Vorkosigan Group Read: Miles, Mutants and Microbes

This is the thread for discussion of books/stories in the Miles, Mutants and Microbes omnibus – Falling Free, Diplomatic Immunity and Labyrinth.

  

Rules:
1. All are welcome – you don't need to be doing a category challenge, you can read only one book in the series if you'd like.
2. When you post, please specify which book/story you're posting about.
3. Mark spoilers using LibraryThing's spoiler feature – spoilers go here. This is accomplished by putting spoilers between spoiler tags like this:

<spoiler>spoilers go here</spoiler>

About the books:
Falling Free is chronologically the first story in the Vorkosigan Saga, but features non-Vorkosigan characters and can be read at any point. Diplomatic Immunity features Miles as a protagonist and is the fourteenth book, chronologically, and probably contains lots of spoilers for previous Miles books. It is my understanding that Falling Free is a sort-of-prequel to the events in Diplomatic Immunity.

I don't know much about Labyrinth, except that it features Miles and it takes place between books 7 and 8. It is also included in Borders of Infinity and Miles, Mystery and Mayhem, but those threads haven't been created yet, so if you've read Labyrinth, feel free to discuss it here. If that changes, I will update this post.

Links:
Vorkosigan Saga main thread | Group read wiki page | List of books in publication order | List of books in chronological order

Discussion of the other books:
* Cordelia's Honor (Shards of Honor, Barrayar)
* Young Miles (The Warriors Apprentice, The Mountains of Mourning, The Vor Game)
* Miles, Mystery and Mayhem (Cetaganda, Ethan of Athos, Labyrinth)

Nicely done!

#3: Thanks!

I just finished Falling Free – my impetus for creating this thread. Some initial thoughts:

- I definitely liked the two Cordelia books a lot more – they seemed more mature. I'm not sure if that is because Cordelia and Aral were both middle-aged, whereas Falling Free features a bunch of naive teenagers, or if Bujold's writing style was different.

- That being said, I still liked the book. Bujold has a knack for characters.

- The romance between Leo and Silver made me somewhat uncomfortable with the ending. It always makes me uncomfortable when there are romances between characters with a significant maturity/experience gap, but I've read quite a few books that do this, so maybe it's just me..

Falling Free proved to be a tad less good read for me too, but I think it was a very thoughtful book and it really picked up pace in the last third.

Yeah, corporate genetic engineering is certainly scary! The TV show Orphan Black addresses similar ideas re: corporate genetic engineering and is pretty good, I'd recommend it.

I actually enjoyed the slow beginning, it really drew me into the world of the quaddies.

I'm just starting to read Falling Free. I have the omnibus edition somewhere but happened upon a special edition of the book at the library when I was checking what in the series was available. It was published by NESFA Press. It has an extended foreword by Lois's brother James A McMaster and primarily discusses their father Robert as well as the origins of various things within the novel. It seems that the character Leo Graf has many of the characteristics of their father. I suppose some/many? LMB fans may already know this but I found it interesting. According to the editor, this copy of the book also contains "minor modifications made by the author to the 1999 edition and a few further emendations."

Here's my short take on Falling Free, spoiler free ...

Conflicting feelings about this book make it kind of tough to rate. I liked this story, and it pulled me right in, one with science in the science fiction, but I found myself bothered by the rather cartoonish portrayal of the creepy bad company and scientist/engineer Van Atta, etc. Our "hero" Leo Graf is a likeable fellow and easy to sympathize with. Van Atta is a former student of Leo Graf who has more or less gone over to the dark side. He was probably always on the dark side.

Without spoiling things I want to give credit for one great bit of writing. The sequence wherein those who had lived their entire lives in space first encounter planet side gravity was great. I had grown so used to the weightless movement that when gravity showed up it was totally alien to me too and I so sympathized with the reactions of the characters. Really well done.

I enjoyed the greater part of the book although the end disappointed me a little.

Just finished Diplomatic Immunity, a Miles adventure in quaddie space.