Miles, Mystery & Mayhem

Halfway through the Vorkosigan saga now!

This was a very interesting collection of two novels and a short, written years apart from each other but which take place near each other inside the series chronology, and which have some very similar thematic elements.

Cetaganda features Miles and his cousin Ivan on a diplomatic mission to attend the funeral of Cetaganda's Empress. Miles being Miles, he of course gets caught up in a web of intrigue and murder while there.

Ethan of Athos contains no Miles at all - rather, it focuses on Ethan, a representative of an all-male planet who has to replace a shipment of frozen ovaries that his society needs for the next generation to be born. Along the way, he gets ... caught up in a web of intrigue and murder.

Both novels were very fun reads, but for fairly different reasons. Cetaganda because Miles is an absolute treat of a character, a whirling dervish of chaos and quick-thinking who defies all expectations of him. Athos was fun, though, precisely because Ethan is so different from Miles - he's not a tactician or spy, so seeing him awkwardly work his way through a Milesesque scenario provided a refreshing take on the series and helped me appreciate Miles more (even though he's entirely absent from the novel).

The main connection between the books, though, is that while both of them focus on societies defined by their technology (gene manipulation in Cetaganda, uterine replicators in Ethan), the technology itself isn't the focus, but rather how those societies, and their members, are changed by them, while still remaining fundamentally human. Both are very interesting thought experiments, but the action setting of them help avoid them from getting bogged down or overly philosophical.