Backlist...Way Back To 1992.

January 06, 2012

Twenty years ago, Lois McMaster Bujold, one of the few women at the time writing science fiction, was already a rising star. Her novel, Barrayar, won the Hugo and Locus awards and was nominated for the Nebula that year. Barrayar begins a saga that spans light years and generations of the Vorkasigan family. It’s one of my favorite science fiction epics of all time.

Bujold has twenty works, novels, short stories, and novellas about the Vorkasigans. Most of them follow the son Miles, who due to an assassination attempt directed at his parents while he was in utero, was born with several profound physical challenges. To compensate for the social disadvantage of his appearance, he develops outrageous charm, intelligence, and boundless ambition that lead him into trouble on hair-raising, hilarious, heroic space adventures.

Bujold didn’t publish her novels in any particular order. They skip back and forth in Miles’s life. Wikipedia has a great list of all twenty works in "internal chronological order" if you’d like to read from the very beginning of the saga. Most of the novels stand alone, but I’d recommend starting with The Warrior's Apprentice  and three novellas about Miles that are combined under one cover called Miles, Mystery and Mayhem. Our collection of the saga is a little spotty, but you can always go to WorldCat and find it outside our system. If you've never used WorldCat before, let us know. We'll be happy to help.

Laura M.
Kearney Branch