Miles Naismith Vorkosigan

These are the third and fourth books (in terms of the chronological story line) in the author's Vorkosigan series, and the first to feature the principal character of the series, Miles Vorkosigan (he appeared as a young child at the end of Barrayar, the second book). The first two books were reviewed here on 1 August and 9 September 2007

In 'The Warrior's Apprentice' Miles is now 17 and, as a result of damage inflicted while in the womb, has a stunted and misshapen body with very brittle bones. At the start of the book, these handicaps prevent his acceptance into the
...
'The Vor Game' is set three years later, immediately after Miles has graduated from the
...
Needless to say, the situation turns out to be more complex than imagined and Miles has to think on his feet and react quickly to a variety of unexpected developments.

Miles Naismith Vorkosigan comes of age.
...
When the simple merchant expedition draws the attention of an unexpected enemy, Miles is forced to masquerade as commander of a fictional fleet of hired guns he names after the mountains near his home--the Dendarii Mercenaries.His original crew of misf... more info>> 1986 Locus Poll Award Nominee
...
[Sequel to "The Warrior's Apprentice"] Miles Vorkosigan graduates from the Barrayaran Military Academy with high expectations of ship command, but is disappointed with an assignment as meteorologist to Lazkowski Base, an arctic training camp.
...
His tenure in the windy, snow-covered north is cut short when Miles narrowly averts a massacre between the trigger-happy base commander and mutinous recruits.After a brief stay under 'house arrest', Miles is re-assigned to investigate a suspicious military... more info>> 1990 HOMer Award Nominee, Hugo Award Winner, Locus Poll Award Nominee, Seiun Award Nominee, SF Chronicle Poll Nominee
...
When the Mercenaries' payroll doesn't arrive on time and someone tries to kill Miles, he realizes he's in trouble again.Miles must juggle both his identities at once to... more info>> 1989
...
[A Miles Vorkosigan Story] Miles infiltrates a prison camp at Dagoola IV, where he plots from within to free the prisoners. [Publisher's Note: The Borders of Infinity was originally published as a stand-alone novella in the anthology Free Lancers in September 1987.
...
[A Miles Vorkosigan Story] Twenty-three year old Lieutenant Miles Vorkosigan challenges the criminal underground on the planet Jackson's Whole to rescue a research scientist. [Publisher's Note: Labyrinth was originally published as a stand-alone novella in the August 1989 issue of Analog.

[A Miles Vorkosigan Story] Twenty-three year old Lieutenant Miles Vorkosigan challenges the criminal underground on the planet Jackson's Whole to rescue a research scientist.
...
[A Miles Vorkosigan Story] Miles infiltrates a prison camp at Dagoola IV, where he plots from within to free the prisoners.

[A Miles Vorkosigan Story] Twenty-three year old Lieutenant Miles Vorkosigan challenges the criminal underground on the planet Jackson's Whole to rescue a research scientist. [Publisher's Note: "Labyrinth" was originally published as a stand-alone novella in the August 1989 issue of Analog.
...
[A Miles Vorkosigan Story] Miles infiltrates a prison camp at Dagoola IV, where he plots from within to free the prisoners. [Publisher's Note: "The Borders of Infinity" was originally published as a stand-alone novella in the anthology "Free Lancers" in September 1987.
...
[Sequel to "The Warrior's Apprentice"] Miles Vorkosigan graduates from the Barrayaran Military Academy with high expectations of ship command, but is disappointed with an assignment as meteorologist to Lazkowski Base, an arctic training camp.
...
His tenure in the windy, snow-covered north is cut short when Miles narrowly averts a massacre between the trigger-happy... [
...
Miles Naismith Vorkosigan comes of age.
...
When the simple merchant expedition draws the attention of an unexpected enemy, Miles is forced to masquerade as com... [

[A Miles Vorkosigan Story] Twenty-three year old Lieutenant Miles Vorkosigan challenges the criminal underground on the planet Jackson's Whole to rescue a research scientist. [Publisher's Note: "Labyrinth" was originally published as a stand-alone novella in the August 1989 issue of Analog.

The central character Miles Vorkosigan was introduced as a deliberately unlikely military hero, made diminutive -- even, in the author's word, dwarfish -- and brittle-boned thanks to being poisoned while still in the womb, and so forever reliant on fast talk, intelligence and clever strategy rather than socking the foeman on the jaw.

In the early The Warrior's Apprentice (1986) Miles showed the inspired blarney of an Eric Frank Russell protagonist as he talked his way from nowhere very much to leader of the dread -- though previously nonexistent -- Dendarii space mercenaries. A convenient timeline in the back of the present volume charts his further exploits in both this alter-ego role and a more legitimate career in the military security division of his homeworld Barrayar's small and much beset Empire ... whose semi-feudalism, rigid codes of honour and lords-and-ladies social pyramid are considered uncouth, almost barbaric, by larger galactic society.

While Miles is an unfailingly likeable viewpoint character, Bujold takes pains to show him as simultaneously a near-monster of pushiness and overcompensation who doesn't hesitate to use trump cards of lordly status, charisma, and even the exploitation of his own vulnerability as weapons in personal as well as combat arenas.
...
Like a P.G. Wodehouse hero riding high on false confidence, Miles can be rapidly deflated when he pushes too far and tumbles into comic come-uppance. In A Civil Campaign, for example, he unscrupulously bullies a friend into promising to have nothing to do with the woman whom Miles fancies -- a far from heroic move which betrays his own streak of gnawing insecurity, and of course backfires on him.

Much has gone before. Miles's military career came to an uncomic end after near-death and cryonic preservation in Mirror Dance, recovery from which has left him with nerve damage causing repeated quasi-epileptic seizures.
...
This brings us to Komarr (1998), where Miles investigates apparent sabotage of the solar mirror that was central to terraforming plans for this eponymous subject world, one social embarrassment being that while previously conquering the place, Miles's own father acquired the soubriquet "Butcher of Komarr". Although generally light in tone, the novel features a grim, economical sketch of a bad marriage, and even before its subtly abusive husband is eliminated (by an anti-Barrayaran revolutionary group so high-minded that every one of the many deaths they cause is accidental), our hero has fallen mightily for the emotionally scarred wife Ekaterin Vorsoisson.

A Civil Campaign (1999) is the immediate sequel to Komarr, and gives the saga an enjoyable twist into pure social comedy with a spice of politics. Its dedication begins: "For Jane, Charlotte, Georgette, and Dorothy ...", presumably Austen, Bronte, Heyer and Sayers. The last in particular suggests conscious echoes of how a wealthy, overconfident, undersized member of the privileged classes (Lord Peter Wimsey; Miles) can bungle his initial courtship of a traumatized woman (Harriet Vane; Ekaterin) who's as yet profoundly unready for a new relationship.
...
As the incurably pushy Miles scatters patronizing largesse and begins to plan his "civil campaign" of romance in terms of laying siege to some massively defended fortress, we can sense that there are bad times just around the corner, and that Nemesis is waiting for our hero with a well-stuffed sockful of sand.
...
"Bug vomit," said Miles, working through the implications.
...
Meanwhile, on woman-starved Barrayar, the hoped availability of widowed Ekaterin provokes a buzz of interest that worries Miles no end. Meanwhile, our hero's friend and rival Lord Ivan Vorpatril is wistfully fancying reunion with one of his old mistresses, an encounter which thanks to Betan biotechnology is an awful shock. Meanwhile certain members of Ekaterin's Barrayaran family feel they could do a far better job of raising her nine-year-old son Nikki -- with whom Miles incidentally gets along well, in part because he's as good as Wimsey at talking uncondescendingly to children; being short may help.

The Meanwhile list goes on and on. Miles's own father and mother, who held centre stage in Shards of Honor and Barrayar, are still around and still formidable despite semi-retirement. Meanwhile, the rumour that Miles himself was responsible for the death of Ekaterin's unloved husband -- a rumour which like all the best lies has one faint toehold in fact -- is being eagerly milked for political blackmail. Meanwhile, various more or less dirty tricks regarding succession and inheritance are timed to detonate at a climactic session of the Chamber of the Council of the Vor Counts ... but nothing in this lofty political court could go as spectacularly wrong as the Miles Vorkosigan dinner party at which too many of his imprudences come home to roost, not at all helped by a contribution of sheer Wodehousian farce from the butter-bug plot strand.

The central character Miles Vorkosigan was introduced as a deliberately unlikely military hero, made diminutive -- even, in the author's word, dwarfish -- and brittle-boned thanks to being poisoned while still in the womb, and so forever reliant on fast talk, intelligence and clever strategy rather than socking the foeman on the jaw.

In the early The Warrior's Apprentice (1986) Miles showed the inspired blarney of an Eric Frank Russell protagonist as he talked his way from nowhere very much to leader of the dread -- though previously nonexistent -- Dendarii space mercenaries. A convenient timeline in the back of the present volume charts his further exploits in both this alter-ego role and a more legitimate career in the military security division of his homeworld Barrayar's small and much beset Empire ... whose semi-feudalism, rigid codes of honour and lords-and-ladies social pyramid are considered uncouth, almost barbaric, by larger galactic society.

While Miles is an unfailingly likeable viewpoint character, Bujold takes pains to show him as simultaneously a near-monster of pushiness and overcompensation who doesn't hesitate to use trump cards of lordly status, charisma, and even the exploitation of his own vulnerability as weapons in personal as well as combat arenas.
...
Like a P.G. Wodehouse hero riding high on false confidence, Miles can be rapidly deflated when he pushes too far and tumbles into comic come-uppance. In A Civil Campaign, for example, he unscrupulously bullies a friend into promising to have nothing to do with the woman whom Miles fancies -- a far from heroic move which betrays his own streak of gnawing insecurity, and of course backfires on him.

Much has gone before. Miles's military career came to an uncomic end after near-death and cryonic preservation in Mirror Dance, recovery from which has left him with nerve damage causing repeated quasi-epileptic seizures.
...
This brings us to Komarr (1998), where Miles investigates apparent sabotage of the solar mirror that was central to terraforming plans for this eponymous subject world, one social embarrassment being that while previously conquering the place, Miles's own father acquired the soubriquet "Butcher of Komarr". Although generally light in tone, the novel features a grim, economical sketch of a bad marriage, and even before its subtly abusive husband is eliminated (by an anti-Barrayaran revolutionary group so high-minded that every one of the many deaths they cause is accidental), our hero has fallen mightily for the emotionally scarred wife Ekaterin Vorsoisson.

A Civil Campaign (1999) is the immediate sequel to Komarr, and gives the saga an enjoyable twist into pure social comedy with a spice of politics. Its dedication begins: "For Jane, Charlotte, Georgette, and Dorothy ... ", presumably Austen, Bronte, Heyer and Sayers. The last in particular suggests conscious echoes of how a wealthy, overconfident, undersized member of the privileged classes (Lord Peter Wimsey; Miles) can bungle his initial courtship of a traumatized woman (Harriet Vane; Ekaterin) who's as yet profoundly unready for a new relationship.
...
As the incurably pushy Miles scatters patronizing largesse and begins to plan his "civil campaign" of romance in terms of laying siege to some massively defended fortress, we can sense that there are bad times just around the corner, and that Nemesis is waiting for our hero with a well-stuffed sockful of sand.
...
"Bug vomit," said Miles, working through the implications.
...
Meanwhile, on woman-starved Barrayar, the hoped availability of widowed Ekaterin provokes a buzz of interest that worries Miles no end. Meanwhile, our hero's friend and rival Lord Ivan Vorpatril is wistfully fancying reunion with one of his old mistresses, an encounter which thanks to Betan biotechnology is an awful shock. Meanwhile certain members of Ekaterin's Barrayaran family feel they could do a far better job of raising her nine-year-old son Nikki -- with whom Miles incidentally gets along well, in part because he's as good as Wimsey at talking uncondescendingly to children; being short may help.

The Meanwhile list goes on and on. Miles's own father and mother, who held centre stage in Shards of Honor and Barrayar, are still around and still formidable despite semi-retirement. Meanwhile, the rumour that Miles himself was responsible for the death of Ekaterin's unloved husband -- a rumour which like all the best lies has one faint toehold in fact -- is being eagerly milked for political blackmail. Meanwhile, various more or less dirty tricks regarding succession and inheritance are timed to detonate at a climactic session of the Chamber of the Council of the Vor Counts ... but nothing in this lofty political court could go as spectacularly wrong as the Miles Vorkosigan dinner party at which too many of his imprudences come home to roost, not at all helped by a contribution of sheer Wodehousian farce from the butter-bug plot strand.

Miles Naismith Vorkosigan comes of age.
...
When the simple merchant expedition draws the attention of an unexpected enemy, Miles is forced to masquerade as commander of a fictional fleet of hired guns he names after the mountains near his home--the Dendarii Mercenaries.His original crew of misf ... more info>> 1986 Locus Poll Award Nominee
...
Miles infiltrates a prison camp at Dagoola IV, where he plots from within to free the prisoners. [Publisher's Note: The Borders of Infinity was originally published as a stand-alone novella in the anthology Free Lancers in September 1987.
...
Twenty-three year old Lieutenant Miles Vorkosigan challenges the criminal underground on the planet Jackson's Whole to rescue a research scientist. [Publisher's Note: Labyrinth was originally published as a stand-alone novella in the August 1989 issue of Analog.
...
[Sequel to "The Warrior's Apprentice"] Miles Vorkosigan graduates from the Barrayaran Military Academy with high expectations of ship command, but is disappointed with an assignment as meteorologist to Lazkowski Base, an arctic training camp.
...
His tenure in the windy, snow-covered north is cut short when Miles narrowly averts a massacre between the trigger-happy base commander and mutinous recruits.After a brief stay under 'house arrest', Miles is re-assigned to investigate a suspicious military ... more info>> 1990 Locus Poll Award Nominee, Hugo Award Winner, HOMer Award Nominee, SF Chronicle Poll Nominee, Seiun Award Nominee, Fictionwise eBook of the Year (2002)
...
Cetaganda is another installment in the Hugo-award winning adventures of Miles Vorkosigan, in which Miles and Cousin Ivan go to Cetaganda to play the part of sprigs of the nobility doing their diplomatic duty by good old Barrayar.
...
The idea is that they will gain diplomatic polish on this simple mission, but when the Cetagandan empress dies naturally and her lifelong attendant dies unnaturally--apparently a suicide, but there are rumors--Miles and Ivan find themselves in the thick of it.Miles tr ... more info>> 1996 Seiun Award Nominee, HOMer Award Nominee, Locus Poll Award Nominee
...
When the Mercenaries' payroll doesn't arrive on time and someone tries to kill Miles, he realizes he's in trouble again.Miles must juggle both his identities at once to unravel the complicated plo ... more info>> 1989

Miles' suddenly defunct bodyguard evidently had a long pre-history, and Miles himself was an incipient case of schizophrenia as well as chronic hyperactivity.At the close of Apprentice his alternate persona as "Admiral Naismith" was in the closet while he finagled his way into the academy, but I had no doubt Naismith would escape to cause more mayhem very soon.

Narrative impulsion is actually a constant in Bujold's work, as is her easy, almost transparent style with its occasional unexpected striking turn of phrase - "Death had a temperature and it was damned cold" (Komarr 27) - or its wickedly reshaped allusions: " The cream pie of justice flies one way" (Vor 336).
...
Much later, readers must follow Miles into a hospital where his battle casualties are revived from frozen sleep - or not (Mirror 29-37).
...
Among women's interventions in the SF tradition of action/suspense and technical focus, let alone the gung-ho realms of military SF, Bothari's characterisation is a tour de force that almost overshadows Bujold's long-term development of her central protagonist, Miles Vorkosigan.
...
Miles bestrides the Vorkosigan universe, a figure whose panache conquers readers as fast as fellow characters, and who has bent the shape of the military sub-genre along with most of the rules of SF: even as he re-writes the manual for military heroes, Miles slews Bujold's books irrevocably toward the primacy of character.Beyond that, his long-term development is a phenomenon in either mainstream or genre fiction.
...
It is quite easy to see Miles as the focus of Bujold's thematic concerns as a writer, and to propose that those concerns centre on the question of identity.
...
Against such theoretical background, concern with Miles' self-discovery and personality integration can appear slightly dubious; nevertheless, the extended study of such a process in fiction, rather than theory, and what it does to SF and the SF hero, make Miles a rara avis well worth following.

Against Miles' trajectory, Bujold's Vorkosigan oeuvre splits easily into two phases, the earlier and later books.Early books are epitomized by The Warrior's Apprentice: unabashed space opera, clearly military space opera, with unwonted variations that I have already discussed.Even in Apprentice, Bujold's shreddies don't just shred.The death of the pilot officer, tortured for information to allow Miles' first ship capture, is a particularly excruciating case (127-30).Repeatedly, these shards of untoward reality, so to speak, puncture the light-hearted adventure envelope, just as Miles' character repeatedly contradicts what we expect of the classic young male SF protagonist.

In these books Miles appears what Joan Baez once called Bob Dylan: a "genius brat," a manic loose cannon who triumphs where superiors and enemies fail, an outlaw, a white Coyote prevailing not by gun or fist but wits.
...
But hardly anything in Jim Villani's description of SF women writers' anti-heroes fits Miles.He is "highly intelligent" but not "rendered impotent by ... nature and/or culture" (26).If "not brave in the accepted masculine sense" he is anything but "indecisive," though often "lonely" he is not solitary, and he is above all a "charismatic leader" who does inspire "blind faith" everywhere (27).And unlike Frankenstein or Le Guin's Shevek, his sexuality is definitely not "emasculated" (27-28).

In this subversion of the SF heroic model, the comedy is critical, and although some is drawn by the cultures and other characters, much centres on Miles.Most notably, Bujold makes Miles both comic and able to laugh at himself.
...
After slipping in and out of Naismith's persona in Apprentice, in Brothers in Arms (1989) Miles infuriates Barrayaran authority along with their mortal Cetagandan enemies, by making first one, then the other persona his alias.In The Vor Game (1990) the same double-bluff runs throughout.In Cetaganda (1996) he is limited to Lord Vorkosigan; in Brothers in Arms, Bujold ups the stakes by giving Miles a physical double, a clone, whom he acknowledges, in a maternally inherited tradition from Beta Colony, as his true brother.But as the series continues the strains of the psychic double become more and more evident.Miles invented Naismith, says Cordelia, because Barrayar gave him

'so much unbearable stress, so much pain, he created an entire other personality to escape into.He then persuaded several thousand galactic mercenaries to support his psychosis, and ... conned the Barrayaran Imperium into paying for it all' (Mirror 216)

Although his "safety valve" (217) works, Miles needs "the little Admiral" to survive.

As Naismith, Miles is rambunctious, riotous, gung-ho to the point of lunacy.
...
It takes a lighter hand to show Miles moved to respond by an ambition for "mountain-climbing" ("Labyrinth" 166), without outrage to the sensibilities of a card-carrying feminist like me. On the other hand, it is a charming renovation of so much heavy-handed SF sex, that when a true siren casts her eye on Miles, he is rescued by a frantic allergy to her perfume - in effect, by a strategic sneeze ( Vor, 227).Nevertheless, despite Naismith's heterosexual enterprise, and although Miles' father is quite comfortably credited with bisexuality, as Vorkosigan or Naismith Miles' nearest approach to alternate sexualities is a flirtation with a Beta Colony hermaphrodite.And in the Bujold universe, alternate female sexuality does not appear to exist.But as Lord Vorkosigan, in the early books Miles has no sexual adventures.Indeed, he limits his love interest to vain attempts at making one of his spectacular women into Lady Vorkosigan, a role that they concertedly refuse.
...
By that stage, Miles is also in danger of ossifying as an enfant terrible, caught outside the Barrayaran command structure and condemned to rebellious insubordinacy, a brilliant but wacky freelance, a divided personality.A striking divergence, to be sure, from the military SF prototypes and the SF hero or anti-hero, but ultimately, just one more of those adolescent conquerors, from the protagonist of The Last Starfighter (1984) back to the Heinlein juveniles, whose entrapment in the light-hearted world of genre SF and space opera will make sure he never grows up.
...
Originally trained to impersonate Miles and physically warped to match his physique, he was intended as a pawn in the overthrow of the Barrayaran emperor.In Mirror Dance he gets Miles killed attempting to match his brother's military prowess in a raid on the clone-factories of his birthplace, Jackson's Whole.With Miles sidelined and literally mislaid for half the novel, Mark is forced to make his own integrations - and dis-integration - firstly with Miles' parents, then into the Vorkosigan family and Barrayaran society, and then, when he returns to Jackson's Whole to find Miles, as his personality fragments under the tortures of a mutual enemy.The novel closes after some normal fast and twisty action with Miles recovered - in both senses - and Mark's personality reconciled, its dark aspects accepted along with his abnormal physique, and his own interests laid down within his individual niche on Barrayar.

Mirror Dance is then a double reach for psychic equilibrium, for Miles with his physical double, for Mark with the unstable, as yet undefined and often dark limits of his own subjectivity.If it leaves Mark as a close approximation of the monolithic humanist subject, Miles takes away more dangerous mementos than a fresh collection of scars and another beautiful but transient lover.His resurrection also leaves him with chronic, sudden, unpredictable convulsions, that threaten not only his persona as Admiral Naismith but his entire military career.
...
For Miles as Naismith or Vorkosigan, the worst thing that could ever happen is to be expelled from the Barrayaran military and his niche in ImpSec, the elite if invisible crème of Barrayaran security.It is not unusual for military SF heroes to be disgraced, or expelled from service, even to have the expulsion carried over a couple of books, as with David Weber's Honor Harrington.But in these cases, the disgrace is always falsely based.In Memory it is not only real but permanent: Miles is found out fudging a report to cover the effects of a convulsion during action, and after an excruciating scene with the head of ImpSec, also an old family friend and mentor, he is pitched literally and metaphorically into the street.The spy-novel plot that carries Memory exhibits Bujold's usual narrative drive and ingenuity; but in Miles' ongoing story it is only a springboard for this metaphorical death of his career, and more crucially, of his Naismith persona.Naismith can only function in the mercenary fleet, and the mercenary fleet freelances for ImpSec.But to take the fleet and become Naismith permanently would be to commit treason, and thus kill, perhaps in the most literal sense, Lord Vorkosigan.

Miles Naismith Vorkosigan comes of age.
...
When the simple merchant expedition draws the attention of an unexpected enemy, Miles is forced to masquerade as commander of a fictional fleet of hired guns he names after the mountains near his home--the Dendarii Mercenaries.His original crew of misf ... more info>> 1986 Locus Poll Award Nominee
...
Twenty-three year old Lieutenant Miles Vorkosigan challenges the criminal underground on the planet Jackson's Whole to rescue a research scientist. [Publisher's Note: Labyrinth was originally published as a stand-alone novella in the August 1989 issue of Analog.
...
Miles infiltrates a prison camp at Dagoola IV, where he plots from within to free the prisoners. [Publisher's Note: The Borders of Infinity was originally published as a stand-alone novella in the anthology Free Lancers in September 1987.
...
Cetaganda is another installment in the Hugo-award winning adventures of Miles Vorkosigan, in which Miles and Cousin Ivan go to Cetaganda to play the part of sprigs of the nobility doing their diplomatic duty by good old Barrayar.
...
The idea is that they will gain diplomatic polish on this simple mission, but when the Cetagandan empress dies naturally and her lifelong attendant dies unnaturally--apparently a suicide, but there are rumors--Miles and Ivan find themselves in the thick of it.Miles tr ... more info>> 1996 Seiun Award Nominee, HOMer Award Nominee, Locus Poll Award Nominee
...
When the Mercenaries' payroll doesn't arrive on time and someone tries to kill Miles, he realizes he's in trouble again.Miles must juggle both his identities at once to unravel the complicated plo ... more info>> 1989
...
[Sequel to "The Warrior's Apprentice"] Miles Vorkosigan graduates from the Barrayaran Military Academy with high expectations of ship command, but is disappointed with an assignment as meteorologist to Lazkowski Base, an arctic training camp.
...
His tenure in the windy, snow-covered north is cut short when Miles narrowly averts a massacre between the trigger-happy base commander and mutinous recruits.After a brief stay under 'house arrest', Miles is re-assigned to investigate a suspicious military ... more info>> 1990 Locus Poll Award Nominee, Hugo Award Winner, HOMer Award Nominee, SF Chronicle Poll Nominee, Seiun Award Nominee, Fictionwise eBook of the Year (2002)