Cryoburn

I am such a huge fan of these books that I cannot possibly overstate it. I love Miles Vorkosigan et al to itty, bitty little pieces and I would fall on any book featuring him like a rabid piranha.

That said.

Cryoburn, the most recent in the series, is a fairly solid caper that holds your interest,

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but doesn't captivate it. I'm sorry to say that I think this particular series with this particular character at its helm is starting to show its age. Miles is 39, grown, respectable, and while he's still got that fantastically manic mind, he's also got a wife, a host of children, and a bigger sense of responsibility than risk.

These are all good things - we spent a long time watching Miles become this person, and it was a gorgeous journey. In fact, I can't think of another character journey I've loved even half as much. The shift from Warrior's Apprentice Miles through Mirror Dance and Memory and toward the Miles we know now is amazingly rich, with a wonderful backdrop of characters, culture, and technology to keep him company. But it feels now that he's winding down.

Cryoburn is a book set on a planet that revolves around death. Or not-death. Most of the business on the planet revolves around cryogenically freezing and storing people. As such, it's a great tool for Bujold to explore notions of death, of generations come and gone, of the shadow of great men and those who stand in it. We spent many of the early books of the series watching Miles try to wiggle his way out from his father and grandfather's sizable shadows - now Miles himself has grown an impressive one.

Bujold is a deft enough writer that even a fun caper and mystery book has these lovely touches of character and philosophy, but there's not a lot of character change or growth here.

The book gains most of its strength in retrospect when

GIGANTIC SPOILER

the aftermath drabbles show us not the aftermath of Miles' usual antics, but of the unexpected news of his father's death. Suddenly, all that musing about generations and change and life and death feels so much more poignant - and Aral Vorkosigan, who has been a secondary figure in most of the novels, but a very important one - feels both gigantic and very, very small.

Do not read the last pages in a public place. I made that mistake. And the final 100 words reduced me to tears with an unexpected efficiency. Absolutely beautiful, and the sort of emotional gut-punch you can only get after living with these characters for years.

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Fifteenth book in the Vorkosigan series, and mostly, but not entirely, "Miles happens to people". I don't think this book would do much for people who aren't already familiar with the series, even though I think it's a wonderful book for existing fans. it's a competent enough caper novel, but if

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you come to it new to the series, it's going to feel as if it's not fleshed out. The richness comes from reader familiarity with the character of Miles, and what it's taken him to get to this point in his life -- he's 39, 8 years on from the previous novel, married with children and getting tired of of being called away from home on the Emperor's business for weeks at a time. While there's still some action, the ostensible focus of this book is on economic shenanigans, of a sort Miles is well fitted to investigate because he's a natural scam artist himself.

The real emotional punch comes in the last few pages. I knew what was coming, because I'd heard Bujold talking about it at a con a few years ago, before she'd started writing the book -- but it still got me. The final 100 words made me tear up, and probably always will do when I read them again. And that is something that simply will not have the same effect on a new reader. This is not the book to start reading the Vorkosiverse with, but the one to come to after you've watched Miles grow to this point.

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I've been away from Bujold's stories about Miles Vorkosigan for a while—I wonder if my reaction would have been different had I been reading them in a steady stream.

First, this isn't a good candidate for entering the series if you're not already familiar with it. This isn't because of backstory:

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while Bujold doesn't provide much explanation for the references to previous events that crop up, they are largely irrelevant to this story and could be skipped over quite readily. The plot, itself, is largely self-contained and easily accessible to a new reader.

No, it's more a question of the characters. While the new introductions (Jin or Vorlynkin, for example) are fleshed out, the recurring characters have only their outlines sketched in for the reader. Bujold is relying entirely on the reader's memory to provide depth or understanding of the frenzied little clown who (nonetheless) seems to be quite an important person, or the stalwart bodyguard who is curiously ineffectual at keeping his charge from doing stupid things, or the cold and calculating younger brother. Longtime readers will have little difficulty with this aspect but the newcomer is likely to find them all stilted, stereotyped and maybe just a bit stupid.

Moving on, I found that I didn't enjoy the tone or storyline of this book so much. The early Miles books were, well, rollicking...sort of madcap, fast-paced quasi-military adventures full of colorful characters that sometimes were just plot-driven but sometimes had some depth to them. This book, however, is more somber in tone with an edge of moralizing at the reader. It's entirely plot-driven. The adventure content seems diminished, replaced with some economic/political conspiracy descriptions. The main plots (there were two of them) never integrated into a coherent whole. Everything was just so pat in how it worked out. In other words, it wasn't as much fun.

Be careful how much you read about this book as the ending is supposed to be a surprise. Unfortunately, many commentators seem to have no objections to spoiling it for everyone. In retrospect, I did feel that much of the moralizing throughout the story was aimed at making the ending more Significant (with a capital letter), but it's not a bad ending for all that.

In the end, I felt like Bujold just mailed this one in and I'm astonished it's up for a Hugo. It really makes me wonder how much of a role "Name & Fame" play in that nomination process...or else the other contenders are really quite bad.

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Miles Vorkosigan investigates and thwarts yet another threat to Barrayar. This one both bizarre and truly fascinating. This novel begins with Miles in the middle of things on a strange planet, and brings in a fascinating cast of characters including a very affecting young lad and his sister. Plus

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of course, Lord Mark, Armsman Roic, Kareen Koudelka, and assorted Vor and galactics. Miles continues to mature, while remaining Miles, Mark continues to be Mark, while maturing. There is an expectable, but still painful, twist at the end, presented in proper Barrayaran style.

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Miles is sent to Kibou-daini to investigate their cryogenics corporations. Something smells, and it isn't the hundreds of thousands of frozen corpses trying to cheat death.

Being Miles, it isn't long before things start to slide sideways. The first page of the book, in fact. He soon gathers an

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interesting crew around him, including Jin, the boy who loves all animals, and his sister Mina. Their mother, a cryogenics protester, has been suspiciously frozen and Miles will not rest until he knows everything.

Of course I love this book. Bujold has a flair for writing about complicated ideas; the possibilities of science and the morality of those possibilities, and how people might work through them. Though the I knew the ending of events beforehand, I forgot that this was the book they took place in, and so was devastated. This only happens with excellent stories.

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Ah, I love Miles Vorkosigan and his hyperactive and detecting ways. It's been quite a while since the last Miles space caper, and this book holds up to the best of them. You don't need to read the others to read this one. It starts off with a bang, as Miles is wandering lost, drugged and confused

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through kilometers of creepy subterraneum crypts which house cryogenically frozen bodies. He's on planet Kibou-dainai, where a handful of cryogenics corporations hold a lot of power and seek to expand into Miles' home empire with their business, which is why he has been sent there to get more information in his Imperial Auditor capacity for his empire. Miles has just escaped a botched kidnapping attempt by what appear to be resistance fighters to the cryo-freezing way of life, where few die and the ill are frozen so that in more technologically advanced times they can be revived and cured, while their voting proxies go to others until they are revived. Soon he is rescued by a young orphan lad, Jin, who has a habit of rescuing pets, and recovers to find himself amidst a community of squatters running an illegal cryofreezing establishment. Jin's mother was a top freedom fighter who was abruptly & mysteriously taken away and frozen, and Miles is determined to uncover what's really going on in this society. The pace stays fast and suspenseful through this tale, and I enjoyed the switching of viewpoints from Miles to young Jin.

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It’s been a long time since Lois McMaster Bujold gave us a Miles Vorkosigan novel – eight years, to be precise, since Diplomatic Immunity. I’ve missed Miles; his adventures have always been the science fictional equivalent of popcorn, fun to read, not too taxing, written breezily and well.

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Cryoburn takes a leap in time to show us a Miles who is now 39 years old, married with four children, and working as an Imperial Auditor – with his own peculiar, almost childlike, disregard for rules and complete creativity and curiosity. It’s good to read about him again.

This adventure finds Miles on the planet Kibou-daini, which is built around the industry of cryonics, that is, freezing those who are fatally ill, injured, or just too old to live any longer. The idea is supposed to be that these individuals will be thawed and cured of their afflictions as cures are discovered by medical science, but oddly, few revivals ever take place. The reason for this seems to be not that medical science is making no advances, but because the cryocorps that run the cryonics businesses accumulate the votes of those who are frozen, and are allowed to exercise them. Who wants to give up even a single vote – a single bit of power – by reviving someone?

Miles goes to Kibou-daini under the pretense of attending a conference on cryonics, but when we first come across him on this planet, he is wandering about the deep, dark halls of a typical cryocorps installation, with rows upon rows of frozen corpsicals around him, hallucinating. Someone attempted to kidnap him and probably shot him with a sedative to keep him quiet. Unfortunately, because of Miles’s strange body chemistry, most sedatives have precisely the opposite effect on him. The hyperactivity which resulted was probably what allowed him to escape his captors, but now he’s lost and not exactly in his right mind.

Fortunately, Miles is rescued by a young boy, Jin, who takes him back to his homeless shelter and cares for Miles until Miles recovers from the drug. This particular homeless shelter, though, turns out to be quite fascinating to Miles. It is an illegal, underground cryocorps, freezing people who can’t afford the procedure otherwise. This business and its owner show a whole new aspect to the cryonics business to Miles, and reveals a fissure in Kibou-daini’s society between the wealthy and the poor – one that is even more a matter of life and death than is the same fissure in our own society. Miles becomes very interested in and involved with Jin, who turns out to have a mother who is a political activist working for justice in cryonics, a mother who was illegally frozen to shut her up when her protests started to catch fire.

Miles accomplishes his first mission – to prevent a Kibou-daini takeover of Barrayar – quickly and with finesse, but by then he is more interested in Kibou-daini’s problems, and more specifically, with Jin’s. His schemes to solve those problems consumes the bulk of the book in trademark Vorkosigan style, complete with conning the conmen, deceiving the liars, politicians and corporate bigwigs, and working some real justice for those for whom the word “justice” has been only a theory that never worked in their favor.

In other words, this is a typical Miles Vorkosigan story. It’s fun. This is by no means the equal of Bujold’s more challenging Vorkosigan novels like Mirror Dance; I’d be very surprised indeed if this book were nominated for any awards, no matter how often Bujold has been on the Hugo and Nebula shortlists. But that’s not to say that it’s not worth reading, because it is. I’d enjoy ten more like it. But the end of the book indicates that Miles is moving into a new phase of his life, and I suspect that the next Vorkosigan novel is going to be quite different from this one. I look forward to it.

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Cryoburn is very much a paired bookend with Diplomatic Immunity. Where that book was thematically about birth and children, and set in an orbital zero-gravity environment, this one is about death and parents and takes place - much of it - in catacombs under the surface of the earth.

The ending was

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in retrospect inevitable: it is one of the few events which could have tied in the overall themes to Miles personally.

There are other thematic deaths as well. The book is implicitly about the death of a society: the changes pending to Kibou-daini after Miles leaves will turn almost everything there upside-down, with a radical reformulation at almost every level of society. It is also, in the end, about the death of memory. It is not so much that Aral's secrets die with him - Cordelia is still a witness to those - but that he is the last surviving witness at the centre to Barrayar's transition from Mad Yuri's war through Ezar's reign to Gregor's day. There may be others who remember as far back, but he is the last one who was there at the beginning and at the centre of the changes.

It is possible at first glance to see this as about death and resurrection together, with Mark's cryo-revival scheme as a future counterbalancing the cryo-sleep of the backstory of Kibou-daini, but (just as it is usual to make a firm distinction between reanimation which merely restores an old life (as with Lazarus) and resurrection to a new life) Lisa Sato and her colleagues go back to their political action group; the newly-raised sleepers in the facility get an extra twenty years of doing whatever they had been doing before. And the dead -- all those embalmed with decaying fluids as well as Aral -- remain really dead.

At first, the plot looks a bit like Komarr, another claustrophobic book with a detective theme, in that much of the plot is driven by an initial and largely incidental coincidence, but where that novel is tightly unified, this one (like, say, A Civil Campaign) is disjointed, with Miles' primary mission merely sharing the same milieu as the "main" plot of the novel. (Running across Jin at random is not, in the end, a coincidence in the sense that running slap up against Tien is, as the whole plot with Jin and his mother and Dr. Leiber is really a separate sideshow to Miles' real mission.) This may have the most understated romantic plot of all of Lois' novels, as well.

Not that Lois has moved away from coincidence in structuring her novels. The neat resolution is made possible by Miles' close relationship with (probably) the one person in the galaxy for whom 3000 frozen and largely poor people are not a liability but a business opportunity.

Overall, this seems to me to be more successful than DI, possibly because it explores new territory (in many ways, DI was a closing of a set of already existing arcs, tying up loose ends).

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Miles and Armsman Roic are sent to a Japanese cultured world to investigate a corporation that has interests in a major new Cryopreservation facility on Komarr. Miles get involved in a scuffle during the official presentations and quickly discovers the seemy underside to the planet's corporate

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glossy surface. This rather trivally enables him to deduce all the consequences. The japanese effect is limited to the names and scenary though it has no other consequence or notice.

This is far from the best of Miles' adventures, although not actually bad - I'm not sure Bujold is capable of writing a bad novel. It is somewhat short, a little rushed, and lacking in much of Miles' brilliance. in part this is because other characters get a chance to have the narrative especially Jin a young boy living in the seemy underside, who helps Miles several times. This sort of works as a narrative device, it isn't over used, but it is unusual in the Miles series. Several years have passed since the last book but these are flashed past us in one Holocube scene. None of the characters appears tohave changed.

As might be obvious ina book featuring Cryopreservation the theme often (over) heavily accented here is death. However rather than the perhaps expected good deaths and bad deaths theme, it is more the consequences of death and not-death that are highlighted. How does early freezing effect a planets demograpghics, why are the religious not concerned about the period of teim before they born, that kind of thing. It is also an opportunity Bujold takes to kill off a couple of major characters. I'm sure there actual death scenes will be the subject of some future short stories, as they're very much in absentina here. Somehow this all seems a bit ladelled on top of the story rather than properly integrated, as has been managed in some of the previous volumes.

Readable, enjoyable in places, and even laughout loud funny once or twice, it never quite manages the seriousness of a funeral, but also avoids the levity of a wake. Not one of her best.

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I love LMB, nad love this series, but I couldn't really follow the crime here, and so never quite understood the plot. I had just reread Cordelia's honor, and this may have just seemed too removed from Barrayar for me, but while I knew the baddies were bad, I still couldn't see what evil they were

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planning on the other planet. I liked Miles, acting in his usual Milesish way, and I liked seeing some old characters drop by. I did like the boy Jin and menagerie and the ending packs a huge wallop.

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I thoroughly enjoyed this book (a Christmas present). Miles Vorkosigan is always a welcome visitor. And while I agree that it is not the best of the series, it is still much better than many novels. Mark makes a too brief appearance. I never felt that Miles was in real danger - he had the bad guys

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in a spin from the beginning. But I, like other reviewers, cried at the unexpected end - 100 words to make a reader cry and there's nothing wrong with an author's writing skills! And am I the only one to spot the dig at bankers? - commodification of frozen toxic assets indeed.

And there's a CDROM with the book. I am puzzled by this at first but WOW it has a copy of the entire series on it and interviews and a load of other stuff - enough to keep one happy for many hours. Baen win a prize for enlightened attitude unlike most publishers.

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The latest book in Bujold's Miles Vorkosigan series, which, conveniently, came out just as I finally managed to catch up with the rest of the series. In this one, our irrepressible pint-sized hero deals with politics, corporate corruption, and kidnappings on a planet obsessed with cryogenics. It's

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not quite up there with the best of the series, perhaps, but it's a fun, solidly entertaining installment. Even though it'd only been a couple of months since the last book for me, it's been several years for the characters and for most readers, so there's a pleasant feeling here of catching up with old friends, and Bujold does a great, very smooth job of letting us know what various characters have been up to, even when they don't play much of a part in this particular story. I have the impression from somewhere that this is may be the final volume, and I'm a bit torn as to how I feel about that possibility. It ends on a note that may possibly mark a natural stopping place for the series, but I still really, really want to know what will happen to Miles next. Whether it's forever, or just until the next installment, I'm going to miss that crazy little guy.

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A later book of the Vorkosigan saga. In this one Miles is 39.

The idea behind this book is cryo-preservation. If you have yourself frozen by an organization or a corporation, you are not considered dead, and so can still vote. The org that froze you votes your vote. And controls whatever finances

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you signed over to them. Eventually the forzen out vote the population.

Lois explores this and other ideas. The plot twists and turns are frequent, mostly un-forseen and pretty good!

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Not her best work.
The book is highly predictable (the first time Miles thought about the Durona group and their rejuvenation therapy for his father, I knew that Aral was going to die in this novel) And that's not where the telegraphing ended either. It was a sad departure for her. Her action scenes

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were almost non-existent, the character development bland or not existent (Miles is 39 and the only thing that's changed is his holocube with kids photos in them. Huh?)
Seems to me that this book was simply a way to shut her fans up.
Don't get me wrong I love the Vorkosigan saga, and would like to read more of them. This wasn't one of them though. It was a poorly slapped together book that was there only to show the death of Aral Vorkosigan.
If she was in front of me I'd slide it to her and ask "really?".

And for the record, the ONLY reason I'm giving it one star is because I'm comparing it to her other works.

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I think I burned myself out a bit on Miles, and Cryoburn brought him back a bit for me. He's charming and funny again. There are some great supporting characters (both new and old). The action trips along. Cryoburn was quite enjoyable.

[personal profile] facetofcathy has a thought-provoking and not terribly spoilery review (it discusses the culture of the planet on which Miles has his latest adventure and the roles of women throughout the series) with which I basically agree. The way in which Miles casually disrupts the lives of

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others, with consequences for them and their families, was very much on display, as was his lively mind and willingness to cut corners. It was a perfectly respectable outing, exploring some of the ramifications of cryopreservation technology with a bit of allusion to present troubles with securitization and corporate ownership of government.

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This story is more socio-political drama than military sci-fi (and thus, unlike any of the others I've read in this series). Miles is more mature and the topic is more mature and the people are more mature and... I didn't like it.

I read these books for a fast, fun and frenzied look at people not

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so different than us living in worlds very different from ours and what I got in this book is mostly moralizing (oh, how bad it is to value cryo-preserved bodies for monetary gain instead of... well, not sure what happens in a society with stacks of dead people waiting to come back) and boring (like I care about the soap-opera activities of Jin and his pets? what does that have to do with anything other than to show some "human" side to the story).

Certainly it's not the light-hearted, fun and resolved Miles storyline I was expecting. I don't want someone else's morals, but thanks for the offer.

I wish the last 100 pages had been written like the last 500 words - at least then it would have had some pacing and angst.

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You definitely need to have read other books in the series, have a fondness for the Vorkisigans in general and Miles in particular. Miles investigates a finance scheme involving trading cryogenically frozen people on a planet deeply interested in death and aging. A failed kidnapping attempt sees

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him stumbling, hallucinating into the run-away heir (and his menagerie) of the force-frozen leader of a cryo reform movement. Shenanigans ensue!

Spoilers

Miles was most amusing while hallucinating, Roic seems to have grown up a lot and Ekaterin is off screen looking after what appears to be a vast army of Vorkosigan children. The final drabbles outlining the passing of Aral Vorkosigan were heartwrenching and I’m glad I had some warning. I’d love to know how Aral handled being a grandparent.

I missed the strong women of previous novels, I like having people around who I might want to be.

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After a very long wait for another Miles book, this was a much appreciated return to the Vorkosigan universe. Cryoburn explores the interesting possibility of what would happen if we put everyone in cryostorage instead of cemeteries and who might benefit. We get a taste of Mad Miles when he is

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separated from his armsman and other support crew and must fend for himself. There are many elements of the book that feel like earlier books, but not in a way that becomes repetitive because Miles is older and approaches problems slightly differently. I absolutely loved getting to see Roic's point of view and how he has really settled into chasing after Miles in the past few years. The end of the book does feel rather disjointed. I kept expecting for the two cryostorage facilities plots to intertwine but they never did. It did feel more realistic, but a bit of a let down when I was expecting more of a unified resolution. The last few pages, however, made my breath catch with only three unexpected words.

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A fun book in the Miles series of books. I've read where some readers have problems with the ending -- they thought that the subject of the very end should be the book not the case, but I thought it worked perfectly in the context of the book's arc.

This one was top-notch all the way to the end. Whereupon it became transcendent and eviscerating and made me temporarily lose the ability to breathe.

Miles is so real, by which I mean to say, Bujold is an extraordinarily good writer. I loved Jin's POV in this book and was briefly surprised that

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Bujold was so convincing writing an 11 year old boy. Then I stopped and remembered it was Bujold, after all. She could write convincingly from a snail's POV, no doubt.

The story is splendid- full of philosophical reverberations and big questions and entirely believable multi-faceted people. I am sorry to have reached the end of the series. At least till November- which as I write is only 3 months away.

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Wow. It's a good Miles story - a wild tangle of events, though he does, I think, more planning and less improvising than usual. It starts rather confusingly, with Miles already in serious trouble, though he escapes that brouhaha relatively easily - but it sets up the rest of the tangle nicely. I

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like Jin - he's a great kid. Then every twist in the tale opens up new vistas of puzzle...good story. Nicely rounded solutions (personal solutions, I mean, though the legal ones work well too). We get to see quite a bit of Armsman Roic, from Miles' POV and his own, among others. A mention of Sergeant Taura, too. And with everything nicely wrapped up - the shocker at the end. Ouch. The short views after that sum things up beautifully. Very very rich. I'm going to have to wait a while before I can reread - see if I can read the story without thinking of the end. Don't know - I've done it for other books but right now the whole Kibou-danai story is drowned out in my mind.

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The characters are what I really love about these books. Lois does such a great job with character development. I've become attached to not one or two, but many different characters in the series. This book certainly doesn't disappoint in that respect.

The newest book in the Vorkosignan series follows Miles as he explores Kibou-Daini, a planet with a political system and economy built around the world of freezing the dead. In his role as Imperial Auditor, he is investigating how things work but quickly things spin out of control. Miles interacts

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with a young man named Jin Sato and finds another side of Kibou-Daini that requires him to rethink his plants. This book isn't the one to start with since it references the rest of the Vorkosignan series but those who love Miles will not be disappointed as Cryoburn is an exciting read.

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