I've enjoyed the two Lois McMaster Bujolds that I've read for my Hugo Award-winners project but they unfortunately count as books six and seven in what's become known as her 'Vorkosigan Saga', which doesn't seem like a great place to start. It would seem appropriate to leap back to the very beginning and otherwise read through them in publication order, even though I'm aware they do leap around outrageously within their internal chronology.

While 'Shards of Honor', first published in 1986, was the first of them, Bujold had already planned much further into the series. In fact, she'd written the next two books, 'The Warrior's Apprentice' and 'Ethan of Athos', before she'd sold this one, so they turned into a package deal. New readers could therefore dive into multiple books pretty quickly, because all three saw print in 1986. More importantly, at least to my perspective, she originally envisaged this as part of a larger work she initially called 'Mirrors', along with a later short story, 'Aftermaths', and the second of the novels that won her the Hugo, 'Barrayar'. They were eventually reunited as 'Cordelia's Honor'.

And that's very telling, because, even though this is the 'Vorkosigan Saga', that framework starts and ends with Cordelia at the fore. Here, she's Commander Cordelia Naismith, captain of a Betan Astronomical Survey vessel, initially on a mission to a newly discovered and believed uninhabited planet. By the end of 'Barrayar', she's become Lady Cordelia Vorkosigan, living on a world not her own, enforcing her presence not only as the wife and mother of important characters but through emphatic actions of her own. She's a seriously worthy character and she deserves the lead, even if she's only a Vorkosigan by marriage.

At this point, of course, she's an astrocartographer who's working for a living, but she meets Capt. Aral Vorkosigan only ten pages in, inside the first chapter, and the sizeable first chunk of the book, running eighty or so pages, is almost entirely dedicated to the two of them. At this point, he's the Butcher of Komarr, a legendary villain, at least from the Betan perspective. As we find, the truth doesn't quite match the published reports, a realisation that inevitably changes Cordelia's future. For now, they're alone, both separately and together, a state of affairs I should explain.

When the Betans encountered Barrayans, most of her cohorts were able to make it back to their ship to escape. After all, they're non-combatants on a scientific mission. She was knocked out, but that left her in much better condition than Ensign Dubauer, whose brain has been fried by a nerve disruptor, and Lt. Rosemont, who's dead. Vorkosigan, on the other hand, who's the captain of the 'General Vorkraft', has been marooned there by his men in a mutiny, his command usurped by the secret police on board under political officer Radnov. They bury Rosemont together and leave for a hidden Barrayan supply cache five days away on foot.

What follows during that arduous trek is quite frankly a lot of different things. It's not a romance yet, though the two characters are obviously attracted to each other. It's also not the exercise in teamwork that it could easily be painted as in hindsight, though it works as one. It's not quite the life changing meeting of enemies that 'Enemy Mine' was in theatres only a year before, though it isn't far from it. In many ways, it's an opportunity to grow characters, because both of them are a darn sight more than they initially appear to be, especially to each other but also to us.

If she's focused on character at this point, Bujold is also very aware of how she can play with pace. I've commented in my reviews of both 'The Vor Game' and 'Barrayar' about their unusual tempos and I'm going to do the same here. Initially, this is slow, albeit never boring, as we learn about an antagonistic couple of characters and their respective cultures as they learn the same about each other. However, when this long section ends, we leap immediately into action and intrigue and an awful lot of things happening apparently at once. Once that frantic midsection is over, things slow down again towards a very deliberate finalé, safe in the knowledge of the much bigger picture.

It's fascinating writing, especially for a debut novel. Textbooks certainly wouldn't recommend an approach like this but it works very well indeed, my only real concern being how quickly these two characters reach the point where one proposes to the other. Everything else works for me and it works both with power and subtlety, which is the other contrast I'll take away from both this and the two later books I've read before it. Some authors can write action but can't slow down, or the reverse. Some authors can write with power but can't find subtlety, or vice versa. From the start, Bujold had all these things.

There are seriously impactful scenes, not least one in which Sgt. Bothari, a big name in the series to come but here a broken mess of an officer, is ordered by an aristocratic sadist to rape Cordelia. He doesn't but the reasons why he doesn't and the events that follow that decision aren't easy to either watch or look away from, whether they're in action sequences or pyschology. There's also impeccable nuance, schemes within schemes pitted against schemes. Cordelia's escape from the 'General Vorkraft' is absolutely impeccable, even if it's into a situation back on Beta that she had emphatically not envisaged.

So I thoroughly enjoyed a third book in the 'Vorkosigan Saga', which happens to be the first to be published and currently the second in internal chronology, given that 'Falling Free', the first book to see print after the first three, was set two hundred years before it. Everything else takes place later in the series, initially with 'Barrayar' and mostly within a relatively short span of a quarter of a century starting seventeen years on from there with 'The Warrior's Apprentice' and 'The Vor Game'.

The biggest new question I had here is to wonder who gave their name to the series title. It's the 'Vorkosigan Saga' and, even before I started reading these books, I assumed that translated to a single character, Miles Vorkosigan. However, while he's the lead in 'The Vor Game', he's not born until the later stages of 'Barrayar' and he hasn't even become a gleam in his father's eye here in 'Shards of Honor'. Perhaps, therefore, the series is named jointly for father and son, but after an important three books, I'm thinking it's for the whole family. Cordelia may only be Vorkosigan by marriage but two of these three books are told primarily from her perspective and she shouldn't ever be discounted. ~~ Hal C F Astell

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