):

Cordelia's mother laughed uncertainly. “He surely seems to have charmed you. What does he have, then? Conversation? Good looks?”

“I'm not sure. He mostly talks Barrayaran politics. He claims to have an aversion to them, but it sounds more like an obsession to me. He can't leave them alone for five minutes. It's like they're in him.”

“Is that—a very interesting subject?”

“It's awful,” said Cordelia frankly. “His bedtime stories can keep you awake for weeks.”

“It can't be his looks,” sighed her mother. “I've seen a holovid of him in the news.”

“Oh, did you save it?” asked Cordelia, instantly interested. “Where is it?”

“I'm sure there's something in the vid files,” her mother allowed, staring. “But really, Cordelia—your Reg Rosemont was ten times better looking.”

“I suppose he was,” Cordelia agreed, “by any objective standard.”

“So what does the man have, anyway?”

“I don't know. The virtues of his vices, perhaps. Courage. Strength. Energy. He could run me into the ground any day. He has power over people. Not leadership, exactly, although there's that too. They either worship him or hate his guts. The strangest man I ever met did both at the same time. But nobody falls asleep when he's around.”

“And which category do you fall in, Cordelia?” asked her mother, bemused.

“Well, I don't hate him. Can't say as I worship him, either.” She paused a long time, and looked up to meet her mother's eyes squarely. “But when he's cut, I bleed.”

“Oh,” said her mother, whitely. Her mouth smiled, her eyes flinched, and she busied herself with unnecessary vigor in getting Cordelia's meager belongings settled.

Hmm, feeling very puzzled after finishing this up. Perhaps this is the best way to express my feelings: I think I just read three different stories: a short, fairly effective adventure-romance story, a less successful war and romance story, plus a rather disturbing inferred story that I guess the author never intended?

Spoiler tags from here on out. So first story - two people thrown together in a survival situation, who develop a relationship even though they hate each other at the beginning. Think anything from Enemy Mine to Romancing the Stone. It's pretty well done - you can see how each of them starts noticing qualities they admire in the other, and their predicament is intriguing. There is a bit of off-key telling rather than showing when Cordelia explicitly narrates how she is finding him attractive, but I suppose you could chalk that up to the author still getting her feet under her, as this was her first book.Second story - here it gets a little weird and often contrived. There's a bad guy who literally idolizes the Marquis de Sade, and monologues his eeeevil plans up front. There's an escape that's dependent on a wildly implausible coincidence. Followed by an even more implausible coincidence. The character traits that made Vorkosigan appealing in the first act get muddied, even as Bujold seems to be trying to underline them. Nevertheless, there's a reveal that's quite satisfying and does set up a tension around "honor" and what it means, and it's still mostly a fun ride.Then Cordelia goes home and the whole story goes rather bonkers, and kind of limps over the finish line.Third story - I take it from a quick Google that Bujold intended this story to be face-value. It's a romance with a happy ending (with enough complications to set up the further story).But from the time Cordelia is heading home until I turned the last page, I was increasingly suspicious. There seems to be plenty of textual support for the notion that Cordelia is a totally unreliable narrator, and all the facile, clunky, and convenient notes early in the story are tells that hint at her successful brainwashing. We're told the Barrayar military can wipe memories and manufacture false memories to replace them. The Beta officials are convinced that Cordelia is a victim of this process, and perhaps that she's been made into a mole without her knowledge. Her behavior becomes more and more erratic, with symptoms that could be explained by paranoia and exhaustion, or could hint at something darker. Eventually she becomes so removed from herself that she almost murders her doctor, having strange, sadistic flashes of thought that could indicate a meditation on what war can do to good people, or could indicate programming by the enemy.Taking the latter view makes some earlier "mistakes" and strange details fall into place - the weirdly emphatic internal monologue notes about her attraction, the sudden marriage proposal, the mustache-twirling villain, the convenient reappearance of known characters, the issue of where Vorkosigan got his intelligence, the "benevolent and self-sacrificing" reason why she must resist Betan psychological probing at all costs, and finally her sacrifice of her entire identity without a look backward. Please tell me I'm not the only one seeing this?

Who doesn't love a tough female lead? I'm a sucker for any story that has a scene where a guy bursts into a room, hoping to save the damsel in distress and she's all “Hey, while you were forming a plan, I just went ahead and took care of business on my own, k?”

This book is OK during the first half. It kind of reads like a dull episode of Star Trek (of which I am a huge fan, but not every episode was awesome, this book seemed like one of the not-so-awesome episodes). I kept thinking: well, this is pretty neat, being on an alien planet with weird life forms and enemies lurking in the forest, but where are the intelligent aliens? And how did these humans get to the planet? I wanted more back-story, and I wanted something besides a space soap opera.

And then the second half just gets great really quickly. The web of deceit that is woven by many of the characters is complicated, complex, murderous, and suspenseful. The 2 main characters, Cordelia Naismith and Aral Vorkosigan are explored in great depth by the author, and we come to understand not only how they do the things they do, but why. And their love story is so simple; it doesn't dominate the book, but it was felt by me, the reader.

By the end of the book, I didn't care that there weren't any amazing alien life forms or any in depth descriptions of future technology. But this is what I was expecting at the beginning. The great thing is that this book doesn't need that to stand just fine on its own. But you've got to keep reading; I'm glad I did. And I love reading a great science fiction book by a woman in a field dominated by men.