Memory

"Memory is a book about Miles Vorkosigan, who is probably Lois’s most famous character, and deservedly so. First of all, let me start this section off by saying that I think that Lois Bujold is the most talented writer in science fiction and fantasy who’s alive right now. When it comes to sheer ability and story craft, she’s stunning. I do this for a living and I think all the time about plot, story, character, world building; and Lois doesn’t seem to understand that these are different things, because they’re all blended together so well and so seamlessly that you can’t tell one from another. It’s depressing how good she is. If you haven’t read Lois Bujold, go read her. Anything Lois does is really good, but some things just happen to be amazing, and Memory is particularly amazing even for her. Her story world is a world called Barrayar, and Barrayar is essentially the Soviet Union that is awakening from horrible times, and becoming a more upright member of the galactic community. They’re trying to do better for their people, to rise up from essentially neo-feudalism into a more modern society, with a leadership that is a bit more enlightened – but also tough as nails, because they’ve come up through hard times. One of the people who was instrumental in this is a man named Simon Illyan, who was essentially the head of the KGB. Simon had a chip installed in his brain that gave him a perfect memory, an eidetic memory for absolutely everything; it was his job to read everything, to know everything and to take appropriate action to keep horrible things from happening. And suddenly, his chip starts malfunctioning. It’s a threat to the stability of everything. So the main character, Miles Vorkosigan, who worked for Simon Illyan as his agent for years, is suddenly the only one who can help. He’s been disgraced, but he has to come back. He’s got neurological problems that are preventing him from operating in the field anymore, and it’s broken his heart; but something bad is happening to his boss (who he did nothing but exasperate for the previous ten years), and suddenly this horrible, terrifying authority figure is helpless. So Miles sets out to solve the mystery of what happened to Simon Illyan: did somebody do this to him? Are the planet’s enemies getting ready to make some sort of attack? Because this would be an excellent way to start… So he has to go through this dark world of very vicious internecine politics, to try and find out what’s happened to Simon. I picked this one in particular, because it has a very strong mystery format, but it’s also an extremely good representation of the series as a whole. You get old world neo-feudalism meeting this new world politics of a representative republic: how do we adjust, how do we move on, how do we balance the interests of these various powers? You come away with the idea that politicians mostly suck, and that’s true, that’s the world that they live in – but they’re just doing their best to wrestle the best solutions they can out of people who are constantly fighting for power. Miles is this character who was born deformed; he’s under five foot tall with a bit of a hunchback, he was damaged in vitro by genetic weapons, and it’s a miracle that he’s alive at all. And he’s absolutely brilliant. He’s the son of a genius warlord who became a politician, a genuinely faithful regent to the upcoming Emperor, who he tried to raise as a good man… The sheer amount of kindness in these books is amazing. And that’s one of the things that I think we lack in our reading a lot of times. We read adventures, all this exciting stuff, but we often lack somebody who’s just kind, and who demonstrates what human compassion can be and what it can do. If you have lost faith in humanity, these are good books to read. Very true! The problem with solving any mystery in one of Lois’s worlds is that you’re so busy enjoying the characters and the world and the story that it takes you out of that meta thinking; you’re too busy laughing at something silly that happened over here, or being shocked at something terrible that happened over there. She’s really good at doing a good show and distracting you from the mystery. At the same time, when you get to the end, you say, “Oh, yeah, of course ” – which is what every good story does. A really good story, when you get to the end of it, feels like it couldn’t have gone any other way. And Lois is brilliant at doing that."