Old Family Friends: Cryoburn

Lois McMaster Bujold has been writing books about Miles Vorkosigan since before he was born, and he's now almost as old as I am.  My favorite books are the two about his mother, conveniently bound together in Cordelia's Honor, but every Vorkosigan book is a pleasure.  I buy Bujold in hardback.


Which is why my copy of Cryoburn (The Vorkosigan Saga) came in the mail a few days ago, and why I've finished it.  It's not top-tier Bujold, or at least I don't think so yet, but it's a book with heart.  The theme of the book is generations, what it means to have parents that will die or that have died, what it means to a family.  Miles gets to look at this issue from the outside, because he is visiting a planet that refuses to believe in death.  Instead they freeze people in hopes of awakening them when there is a cure for what ails them.

Of course, this is a book with Miles, so there are capers, kidnappings, daring escapes, bureaucratic bungles and bribery.  Roic has grown up a lot, although life as Miles's single armsman still stretches him to his limits.  But at the end, most of the convoluted plots and counters seem to dissolve; of course Miles gets his way and we see happy endings for the people we've come to care about.  What remains is the foreshadowing that leads up to the tiny epilogue at the back, the part that tells us why Bujold wrote the book.  I guess that's a spoiler.  B+