Cryoburn, by Lois McMaster Bujold
Dec. 6th, 2010 10:04 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
elfsSummary:
Lois McMaster Bujold returns to her first and most popular character, Miles Vorkosigan, in the lastest novel, Cryoburn. Sadly, the story is sloppy and uninspired, the writing hampered by Ms. Bujold's personal cliches and obvious reluctance to return to this well, follows an entirely predictable arc from beginning to end, and even ends up as its own sort of used furniture, not so much from SF as from modern television police procedurals. The sort of brilliance that turned the SF lexiconigraphic "used furniture" into the literal used furniture scene of A Civil Campaign, by reaching back fourteen (!) books to deliver one of many "oh, yes!" scenes is nowhere to be found in Cryoburn. There is only one "oh, dear God no," scene and it's almost the last scene of the story. The rest of the story runs on rickety rails.
Miles is sent to a planet to investigate a creepy obsessed-with-cheating-death culture ruled by megacorps that promise to cryo the recently dead or almost dead in the hopes that centuries from now they'll wake up healthy and whole. It's a riff on cryonics thing going on here, with weird laws and votes being controlled by the proxy corporations, and involves a mundane sort of financial shennanigans that Miles uncovers halfway through the book and spends the rest of the book, well, not really trying to undo so much as simply make trouble for the corpys who've made his life Hell through the first half of the book.
The book starts with Miles escaping from incompetent kidnapper-terrorists, who are out to bring down the whole Cryo business, and stumbling out into a bad section of the city, where the first person he befriends turns out to be a young boy who just happens to be the linchpin character with The Secret that could bring down the Evil Corporations. The boy lives in a homeless commune, which turns out to be a criminal enterprise, and the two leaders of which tell Miles everything, almost without being asked. It's almost as if Lois said, "It's Miles, the readers know he'll get it out of them eventually, so let's just get past this part because I don't feel like making it up too much."
The corporations are theme-park-ish, with one taking on Egyptology as a theme, another Asiania. When Miles visits the Asian theme park, I had another jarring moment, as none of the usual comparison powers Bujold brings to bear in her books is here. Instead of a concise comparison between the poorly aped Zen serenity and the competent serenity of the Cetagandan Celestial Garden, we get a snide comment about how "The space was all paper screens and tatami mats, plus more art glass and those flower arrangements consisting of a handful of pebbles, three sticks, two buds, and a blossom." A Milesian snide comment, I believe, would have included a wistful thought to The haut Pel.
Roic takes center-stage for two chapters, and seems to have been written to be inhabited by Bruce Willis. A brief scene takes place in a painfully obvious chunk of 20th-century suburbia, complete with little patches of greenery, musty carpets, yellowing wallpaper, the whole kitsch and caboodle. The subject of their investigation, a corporate type, has "an endearingly tame, by galactic standards, porn collection in the bedroom, out in plain sight," as if nobody used data pads on this high-tech world. This is followed by an equally silly police procedural takedown outside a sleazyairport spaceport motel.
Meanwhile, Miles's one "covert ops" moment is so routine as to be boring. Nothing goes wrong. What's the point of writing a "nothing goes wrong" scene?
And finally, Lois's fiction has still not caught up with the Internet. The Internet on Kibou-daini is caught in the year 2000, still, where there's a ridiculous amount of public data about the living and the dead, but somehow all this intense data-mining by the Barryaran consulate never comes to the attention of the corporations, or the officials. As evil corporations go, these are some of the least competent seen in the last century, never mind this one!
All in all, this is a book designed mostly to Say Something About Families, And How Important They Are, a textbook Motherhood Statement, but somehow it manages to look more like Vorkosigan Fanfic, very definitively told by someone religiously avoiding Mary Sue, than it does a Vorkosigan story of any merit. This is a book that begs the audience, "Please, let's let Miles alone, this time. His time is done. Let me write something else." And the plea is strong, because it also conveys the message, "Look, I seriously injured Miles several times, and he's not going to live a completely full life. People get old, they get sick, and they die. Miles and I are only going to get worse at this, and you don't want me to write that story, do you?"
In that, the book does its job. It is time to leave Miles alone. Ten years of Miles should have been enough for all of us. It's obvious that this book was written purely to give the fans one last look at their hero in his later years, as if 39 were "later years!" Sadly, it does that job all too well.
Cryoburn has a sloppy plot, lazy characterization, and settings borrowed from watching too much television, all in the service of a final, authorial plea: please, let's let Miles live out his life without us, because he's no longer anywhere near his prime, and anything after A Civil Campaign will just get sadder and grimmer as he gets older. In that, the book succeeds.
Lois McMaster Bujold returns to her first and most popular character, Miles Vorkosigan, in the lastest novel, Cryoburn. Sadly, the story is sloppy and uninspired, the writing hampered by Ms. Bujold's personal cliches and obvious reluctance to return to this well, follows an entirely predictable arc from beginning to end, and even ends up as its own sort of used furniture, not so much from SF as from modern television police procedurals. The sort of brilliance that turned the SF lexiconigraphic "used furniture" into the literal used furniture scene of A Civil Campaign, by reaching back fourteen (!) books to deliver one of many "oh, yes!" scenes is nowhere to be found in Cryoburn. There is only one "oh, dear God no," scene and it's almost the last scene of the story. The rest of the story runs on rickety rails.
Miles is sent to a planet to investigate a creepy obsessed-with-cheating-death culture ruled by megacorps that promise to cryo the recently dead or almost dead in the hopes that centuries from now they'll wake up healthy and whole. It's a riff on cryonics thing going on here, with weird laws and votes being controlled by the proxy corporations, and involves a mundane sort of financial shennanigans that Miles uncovers halfway through the book and spends the rest of the book, well, not really trying to undo so much as simply make trouble for the corpys who've made his life Hell through the first half of the book.
The book starts with Miles escaping from incompetent kidnapper-terrorists, who are out to bring down the whole Cryo business, and stumbling out into a bad section of the city, where the first person he befriends turns out to be a young boy who just happens to be the linchpin character with The Secret that could bring down the Evil Corporations. The boy lives in a homeless commune, which turns out to be a criminal enterprise, and the two leaders of which tell Miles everything, almost without being asked. It's almost as if Lois said, "It's Miles, the readers know he'll get it out of them eventually, so let's just get past this part because I don't feel like making it up too much."
The corporations are theme-park-ish, with one taking on Egyptology as a theme, another Asiania. When Miles visits the Asian theme park, I had another jarring moment, as none of the usual comparison powers Bujold brings to bear in her books is here. Instead of a concise comparison between the poorly aped Zen serenity and the competent serenity of the Cetagandan Celestial Garden, we get a snide comment about how "The space was all paper screens and tatami mats, plus more art glass and those flower arrangements consisting of a handful of pebbles, three sticks, two buds, and a blossom." A Milesian snide comment, I believe, would have included a wistful thought to The haut Pel.
Roic takes center-stage for two chapters, and seems to have been written to be inhabited by Bruce Willis. A brief scene takes place in a painfully obvious chunk of 20th-century suburbia, complete with little patches of greenery, musty carpets, yellowing wallpaper, the whole kitsch and caboodle. The subject of their investigation, a corporate type, has "an endearingly tame, by galactic standards, porn collection in the bedroom, out in plain sight," as if nobody used data pads on this high-tech world. This is followed by an equally silly police procedural takedown outside a sleazy
Meanwhile, Miles's one "covert ops" moment is so routine as to be boring. Nothing goes wrong. What's the point of writing a "nothing goes wrong" scene?
And finally, Lois's fiction has still not caught up with the Internet. The Internet on Kibou-daini is caught in the year 2000, still, where there's a ridiculous amount of public data about the living and the dead, but somehow all this intense data-mining by the Barryaran consulate never comes to the attention of the corporations, or the officials. As evil corporations go, these are some of the least competent seen in the last century, never mind this one!
All in all, this is a book designed mostly to Say Something About Families, And How Important They Are, a textbook Motherhood Statement, but somehow it manages to look more like Vorkosigan Fanfic, very definitively told by someone religiously avoiding Mary Sue, than it does a Vorkosigan story of any merit. This is a book that begs the audience, "Please, let's let Miles alone, this time. His time is done. Let me write something else." And the plea is strong, because it also conveys the message, "Look, I seriously injured Miles several times, and he's not going to live a completely full life. People get old, they get sick, and they die. Miles and I are only going to get worse at this, and you don't want me to write that story, do you?"
In that, the book does its job. It is time to leave Miles alone. Ten years of Miles should have been enough for all of us. It's obvious that this book was written purely to give the fans one last look at their hero in his later years, as if 39 were "later years!" Sadly, it does that job all too well.
no subject
Date: 2010-12-06 07:37 pm (UTC)