Shards of Honor by Lois McMaster Bujold

As the fortieth anniversary of its publication approaches, I suppose it’s fair to call Shards of Honor an old-fashioned space opera, although the series it kicked off is open-ended and its most recent work appeared just six years ago. Somehow I missed the Vorkosigan saga when it was becoming a big thing in science fiction — four Hugos and five further nominations as a finalist, one Nebula a four more appearances on the shortlist — and I am slowly catching up. I picture the books as mass-market paperbacks, so I have been reluctant to do the easy thing and download electronic editions. When I was in Texas earlier this summer I found seven books from the series, including a couple of omnibus volumes, at a used-book store. Now that I have editions I like, I am diving in.

I will grant that my interest in the book’s form is a little eccentric, but the relationship between length and story is an important one in any novel, and keeping to the constraints of a 250-page paperback meant that Bujold moved her tale along at a quick pace. She had to choose what to focus on, to deliver her scenes with economy, and leave room for readers to imagine what happened in between. At the length of Shards of Honor a recent Hugo winner for best novel was still moving its main characters into place for the story to really get started. I’m having trouble getting into a more recent space opera — one modelled on Alexander the Great — and I suspect that the pace it’s taking to head toward its eventual ending at about page 500 is a major reason. I’m hardly averse to big books, but not every story can hold up that much weight. Especially in a genre like space opera, less can easily be more.

Shards of Honor does not read like the start of a series that would grow to well more than a dozen books. Its ending is open, but it’s generally self-contained. Here’s how it starts: Cordelia Naismith, part of the Survey service of Beta Colony, has led a small party to explore and begin cataloging the life forms of a previously unvisited earthlike planet. At least her team thinks that the planet has not been visited. Unfortunately for them, the warlike people of Barrayar have already established a small presence; worse, they have done it geographically quite close to where Naismith and company are exploring. The novel opens with Naismith observing an attack on her party’s campsite, though she does not immediately recognize it as such, and their ship’s rapid escape into the atmosphere. Aral Vorkosigan is one of the warlike Barrayarans, and he was in command of the people who attacked Naismith’s team. Or at least he was supposed to be, but the attack was part of a mutiny led by his group’s political commissar. Vorkosigan was supposed to die in a conveniently confused situation, and indeed the other Barrayarans leave the scene thinking him dead.

It’s an inauspicious meeting between Naismith and Vorkosigan, the more so because he has an interstellar reputation as a brutal army commander. Naismith is dismayed to find out who she and a fellow surveyor who was neurologically wounded in the fighting have been stranded with. Soon, though, she discovers that he is more honorable than reputed. They reach an accommodation that may enable the three of them to survive, and possibly find a way off the planet. They are still deeply at odds, likely to end up on opposite sides of a war, but Naismith and Vorkosigan must cooperate to keep themselves and the wounded man alive. The attraction that develops between the two of them seems at once natural and impossible, and the two are experienced enough adults to recognize both aspects.

An author with less story to tell would have made the trek a whole book; Bujold gives it three and a half chapters. After that, complications and escalations come fast, and the characters are forced to choose many times between desire and duty, especially once the war does come. Bujold springs surprises, brings along some moustache-twirlingly awful villains, and gives her characters consequences to go along with their choices. Fortunately, some of the consequences are good; otherwise Shards of Honor could easily have spun into a tragedy rather than a space opera. But this is not that kind of a book. This is the kind of book where the main characters have a great deal of agency, where they come from the top reaches of their respective societies, where they give orders, take chances, and make things happen. It’s great fun to read.