Book Review: Mirror Dance

Lois McMaster Bujold

1994
Awards: Hugo, Locus
Rating: ★ ★ – – –
 
Once again the Hugo voters force me back into Lois McMaster Bujold’s Vorkosigan Saga.

The Saga is a multi-book series set in a universe of planets interconnected by trade and internecine political struggles. Space travel and warfare are at a Star-Trek-level of speed and sophistication.

                                                                                
Mirror Dance is one of the later books in the series. Its plot centers on Miles Vorkosigan, the son of the plucky, beautiful starship captain Cordelia Naismith and the handsome, strong, passionate, wise Count Aral Vorkosigan of the planet Barrayar. Enemies of the Count attacked Cordelia with a neurotoxin when she was pregnant, so her son Miles was born with an extremely small stature and brittle bones that break easily. He spent most of his first years in an incubator and later had to go through uncounted types of painful therapy.

Fortunately, Miles was also born with a quick wit, fantastic intelligence, and an innate ability to lead others. This allowed him to compensate for his physical disadvantages and he grew up to be a brilliant military tactician, a beloved ship captain, and irresistibly attractive to all ladies and hermaphrodites of intelligence.

Mirror Dance is a book about Miles in his prime and at his most powerful. It is a time when he is living a double life as the dutiful heir of the Count on Barrayar and the brilliant, daring Admiral Naismith of Barrayan Imperial Security.

It turns out that when Miles was a baby, an evil group of the Count’s enemies stole some of Miles’s cells and created a clone of Miles, whom they named Mark. In an impressive display of long-term plotting, they raised Mark from a baby and trained him to be an assassin, the idea being that they would eventually substitute Mark for Miles and he would then be able to get in and kill the Count.

The sinister lab where Mark was created and raised is also a facility that raises clones for rich people and performs brain transplants on them when the progenitor grows aged and wants a new, younger body. Unfortunately for the Count’s enemies, the head of the cloning facility has been abusive to Mark. By the time of Mirror Dance, Mark has had enough of it. He steals a spaceship and tries to free all the other clones. But his escape attempt fails and lab security clamps down. Miles comes after Mark and rescues him and the other clones, but gets shot and left behind in the process. Miles’ crew, Mark, and the rest of Miles’ friends and family spend the rest of the book trying to rescue Miles and also trying to destroy the clone lab, if they can, as a nice side project.

I’m sure if you’re a fan of the Vorkosigan Saga, you will love this book. For me, the saga is too much like a romance novel or a soap opera to get very excited about, and the plots are overly convoluted and not terribly original, and this installment is basically par for that course.

Bujold's characters are divided cleanly between those who are unjust and evil and horrifyingly ruthless, and those who are completely in love with Miles. Miles always knows exactly the right thing to do in any social, diplomatic, or wartime situation. As Admiral Naismith he is theoretically in danger of his life almost every minute, but you also never for a moment forget that he’s secretly royal and that gives him a lot of advantages in staff and equipment that others would not have. Also it lets him bestow lavish and perfect but anonymous gifts on his friends and loyal subordinates.

There is also a lot of time spent on how tedious and wasteful all the glamorous royal ceremonies are, and the primary characters spend a lot of time being forced to go and dress in fancy uniforms and stand around making cynical comments about the other guests, but underneath it all you feel like they really love it. No one could force the Count and Countess Vorkosigan to hold their own Winterfair Ball if they didn’t want to, after all, so it seems kind of hypocritical to have them standing around being snarky about it the whole time. 


An earlier version of this review originally appeared on Cheeze Blog.