Book Review: The Vor Game

Lois McMaster Bujold

1990

Awards: Hugo

Rating: ★ ★ ★ – –

The Vor Game is yet another installment in Bujold’s lengthy Vorkosigan Saga and it is the fourth book in that series to win either the Hugo or the Nebula. In the saga’s internal chronology, it comes after Falling Free and Barrayar, and before Mirror Dance.

I’ve already gone into some detail about the Vorkosigan Saga’s setting and main characters in my reviews of those other three books, so I won’t repeat all of that here. The summary is that it takes place in a universe where humans have colonized many planets and can travel many light years in a single jump by using wormholes. The Vorkosigan family is one of the more influential branches of the Vor, a powerful military caste living on the planet Barrayar, which is ruled by the young Emperor Gregor.

This book stars Bujold’s oft-recurring protagonist Miles Vorkosigan, the son of the superlatively titled Admiral Count Aral Vorkosigan (who is, in turn, arguably the most powerful man on Barrayar next to the emperor). 

The important thing to know about Miles is that his mother was attacked with poison gas when she was pregnant with him, and the result was that he was born extremely small with fragile bones that are easily broken. What Miles makes up for in physical stature and robustness, however, he more than makes up for in brains, charisma, and ego.

At the beginning of this story, Miles is a lowly ensign just graduated from the Barrayaran military academy. To teach him humility and cure his rampant tendencies toward insubordination, the military assigns Miles to Kiril Outpost, a bleak, frozen base on the arctic circle, where his job is to monitor weather data.

In short order, Miles’ unwillingness to blindly do what he’s told manages to get him in deep trouble with his commanding officer and hauled in front of Imperial Security (“ImpSec”). ImpSec decides it’s doing nobody any good to have Miles at the weather station and that someone of his talents would be better used clearing up a military and diplomatic mess at one of the major wormhole hubs.

In his new assignment, Miles discovers that the Barrayaran’s enemies, the Cetagandans, are planning a sneak attack on the wormholes that connect most of Barrayar’s key worlds. Mercenary fleets are being hired by both sides to, on the Cetagandan side, set up an invasion force and, on the Barrayaran side, to counteract it. It gets even more complicated when some of the mercenaries turn out to be double and even triple agents.

While all of this is going on, Miles stumbles across the young emperor Gregor, who escaped from his security people in order to have an adventure, but who has gotten himself in way over his head on a ship with some of the aforementioned double-agent mercenaries. In addition to exposing the Cetagandan invasion plans, Miles is then also responsible for delivering Gregor back home safe and sound. The two of them escape death and/or the brig by only a hair’s breadth several times on several different space stations and ships.

This story was faster paced and more entertaining than most of the other books in the Vorkosigan Saga. It had adventure, close shaves, and conflict with authority. But it still had some of the key disappointing characteristics of the others.

One of the problems is that Vor politics are almost as convoluted and uninteresting as those in Cyteen. There are some sizeable hunks of the Vor Game during which you can ignore the diplomatic minutia and focus on the adventures and spies and captures and escapes and re-captures and re-escapes. But the politics keep reappearing to drag the story down.

The other problem is that Miles is an irritating main character. He has the potential to be a great hero; he has charisma and personality and he’s had to overcome prejudice and physical limitations almost solely by force of will. But I find him annoying.

I think it’s partly because Miles presents himself as a disadvantaged lowly ensign in public, but he can—and does—whip out his high-caste status and use it to threaten people or to get out of dangerous situations whenever he needs to. His flippant insubordination is treated like a funny joke that he can get out of by playing one of his many trump cards at any time. He can pretend to be a grunt in the infantry, but at any moment he could get called by his dad’s buddy, the head of Imperial Security, or his childhood playmate, the Emperor, to be hauled out of the arctic and command his own flashy fleet. It makes it seem like he’s just playing at danger and self-sacrifice.