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Fiction. Science Fiction. HTML: Miles Vorkosigan makes his debut in this frenetic coming-of-age tale. At age seventeen, Miles is allowed to take the entrance exams to the elite military academy; he passes the written but manages, through miscalculation in a moment of anger, to break both his legs on the obstacle course, washing out before he begins. His aged grandfather dies in his sleep shortly after, and Miles blames himself. He is sent to visit his grandmother Naismith on distant Beta Colony, accompanied by his bodyguard, Sergeant Bothari, and Bothari's daughter, Elena. Miles passes himself off as a mercenary leader as he picks up a ragtag crew, and soon his father Aral is under political attack back home as garbled rumors of Miles' mercenary operations trickle back. Miles must abandon his new fleet and dash back to Barrayar to stop the plot..… (more)
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I won't repeat the basic synopsis that you can find all over the net, but I will point out that this novel (and Author of course!) is perhaps one of my all time favourites and I've re-read the series at least
Character development is superb (especially if you follow the series) and Bujold has pure mastery in that she creates characters that you can't help but to enjoy /fall in love with /laugh at /cringe for /fear with etc.
It has humour, insanity, strategy, 'forward momentum', interesting plot developments and a background story/universe that was well thought out and keeps getting richer as you read the rest of the series.
Go pick up a copy at your book dealer or do the eBook thing and get ready to be entertained!
A great start to a
Miles is cursed with a hyperactive, intelligent mind in a body that forever lets him down.
His resentment at being unable to do the things he really wants to do leads him to help another desperate man, and suddenly he's in a situation where one thing piles on top of another and he's juggling eggs in an evermore complex pattern.
Here's where his upbringing comes in handy. Miles has always wanted the military life, he's inherited his father's gift for tactics, but this military life is a trap of a kind that he fails to spot until it is almost too late.
Bujold's characters are wonderful - each of her books usually works as a stand-alone (this one included), but it's great to have extra glimpses of characters whom we've met in the past or will see more of in the future. Her female characters are intelligent and capable of challenging the cultures that surround them.
The book is also funny. Mile's thoughts about his idiot cousin Ivan, his efforts at playing matchmaker, and many other scenes besides.
In a nutshell, the book is wonderful space opera, with great characters. Read it!
The Warrior’s Apprentice opens with Miles at seventeen. He’s aced the written portion of the entrance exams to the Barrayaran Military Academy, but a miscalculation during the physical test results in disqualification… and two broken legs. Disheartened, Miles heads to Beta Colony to visit his maternal grandmother, taking with him his bodyguard since birth, the implacable but haunted Seargent Bothari, and his daughter Elena Bothari, a beautiful and spirited young woman who is stifled by the limited opportunities that Barrayaran culture offers her gender.
However, Miles is barely on Beta Colony long enough to unpack before he manages – completely by accident – to take command of a ship and its pilot, and get them a mission smuggling weapons past a blockade to a much-besieged planet. Soon, without knowing quite how it happened, Miles finds himself in charge of an entire mercenary company. Despite washing out of the Military Academy, and despite not planning for any of this, he must quickly learn the realities of what it takes to be in command, and he must do it the hard way: on the battlefield.
Review: Well, it’s official. Lois McMaster Bujold has officially cemented herself into the hallowed ranks of my favorite authors. Has this woman written anything that isn’t great? She writes fantastic high fantasy (The Chalion series), she writes great fantasy romance (The Sharing Knife series), and she writes crazy-compelling sci-fi/space opera (The Vorkosigan Saga). The way she does it is that she’s not writing genre fiction at all; rather, she’s writing intensely sympathetic and real characters caught up in fascinating situations… they’re just fascinating situations on worlds other than Earth, is all.
Miles Vorkosigan is certainly an interesting character – which is good, considering he’s the focus of many more books after this one. Does he replace Cordelia (Miles’s mother, and the heroine of Shards of Honor and Barrayar, the preceeding two books) at the top of my Bujold-ian Fictional Character Crush List? No, not quite, but that’s a tall bar to clear. I enjoyed watching Cordelia deal with the deeply ingrained Barrayaran sexism more than I enjoyed watching Miles deal with the deeply ingrained Barrayaran disability-ism, but that may be because as a non-disabled woman, I found her plight more immediately recognizable than his. To Miles’s credit, however, he spends hardly any time whining or moping about what others perceive as his disability. He gets frustrated, of course, when he comes up against its limitations, but he only descends into self-pity once, and that very briefly, so he remains hugely likeable. Contributing to that likeability is his intensely snarky sense of humor and his sharp intelligence, coupled with enough youthful naiveté to keep him from veering into the land of the insufferable know-it-all.
The story itself is very quick-moving – perhaps too much so, at times – with circumstances flip-flopping multiple times within a single chapter, leaving both Miles and the reader a little befuddled as to how things had gotten to their present state. Still, it’s woven together pretty neatly, and contained some serious shocks that I did not see coming. The space battles were more numerous than I would ordinarily prefer, but Bujold writes them well enough that I can follow the action, and she typically focuses more on the people and less on the laser cannons, which I always appreciate. I was also impressed when I realized that this book was originally published before Barrayar, even though it takes place later in the internal chronology of the series. Either Bujold was planning well ahead when she wrote this book, or else she’s got a deft hand at retconning previously established details, because the disparity between publication and chronological order is seamless.
Grover Gardner’s narration was wonderful as always, although it was a refreshing change to hear him reading a book with a male protagonist. He does an excellent job distinguishing characters by voice, and between his efforts and Bujold’s dialogue, I had no problem telling who was who, even among the more minor characters, despite the fact I could rarely keep all of the sci-fi-ish names straight. 4.5 out of 5 stars.
Recommendation: Overall, I enjoyed the heck out of this book, exactly as I was expecting to. While it follows well from the two books that came before it, this is the first book with Miles as a protagonist, so it would also work just fine as a stand-alone novel… or, more likely, as the introduction to the series as a whole, because I suspect that anybody who reads one will be as charmed as I was, and want to pick up the rest.
It's an endearing formula, but the novel never really does much to show you how or why the main character is the supposedly amazing leader and strategist he is. What makes him inspire all this devotion people are tripping over themselves to give him? All we ever really see is that he's fairly nice and intelligent, but that really doesn't cut it. He goes through lots of huge that-should-not-have-worked undertakings and manages to get out because of pure random luck (only not so random, of course, because the author makes it happen that way and it happens ever time), and people pat him on the back like it was because of his excellent smarts. It gets difficult to really care about a character that never actually has to work or act intelligently in order to get things to work out for him.
The story here also sports the common Slightly Feminist Leanings While Still Managing To Privilege Male Characters Over Women Syndrome™. It's got it's token strong female character (extra points for her being an amazing fighter but still sweet and virginal!) whom the main character likes to go on short inner diatribes about since she has such amazing talents but will never get to take advantage of her abilities because of how women are excluded in certain ways in their society. In the end, though, she's effectively just there to be the (quite bland in comparison to the other characters) love interest, who doesn't even get much description of her actions in fight scenes compared to the males, despite supposedly being one of the most skilled among them.
The novel is swift and readable, and while on vacation I got within less than 100 pages of the end just because I didn't want to start reading anything else right before my trip ended. As soon as I was home, though, I quit before finishing without a second thought. There just really wasn't any point. I only read it for a little light enjoyment, but when a book is this empty and unconvincing, there's really not much enjoyment for me to get out of it, anyway.
This book was different. For at least the first half I felt a bit apathetic about it all, it seemed standard in parts and very cheesy. I get that it's a product of its era but I couldn't shake the raised eyebrow while I read. The intricate political stuff also went mostly over my head, as did a lot of the ins and outs of the combat. I don't know whether it was me being new to the genre or just lacking in the imagination required to follow along but I mostly just sort of kept reading and hoped it would all become clear.
It mostly did, but what helped this one succeed where previous attempts had failed was the pacing. Even if I didn't have a clue what was going on or who was winning or why I cared it was *really* easy to keep reading. It just rolled on really smoothly.
About a third of the way from the end something clicked. I found myself snickering at in-world jokes, really warming to Miles as a character, getting a feel for the supporting cast and grinning like an idiot in the final court scene. It was a bit of cheesy melodramatic FUN at that point.
I'm giving it a three because I'm pretty stingy with stars and stick fairly strictly to Goodreads' suggestions. In this case I'm not willing to say I more than "liked" this one due to the problems I was having following the plot and events during the start and middle of the book.
I am however willing to check out the next one and see if the series builds on that over the top fun stuff that peeked out of the end of this one.
21 December 2012
So I totally read this again.... It's funny to me
23 December 2015
Oh look, I'm reading "Warrior's Apprentice" again. Miles is obviously the apprentice, but who is the warrior here? Bothari? Tung? The entire Dendarii fleet? Hm.
Miles is a hilarious and ingenious character. Hyper-active, audacious, daring, and naïve – he’s thrilling to watch as he just digs himself a deeper hole. At the same time, he isn’t without depth. Constantly reminded of his own physical disabilities and his fear of his Father’s disappointment, his heart is there as well as his mind.
Fast-action, sorrow, character development, and intrigue make this a fun space adventure with surprising depth. As the all Bujold’s work, I highly recommend, particularly if you like solid science fiction adventure novels.
(That disappointed baby is effing adorable though, so I guess this review won't be ALL bad.)
Well, it wouldn't be ALL bad anyway. I wanted to like this so much. I liked the idea of this book much more than I liked the actuality of it, actually. I feel
OK, so the main character, Miles, has a handicap. That's a plus for me because I like realistic characters who have to legitimately struggle to make it. But then he doesn't. At all. He's rich, his family is practically universally known and respected, he's bi-cultural, he has a lethal bodyguard who is more than willing and more than capable of protecting Miles from any and all danger, be it small armies or stubbed toes, unless ordered otherwise, and pretty much every success just falls in his lap. He stands on the shoulders of those around him, getting by on their ability and sometimes just blind luck, when his position as Vor isn't handy, and shit just falls into line.
It's just... boring. Boring to read about someone who only has to say "I'll think of something!" and then he does. Over and over... all these little episodic crises that never really felt serious or thrilling at all, because two paragraphs later Magic Miles has somehow won the fight, saved the day or whatever else was needed for victory. And did it all with this Mt. Everest-esque moral high ground. (And speaking of the action scenes, ugh, they were just terrible. I felt like I never really knew WHAT was going on, but a bunch of stuff was happening, and then bam, it's all over. Tally up another one for Miles.)
I wanted to know more about Bothari, but I feel like he was given really short shrift, both in character, and in how his situation was handled. I was so curious about him, and I really wanted to know who he was and what his history was and what he wanted and hoped for, etc... Maybe this is addressed in later (or earlier) books, but, well... the whole thing just felt like a cop out. An accusation and then that's it?
I just wanted more. More substance. More struggle, more realism. More. I wanted to really like this, and it sucks that I didn't, because a friend recommended it to me, and I respect her opinions. Oh well. Can't win 'em all. =",,,,,,0,,,,,
3227063,The Way of Shadows (Night Angel
This was a reread for me; I don't know how many times I've read it before, but certainly more than once, yet it still made me laugh out loud (possibly more so than before) and shed a tear or two. I even found it unputdownable, not so much because I was wondering "I can't wait to find out
Miles, sole child, son and heir of Aral and Cordelia, Lord and Lady Vorkosigan of Barrayar, has suffered from before birth from a bone wasting toxin, the effects of which have stunted his growth to over a foot below his intended height of over 6 feet and left him with brittle bones. This in a society which still considers mutants with superstition and practices infanticide, in the back country, on babies perceived to be genetically defective.
All his short :0) life, Miles has tried to prove himself to his grandfather, a Barrayaran war hero of the old guard, and to measure up to his father, also a war hero and - until recently - regent for the emperor. His lifelong dream, which he is on the brink of achieving at 17 as the story opens, is to join the Imperial Military Service - if he can pass the physical, a mere formality for his peers.
When his dream crashes about his ears, he is initially at a loss as to what to do with himself. But Miles has a frenetic energy, to go with his driving ambition, which he uses to dance and charm his way from situation to crisis, not to mention a fertile imagination with which he manufactures seemingly impossible triumphs from impending disasters. Or, as he puts it, 'forward momentum'.
His other cherished dream involves his childhood friend, Elena Bothari, daughter of his formidable bodyguard. When he is sent off-planet, he sees this as an opportunity to whirl Elena away from her circumscribed life in the hopes that it will win him her heart and hand. If only a little problem like an intergalactic mercenary war didn't keep getting in the way ...
I like Miles. He is as honour bound as his parents, and his word costs something to give - which plays its part in creating awkward situations. But I think he has more fun.
I love Sergeant Bothari, who really comes into his own in this book as Miles's personal bodyguard, driven sometimes to the edge of his endurance in an effort to protect Miles from himself as his ambitious plans endanger his fragile bone structure.
As ever, I love Aral and Cordelia. I like the way Bujold conveys the depth of Aral's feelings for his son, or even his adversary, just in his posture. And Cordelia; well
She went off toward the library, muttering her favourite swear-word under her breath, "Barrayarans!"
Funny, touching, fun, great pacing and characterisation.
Absolutely recommended!
5 stars
But hey, I'm a girl, what do I know.
After an exciting talk by sci-fi author, Jodie Lynn Nye, at the 2011 Evanston Writer’s Workshop, I decided to read my first SF novel by Lois McMaster Bujold. The Warrior’s Apprentice is not the first book in the Vorkosigan Saga series, but Jodie recommended it as a classic introduction to the genre.
I was surprised by the ease with which I could follow the story, even midstream through the series. Bujold possesses a cleverness, which eludes some of her contemporaries. I did not feel lost in a world where I understood very little of the technology or customs. She intersperses pertinent details throughout the tale.
Miles Vorkosigan, the main character, goes on an extraordinary venture which distances him from his home galaxy and familiar surroundings. Have not most of us wanted to go on such a road trip, leaving it all behind? This premise immediately grips the adventurous reader, and we are anticipating all the inevitable discoveries.
Character arc is a necessary component to a compelling story. Bujold satisfies this innate expectation through novice Miles transformation to capable captain. Still, he faces the consequences of his decisions along the way. He is not an elusive hero without real weaknesses. He is a bit endearing, then annoyingly distant at times.
The plot is exquisitely designed, in my opinion. No loose ends are left tantalizing the reader at the end, though one must continue reading the series for the final resolution, of course.
My favorite aspect of the character development: the depth to which Miles thinks through his plight at the end of his adventure. He entertains possible resolutions because he has endangered more people than his shipmates. He is not a shallow character with superficial emotions. Because of this, he feels as real as the characters in my own life.
Overall, I was pleased that I enjoyed a real Sci-Fi story. No longer is that genre untouchable. The argument that “sci-fi is just too hard to understand” can be vanquished with a reading of The Warrior’s Apprentice. Bujold has perfected her craft, and I anticipate reading more of her work in the decades ahead.
Some 18 years after the events of Barrayar, Miles is now full grown (such as he is) and looking for his entrance into the Imperial Service. Unfortunately this comprises a physical endurance course which stresses his weakened bones beyond breaking point.
Miles is fun. But because his initial involvement is so unlikely much of the rest of his predicaments fail to garner any serious weight with the reader, and I struggled to care how Miles resolves his various difficulties. Many of the supporting characters also seem to make unlikely choices or actions, and I remained unconvinced by the entire plot. However it all rolls along at speed, and is, like all of Bujold's work, well written. Miles' banter is frequently amusing, which helps.
Overall: not as good as Barrayar.
One could see there part of why I love Miles--not conventionally handsome, handicapped, someone who has to work so hard. But it's more than that. I've always had a weakness for the kind of character not only with gifts of leadership, but a certain kind of cleverness. Whether Homer's Odysseus, CS Forester's Horatio Hornblower or Roddenbury's Captain Kirk of Star Trek. Miles has that quality in abundance--of turning defeat into a fighting chance to survive. And in this story, which Bujold has said is modeled on "The Sorcerer's Apprentice" there's quite a bit of humor too in seeing Miles manage to keep his head above the rapidly rising waters he conjures up.
Lois is one of my favorite authors
There are scenes that make me laugh every time I read them. And there is a scene that I cry every time I read it. Yes, I laughed, I cried, it is way better than Cats.
Beyond that, this is a good solid adventure story with likable characters. Miles is magnetic. The supporting cast is well developed.
There are scenes that make me laugh every time I read them. And there is a scene
Beyond that, this is a good solid adventure story with likable characters. Miles is magnetic. The supporting cast is well developed.
I think my main problem here was the middle of the book, which,
And Miles himself, while without a doubt well-written, was incredibly frustrating to read about at times. I'm pretty sure this is mostly intentional; this *is* his big coming-of-age story after all and he still has a lot to learn, but as much as I sympathized with him at other times, I had absolutely no sympathy for him any time the romance subplot reared its head and he was jealous or overprotective when it came to Elena. (I do hate jealousy plots with a passion though and just don't get them, so take that with a grain of salt.) And it was hard not to wince when, in his quest to find his place in life and Prove Himself to his father (who already believed in his worth so that was kind of unnecessary), Miles didn't realise he was dragging other people down with him until it was too late. (This mix of self-centredness and the way he does think of other people first sometimes was interesting to read about, don't get me wrong, and this was definitely an important learning experience for the character but as I said, it was just so damn frustrating at times. Well done, author, I guess?)
Oh, and speaking of things that make me wince? I'm glad that the book doesn't always treat sex/gender as a binary and features genderqueer people! But could we please not refer to them as "it" gdi. Grah. And the one time the character in question comes up in a romantic context, it's as a joke. This was especially disappointing given the running commentary on media representation that came from Miles himself earlier in the book, about how no, he can't just be an actor despite his love for theatrics, because the stage doesn't have a place for people like him unless it's as a villain or comic relief, and he might not know yet what to do with his life but that wasn't exactly what he had in mind. I loved that. It rings very true and makes an important point and all that, but then the story can't quite do it for other marginalised people.
... which in turn reminds me - please tell me there'll be more examination of class differences in later books because woah does Miles ever have more to learn there.
Back to the book itself! (Apparently I do have more to say about it than I thought I would.) Once again the ending tied things up quite neatly (although I still don't quite understand how all those Dendarii Mercenaries will get paid) and a bit too quickly for my taste. The whole council session scene was beyond excellent and there was so much stuff in there that was just vaguely alluded to and it was all fascinating and I just want more of the trainwreck that are Barrayaran politics, so that's another reason why I would've wanted that part of the story to be a bit longer. Time and again Miles just barely managed to make it out of a tight spot thanks to a ton of really lucky coincidences - but also thanks to a lot of quick & clever thinking on his part; improvising really is his big strength, so I can forgive that.
So, err. Despite this rather... critical-sounding review, I enjoyed the book a lot and am looking forward to more adventures with Miles - maybe even with a Miles that I don't want to grab by the shoulders and shake every thirty pages or so. He's a great character, and I'm glad he got more books. :D
Thank goodness he seems to get over it, because the rest of it is a bit of a romp. I'm sure I've read and enjoyed another book in this series.
What this book reminded me of more than anything was the Artemis Fowl books. I believe Eoin Colfer may have gotten a few ideas from this book. The characters are very similar although morally opposite.
A fun book I really enjoyed it.